My training is in acupuncture, herbal medicine and functional medicine, so I can speak to that a little bit.
I only have direct clinic experience with chronic Lyme so far. My patient was diagnosed with Lyme years ago and was still suffering from a range of symptoms (joint pain, headaches, fatigue, GI distress) until last fall (2017) when he started to see me. I suspected that the pathogen was long gone and that we needed to repair his body, so I recommended a basic functional medicine test, a hair tissue mineral analysis (HTMA) from TEI labs in Texas (
Trace Elements... Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis (Hair Mineral Analysis)). His metabolic profile suggested that his endocrine system had been damaged, either by the Lyme or the antibiotics or both, and he also had high levels of lead, cadmium, arsenic, iron and copper, which may or may not be related to the Lyme. He started feeling better about 2 weeks after going on the diet and supplement regimen I recommended for him. He's had two follow-up tests, he's "feeling great" and he told me this helped him more than anything else he's tried.
Since you have an acute case of Lyme, antibiotics are powerful and a good choice for killing Borrelia burgdorferi and co-infections. If you were my patient I would prescribe a custom complementary herbal formula to support your natural immune response and the antibiotic action of the drugs, and to protect your digestion and reduce side effects. IMO a custom herbal formula is the best way to to support your body and mitigate side effects, but glutathione, iodine and probiotics are good general tools if that's not an option. FWIW I think Saccharomyces boulardii is the best probiotic to take when on antibiotics because it is a yeast and therefore unaffected by the drugs and numerous clinical studies have demonstrated that it protects against candida and c. diff and other nasty gut pathogens. Serrapeptase is a good suggestion too, it was actually derived from a Chinese herb called Jiang Can and it is a good proteolytic enzyme that attacks biofilms and has anti-inflammatory properties.
I always recommend that my patients drink ginger tea whenever they have to take antibiotics. If possible buy fresh ginger from the store, grate it into a pan and boil it on the stove for a few minutes, then strain it into a mug and add a little sweetener if you want to. In Chinese medical language ginger is a "warm" herb that counteracts the "cold" properties of the antibiotics, in other words it helps with common side effects like nausea and diarrhea and loss of appetite.
If you can't find a good herbalist locally and you want to go that route I would recommend that you consider contacting Dr. Qingcai Zhang in New York. From his website:
http://www.zhangclinicnyc.com/drz.htm said:
Upon graduation from Shanghai Second Medical University in 1962, Dr. Qingcai Zhang worked as a physician in a teaching hospital, The Reijing Hospital of the Shanghai Second Medical University in Shanghai, China, and doing clinical and research work to integrate Chinese and Western medicine. He was an associate professor of medicine at the medical university. In 1980, he was awarded a World Health Organization scholarship, which supported his two-year fellowship in Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1984 he worked as a research fellow at the Wakai Clinic in Nagoya, Japan. A year later, he received a one-year appointment from the University of California at Davis as a visiting professor. Since 1986, Dr. Zhang has been the primary researcher at the Oriental Healing Arts Institute in Long Beach, Calif., where he conducted research on treating AIDS with Chinese medicine, designed herbal formulas for AIDS patients, and published two books on AIDS and Chinese medicine. He started his private practice in 1990, first in Cypress, California, and then moved to New York City in 1992. He is the founder of Zhang's Clinic in New York City and White Plains, New York. Since 1987, he has been focusing on treating chronic viral diseases with modern Chinese herbal medicine, such as viral hepatitis and AIDS, infectious diseases, such as Lyme Disease, and autoimmune diseases, such as inflammatory bowel diseases, psoriasis and rheumatoid arthritis.
A friend and patient of mine told me about Dr. Zhang a few years ago. She was diagnosed with Lyme and antibiotics didn't work for her for some reason. She had regular phone consults with him and he sent herbs to her in the mail and after he treated her for a while (sorry I don't remember how long) she had a complete recovery from both the Lyme and the antibiotics. More from his website:
http://www.zhangclinicnyc.com/ld/treatment/Dilemma.htm said:
Most cases of acute Bb infections are treated by conventional allopathic medicine with antibiotics. Antibiotics can suppress many patients’ symptoms, but cannot completely eradicate the infectious agent, causing many cases to become chronic. Chronic LD is an extremely complex and recurrent illness that is still poorly understood. Its symptoms may include fatigue, fibromyalgia, CNS symptoms, and malaise. It is a disease involving damage to multiple body systems, including arthritis, neurological abnormalities such as aseptic meningitis and Bell’s Palsy, as well as cardiac conduction abnormalities.
The results of conventional treatment also vary widely. Antibiotics can often help ease the joint pain and the brain problems, but not always. “ Relapses following use of potent antibiotics and detection of the Lyme organism or its DNA following treatment likewise demonstrates an inability to completely eradicate the pathogen and permanently halt the pathologic process with current methods of treatment in some patients. This is a problematic situation because intensive antibiotic treatment is costly, is inconvenient, and carries associated risk for the patient. Such antibiotic usage may foster the emergence of strains of other types of bacteria resistant to the antibiotics employed and thus has public health implications. For some patients however, this may be the only presently available alternative to progressive neurologic deterioration. In view of this dilemma , the international biomedical research community must give high priority to the development of improved and /or alternate methods of treatment that can definitively cure persisting Bb infections responsible for neurologic and other manifestations of chronic Lyme disease.” (Kenneth B. Liegner et al., Lyme disease and the Clinical Spectrum of Antibiotic Responsive Chronic Meningoencephalomyelitides, Proceedings of Lyme & Other Tick-borne Disease: A 21st Century View, Nov 10,2001, p.72)
What is the cause of this dilemma? Why is conventional allopathic medicine unable to cure this seemingly simple bacteria infection? I think that the fundamental difficulty is in western medicine’s philosophy and way of thinking. It looks at an infectious disease, such as LD, only as a pathogen. Therefore its treatment is only antibiotics. The human body’s role in this complicated disease is overlooked. In reality, an infectious disease consists of two sides, the invading pathogen and the body’s reaction to the invasion. To only use anti-pathogen treatment is insufficient; adjusting the body’s reaction to the invasion of the pathogen is a more important aspect. To only rely on antibiotics to eradicate the bacteria without enhancing the body’s immunity and repairing the damaged tissue is an incomplete strategy of treatment. Therefore the conventional allopathic medical approach has only partial efficacy. The eventual eradication of the pathogens is the role of the body; antibiotics can only be a help to the body in accomplishing this task.
The antibiotics may clear it up for you since you caught it early, but if they don't or if you want to supplement with herbal medicine (numerous studies have shown that herbal formulas enhance the effects of antibiotics and mitigate side effects), you could contact his office and ask for a phone consult with him.
Another option to consider if you are in the US is Hillary Thing at Uprooting Lyme (
Home - Uprooting Lyme). She is also an acupuncturist and an herbalist with a very interesting personal story about Lyme disease (
Hillary Thing, LAc - Uprooting Lyme). She is well regarded by my colleagues and her website has a support forum and a protocol you can sign up for online, but I can't speak to its effectiveness.
I hope this is helpful, good luck!