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The annual number of new cases of Lyme Borreliosis disease occurring in the United States is unknown due to many factors, mainly underdiagnoses and misdiagnoses. Harvard researchers and Lyme-literate physicians believe that as many as 200,000 new cases of Lyme occur in the US annually and that the number of people infected grows each year. As reported in the Townsend Letter ("What Makes Lyme Disease Tick and How Samento Eliminates It," July 2004), (1) Samento was the only herbal antimicrobial recommended for treatment of Lyme Borreliosis. Nutramedix now offers many additional products, some of which are currently undergoing clinical evaluation for effectiveness in the treatment of Lyme disease. Dr. Lee Cowden considers the use of Samento, Cumanda, Burbur, Quina, and other products to be a fine-tuned antimicrobial approach that addresses fungus and other problems that accompany Lyme disease (L.E. Crowden, oral communication, August 2006).

Dr Lee Cowden: Lyme Borreliosis May Be the Root Cause of Many Chronic Illnesses

Although many Lyme patients have had success with long-term antibiotics, Lee Cowden, MD, integrative medical researcher and physician, believes many patients being treated with antibiotics recover completely for months or years only to suffer a recurrence. "Lyme disease is an epidemic in this country," says Dr. Cowden. He believes most of the diseases "that are considered incurable by conventional medicine have some kind of Lyme component." Many chronically ill people have Lyme as a factor. Dr. Cowden not only suspects Lyme bacteria as a root cause for autoimmune diseases, he also lists neuro-degenerative diseases, cardiovascular diseases, cardiac-arrhythmias, gastrointestinal diseases, Multiple Sclerosis, ALS, Parkinson's, ADHD, and autism. "I've found that if you can start working on the Lyme and the toxins, then a lot of these labels go away," he says.

Dr. Cowden says that through the studies he has discovered the following:

... antibiotics do seem to work fairly well in a lot of patients. But,
  if they've had the illness for longer than six weeks, the chance of
  antibiotics getting rid of the infection, in my experience, is pretty
  unlikely, pretty remote. So, they're basically just guaranteeing that
  they'll stay on antibiotics for the rest of their life. The problem
  with staying on the standard pharmaceutical antibiotics long-term is
  that you kill off the friendly bacteria in your gut, and you cause an
  overgrowth of fungus in your gut, so then you trade one problem for
  another.

  In the pilot study in 2003, we used Samento quite a bit, and still use
  it. But we've found that there are some other herbal therapies that
  have been brought from Peru by Nutramedix that work just as well or
  better than Samento.

  Cumanda is an extremely powerful anti-Lyme treatment, as well as an
  excellent anti-fungal and also is a pretty good anti-viral and
  antiparasitic. So you eliminate a lot of different bugs with one
  therapy. It's a different philosophy than the philosophy used by
  conventional medicine, which is one bug, one drug. So if you have six
  bugs, you have six drugs.

  Now, besides Cumanda we have Banderol, which is a very powerful herbal
  antimicrobial from Peru also through Nutramedix, and Quina, which has
  been used in Peru for many centuries for treatment for malaria, but is
  also an excellent anti-Lyme treatment as well as a pretty good anti-
  fungal and anti-parasitic.

  I guess the most important thing we've learned since the pilot study
  is that if you don't continue to work on getting the physical toxins
  out of the body, the few remaining microbes that can survive the
  aggressive therapy with herbals or pharmaceuticals, or whatever is
  used, those surviving microbes will usually regrow and form a
  completely new population of Lyme-related microbes in the body because
  of the toxins stimulating their regrowth. So, it's so critically
  important, in my opinion, to work as hard on getting the toxins out of
  the body as on working on getting the microbes out of the body. The
  worst culprits usually are the heavy metals. The most common source
  for heavy metals that I see usually is mercury from the silver mercury
  amalgam fillings in people's teeth.
 

The simple act of chewing releases mercury back into the body, where it stimulates the growth of Borrelia and other microbes, and where, additionally, it "blocks the release of other toxins, including other metals, pesticides, solvents, herbicides and so on," says Dr. Cowden. He urges Lyme patients to have amalgam fillings removed "in a very cautious and methodical way. Then, once the mercury is removed from the teeth, the patient must gear up the detoxification for mercury, so that the mercury can be removed from the body over time."

Mercury is just one issue that predisposes patients to microbial growth and poisons their systems. Other metals such as aluminum, bauxite, and copper are also found in high levels in Lyme patients. Pesticides from household use and from conventionally produced meats, and petroleum by-products from skin care products and cosmetics represent further challenges. Dr Cowden continues:

Once you get a lot of that toxic load out, then it becomes easy to get
  rid of the microbes. The other thing we've learned since the study is
  that enzymes are critically important in breaking up the fibrin that
  covers over the bugs and hides them from the immune system. The fibrin
  is a protein produced by the body in response to infectious illnesses.
  And those bugs can hide very well if the fibrin is coating them over,
  but if you give a proteolytic enzyme about thirty minutes before food
  with water only, a couple of times a day, enough of that enzyme gets
  absorbed and breaks down the fibrin coating on the surface of the bug
  so that the immune system can find them and get rid of them.

  In addition to that, the fibrin that is being produced gets plastered
  up against the capillary walls, the blood vessel walls, and restricts
  the movement of oxygen into the tissues. So the tissues become oxygen-
  starved, and start producing lactic acid and go into anaerobic
  metabolism and create all kinds of other trouble from that. So the
  proteolytic enzymes have been very helpful to resolve that.

  I use bromelain as a proteolytic enzyme. Bromelain is derived from
  pineapple. And also I use Carnivora, which is derived from Venus
  Flytrap. These two seem to be fairly well-tolerated and not likely
  contaminated and not very allergenic. A lot of the other enzymes that
  are on the market are either contaminated or allergenic. But those two
  work really well.

  We've found that if you rotate remedies, that you're less likely for
  the microbes to develop a sensitivity or resistance to the treatment,
  and [it's] less likely for the patient to develop an allergy or
  sensitivity to it."
 

IIn 2001, Dr. Cowden co-developed a technique to remove toxins using the principle of complex homeopathy and laser, called cold laser therapy. "That's been a great advance in getting the toxins out of the body, and the doctors I've taught how to do that are very impressed with their results," he says. "Unfortunately, there are so few doctors in the country who are trained in that technique that there are more people wanting it than doctors who can deliver it." Dr. Cowden currently leads seminars for physicians who want to learn how to use cold laser therapy for faster detoxification

Dr. Andrew Wright: Treating CFS and Lyme Disease with Samento and Cumanda

Dr. Andrew Wright sees patients in his private clinic in Bolton, near Manchester, UK. For the past fifteen years he has specialized in the treatment of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). He believes that CFS is mainly a chronic bacterial infection, and that Borrelia is a bacteria that can cause CFS (A. Wright, oral communication, January 2007). "Clinically, CFS is identical to chronic Lyme disease in many ways," says Dr. Wright. "I think there are several reasons why we should think that bacterias are the main causes of these illnesses. The symptoms are similar to bacterial illnesses. The gene expression, in very carefully selected CFS patients, appears to be identical to that found in Lyme disease. Many patients are positive for Borrelia. I do microscopy and I find spirochetes in many people."

Dr. Wright has treated five hundred or more patients with Samento, which he says is safe and well-tolerated by most people. He believes that for treatment of CFS and Lyme Borreliosis, the best choice is an integrated program if the patient can afford it. "Often it comes down to what patients can afford," he says. "Many of my patients are on pensions and Social Security and can't afford to pay for lots of herbs and supplements. They go for cheap antibiotics. Some of them get better."

Dr. Wright says that because Samento works very well in at least two-thirds of his patients who choose alternative therapies over antibiotics, it remains his first choice in treatment with Lyme Borreliosis. Eighty percent of his patients who are on the antimicrobial treatments respond positively, with about sixty percent of the patients declared clinically cured after a period of one or two years. He now uses other Nutramedix products as well, particularly Cumanda, Quina, Burbur, and also Amantilla.

In general, Dr. Wright says, he tries Samento first. If patients don't respond he puts them on Dr. Cowden's protocol. He finds that about half the patients who don't respond to Samento will respond to the protocol. Some people simply do not respond, which, as he points out, is typical for any type of treatment including conventional antibiotics.

The results of Samento treatment are varied due to patients' spectrum of tolerance, in Dr. Wright's experience. "In general," he says, "it is very well-tolerated. It's very rare for someone to have to stop treatment." Some people are very sensitive and can only begin with one-quarter of a drop. Others have a greater tolerance and can build up their dosage more quickly, thus achieving quicker results. "The fastest I've seen it work is in six weeks," he says.

Dr. Wright typically recommends a dosage of five to ten drops, three times per day, working up to that dosage over a period of a few weeks. Occasionally, he has put patients on sixty drops a day. In his experience, if Samento is going to work, the patient sees a reduction in symptoms within three months. "Certainly, Samento causes fewer side effects than antibiotics, such as gastritis, thrush or irritable bowel syndrome, and so forth," says Dr. Wright. The only side effect from Samento that his patients have experienced with any frequency is diarrhea, which subsides after about one week.

Dr. Cowden comments on why patients have fewer problems with herbal antimicrobial treatments than with conventional antibiotics. "Fungal overgrowth can be just as bad a problem as Lyme disease," he says. "The herbal treatments we've been using don't tend to cause that problem, because they kill the fungi as much as they kill the Lyme-related bacteria and protozoa, without, in many cases, killing the friendly bacteria in the gut."

In treating CFS and Lyme, Dr. Wright would ideally employ a "combination of therapies," he says, "including Samento, nutritional supplements, dietary change, stress management, the whole thing, because this is a holistic illness. I think we need to do more research, because long-term effectiveness of these therapies is yet to be determined."

A Clinical Study Currently Evaluating the Effectiveness of Samento, Cumanda, and Burbur

In Fall 2006, pharmacist Philip Kielman of the Netherlands began a year-long, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study to evaluate the effectiveness of Samento, Cumanda, and Burbur in the treatment of chronic Lyme disease (P. Kielman, oral communication, January 2007). This is a follow-up to the pilot study conducted with Samento in 2003. The twelve-week preliminary report shows a 65% reduction in symptoms in the treatment group and a 20% reduction in symptoms in the placebo group

Kielman says, "When we check with the Western Blot or ELISA and we get a negative result for the disease, and there are no symptoms remaining, we conclude that it works. Of course, some people are skeptics. They will say, yes, but you can't cure 100% of the people."

"But I'm a pharmacist," he continues. "And I know that I can't cure anyone with any disease, one hundred percent with 'normal' medication. When you have a 30% success rate with pharmaceutical medication, everyone shouts 'wow, that's great, we have a new drug.' But when there is a natural product and people who have been given no hope with conventional therapy succeed at a rate of 50% or 60%, well, I think that's great."

Jean Reist, RN: Treating Lyme Patients with Help from Detox Formulas Burbur and Parsley

Jean Reist, RN, has treated over a thousand people diagnosed with Lyme disease in her Pennsylvania clinic, Journey to Wellness (J. Reist, oral communication, December 2006). Nutramedix products Burbur and Parsley are in her arsenal of herbal therapies for treatment because of their effectiveness in lymph drainage, which she considers critical in healing Lyme. Reist believes that the most essential ingredient in her patients' therapy is diet and lifestyle changes.

"Lyme Borrelia will thrive in the presence of fungal elevation. Therefore, sugars, grains, can definitely make the inflammatory situation a lot worse. Sugars will suppress the immune system. But what's more damaging, in our experience, is that Nutrasweet and Splenda are like poison, and you want to avoid that like the plague. Splenda will actually dry up the thymus and effect your T-cells in a way that you cannot afford if you have Lyme disease. So, stay away from those artificial sweeteners. Just don't do it." For her patients, Reist recommends Stevia as an alternative sweetener.

Bea Mistich: Success with Herbal Antimicrobial Therapy

Bea Mistich of Colorado Springs, Colorado spent nearly a decade dealing with serious health challenges and was hospitalized and treated for pain, but not tested for Lyme disease until years later (B. Mistich, oral communication, December 2006). She now believes that many, if not all, the health problems that plagued her over the course of nine years were caused by Lyme. During that time, Bea underwent neck surgery for herniated discs; she suffered back issues, cellulitis, depression, as well as severe flu symptoms. She also believed that she was experiencing strokes.

For pain relief, Bea tried many types of therapies, including acupuncture, with little success. Eventually, she received a positive diagnosis for Lyme from IGeneX in Palo Alto, California. She began a course of Doxycyline, prescribed by her Colorado Springs physician. In spite of an entire year of treatment, she remained symptomatic. As her health declined, a friend who had heard about Dr. Cowden and Nutramedix products urged her to look into it. Initially reluctant to try yet another purported remedy, Bea eventually considered her friend's advice, went to see Dr. Cowden, and began his protocol. Since then, Bea has become progressively healthier.

Dr. Cowden and his associates told Bea that she would start to feel better in about two months. She reports that she had to increase the protocol slowly, at the rate of one drop per every five to seven days. Although she had doubts and feared disappointment in the herbal therapy, she was impressed with the results: "Within three weeks, I was one hundred percent better. It was incredible. It was wonderful," she says.

Like most Lyme patients, Bea was well aware of the magnitude of effect that her illness was having on her loved ones. "My husband threw a party on my birthday recently and announced to our friends the party 'wasn't necessarily just to celebrate Bea's birthday,' as he said, 'it's to celebrate getting my wife back and getting her healthy again.' It was great."

Johnny Asia: Speeding Recovery from Long-Term Illness After Switching to Natural Protocol

Johnny Asia is healing from Lyme disease after a long struggle, made more challenging by the fact that he is a professional musician (J. Asia, oral communication, November 2006). For a time, memory loss, rheumatoid arthritis, profound muscle twitching, and crippling fatigue robbed him of his ability to perform and earn a living. Johnny says his healing progress intensified when he started using herbal alternatives Samento, Cumanda, and Quina.

In 1995, Johnny knew he was very ill but was informed by a doctor who was not Lyme-literate that he did not have Lyme disease. Eventually, Johnny did receive a positive diagnosis and was treated with a two-week course of antibiotics. In spite of his doctor's pronouncement that he was then Lyme-free, his symptoms did not resolve, but plagued him for many years. Because he believed was Lyme-free, Johnny could not understand the persistent symptoms. Discovering that he was experiencing many symptoms of Lyme, he realized that he might have chronic Lyme disease.

In his research, he came across positive reports about Samento from people whose symptoms were similar to his. After beginning treatment with Samento and other nutritional supplements, he experienced the Herxheimer reactions created by the die-off of toxins. After a few months, his headaches subsided. The eyelid twitching stopped completely. Beginning in mid-2006, Johnny began Dr. Cowden's protocol and is now taking Samento, Cumanda, and Quina. He expects to be symptom-free within a year.

How is Lyme Disease Contracted and Spread?

The question of how Lyme is contracted and spread only seems to invite more controversy within a growing population of Lyme sufferers seeking answers. However, one thing is becoming clear. "Only a very small percentage of those have contracted Lyme disease through a tick bite, the way conventional medicine thinks," warns Dr. Cowden. Dr. Wright agrees. "It's not necessarily transmitted solely by ticks," he says. "There is evidence for other means of transmission in the research literature." He lists congenital and sexual transmission. "I think the incidence of Borrelia is much higher than just Lyme disease," he adds.

Master Herbalist, Stephen Harrod Buhner, author of Healing Lyme: Natural Healing and Prevention of Lyme Borreliosis and Its Coinfections, (2) reports that although transmission through a tick bite is still believed to be the most common way of contracting the disease, "little research has been conducted on other routes of transmission." He states, "spirochetes are passed not only through tick bites but also through other mechanisms. Once they infect people, they can be found in breast milk, in tears, in semen, and in urine. Babies have been infected in the womb."

Buhner says that, while gathering research for his book, he expected to find that non-pharmaceutical alternatives were not included in any mainstream medical discussion about treatment of Lyme disease. But he was surprised by something else he discovered, which is "that a significant amount of reputable research is being ignored by the mainstream medical community."