Lyme Handbook

With six number ones and five additional top ten hits throughout the 70’s and 80’s Daryl Hall and John Oates are the number one duo in music history. Still at the top of his game at 69 years old, Daryl has won legions of new fans with his hit MTV Live show Live From Daryl’s House.

In February of 2015, at my very sickest from chronic Lyme and Bartonella, after it was missed by eleven NYC doctors, I was homebound and in heart failure. On one of those terrifying, bleary days I caught the last half of a Dan Rather interview with Daryl.

Near the end, Rather asked, “What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?”

Daryl exhaled, “Getting Lyme Disease is no fun, I’ll tell you that right now.”

“I have to speak with him,” I thought. “He looks so good! I need to know how he got better.”

So, here is my conversation with Daryl and with Dr. Richard Horowitz, Daryl’s esteemed Lyme specialist, Board Certified Internist and Director of the Hudson Valley Healing Arts Center, in Hyde Park, New York, and New York Times best-selling author of Why Can’t I Get Better. His forthcoming book, How Can I Get Better, will be out later this year.

Daryl, thank you for going on the record; many celebrities don’t want to talk about this and I don’t know why.
I don’t either. I don’t know why anybody would want to hide this, there’s no stigma against it. It’s something that’s happening to everybody.

How and when did this all start for you?
About ten years ago, I started getting tremors, especially in my left hand and arm, with twitching, and I didn’t know what that was. I’ve always had food allergies and spring allergies but then I got this very serious celery allergy. And that came out of the blue. And then finally I came down with this raging fever and really stiff neck and body.

What was the timeframe for all of the symptoms to surface?
This took place over the course of about a year.

I assume you were seeing doctors- what were they saying?
They told me it was the summer flu and all this nonsense. So I started talking to my family about it and my ex-wife, who has Lyme, said it sounded to her like Lyme. So I went to another doctor who finally did test me, and found I also had ehrlichia. He gave me two weeks of Doxycycline only, and of course, old story, nothing happened. Except that the bull’s-eye suddenly appeared. But I was not getting any better.

And then my sister found Dr. Joseph Burrascano for me, who was one of the few Lyme doctors practicing, and he was out in the Hamptons. He was the first Lyme-literate doctor that I went to and he gave me my diagnosis and started proper treatment. That went on for about a year.

What was the treatment?
I was pulsing oral antibiotics. I did not do an IV. I cycled through many different antibiotics, and slowly I started feeling better. Dr. Burrascano actually assessed me for Parkinson’s because of my tremors, but thank God, I did not have it. It was Lyme.

Dr. Horowitz, is there a way to distinguish between Parkinson’s and Parkinsonism? How common are tremors with Lyme and other tick-borne disease, and which infection seems to cause it?
Dr. Horowitz: Parkinson’s disease is a clinical diagnosis, and the one common denominator underlying most chronic illness, especially neurological diseases like Parkinson’s, is inflammation. We now know that different neurological diseases, including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, as well as the symptoms of chronic Lyme disease are all influenced by inflammation, which can have multifactorial etiologies.

For example, inflammation could be due to different infections (like Lyme and Bartonella), autoimmune processes, environmental toxins, unhealthy bacteria in our colons (dysbiosis), an improper diet and/or nutritional deficiencies, as well as a lack of sleep.

I call these multiple overlapping medical problems keeping Lyme patients sick, MSIDS. It stands for Multiple Systemic Infectious Disease Syndrome and it is a comprehensive map to identifying the factors that keep people sick so that they can achieve wellness. Infections and toxins on the MSIDS map drive inflammation, and in the case of tremors, Lyme combined with mercury toxicity and pesticide exposure, can all increase inflammation in the central nervous system, leading to amyloid production, which damages our nerve cells. This causes memory problems and tremors. If we want to control the symptoms of Lyme disease and decrease these neurological manifestations, we have to address all of the above overlapping causes of inflammation.

Daryl, did you continue on treatment after the first year?
Yes, Joe moved into research and I began treatment with Dr. Richard Horowitz, and I have been with him ever since. He is an extraordinary doctor, incredible.For

For more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/scientists-discover-new-bacteria-responsible-for-lyme-disease_us_56ba2000e4b08ffac122b719