The Treatment of Lyme Disease With Chinese Medicine
This post is a continuation of a prior post entitled, “Chinese Medicine’s Insights Into Lyme Disease.” So if you haven’t read that yet and feel you need more grounding and information about Chinese medicine’s ancient understanding of Lyme disease (Gu Syndrome in Chinese medicine), then please read that post as well.
As discussed in the previous post, masterful Chinese doctors from 2,000 years ago described a parasitic super-infection syndrome that was characterized by it being difficult to diagnose, difficult to treat, and presenting in a vast myriad of ways in different individuals.
It is known as Gu Syndrome, and is a very accurate description of the Lyme and Lyme-like diseases that we see in the modern clinic. In this blog we’ll look at the treatment approaches that were developed for healing Gu Syndrome, for they are still highly valuable and applicable today for all multi-systems chronic infectious and inflammatory diseases.
**Please note, this is the author’s interpretation of what is meaningful and important from the Gu treatment tradition of classical Chinese medicine; ancient wisdom that she would like to bring forward. It is not meant to be a translation or summation of what is written in any classical text on the topic.
Gu Treatment Principle #1: Commonly used diagnostic and treatment practices will not be effective for Gu diseases.
Like most professionals, doctors and health practitioners rely upon what we learned in school and prior training to make treatment decisions. What is clear to those who begin to treat numerous cases of Lyme disease is that the old paradigms of medicine simply do not apply to these cases.
For example, conventional rules for interpreting diagnostic labs do not hold true for the Lyme Western blot test (and other co-infections as well). In terms of treatment, a simple course of antibiotics is not always effective at resolving the illness. What’s more, antibiotics – no matter how much – is sometimes not a complete answer.
For holistic practitioners, our training in using herbals to tonify deficiencies is also mis-informed. Because Gu diseases like Lyme are diseases of toxicity, where so much of the symptom presentation and suffering is caused by accumulations of toxins that fuel inflammation, the common tonics such as ginseng or rehmannia will aggravate the internal stagnations and either not work or will make the patient feel worse. Instead, we use only the tonics that also have detoxifying properties.
On the whole, the wisdom of Gu Syndrome treatment encourages us as clinicians to think outside of the box. We have to be willing to do things differently that our prior teachings and trainings (if they are not working), try new things, experiment, and innovate if we are to learn how to successfully treat our most challenging patients.
Gu Treatment Principle #2: Gu disease may be difficult to treat because it becomes very enmeshed within the body, “like oil seeping into flour,” difficult to draw back out.
Acknowledging this is key for several reasons:
- First, it highlights the fact that proper treatment at the acute phase is essential. There is a window of opportunity following an infectious tick bite or acute febrile illness to clear it from the body before it becomes entrenched.
If there is known infection, we recommend both antibiotics + herbals and other natural methods to resolve the infection fully. We also recommend that patients remain on the herbals for a full 3 months to ensure there is no recurrence.
(Check out our Acute Lyme Treatment Kit here!)
- This treatment principle also explains why treatment for more chronic cases may take time to heal, and necessitate releasing many different types of infections, toxins and disease problems that otherwise serve to keep the Lyme disease (or other causative factor) entrenched inside the body. If we understand this from the get-go as the practitioner who is guiding the way, we can help our patients to have realistic expectations about the length and sometimes circuitous nature of the healing journey.
Gu Treatment Principle #3: All of your Gu (Lyme and complex chronic disease) patients are threatened with and may be experiencing deficiencies on all levels of their being.
This means that every successful approach to the treatment of Lyme disease needs to have multiple building blocks that can be combined in flexible ways to address both the excess disease-toxin burden and the deficiency aspects of the disease.
All patients with chronic multi-systems have some level of malevolent toxin accumulation and pathogen load that does need to be properly addressed at some point in the treatment process.
Meanwhile, mineral, nutrient, collagen, hormonal and hydration deficiencies all need to be restored in order for organ, immune system, and body tissue repair (i.e. healing!) to occur. With commitment to both detoxification and restoration, the body’s terrain will become a health-generating ecosystem again, and the pathogen load will be reduced in a lasting manner.
As you can see, Chinese medicine as practiced through the Uprooting Lyme approach has real solutions for chronically infected, inflamed, auto-immune patients.
Our work is to reset the conditions within the body to create a clean, flowing, light-filled body and mind that is no longer a desirable place for dark decay-seeking stealth pathogens to live.
Want to learn more about how to successfully treat Lyme & Lyme-like diseases naturally?
Consider joining our next year-long professional training which is anchored in over 60 hours of online coursework + live clinical mentorship experiences that supply you with ample real-life cases to workshop, practice and apply the principles of holistic Lyme recovery in a guided setting.
Learn more and apply at https://uprootinglyme.com/mentorship/
Holistic Lyme Clinical Experience & Training is Vital for Practitioners
There is no substitute for clinical experience for health practitioners who want to specialize in Lyme, auto-immune, and complex chronic disease. That’s why our year-long professional training is anchored in live clinical experiences that supply you with ample real-life cases to workshop, practice and apply the principles of holistic Lyme recovery in a guided setting.
Learn more and apply at www.uprootinglyme.com/mentorship/
