Lyme Disease
In the summer
of 2002, I came down with a severe and debilitating
case of Lyme disease. I'd experienced unexplained
joint and muscle pain for several weeks, which
I'd attributed to the normal strains of being
an aging athlete. On a hot July evening after
a long run in extreme heat, I experienced severe
shooting pains throughout my upper body, with
fever and chills, headache and a variety of other
extremely uncomfortable symptoms. Only my training
as a naturopathic physician kept me from going
to the emergency room--I knew there was nothing
conventional medicine could do for me that I would
want done. These symptoms raged on for several
days, and I sent a sample of my blood to a laboratory
that confirmed what I suspected--I was having
an acute attack of chronic Lyme disease.
In the late
1990s, I had learned that optimal native diets
were invariably high in the fat-soluble activators
available in animal fats. I'd begun using more
raw dairy foods and fatty meats to complement
the huge amount of raw vegetables and moderate
amounts of fresh fish and fruit that I'd eaten
for decades. When I came down with Lyme, I'd just
begun working on my next book, The
Untold Story of Milk, which was published
a year later.
I thought my
diet was great. But why did I get sick? I've always
maintained that if health is optimal, one should
be resistant to all disease, acute or chronic.
Yet here I was with a debilitating case of Lyme
disease. What was going on?
My lab tests
made it clear that my Lyme was chronic, that I
had had it for some time. The unexplained symptoms
I'd been experiencing before the acute attack
confirmed that the problem had existed for many
months. I'd continued to function at an intense
physical level but was in retrospect clearly overdoing
it. Eventually the Lyme overwhelmed my system
and I became acutely ill. But the question remained,
why had I been susceptible to Lyme?
Because of
my basic assumption that the fundamental cause
of all disease is faulty diet, I went back to
the drawing board. I decided to question all my
assumptions and make any changes that seemed reasonable.
Understanding
what Weston Price taught is really just the beginning
of understanding how to use food to prevent and
heal chronic disease. Think of it this way: Price
studied cultures all over the world, all of which
ate wildly different diets. From the vast amount
of information he gathered, he extracted certain
principles about what foods were most important
and the nutrients those foods contained.
Based upon these
principles, we must try to choose from the foods
available those that will best supply the essential
nutrients common to these varied traditional diets,
and then supplement the diet with the special
foods extracts and concentrates that even the
best diets generally available today do not supply
in optimal amounts. In so doing, it's essential
to decide what the optimal proportions of different
foods are, how much of each to eat. Then there
is the question of which foods, and how much of
them, are best eaten raw or undercooked. These
are among the issues I looked at in tackling my
Lyme problem.
I resolved that
I would not take antibiotics. When the disease
is diagnosed early, when it initially appears,
antibiotics are not unreasonable, and often eradicate
the organism that is involved in Lyme. Many people
go this route and never have a further problem.
However, once Lyme is established for several
months, as mine was, conventional treatment calls
for months of intravenous antibiotics. Results
are at best mixed; I've interviewed many patients
who continued to suffer severe symptoms in spite
of such treatment.
The symptoms
of chronic Lyme tend to exacerbate into acute
attacks lasting a few days about every four weeks,
and that was my experience. A month after my first
acute attack, I again had several days of marked
symptoms, but this time only about half as severe
as the initial attack. I'd been applying what
I'd learned, and was eating much more animal food
and much more raw food (more on this later). It
took me three or four months to get to the point
where I felt 95 percent well, to where I was playing
tennis and running again (although less than before,
having decided that there is wisdom in moderation
and that discretion is the better part of valor).
During my recovery, I was writing The Untold Story
of Milk, and in the spring we bought the small
farm where we now live.
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