Lyme Disease Explained: Chronic Symptoms, Alpha-Gal & Ticks - Dr. Barrett Deubert

Conventional medicine generally recognizes Lyme as like an acute situation. So they see a Lyme as being an acute Lyme issue, not chronic. Early diagnosis and typically like using antibiotics for treatment. But the controversy really of Lyme arises around persistent symptoms after treatment.

Welcome back to another episode of The Real Health Podcast. Today, we are talking all about Lyme. Lyme disease, tick borne illness, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Alpha gal syndrome. And this is gonna be a two part series. This first part is gonna be all about what is Lyme, what is Alpha Gal, and then we'll talk about treatment modalities and therapeutic interventions on the next podcast. Really, it's just an awareness thing.

I think people are becoming more aware of Lyme and tick borne illnesses than ever before. I think the issue is multifactorial when we get into why we're seeing it at rising rates. But regardless, I think today is just gonna be super helpful because it is spring, summer, and ticks are more prevalent right now. And if you do get into a situation where you get a tick bite, we need to process whether or not we should be concerned, alarmed, and what to do next. So today is all about education.

What is Lyme? What is Alpha Gal? And next week is going to be, all right, if I get a tick, what do I do? Or how do I test for Lyme? How do I treat Lyme?

Those types of conversations. So let's get in it. Without further ado, let's dive in. Ticks are no longer just a camping problem. When you think about ticks, you thought about when it was just, you just went camping.

But, you know, right, your dog runs in the backyard, plays in some high grass, brings a tick in, lands on a kid at night, and you find it in the kid's head the next day, right? And that's what we're seeing. We are seeing increased rates of tick borne illness. So what Lyme disease? That's what we're going to get into in this first part.

Most people, when they hear now a tick bite, they think Lyme disease. So, you know, there's some association there, which I think is actually really beneficial, whereas before, Lyme was something that was really never discussed. And for sure, without question, medical doctors didn't know what to do with it, and even still today, MDs are so confused when it comes to Lyme. The reality is that ticks carry multiple, organisms. And although some ticks can cause alpha gal or, Lyme disease, we can also see ticks drive alpha gal, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, babesiosis.

There's different conditions associated with different organisms. And it's important to differentiate and know that it's not just tick and Lyme, it can be tick and many other diagnoses. A single tick bite can potentially expose your body to multiple organisms, not just the Borrelia that is associated with Lyme. And that's one of the reasons why Lyme can be such a complicated and complex subject matter is it's not just tick Borrelia, and Lyme. It can be multiple organisms.

Then Lyme disease in and of itself is just an incredible situation that's happening within the immune system and the organism itself. So, Lyme disease specifically is from an organism called Borrelia, and that particular organism is a bacteria. And unlike most bacteria, Borrelia is extremely adaptable. So it's a very interesting organism. And what I mean by adaptable is Borrelia can actually change its form, number one.

So there's certain forms, like a spirochete, for instance, is a form of the bacterium of Borrelia. So it can change forms. It does a really good job at hiding itself within tissue that make it unrecognizable by the immune system. It forms what's called a biofilm. And when we look at biofilms, the best way to describe a biofilm is if you've ever gone to the, hopefully you have, to the dentist, the dental hygienist, and they clean that plaque, right?

They're chipping away at plaque. That plaque is a biofilm of bacteria. That hard, calcified part of the tooth that gets chipped off and they call that plaque, well, fundamentally, that's actually a biofilm. And within the biofilm is organisms, and particularly, Lyme forms biofilms, and those biofilms are small calcium style deposits within certain tissue, whether it be the gut or the brain or other areas. And these biofilms are protective communities.

And so what happens is the organisms that sit within these biofilms, they are undetectable by the immune system, and those organisms kind of camp out and hide out. And so, maybe you got a tick bite, maybe you got a bull's eye rash, maybe you had an infection and a fever, and your medical doctor treated with you an antibiotic. But potentially, that didn't happen. And that organism developed a biofilm. And then what happens is people chronically treat these organisms that are what we would call the current acute infection, but yet they neglect the biofilm where the healing happens is addressing the entirety of the colony of organism all the way to the biofilm layer.

Like I said before, the organism itself is incredible at evading the immune system, which again makes it really difficult on patients because it becomes a chronic immune deficiency issue. And Lyme is classic to starve your energy systems and drive chronic inflammation. So from a functional medicine perspective, Lyme often behaves a traditional infection, less like a traditional infection and more like an immune disruptive infection. It is going to be something that chronically suppresses immune health. Really, there's only two things that do it, mold and Lyme.

Mold and Lyme are just known to be immune suppressors. And because of it, they rob energy systems and ATP production, mitochondria health. It drives chronic inflammation. And these are commonly linked to conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. So, right, what's a good segue here?

What are the common Lyme symptoms? Like if you had Lyme, how would you know? And so, here's a few that you may consider being associated with Lyme. The first is we're going talk about neurological symptoms like brain fog, memory issues, panic attacks, anxiety, depression, feelings of brain fog, and then dizziness, vertigo symptoms, and light sensitivity. In the musculoskeletal body, chronic pain is a known symptom of Lyme.

You get neck pain, back pain, joint pain, TMJ issues. The immune system is chronically fatigued and suppressed. How would you know that? Well, you just get frequent illnesses and autoimmune like symptoms. And then the nervous system.

The nervous system, because Lyme really affects the brain, is you get poor HRV, heart rate variability, get sleep disruption, dysautonomia symptoms, and even just difficulty regulating temperature. That's why many patients feel like they're absolutely falling apart when it comes to Lyme. If that's you, Lyme may be something to consider and process whether or not you have it or not. And Lyme today is less controversial than when I started talking about it twenty years ago. It was very novel, new, and lacked understanding for most people.

Now most people understand that Lyme is more prevalent than they thought. But where we see it get a little bit complicated is that conventional medicine generally recognizes Lyme as like an acute situation. So they see a Lyme as being an acute Lyme issue, not chronic. Early diagnosis and typically like using antibiotics for treatment. But the controversy really of Lyme arises around persistent symptoms after treatment, right?

And this is when we get into the conversation of chronic Lyme. Some patients continue to experience brain fog and fatigue and joint pain and neurological symptoms. So the question is, was Lyme effectively treated or not? Well, your medical doctor will typically run a panel that is insufficient data to determine Lyme disease. There's not great medical testing in the traditional sense for Lyme.

And so a lot of times the symptoms are blown off and medications are given to treat what? Treat symptoms. But researchers continue, I mean, this conversation is after the initial infection, symptoms still linger. And what we see is ongoing immune dysregulation, residual inflammation, autoimmune responses, tissue damage, co infections. And what we see is that it's a perspective of knowing that there's more than just treating this initial Borrelia infection.

You know, that, hey, this tick might have carried other organisms with it. Maybe just that antibiotic treatment wasn't sufficient at addressing the root issue. And so I think the differentiator here is understanding that Lyme is more than just Borrelia, that there are other infections or co infections that are usually prevalent. And this is one of the biggest mistakes in Lyme treatment today is just focusing on the single organism of Borrelia. And patients often have Babesiosis, they have anaplasmosis, they have even issues like Alpha gal syndrome.

And these organisms can produce night sweats, fatigue, neurological symptoms, immune dysfunction, just like Borrelia does. And sometimes the co infections cause more symptoms than the Lyme Borrelia species in and of itself. And I mentioned it before, but alpha gal is something that is one of the most the fastest growing tick related condition in our country today. And alpha gal is simply when you are bitten from a lone star tick, when you have a bite from a lone star tick, then the immune system develops antibodies against a really specific molecule called alpha gal. It's a sugar molecule.

And so the immune system gets a little bit confused and starts to attack this sugar molecule associated with the lone star and anything like it. And so what happens is the immune system will then start to react to that same alpha gal found within beef, pork, lamb, venison, even certain dairy products. And that's mainly within something called the gelatin or the alpha gal. Gelatin is a type of protein, amino acid sequence that the immune system starts to react to. And so what are the symptoms?

Well, it's like someone eats a steak and then all of sudden their throat feels itchy. They break out in hives. They start to itch. They start to swell. They're having an allergic response to beef or pork or whatever I just mentioned.

This is alpha gal. When the immune system gets disrupted, it starts to cross react with foods that it shouldn't react to. And the symptoms are very allergenic in nature. And many patients spend years trying to figure out why meat suddenly makes them feel sick and terrible. Well, alpha gal is absolutely on the table here.

We also have another condition that isn't Lyme or alpha gal. It's something we call Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. And this is not something we take lightly. This is usually hospital type visit, ER type situation because the acute symptoms are very high fever, severe headache, rash, muscle pain, fatigue, and early diagnosis is absolutely crucial with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. And fortunately, they're doing a better job at testing with this particular condition.

And unlike some chronic Lyme kind of discussions, this is a true medical emergency when active. And we need to make sure that we have discussions around that this may be the potential reason for the patient presenting into the ER. So, let's just say if you get a tick bite, and those are the symptoms, those acute symptoms of high fever, sweating, headache, we should absolutely consider this a life threatening situation and get to medical intervention as soon as possible. Because this particular condition, if left untreated, is very dangerous. So when we think about ticks and Lyme and alpha gal and Rocky Mountain spotted fever, really what we're having a discussion and creating conversation around is that a tick can effectively transfer organisms that then drive certain disease processes.

And some of these are acute and life threatening, and some of these are chronic. We're gonna, next episode, have a conversation about the chronic condition of Lyme, alpha gal, how I treat it in the office, how to diagnose it, how to effectively test for it, and what are the solutions and therapeutic interventions now at our disposal to overcome Lyme disease? Because people have been bitten by ticks, had Borrelia organism in their body, and have no symptoms, don't even know it. There are people that have the exact same situation and have a myriad of what is the differ differentiating factor behind that patient and the other patient? The symptom patient versus the asymptomatic patient.

We're gonna have that discussion all about the immune system and how to help overcome chronic Lyme. So stay tuned on our next episode of the Real Health Co Podcast.