Pamela Weintraub is a science journalist, Lyme disease survivor, and author of the groundbreaking book Cure Unknown: Inside the Lyme Epidemic.

I highly recommend you read her most recent article, entitled “A New Look at Chronic Lyme.” You can find it online at Experience Life, a health and wellness website and magazine.

It provides important perspective about changes that are happening in the world of treating Lyme disease–including the fact that many Lyme-savvy doctors now combine conventional medicine with gentler integrative strategies.

Weintraub points out:

Doctors who are literate in chronic Lyme used to be rare. If you could find one, you’d likely be subjected to high doses of antibiotics and anti­malarials in harsh regimens that might’ve lasted months or years.

The success of this approach was mixed. Some chronic-Lyme ­sufferers regained their lives but endured ­grueling side effects, including ­destabilized microbiomes. Others suffered side effects but did not improve.

Perhaps because so many chronic Lyme cases involve co-infection, these treatments often didn’t resolve the problem.

Today, many of these same practitioners have taken a different path, a multipronged approach that combines the judicious use of drugs with more natural therapies. And many patients with intractable illness are finally getting their lives back.

She profiles Lyme writer Jennifer Crystal, who has dealt with tick-borne infections for 25 years. She interviews several top Lyme doctors–including a number of whom have had chronic Lyme themselves.

I found this article highly enlightening. I think you will too.

TOUCHED BY LYME is written by Dorothy Kupcha Leland, President of LymeDisease.org. She is co-author of When Your Child Has Lyme Disease: A Parent’s Survival Guide. Contact her at dleland@lymedisease.org.