Killing Lyme Disease: Why Is Lyme Disease So Difficult to Kill?

Killing Lyme disease is hard because it plays hide and seek. Here’s what you need to know.

Let’s start with the basics. Lyme disease is the result of the human immunopathological response to a tick-borne parasite called the Borrelia burgdorferi spirochete.

Let’s break that down really quick.

Borrelia is a genus of bacteria that causes disease transmitted primarily by ticks or lice. It’s named after French biologist Amédée Borrel. Burgdorferi is named after Willy Burgdorfer, who identified the bacteria that causes the disease. A spirochete is a bacteria that has long, cork-screw shaped, spiral body.

So Killing Lyme Disease Is Easy?

This infectious spirochete is actually relatively easy to kill in a petri dish. That’s why we get false hope reports of sweeteners like Stevia killing Lyme.

Lyme may be easy to kill in the petri dish, but it’s extraordinarily difficult to clear from the body. (Sorry, Stevia, but it’s true.) The secret isn’t in the spirochete’s resilience but rather in its ability to evade the immune system. In its planktonic blood-born form, you can successfully treat the spirochete with antibiotics. However, once antibiotics are introduced into your system, the spirochete can respond by forming a protein shell and taking a cyst-like form. Antibiotics can’t easily penetrate this shell.

Lyme Disease Plays Hide and Seek

The Borrelia burgdorferi spirochete also plays a second trick. Because it’s a spirochete, the corkscrew shape allows it to burrow into cells and into the space between cells (called the interstitial matrix). There, it’s difficult for any treatment to access the disease. Once it reaches the nervous system, it can mimic a neuron. As a result, it’s effectively invisible to the immune system. In a sense it’s playing hide and seek.

Finally, once the bacteria establishes itself in a hospitable location (for example, in a joint), it can create a biofilm. A biofilm is a colony of bacteria in strata, and the upper strata shield the lower strata from antibiotics. In this way, antibiotics can’t eliminate it, making killing Lyme disease very difficult.

How Can You Go About Killing Lyme Disease?

Killing Lyme disease isn’t difficult. What’s difficult is locating and reaching it. If you want a viable treatment, you need to find something that diffuses through the entire body, including the intercellular matrix. You need something that acts in the blood and can work to penetrate or break up biofilm.

If you’d like to learn more, we have a lot more to say on this subject and about Phyllanthus niruri (Chanca Piedra, Stonebreaker), a very special plant.

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