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One of the greatest controversies about lyme is whether antibiotics resolve the infection entirely. If they do, then chronic lyme problems “don’t exist.”
I’ve always found this an interesting sleight-of-hand. No one asks if polio exists in patients with post-polio syndrome, and no one has the obnoxiousness to claim that those symptoms are “all in the patient’s mind.”
So, do the lyme spirochetes continue to exist after antibiotics? Well, we can’t do human trials, because that’s not ethical. And test-tube trials show that antibiotics do kill all the lyme. But… now we have “human” trials on one of our nearest genetic relatives, the Rhesus Macaques. And, when you infect them, inject them with antibiotics to kill all the spirochetes, and then try to get some spirochetes out of them, they continue to pass on the spirochetes to lab-bred ticks. So the spirochetes continue to exist after antibiotic treatment.
Now, that brings up the question. Not – does chronic lyme exist - which it does. Now proven. But why do most people not exhibit lyme symptoms despite a pretty good likelihood that they continue to have the spirochete in their systems? In other words, why don’t many more people have chronic lyme?
I think the answer lies in the autoimmune sensitivity realm. A piece of the spirochete may or may not trigger a massive autoimmune response within an infected individual. It is that response as much as the presence of the spirochetes themselves, that generates the illness known as chronic lyme.
Here’s the Rhesus Macaques’ study.
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