A Mother's Story of her Son's Lyme Disease Journey with LDI & Homeopathy

I was blessed with a happy, energetic, friendly, curious, bright, loving and very funny son.  His spirit and soul were apparent even at a young age.  As a toddler through kindergarten my little ball of light started having a lot of strange symptoms starting with a vaccine reaction of myoclonic jerks in his crib all night, constant ear infections, attention issues, hyperactivity, rashes, eczema, gluten & dairy intolerances, environmental allergies, always falling down with poor balance. All this continued and ramped up to extreme and painful gastro issues, diarrhea or constipation depending on the day, headaches, physical pain intolerance, anxiety in sleeping alone, extreme hypermobility, constant viral & bacterial infections much more than other children. When he entered grade school these continued to worsen and the pain issue turned into a frightening autoimmune disease called Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS). His sleep was destroyed, he had no energy, and a plethora of new symptoms would pop up all the time, wax and wane (like tics where he would open and close his mouth repeatedly) and then some symptoms stayed constant like brain fog and short-term memory loss.  I am very serious when I say that his symptom list by 4th grade was more than 3 pages long typed!  He had also had so many co-morbid issues from Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO) to Hpylori.    

We went to over 30 specialists during this time and tens of thousands of dollars in tests, therapies galore and treatments from a number of medical modalities to treat each symptom.  Finally we went to a practitioner who is highly trained in Dr. Dietrich Klinghart’s Autonomic Response Testing (ART) which is a tremendously accurate non-invasive biofeedback diagnostics.  The practioner instantly found my son as having Lyme & Co-infections (Borellia, Bartonella & Babesia). Wow!  I then took him to a LLMD (Lyme Literate Medical Doctor) whom confirmed this diagnosis clinically and based on labs.  You see, my son got these pathogens from me in utero even though mine was mostly dormant. It’s like syphilis that way.  Lyme & Co’s can affect every organ and become auto-immune and chronic.  So we embarked on finding the top Lyme Literate specialists in the country traveling far and wide.

At the time, I was a single working mother with an amicable relation with his dad who had remarried and lived in another state.  But his dad wasn’t believing any of it and dismissed my worries. I feel deep down inside that he loved our son so much that he couldn’t fathom him being as sick as I explained.  And to be real, the multitude of strange symptoms I described do sound out-landish…but that’s Lyme. Regardless, I wish I would have had his dad’s emotional support back then since this was so serious and the fact that he is indeed a good person and had been one of my best friends. Then shockingly my sisters weren’t a support either, thinking I was just worrying too much and questioned me.  “He doesn’t look sick” was a phrase I’d hear over and over. Or they would just stop asking about him altogether and pretend nothing was going on. I had no support from family and found out that this was a common occurrence with other Lyme families.  The invisible, strange illness that has not been properly acknowledged by mainstream is a painful reality. Connecting with other Lyme families in group’s online, social media and in my community were some of things that supported me greatly in this journey. Thankfully his school was supportive as well, since they saw him daily and the issues first-hand.  They recommended a 504 that transformed into Special Education to support his learning issues especially his ADHD, memory loss and social skills.  Then as things worsened for my son and he could not attend or handle school, they were accommodating to enact short homebound teaching twice a week.

I also lost plenty of friends - with even one turning me into Child Protective Services, which of course they quickly dropped the case after investigating. But that’s all I needed at the time. I found how people just don’t “get it” when it comes to Lyme & Co’s.  For sure some of the mainstream physicians and specialists even doubted us, but I did find physicians that were more integrative, alternative, functional medicine types and especially LLMD/LLND’s (Lyme Literate Medical Doctors/Naturopathic Doctors trained by ILAIDS) that did acknowledged the issues and helped greatly. In fact, it was a practitioner trained in Dr. Klinghardt Autonomic Response Testing (ART) that first diagnosed him correctly and led us to more testing with the right labs to confirm it. I highly recommend ART as a diagnostic tool as it can help guide further testing since Lyme & Co testing is very poor with around a 50% false negative. It is uncanny how accurate Klinghardt’s ART is for figuring out what is at the root. I’ve double checked ART plenty of times with traditional tests or just by treating the issue and it was right-on.  I even learned how to use muscle testing myself which has been an indispensable tool on a day-to-day basis for testing supplements, medications and for diagnostics.

I was also grateful to work out a flex-time schedule with my employer.  On the couple of days a week I would go into work I had 2 wonderful in-home sitters who were supportive – both of which became a part of our family. 

It was a very painful, scary, lonely journey but I am a resilient one. I dipped into my retirement savings, researched for endless hours, focused on my son, put the unsupportive and negative people out of my life and maintained an all-mighty faith that I would recover my son from this serious, complex and mysterious nightmare.    

All along the one main thing that blew me away was how my beautiful boy handled all this, he was still loving, bright, fun and courageous….until 5th grade.   

Quite dramatically at the age of 10, my sweet and loving boy started having extreme rage, anxiety, depression, hatefulness, over-the-top negativity, constant tics and scary/dark intrusive thoughts. It was like he was possessed, truly. He fell slowly into the abyss, which worsened with each strep throat infection he had. He could not remotely handle school, had meltdowns, lost all his interest in hobbies, raged at friends and lost them, isolated himself from the world, could not sleep alone, nor be left alone even if I went to the mailbox his anxiety would spike. He was addicted to gaming and used my credit card multiple times to buy games that totaled in the end easily to a few thousand dollars. His pupils were dilated and coupled with his expression and actions he looked something you’d see out of horror movie sometimes. I noticed this behavior seemed to intensify and correlate with his repeated strep throat infections. Before all this extreme personality change, keep in mind that he was already in severe total body pain with the highest pain being in his feet/legs where he couldn’t walk or stand for longer than a few minutes and had crippling abdominal pain along with some pretty bad neuro-cognitive symptoms. There were a myriad of other symptoms from Lyme & Co’s that were pages long, but it was PANDAS’s (Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder Associated with Streptococcal infection) that took all of this to a new level.  It is where the body starts attacking the brain due to strep (and can be other pathogens as well) and causes encephalitis which is brain swelling.  I found out from my groups and practitioners that this is an all too common co-morbid autoimmune disease that can trigger in Lyme & Co’s children.

By the age of 11, after a tonsillectomy and many rounds of antibiotics, he was so severe we were considering IVIG and almost put him on psych meds. Then our practitioner recommended the Strep LDI thank the heavens! LDI is Low Dose Immunotherapy which is sort of a blending of homeopathy with allergy tolerance type of mechanism. It’s most similar to a branch of homeopathy called isopathy. LDI is a therapy taken under the tongue every 7 weeks designed to retrain the T-reg cells to stop overreacting and causing the body inflammation & symptoms.  LDI gets to the root of the problem which is the dysregulated immune system.

With each “round” of the Strep LDI he came back to me…the way he used to be! These were pretty immediate type of improvements with even the first dose, and continued to get better with each 7 week dose. He even caught strep that fall and didn't go cuckoo crazy! It took me over a week to realize he had strep because he didn't overreact with extreme neurological behaviors like over-the-top anxiety, anger, and depression - as he had done in the last 1 1/2 years where he had strep 10 times. The Strep LDI is hands down the most amazing therapy we have ever seen such life changing results from.  And to boot, he has not had a strep throat infection since.

I was so impressed, that we started him on the Borrelia & Bartonella LDI’s and had similar dramatic resolve of other symptoms, especially his GI and the body and leg/foot pain. I even saw his Bart striae that he had on his back, chest, underarms start fading!  Seeing how my son’s body responded to LDI, I also embarked on the classical homeopathy path with a highly experienced homeopath.  The miracles continued.  I was skeptical at first but now I am a true believer and have also seen dramatic resolve of some of my own complicated health issues, as well as, heard first hand many other peoples’ experiences with homeopathy. 

Bottom line is there no treatment that is near as good as the human immune system, period. But when the immune system gets dysregulated by some of the more virulent cunning clever pathogens (Borrelia, Bartonella, Babesia, Mold, Strep), it can disable and confuse the immune system, hide and even change its form evading treatments like antibiotics. Then a host of many other problems ensue (food allergies, SIBO, hpylori, parasites) because the immune system is not doing its job anymore.  When I wrapped my arms around this fact -  that it was no longer the actual pathogens causing the symptoms, instead it was the dysregulated immune system causing the symptoms - that’s when my whole focus of research for answers changed to help my son recover.

My son is one the complicated cases, having congenital Lyme from me all his life and not being correctly diagnosed until he was 10. Thus, he suffered enormously with severe complications and had multiple symptoms. Then when he hit puberty (Lyme & co’s love to come out to play with stressors like this), it became so much worse and also took him into autoimmune with PANDAS & CRPS - both horrifying. We spent years of trying multiple modalities of antibiotics, medical procedures, herbals, and traveled to some of the top LLMDs/LLNDs and medical specialists in the country. Not a whole lot of improvement and any improvement wouldn't last until LDI and homeopathy.  It is astounding how a drop or pellet under the tongue can communicate and then educate the immune system to do its job.

My son is now 17 years old and a senior in high school. He is an A/B student and a member of the Beta Club. He worked very hard to catch up in his studies and actually has exceeded this where he recently took a dual credit college class and received an A in the class with his first college paper.  He is still passionate about technology but also has interest in philosophy, government, Algebra, world religions, anthropology and a wide range of subjects. He is drawn to nature and even hiking, which is amazing since he had extreme neuropathy in his feet/legs for most of his life and also refused to leave his room. Most importantly, his true spirit and soul I spoke of in the beginning have been restored and blossomed over the last 4 years, ever since starting LDI & homeopathy.  He’s happy, loving, motivated, deep, and has that contagious fun-loving sense of humor and demeanor. 

Today, for me as his mother, I now feel little worries about his health.  Mainly because my homeopath is a call a way, my trusty homeopathic remedy 200c kit is near me, and his LDI boosters are in arms reach.  And I have empowered myself with ART.  Most of his LDI doses are now only necessary approximately once a year as boosters, and he may be able to stop taking them all together since his immune system has had so much ‘education’ with it.  LDI may not be for everyone, but one thing is clear, a patient needs to explore regulating the immune system as part of their treatment.

One way I can describe how the experience has been in a brief manner is by remembering that feeling when I was a little and woke up to Christmas morning. That's how my mornings are now…and a far cry of how I woke up during those dark years.

I promised myself during those nightmare years that when I found some answers I would help others. I have since become a patient advocate in my spare time and am very involved in the Facebook closed groups for PANDAS/PANS, Lyme, LDI and more.  It’s vital for us to spread the hope and light from the darkness.  I hope I have done so for you today.

For more information on LDI you can read my full story at  https://www.betterhealthguy.com/rooftops