Homeopathy seems to be one of the in-vogue Lyme treatments of 2008, and perhaps rightfully so. I haven’t personally known anyone who has completely healed from Lyme disease with homeopathy, but that doesn’t mean it can’t cure a person, or that it is less effective than other remedies.
Homeopathy has several advantages, which make it a potentially preferable treatment to pharmaceutical antibiotics. First, there are no harmful side effects! No candida, no immune suppression. By the way, yeast overgrowth as a result of antibiotics is a BIG deal. If you have candida in your gut, you won’t properly metabolize your food, and you will create an environment in which other kinds of pathogens can flourish. And how in the world is your immune system ever supposed to fight Lyme disease if it doesn’t have the nutrients it needs to function properly, and it has to waste resources on fighting candida?
The second advantage that homeopathy has over pharmaceutical drugs is that it doesn’t turn your current bugs into Super Bugs. Medications, while they may kill some of the critters, only damages the cell walls of others, which makes the bugs MAD. They don’t like holes being punched in their armor, and may respond by clothing themselves in biofilm armor, or becoming more virulent in some other way so that the antibiotics no longer become a threat. It is partly for this reason that antibiotics in Lyme disease patients must be consistently rotated, and even then, this doesn’t always solve the problem. Evidence shows that bacteria, even when exposed to just ONE kind of antibiotic, can subsequently develop immunity to multiple antibiotics. That is scary. Perhaps it is also why those who have chosen to take antibiotics often relapse. Furthermore, we have no evidence that Lyme disease is completely eradicated by antibiotics. We may be trying to kill the un-killable, which may make homeopathy a better choice.
What’s more, homeopathy addresses healing on a holistic level, since remedies can be designed not only for borrelia and other infections, but also for the detoxification of heavy metals and chemicals; for addressing physical and emotional traumas, and most factors that contribute to a person’s overall symptom picture.
Classical homeopathy has typically been the basis for all homeopathic approaches. It uses a single, perfectly matched remedy as a means of addressing all of a sufferer’s ills, while supporting his or her innate “constitution.” A different type of homeopathy, however, used by the Homeopathy Center of Houston, called Sequential Homeopathy, while it also supports a person’s innate “constitution”, views illness as a series of layers that needs to be treated with various remedies, rather than just one, as is typically the case in classical homeopathy. Furthermore, because illness also results from blocks to healing, such as emotional trauma, these must be dealt with in order for other remedies to effectively work. The Homeopathy Center of Houston believes that each “layer” of illness–whether an infection, toxin or trauma–should be healed at the moment when it presents itself, or when the body is ready to deal with that issue.
For this reason, Sequential Homeopathy (as all other Lyme disease treatments) is a process that requires months of treatments, in order for symptoms to be eradicated. But, unlike antibiotics (for some, anyway) homeopathy is about true healing, not managing and living with the symptoms of illness.
Pharmaceutical antibiotics may be important for some Lyme disease sufferers; however, if you haven’t used them, and are contemplating treating Lyme with either antibiotics or homeopathy, I encourage you to try the latter first, as it is less harmful to the body, and its effects, more permanent. The moment you decide to take antibiotics, you incur the potential of turning your bugs into Super Bugs, at the same time that you risk damage to your gut and immune system.