The Lyme literate practitioners at our functional medicine clinic near Milwaukee diagnose and treat thousands of cases of Lyme disease every year. Lyme disease has become a specialty within Serenity Health Care Center. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicates that the upper Midwest region is a prime location for the illness, but there are cases throughout the United States. Deer ticks, or black-legged ticks on the West Coast, infected with a bacterium called Borrelia burgdorferi bite humans and transmit the disease.
Lyme disease can be difficult to diagnose because the symptoms mimic other illnesses and present differently in each patient. Our medical detectives have years of experience in identifying the symptoms that others misdiagnose as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple sclerosis, depression or other psychiatric illnesses.
If a tick bites you, you should look for several symptoms of Lyme disease.
The rash, shaped like a bull’s eye or a red patch, occurs in 20-30% of people with Lyme disease, but not having the rash does not necessarily mean that you don’t have Lyme disease.
If Lyme disease isn’t treated in the first month, symptoms can become more serious, prolonged and worsen over time, leading to what is called chronic Lyme disease.
Debra Muth ND and our Lyme literate practitioners treat patients from Wisconsin and all over the United States. Greg Brown MD is one of the few physicians who treats children with Lyme disease.
We test patients for Lyme disease with the IgeneX Western blot test, immunoblot and I spot testing. These tests are more accurate than the conventional PCR testing that most physicians perform. Our functional medicine approach includes Ondamed biofeedback and thermography evaluations, which assist in finding the underlying causes of the symptoms. We evaluate you for symptoms and consider your entire health picture when making a diagnosis and creating a treatment plan.
Our team understands that Lyme disease can become a chronic condition, and other infections can play a role in the symptoms. People can have viral, fungal and parasitic infections that affect symptoms and make the disease more difficult to treat.
The longer you have Lyme disease, the more difficult it is to treat. In part, this is due to the stress on the immune system. Focusing on restoring proper immune function is an important part of our treatment.
The practitioners and staff at our functional medicine clinic near Milwaukee treat Lyme disease with tools that are not available from traditional medicine. Researchers at the Tick-Borne Diseases Research Center at Columbia University found that mice that were infected with spirochetes and treated with Doxycycline still became carriers of Lyme disease. This experiment proved that the antibiotics did not cure Lyme disease in the mice.
At our functional medicine clinic near Milwaukee, our clinical experience confirms this research. Our practitioners believe that antibiotics alone are not effective in treating Lyme disease. Instead, we take a multi-faceted approach to Lyme disease and all chronic illnesses.
Not all integrative medicine clinics are the same when it comes to treating Lyme disease. Patients should ask questions to verify that the clinic’s staff takes a full spectrum approach to diagnosis and treatment.
Lyme disease is known as “the great imitator” because the symptoms are similar to so many other medical conditions. The Lyme literate practitioners at our functional medicine clinic near Milwaukee urge you to seek help if you suspect that you have Lyme disease.
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