RW: Lyme Disease Almost Ended Robby Andrews’s Career. Here’s What Finally Cured Him

This is a REALLY important article. Tick-borne diseases also include ehrlichiosis, which almost killed my wife 10 years ago. I mean, seriously, I was sitting at her bedside all night expecting her next breath to be her last. Getting the right antibiotic is absolutely critical. My wife was initially put on the wrong one and it made her even sicker.

We have dogs and live in a high tick area. I routinely check for ticks during each shower and I shave my legs so I can feel them crawling on me. Due to the nasty way ticks feed, they have to be attached for up to 24 hours to transfer a disease so you have time to remove them. Don't panic and just pull them off with your fingers.

I spray my shoes and socks with a tick repellant and use a Tick Stick twisting tool to remove ticks to make sure I don't squeeze them or leave the head attached. Grabbing a tick with your fingers or tweezers runs the risk squeezing the infected blood inside the tick into your body.

You're not wrong. Ehrlichia chaffeensis is awful. When I lived in Arkansas I had at least a dozen ticks. Never got the "bullseye" rash but I came down with symptoms consistent with lyme. Tested negative. Doctor said there are tons of tick-borne diseases we probably don't know about so we're going to treat you with doxycycline anyway. Felt better after a few days. Probably prevented a multitude of problems for me later on.

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A fantastic article by Gretchen Voss. When I heard Robby had Lyme at the end of 2018 or beginning of 2019, I remember thinking "This might wipe him out for 2020" particularly when I heard he wasn't using traditional medicine. A kid at my HS sucked for more than a year when people tried to figure out how to treat his lyme.

I mean the beginning of the article reminded me of Steve Jobs issuing his own death warrant by not going to see a legitimate doctor.

Voss wrote:

Once a week Andrews swallowed eight drops, an hour apart—a concentration of herbs such as ashwagandha, rhodiola, turmeric, licorice root, and cordycep mushrooms—that the holistic doctor said would help strengthen his immune system. He soaked his feet in a proprietary blend of herbs that he was told would draw toxins out of his body. He spent more than $1,000 on treatment. He didn’t care if anyone thought he was nuts. He just wanted to feel better.

Crazy.

Don't misunderstand me, I'm not opposed to alternative medicine but you don't mess around with Lyme. Now he's getting the best of both worlds. He's got a doctor that a) was a former pro b) and believes in both traditional and non-traditional medicine.

I /almost got as far in to that article until the 'essential oil' co-treatment plan from his Dr. /His desire to clinical trial these oils...

JFC lol. Hope to see Andrew on the track soon

A fantastic article by Gretchen Voss. When I heard Robby had Lyme at the end of 2018 or beginning of 2019, I remember thinking "This might wipe him out for 2020" particularly when I heard he wasn't using traditional medicine. A kid at my HS sucked for more than a year when people tried to figure out how to treat his lyme.

I mean the beginning of the article reminded me of Steve Jobs issuing his own death warrant by not going to see a legitimate doctor.

Crazy.

Don't misunderstand me, I'm not opposed to alternative medicine but you don't mess around with Lyme. Now he's getting the best of both worlds. He's got a doctor that a) was a former pro b) and believes in both traditional and non-traditional medicine.[/quote]

Ehhh, right. You don't mess around with Lyme's because it's not just "Lyme's" . It's not one thing. It can be a number of different bacteria and/or a slightly different specie or their strains. It's a sad state of affairs in today's medical system where there's basically no money poured into what is essentially a pandemic across the country. Doctors learn almost nothing about it in school. I should know. I spent 20+ thousand dollars towards our established orthodox medical system and it helped me jack shyt. I was still affected by "Lyme's" for years until I tried one of a variety of "alternative" treatments. You can be affected by this debilitating illness in many ways and for many years. Best to look at ALL avenues for treatment.

I said this earlier, but this is a GREAT article because it raises awareness of tick-borne diseases, but it needs a follow-up.

There should be a section on how to find and remove ticks. Since I run trails and we have a dog, ticks are a way of life for us. A tick-borne disease (ehrlichiosis) nearly killed my wife 10 years ago so ticks are a VERY SERIOUS concern for runners.

Here is what I do. I wear crew or over the calf socks when running in high tick areas. I spray them with a tick repellant. The clothes go straight into the wash when I return. When I shower, I check closely for ticks. You can feel them on your back and backside even if you can't see them. I shave my legs so I can feel them crawling on me. I use a Tick Stick to remove them to avoid the risk of squeezing my own now-contaminated blood out of the tick's stomach back into my body. Even so, I still find a dozen or so ticks on me over the course of a year. Mostly, they catch a ride on the dog and then drop off and attach to me.

Continuing my previous post, but on a new topic...

Robbie's illness highlights the flaws in traditional and alternative medicines, but it doesn't give any advice on what to do about it.

Traditional medicine should be the first line of defense, but you must be proactive. Learn about your illness, your treatment, and ask questions. Change doctors if you don't think your doctor is helping you.

Traditional medicine should be the first line of defense for all serious illnesses/injuries.

Alternative medicines sometimes work, but they are alternative because they don't work all the time for everyone. My rule of thumb is the 85/15 rule. Alternative approaches will fail 85% of the time and succeed only 15% of the time. (Obviously, this isn't scientific, but it's just a rough number to illustrate a point.) For example, it means that if you try one alternative medicine, it will fail to help 85% of the time. If you try two, however, the odds of failure drop to 72%, three is 61%, four is 52%. In other words, if you persist, the odds of finding something that might work swing in your favor. For Robbie, it didn't.

HOWEVER, Robbie did eventually find that a proactive approach and a COMBINATION of traditional and alternative medicines are returning him to good health.

Here is a personal example. As I got older, I would experience a major performance decline 2-3 times a year for no apparent reason. About 5 years ago, I saw my doctor. He explained that mono can lie dormant in your body for years and then flare up. The test was positive for chronic Epstein Barr Virus. We had found the problem! But my doctor said there was no cure. I researched EBV and found that, sure enough, the symptoms of mild EBV were exactly what I was experiencing every 4-6 months... probably brought on by stress or an impaired immune system from a cold or whatever.

I researched EBV online and saw it can be a nasty disease, but I also found a possible treatment. A coconut extract called Lauricidin. How could coconuts possibly help? Still, I was desperate so I ordered a jar. It worked! That was 5 years ago.

This is one example of how traditional medicine and alternative medicine can work together to treat otherwise incurable illnesses. You should start with traditional medicine, but you absolutely must be proactive and not give up if traditional medicine isn't helping.

I did all the herbs Andrew did though I added Teasel Root to better pull the toxin out of tissue.

I had it 8, yes, 8 times...NO MORE.( I hope)

The key takeaway here is that he spent half a year post diagnosis refusing to take the advice of legitimate medical professionals. If you want a second or third opinion on what antibiotics course to take, fine. If you want to supplement with oils or spices or whatever, fine. But to go half a year with only herbs as treatment is a very obviously bad move that SOMEBODY should have been advising him not to make.

qwertu wrote:

The key takeaway here is that he spent half a year post diagnosis refusing to take the advice of legitimate medical professionals. If you want a second or third opinion on what antibiotics course to take, fine. If you want to supplement with oils or spices or whatever, fine. But to go half a year with only herbs as treatment is a very obviously bad move that SOMEBODY should have been advising him not to make.

+1

Spot on.

The Canadian songstress Justine Bieber just announced a bout with it.

I've gotten ticks on me from running in high grass areas in Virginia and its bordering states. Always been pretty cavalier, just ripping them off and flushing them down a drain. I guess I'm lucky I never got sick.

From what I understand from doctors, that's really rare. If it's legitimate Lyme disease, the runner's body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

rojo wrote:

Don't misunderstand me, I'm not opposed to alternative medicine but you don't mess around with Lyme. Now he's getting the best of both worlds. He's got a doctor that a) was a former pro b) and believes in both traditional and non-traditional medicine.

I spent several days at the ILADS (lyme disease) conference two years ago. Almost every doctor and researcher used a combination of alternative healing techniques and drugs. Some just used alternative techiques and I believe one just presented on drugs only. These are practitioners who focus largely on treating Lyme Disease. If I had Lyme Disease, I wouldn’t go to the average practitioner who knows little about the disease and has little experience, but instead go to a practitioner who presented at ILADS or at least cared enough to attend the conference and find out what is and isn’t working in the real world.

A fantastic article by Gretchen Voss. When I heard Robby had Lyme at the end of 2018 or beginning of 2019, I remember thinking "This might wipe him out for 2020" particularly when I heard he wasn't using traditional medicine. A kid at my HS sucked for more than a year when people tried to figure out how to treat his lyme.

I mean the beginning of the article reminded me of Steve Jobs issuing his own death warrant by not going to see a legitimate doctor.

Crazy.

Don't misunderstand me, I'm not opposed to alternative medicine but you don't mess around with Lyme. Now he's getting the best of both worlds. He's got a doctor that a) was a former pro b) and believes in both traditional and non-traditional medicine.[/quote]

Basically the problem was that his first doctor was rubbish and didn't mention the co-infections. Andrews would probably have been fine without all the holistic crap

Yikes. Talk about self sabotage. He had debilitating symptoms and was worried about the side effects of the treatment. To add insult to injury he gets taken by some snake oil salesman for thousands! Then he lets RW write this article to broadcast how much of an idiot he is. Good dude, but not a smart man...

thisguy wrote:

Yikes. Talk about self sabotage. He had debilitating symptoms and was worried about the side effects of the treatment. To add insult to injury he gets taken by some snake oil salesman for thousands! Then he lets RW write this article to broadcast how much of an idiot he is. Good dude, but not a smart man...

This article could potentially help hundreds of people or even thousands when you consider runners talking about it to other runners. Tick-borne diseases are nasty, life-changing, and potentially fatal. This article raises awareness. Kudos to everyone involved.

This thread is one of the reasons I keep coming back to LetsRun in spite of its faults. I learn something or I can pass on something I've learned the hard way to other runners.

This is such an important article for runners since we are at a much higher risk for picking up ticks. In hindsight, I am almost positive I had a Lyme infection while in college but was luckily taking tetracycline at the time to combat acne. I had a severe fever, chills, aches, sweats, fatigue that lasted a few days and came on out of nowhere in the middle of the summer. That had to be Lyme. A lot of doctors don’t know what to look for or how to diagnose the disease, and the longer you wait to treat it, the harder it is to beat it.

Fisky. Thank you so much for presenting your personal example. I have experienced the same symptoms you described. I'm running fine now, but in the Summer of 2018 I could barely go 20 minutes jogging without shutting down from exhaustion. A similar thing happened to a couple of years before that. This time, it went on for months so I just stopped running while I looked into explanations from physicians and found none (bloodwork, neuro workup, cardio, pulmonary workup). When I decided to try running again after about 8 months off, the issues were gone.

I had mono in college, so I'm going to look into this if I have another bout of "the (crappy) runs".

Thanks Again!

Just wow... , there is a website for Lauricidin that you can find with a search. I took one scoop twice a day at first until all my symptoms were gone. Afterwards, I took one scoop twice a week and that seemed to completely eliminate the EBV flare-ups. It's been five years. Now, I take one scoop maybe once a week. However, it's one of the oils in coconut oil and I take about a half-ounce of MCT oil (C8 and C10 oils) in my morning coffee every day so I might be getting some benefit from the MCT oil.

Regardless, Lauricidin works for me and the impact of an EBV flare-up is so frustrating that it's worth trying. Shelf life is 2 years, but it's probably longer if you keep it in the refrigerator. I'd buy it now. You don't want to wait a week for it to arrive after you notice your next bout.

FWIW, my flare-ups got much worse as I got older. By my mid-60s, they were happening 2-3x/year. My running performance would just tank precipitously with no other obvious signs. I couldn't even maintain my easy run pace. Looking back, there were some telltale subtle signs, scratchy throat, slightly swollen glands in my throat, but that was about it.

I am an extremely healthy guy and I take other immune system boosters, but they didn't prevent the EBV flare-ups.