Difficulties in Treating Chronic Lyme Disease and the Efficacy of Using Integrative Therapy for its Treatment, Especially in Regard to chronic Lyme Arthritis

This thesis is being archived as a Digitized Shelf Copy for campus access to current students and staff only. We currently cannot provide this open access without the author's permission. If you are the author of this work and desire to provide it open access or wish access removed, please contact the Wahlstrom Library to discuss permission.Objective: The purpose of this paper is to outline several of the difficulties in treating Chronic Lyme disease and propose a core protocol that addresses many of the these difficulties. Additional treatments can be added to individualize the treatment depending on the symptoms presented and the unique needs that the patient possesses. Emphasis is made to address treatment for chronic Lyme arthritis that is so often encountered in Lyme disease. Basic procedures: Information used to design the protocol was supplied by searching PubMed and the Walstrom Library OneSearch databases. Researched focused on papers showing efficacy in Lyme disease related prevention and treatment. Papers were generally chosen that were published within the last 20 years. Main Findings – The efficacy of alternative treatments relied on addressing Lyme disease not just by direct toxicity to Borrelia burgdorferi, but by targeting one or more of the unique evasive mechanisms that the spirochete uses to evade host immunity. Principal Conclusions – Designing a core treatment with many different components, that address the many mechanism of evasion of Borrelia burgdorferi, is potentially more effective for treating Chronic Lyme disease than single antibiotic protocols