Hyperbaric Therapy For Lyme Disease

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Is Growing In Popularity All Over The World

With its tremendous health benefits and healing advantages, HBOT has been used for patients with non-healing wounds, fibromyalgia, cerebral palsy, dementia, chronic illnesses, inflammatory bowel disease, plastic surgery recovery, chronic inflammation, and much more.

Its a non-invasive and innovative treatment that is virtually painless and has an abundance of health benefits. If youve read our previous blogs, youll know all about its amazing properties and how it helps the body heal from so many conditions.

In this blog, we talk about the relationship between hyperbaric oxygen therapy and lyme disease.

Real Solutions For Chronic Immune Dysfunction

I divide options for overcoming illnesses associated with Chronic Immune Dysfunction and stealth microbes into two categories: Heroic Therapies and Restorative Therapies.

A third category of solutions, Symptomatic Therapies, is best reserved for acute relief. Specifically directed at controlling symptoms, Symptomatic Therapies come mostly in the form of prescription drugs and contribute only minimally to healing and wellness.

Borrelia Bacterium And The Black

The spread of Lyme disease occurs when the Borrelia burgdorferi transfers from a tick bite to a human. In the northeastern, mid-Atlantic and north-central United States, this comes from the black-legged, or deer, tick . On the Pacific Coast, it is spread by the western black-legged tick . Most cases of infection are transmitted through the bites of immature ticks, or those in the nymph stage. These ticks are typically tiny, measuring less than 2mm, and are very difficult to see.

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Contact Us For An Appointment

Hyperbaric chambers are a class 2 medical device and require a prescription for use.

The information provided by Delaware Hyperbarics Inc. does not constitute a medical recommendation. It is intended for informational and educational purposes only, and no claims, either real or implied are being made. All customer testimonials and opinions are real and voluntary. The FDA 510 approved intended use is, to provide mild hyperbaria for the treatment of Acute Mountain Sickness and its associated mild symptoms. Delaware Hyperbarics as a clinic treats both on-label and off-label conditions under the prescription of a doctor.

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Creating The Perfect Environment For Healing

Healing is the ability of cells to regenerate and recover from being stressed. Healing can only occur if ongoing stresses are reduced enough for cellular recovery to occur.

No doubt, killing bacteria and other microbes is essential for cellular healing, but it must be done without upsetting the delicate balance of other microbes that inhabit the body. This is the problem with antibiotics. Conventional antibiotics dont penetrate into cells very well, but do disrupt the balance of normal flora in the gut and skin. Prolonged use of antibiotics typically leads to a host of issues that disrupt cellular healing and often doesnt eradicate the ongoing infection.

This is where the antimicrobial properties of herbs offer a distinct advantage. Taking an herb with antimicrobial properties isnt like taking an antibiotic. Instead of being a single chemical agent, like an antibiotic, herbs offer a wide spectrum of chemical substances with broad spectrum action against a wide variety of microbes. In essence, it acts like an intelligent defense system that targets pathogens and not normal flora. This allows herbs to be taken for extended periods of time months and even years without disrupting the balance of bacteria and other microbes in the body. Which is exactly what it takes to wear the intracellular microbes down.

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Can Hbot Help You With Your Lyme Disease

As the information and studies show, hyperbaric oxygen and HBOT provide an effective alternative or adjunctive therapy for your Lyme disease. Dr. Spiegel is happy to meet with you in an initial consultation, go over your symptoms, as well as current and past treatments and how HBOT can help you. Contact our office today at 727.787.7077 to set up an initial consultation. You may also click HERE to fill out our request form.

When Symptoms Boil Up

You can think of it as a pot of water on the stove that starts out over a low simmer. As the simmer increases, minor discomforts start showing up general body aches and joint stiffness bloating, gas, and digestive issues lack of energy and simply not feeling well. Often, these kinds of changes become accepted as part of aging or life in general.

Its not until the pot is fully boiling over that things become noticeably uncomfortable. Sometimes its a specific event that causes the pot to bubble over severe emotional stress, an accident or trauma, an acute viral illness, or even a tick bite. But most often, its a perfect storm of cellular stress factors accumulating over time until a tipping point is reached.

At that point, the immune system can no longer keep a lid on things, and life becomes miserable. I refer to this as Chronic Immune Dysfunction.

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Situations Where The Addition Of Synthetic Antibiotics May Prove Beneficial

• Ehrlichia, anaplasma, and rickettsia. These microbes have a higher potential to cause severe disease and less likelihood of chronic disease after treatment of the initial infection. When chronic disease does occur, it is generally characterized by long asymptomatic periods with the microbe hidden in isolated locations in the body followed by relapse of acute symptoms . Relapses should be treated like an initial infection with doxycycline 100 mg twice daily for 30 days or until 3 days after symptoms subside.
• Chronic babesia infection. Babesia is characterized by relapsing high fever or positive test for babesia . Sometimes triple antibiotic therapy is required to eradicate severe babesia infection. Current guidelines for babesia should be followed. Natural therapy for protozoan infections can accompany conventional therapy.
• Persistent severe Lyme symptoms refractory to natural therapy. If chronic infection has been present long term and a persons immune status is severely depressed, pulsed antibiotic therapy may provide benefit . Antibiotics should never be continued for more than 30 days at a time and a 30 day break should be taken between episodes of antibiotics to allow the system to recover. Rotating different antibiotics may decrease bacterial resistance. Whether to use multiple antibiotics simultaneously is unknown and may disrupt the microbiome even further.

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Brings Relief To Those With Chronic Lyme Disease

First identified by a Yale University researcher in the 1970s, Lyme disease is caused by bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi and spread by the blacklegged tick. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2013 that 300,000 people get Lyme disease every year in the United States. Lyme disease can progress from feeling feverish, tired and achy to far more serious conditions. It can impact the immune and nervous systems, the eyes, brain, heart and other organs.

Accurately diagnosing Lyme disease baffles doctors for two reasons. First, tests for the disease can yield both false positives and false negatives, and second, early symptoms mimic those of many other health conditions, including the flu. Patients also get misdiagnosed with arthritis, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, MS and Lupus. Only around 60 percent of those with Lyme disease will present with a telltale bullseye rash.

Doctors in New England and the Upper Midwest encounter Lyme disease so frequently that they routinely prescribe antibiotics regardless of whether patient blood tests return negative. Thats because when left untreated Lyme disease can even prove deadly. In fact, in August of 2013 a 17-year-old young man from Poughkeepsie, New York, died from Lyme carditis after suffering flu symptoms for just three weeks.

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As Lyme Disease Progresses

If left untreated, symptoms will continue to progress. They spread to other areas of the body and often become resistant to traditional antibiotic treatment. Additional symptoms that develop in the months after initial exposure include:

• Erythema Migrans Spreads The initial target rash continues to spread. In many cases, additional target rashes can develop on other areas of the body.
• Joint and Muscular Complications Lyme disease can attack the joints in your body, causing severe pain and swelling. While it can affect any joint in the body, the knees tend to be a target. This can be referred to as Lyme arthritis. Pain can extend beyond the joints, affecting tendons, muscles and even cause bone pain.
• Neurological Complications Neurological symptoms can surface within weeks of infection or can develop months or years later. Lyme disease can cause impaired muscle movement, numbness or weakness in the arms and legs, and nerve pain. Bells palsy , meningitis and spinal cord inflammation also occur.
• Severe Fatigue This goes beyond the need to take a nap or feeling overly tired. This level of fatigue can be debilitating and greatly affects your quality of life.
• Organ Involvement In severe cases, Lyme disease can affect various organs in the body. This includes eye inflammation, heart complications or inflammation of the liver.
• Cognitive Complications Impaired memory, confusion, inability to concentrate and loss of words. Completing daily tasks may become difficult.

The Consequences Of Improper Diagnosis And Treatment

When people with undetected Lyme disease or other infections are misdiagnosed with psychiatric illnesses or cognitive dysfunction, treatments often dont work. And in some cases, they can make symptoms worse. Without a correct diagnosis and the appropriate treatment, the infection persists, causing further injury to the brain.

This can eventually lead to trouble in all areas of your life, including decreased productivity at work, poor school performance, and problems with personal and interpersonal functioning. Without getting the right treatment, Lyme disease and other infections can steal your mind and steal your life.

For people who are not responding to treatment for their symptoms, it is very important to investigate whether an underlying infection may be contributing to the issue.

With A Better Brain Comes A Better Life

Daniel G. Amen, M.D.

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Connections To Chronic Illness

Whether you are symptomatic or not depends a lot on the health of your cells. Your cells are not defenseless!

All of our cells have an internal housekeeping system called autophagy. Cells continually break down misfolded proteins, burned-out mitochondria, damaged DNA, and worn-out parts and recycle them into new proteins and cell parts. It is also the mechanism by which cells expel many types of intracellular microbes. The fact that our cells can expel intracellular microbes is another important and often unrecognized part of our natural defenses.

But when cells are chronically exposed to poor nutrition, toxic environment, chronic mental stress, and sedentary lifestyle, auto-nagy is impaired and cells become more vulnerable to invasion by intracellular pathogens. Increased cellular turnover and increased microbe activity overtaxes the immune system. At a certain point, a threshold is crossed, such that symptoms occur. The type of symptoms that occur depends on the types of cells affected different microbes have preference for different types of cells in the body. This is one reason why there are so many different chronic illnesses.

Sample Studies On Hbot And Lyme Disease

As previously mentioned, there have not been many studies conducted in relation to hyperbaric oxygen and Lyme disease, however, we will discuss two particular studies on the topic.

The first is a 2014 paper that reviewed the case of a 31 year old male suffering from Lyme disease and had gone through years of traditional antibiotic treatment. Over the course of the treatment, the antibiotics brought about minor symptom reduction, but found that symptoms would keep returning.

After years of unsuccessful antibiotic treatment, the patient underwent 30 sessions of hyperbaric oxygen at 2.5 atmosphere. Each session lasted 1.5 hours. The patients sleep disturbances and loss of thinking ability drastically improved and disappeared after 10 sessions. Periorbital twitching and numbness in the extremities disappeared after 20 treatments. Musculoskeletal symptoms and joint pain disappeared as he completed 30 treatments of hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

Another paper conducted in 1998 observed the connection between hyperbaric oxygen therapy and Lyme disease.

It was discovered that the fibroblasts can often protect the Borrelia bacteria from antibiotic treatments, making these traditional treatments somehow ineffective.

Since hyperbaric oxygen therapy provides higher levels of oxygen under pressure in the hyperbaric chamber, oxygen is able to penetrate the tissue, where bacteria are unable to survive in high-oxygen environments.

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Lyme Disease Brain Scan

SPECT is a nuclear medicine study that evaluates activity in the brain. Basically, it shows three things: healthy activity, too little activity, or too much activity. The healthy surface brain SPECT scan on the left, looking down from the top, shows full, even symmetrical activity. The scan on the right, which is of a patient with Lyme disease, shows overall decreased blood flow denoted by the bumpy appearance on the surface of the brain. The pattern on this scan shows low activity due to the infection.

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Message From Dr Alexander Alvarez Md

After practicing medicine for 35 years, Ive seen far too many patients struggling with Lyme disease for too long. Living with lingering Lyme symptoms year-after-year can be a lonely and constant battle for the 10 to 20 percent of people not able to achieve remission with antibiotics. Ive witnessed patients who have spent the past 10 years taking prescription medications before learning that HBOT is a viable medical solution. After three months of Aviv Clinics proprietary HBOT protocol, patients are symptom-free and wishing they would have known sooner it could have saved years of living in the shadow of Lyme disease.

With May being Lyme Disease Awareness Month, there is no better time to share a snapshot overview on HBOT and how it treats chronic symptoms. I invite you to explore how Avivs personalized treatment is revolutionizing how to promote healing in Lyme patients.

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Transmission And Prevention Of Lyme Disease

In the United States, most cases of Lyme disease occur in the upper mid-western states, upper north-eastern states and the northwestern states on the West Coast. Ticks live in shady, wooded areas or heavily grassy areas and remain close to the ground. They can cling to tall grass, brush, and shrubs. The ticks responsible for the transmission of Lyme disease are typically in the nymph stage and are very small.

While they can bite and attach anywhere on a human, they are more likely to attach in hidden or hairy areas, such as the armpit, groin, and scalp. While it is possible, the transmission of Borrelia burgdorferi does not occur unless the tick has attached and been feeding for more than 36 hours. When hiking or camping, it is essential to check for ticks on a regular basis. And also remove them as soon as possible. The longer a tick remains attached, the greater your risk is of developing Lyme disease.

Other Infections That Can Harm Brain Function

Bacteria, parasites, viruses, and other infectious agents that can cause inflammation and lead to brain disorders, include :

• Streptococcusstrep throat or scarlet fever
• Toxoplasma gondiia tiny single-celled parasite that is often carried in cats and shed in their feces
• Fungal infectionscommonly an overgrowth ofCandida albicans,a yeast found in the mouth, gut, and genitals
• West Nile virusa mosquito-borne disease
• Meningitisinflammation of the tissues surrounding the brain and spinal cord
• Herpes family viruses, such as Epstein-Barr, cytomegalovirus, herpes simplex virus-1 , and herpes simplex virus-2
• Other tick-borne illnesses, including Rocky Mountain spotted fever, anaplasmosis, ehrlichiosis, and Powassan virus
• Helicobacter pylori
• Chlamydophila pneumoniae
• Influenzathe common flu bug

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Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Benefits

The bacteria that cause Lyme disease in humans is anaerobic, like most bacteria. This means it does not use oxygen and dies off in a high oxygen environment. The way that hyperbaric therapy works is a person is put into a chamber that seals. The air pressure is increased and the air is made up of pure oxygen. With the added high pressure, blood oxygen levels are increased.

Since the bacteria that cause Lyme disease cannot survive in an oxygen-rich environment, it dies off. Together with antibiotics, the bacteria are completely killed off and the toxins left behind are removed too. Lyme disease treatment in humans is more than just killing the bacteria though. This is when the hyperbaric oxygen therapy becomes even more beneficial.

People who contract Lyme disease often have lingering symptoms, including muscle and joint pain, chronic inflammation, and nerve damage. The earlier that someone seeks treatment for Lyme disease, the better. When the bacteria, metals, and toxins that accompany Lyme disease bacteria sits in the body for too long, the symptoms and conditions get worse.

Other benefits of highly oxygenated blood from hyperbaric oxygen treatments includes:

• Stimulated tissue repair
• More white blood cells to boost the immune system
• Repair and restore brain function
• Heal damaged organs

Some patients are finding relief after suffering for years with these symptoms.

What to Expect During Treatment

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Lyme Disease And Treatment By Robert M Lombard Hyperbaric Oxygenation Medical Centre Inc

withinPenicillins and Cephalosporins:Macrolides :Ceftriaxone and Vancomycins:Charles Pavia, PhDWilliam P. Fife, PhDspirochetes exposed to an increased partial pressure of oxygen could not survive.1. 2.Burruscano, Joseph J., Jr., M.D. Managing Lyme Disease3.Practice Guidelines for the Treatment of Lyme Disease Gary P. Wormser et al.CID 2000 314. Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Gains Respect in Medical Circles, Deborah S. Cowder, As, RRT. Issue Date: 7/29/20025. An Overview of Lyme Disease and Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Mitchell L. Hoggard and L. James Johnson

The healing benefits of Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy and Lyme.

Why it works

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Effects

On Neurological Conditions Associated with Lyme

Benefits include: Decreases neuroinflammation enhances short term memory, reduces chronic fatigue ameliorates chronic headaches lessens depression moderates insomnia.

On Mobility Improvement

Benefits include: Diminishes inflammatory-related arthritic pain lessens muscle discomfort increases energy levels.

On Antibacterial Activity

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