How Can I Get Better?: An Action Plan for Treating Resistant Lyme & Chronic Disease

493 Pages·2017·5.2 MB·English

by  Richard Horowitz

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Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page

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To my wife, Lee, and the millions of people suffering from Lyme and associated
tick-borne disorders
Acknowledgments
This book couldn’t have been written without the help of many people. Jennifer
Weis at St. Martin’s Press has been an invaluable supporter for many years, and
I’m thrilled that I was able to work with her. Pam Liflander has been helpful in
getting my thoughts onto these pages clearly and coherently.
A huge thanks goes out to my wife, Lee, for her understanding and support,
as long hours (including on vacation) were needed to get this book into its
present form. Her love has graced my life.
My office staff also deserves a special thank-you for their dedication, hard
work, skill, knowledge, and compassion, which has allowed me to help so many
stricken with chronic illness. These people include John Fallon, FNP-C
(Batman); Janet M. Cosh, AAS; Lisa Haynes; Danielle Passineau; Angela
Jacobs; Diamond Elting; Renee Nelson; Kalah Matthews, BSN; Sonja Siderias,
AAS, LPN; Etheldria Walker, MA; and Barbara Semanick, BSN, RN. A special
thanks and large debt of gratitude goes to Phyllis R. Freeman, PhD, senior
researcher at our center, whose skill, compassion, and hard work has allowed us
to publish new groundbreaking research on Lyme and co-infections.
I would also like to acknowledge Dr. Mark Hyman and the speakers from the
Institute for Functional Medicine (IFM) conference in San Diego, California, as
well as Dr. Leo Galland and Dr. Chris Melitis, from the Integrative Health
Symposium conference in New York City, who contributed material. Dr. Eva
Sapi, from the University of New Haven, shared her original research on
biofilms. A debt of gratitude also goes out to Dr. Alan McDonald for his
groundbreaking work on Borrelia and permission to reprint his slides on its
cystic form and biofilms, as well as Dr. Judith Miklossy, who provided photos of
the atypical and cystic forms of Borrelia in neurological Lyme disease. Dr.
Claire Riendeau provided her insight on biotoxin illness. I also wish to thank Dr.
Garth Nicolson for reviewing the initial manuscript and for his assistance in
providing extensive scientific literature on mycoplasmal infections and
mitochondrial dysfunction. I would also like to recognize the heroes of Lyme
disease, who have consistently put their patients before themselves, sometimes at
the risk of their own careers. This includes Dr. Joseph Burrascano (who also
provided a short history of Lyme disease for this book, and information on
Advanced Labs and the new Lyme culture); Dr. Sam Donta; Dr. Charles Ray
Jones; Dr. Kenneth Leigner; and many others.
I am also grateful for the assistance of several colleagues who lent their
expertise and reviewed individual chapters: Allan Warshowsky, MD, for his
work on the endocrinology chapter; David H. Haase, MD, for reviewing the GI
autonomic nervous system dysfunction and allergy chapters; Andrea Gaito, MD,
for her help with the immunity and inflammation chapters; Sunil Khurana, MD,
for helping with the GI and liver function chapters; Fred Harvey, MD, for his
assistance in reviewing the chapter on environmental medicine; and David
Perlmutter, MD, FACN, who reviewed the brain and pain chapters. Dr. Elizabeth
Maloney and Dr. Bea Szantyr also provided their feedback on the manuscript,
and I am grateful for their help.
A huge debt of gratitude goes to my spiritual teachers, who have guided and
supported me perfectly through this life.
Finally, thanks to all of the Lyme-MSIDS sufferers, who have been some of
the greatest teachers to me in this lifetime. Your courage and perseverance to
regain health has inspired me to constantly look for answers, and has been the
inspiration for this book.
Introduction
Lyme and associated tick-borne diseases are rapidly spreading worldwide,
mimicking a host of common illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS,
now renamed as systemic exertional intolerance disease—SEID), fibromyalgia
(FM), and autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis (RA), lupus, and
multiple sclerosis (MS). These tick-borne diseases can even imitate psychiatric
conditions such as depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD),
and psychosis. Lyme is known as “the great imitator,” and I have witnessed
tremendous suffering among the twelve-thousand-plus patients I have treated
during the past twenty-nine years.
Lyme disease may also be one of the driving forces underlying multiple
chronic diseases. People from all over the United States and abroad come to my
office complaining of chronic fatigue and varying pain syndromes, as well as
cognitive and neuropsychiatric problems. These symptoms often are severe and
can result in long-term disability. Many of my patients have the same story.
They have gone from doctor to doctor looking for answers and only ended up
getting help once their Lyme, associated co-infections, and multiple overlapping
medical illnesses were all simultaneously addressed.
In 2013 I published my first book, Why Can’t I Get Better? Solving the
Mystery of Lyme and Chronic Disease. It has been tremendously satisfying that
this book is often referred to as the “Lyme Bible” and that it has changed the
way doctors both understand and treat this debilitating disease. This new book is
an updated and simpler version, and it includes some of the most important
scientific discoveries to emerge since the original publication. For instance, we
now know that there are bacterial “persisters”—bacteria that can survive short
courses of antibiotics—and how pulsing medication, treating biofilms that
protect bacteria, and using established “persister drugs” for other chronic
bacterial diseases may lead to better outcomes. I have done studies in my office
on these newer protocols, taking the research from the laboratory into the
clinical setting, and I am seeing successful outcomes in patients who have failed
prior therapies. This is very exciting, as our team at the Hudson Valley Healing
Arts Center has searched for close to thirty years to find answers for people who
are suffering with persistent/resistant symptoms. Details of these new and
effective protocols are in this book to help you get better.
LYME IS SPREADING
While you may know of the health epidemics of obesity, diabetes,
cardiovascular disease, strokes, heart attack, and cancer, unless you or a family
member has faced Lyme disease, you might not know that we are also
witnessing epidemics of bacterial, viral, and parasitic illnesses. Lyme disease is
the number one “vector borne” spreading infectious disease in the United States
and in Europe (while rapidly expanding to other countries like Canada,
Australia, and China).
Several months after my first book was published, the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that 1.3 percent of respondents of a
survey in the United States in 2009, and 0.9 percent in 2012, had been diagnosed
with Lyme disease. Of the respondents in 2012, 0.3 percent had been diagnosed
in the last year. This forced the CDC to revise their figures and increase the rate
of annual infection by a factor of ten, from thirty thousand to over three hundred
thousand individuals a year. These numbers have more recently been revised and
found to be even higher. A 2015 CDC study, published in the journal Emerging
Infectious Diseases, discussed the geographic distribution and expansion of
Lyme disease in the United States over the past twenty years. They found a 320
percent increase in the northeastern states, and in the north-central states where
the number of counties having a high incidence of Lyme disease increased by
greater than 250 percent for the same period. According to the CDC, “The center
of the high-incidence focus in the northeastern United States generally moved
westward and northward, away from the coast of northern New Jersey and into
east-central Pennsylvania. In the north-central high-incidence focus, the
geographic center remained relatively stable in northwestern Wisconsin, moving
northward and southward between adjacent counties over time.” Their
conclusion was that “relatively constant rates of geographic expansion (were
happening) in all accessible directions.”
A population-based, cross-sectional study was also conducted several years
ago by Professor Holly Ahearn, which was published in the Journal of
Microbiology Research. She concluded that we were underestimating the risk of
Borrelia burgdorferi, the etiologic agent of Lyme disease, and the spread of
borreliosis, diseases caused by borrelia, a genus of spirochetal (corkscrew-
shaped) bacteria. In her study, 2 percent of respondents reported being diagnosed
with Lyme according to the CDC criteria for “probable” Lyme disease, which is
significantly higher than the number of reported cases by the CDC. Another 16
percent of undiagnosed survey respondents also reported subjective signs and
symptoms consistent with “late stage” Lyme disease, which is consistent with
the CDC study, in which 10.5 percent of respondents in 2011 reported personally
knowing someone described as having “Chronic Lyme disease.” These figures
imply that millions of people have been bitten by ticks and infected with Lyme
disease and associated co-infections, and yet the numbers are probably
significantly underestimating the risk and true incidence.
Other studies reveal that 3.5 percent of the U.S. population was diagnosed
with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS/SEID), and up to 1.5 percent was
diagnosed with Fibromyalgia (FM). That means over 17 million people have a
chronic fatiguing, musculoskeletal disorder of “unknown etiology” or cause.
There are no reliable tests for either of these syndromes, as the diagnosis is
primarily made by relying on clinical criteria—like Lyme disease. Chronic
fatigue, sleep disturbances, musculoskeletal pain, and neurocognitive difficulties
are exactly the same symptoms that are seen in Lyme, and I have helped many