Thanks for the effort in posting this. You literally scoured the entire net and posted every Lyme success story out there. But I think it's important to keep a lot of these so called success stories in perspective. While I think there are more successes out there, many don't share.
I am a bit skeptical of some of these having read them many times over after googling 'lyme success stories' more times than I can count. So I feel the need to express my doubts based on my experience. This will come across as negative to many of you so please skip this if you are just looking for hope in general, but I believe we shouldn't have to settle for just imaginary hope.
It's good to know lyme is beatable. But the next question we will obviously ask is how they did it. This in my opinion is where some of these success stories fall apart upon closer inspection.
Some of these results are of people claiming they healed themselves through 'the healing power of diet'. It strikes me as odd that some lyme success stories aren't appearing on lyme or disease management sites, but sites like realfoodrebel and foodhealthrevolution. And while I know diet is important, I don't believe one can just diet your way out of a serious infection like lyme any more than you could syphilis or aids. Many of us need genuine medical intervention.
I also am a bit skeptical of people who refer you to their blog, directly or indirectly to sell programs or strongly suggest very specific companies by name, as Katina Makris and Brenda C. do, as many times these people are being compensated for their suggestions. This has been proven to happen on sites like better health guy. Their sites aren't just personal journals but professional business sites with ads that have turned their 'healing journey' into an enterprise for profit so they can work from home and exploit very desperate people.
Far too many of these people just so happen to also be motivational speakers or life coaches, or energy medicine practitioners and while they all seem to want you to know they had lyme and claim to have beaten it, they only quickly glance over their protocols and usually say antibiotics don't work and only vaguely mention what they thought did work before referring you to some overly complex dietary protocol.
They create the impression that they have secret knowledge and they got better because they know something the rest of us don't and you should consult them or their naturopath to learn the secret diet or supplement. Take Steve Cabana's testimony for example. Can anyone really follow such a protocol and acquire every strange ingredient that he is recommending for his 'smoothies' He is basically just referring us to Klinghardt. This has no more credibility than testimonials for envita. Advice like this just seems disingenuous. It leaves the impression that people just need to add prickly pear cactus juice and bone broth and eat more salads and they will be on the path to recovery, and that if they aren't recovering, they just need even more obscure diet changes. Raw milk, agave, stevia. While you can't heal eating cheeseburgers and pizza, you also can't 'beat' lyme by eating more salads.
Also we tend to have this idea that because lyme is a complex puzzle, if we just use even more complex protocols we will heal. While there is no doubt the disease is complex and difficult, at a certain point you are using so many things that you can't honestly attribute any improvement you may have to any particular med, supplement or herb.
A lot of these come across as if we just had more awareness we could treat it better. This disease ravages you whether you are aware of it or not. It's nice to know what we are facing, but that doesn't mean we are in any better position to 'beat' it.
Furthermore, many of these people also admit to continuing to have symptoms. After fighting it so long, they seem to declare victory prematurely as they want to believe they are over it. It's as if they are trying to convince themselves and the reader they are cured. So after you wade through the long personal story under the headline 'how I beat lyme', you find they haven't really beaten it at all. Or you watch their video and they forget what they were saying in mid sentence , but we are to believe they defeated their disease. They say 'I am 90% better, but I still have debilitating exhaustion and brain fog and arthritis and get lost driving home' or they mention a whole host of other serious medical problems they have, but for some reason they separate these from their lyme. Is that really success?
I hate to be so negative but I just want to save people from the stress time and money involved in false hope. After dealing with this for over a year I have become quite skeptical of most claims of success that tend to come up on google, especially if all they discuss is diet. This is a complex infectious disease that could never be cured by food alone no matter how paleo or gluten free your diet may be.
It's important to remember that true success stories exist. While there are hundreds of people who feel the need to share their struggles with lyme through blogs and journals, there are only a few dozen who ever claim success and those that do make such claims know they will get numerous hits because such accounts are so rare. This is because true lyme sufferers don't want to give false hope or claim early victory.
While hope is important, we need to separate real from false hope. Too many of the sites promote a particular narrative and along with this hope they are reinforcing the idea of buying a product or service from them. So as human as the stories may sound and as much as we lymies can relate to their stories of suffering and misdiagnosis, they lack credibility. True successes don't involve people shouting from the rooftops that they have courageously defeated lyme by sheer will to overcome through some rediculous obscure diet or secret formula. If I were to get better, I would humbly acknowledge that I somehow dodged a bullet and cautiously move on, as I imagine most truly successful people do. I wouldn't pretend to have secret knowledge or know some special naturopath who has the exact dietary formula to conquer lyme. This is one of the reasons mainstream medicine doubts us because we can't produce results though repeatable or verifyable methods.
Again please forgive me for my skepticism and negativity, but I think it's important to define what success really is and have a little healthy skepticism and common sense. We all need hope, but genuine achievable hope is most important. Keep fighting and looking for answers. Just be careful of what you buy into because there are some people claiming to have answers that don't.
Post Edited (logmoss82) : 8/14/2016 8:19:39 PM (GMT-6)