Avoid Ticks But Not the Wild
Precautions for going afield.
You’re here because you love nature. I want you to roll naked through wild grasses in the morning dew. But you need to watch out for ticks.
Here’s why and how.
I received a major education after I was diagnosed with Lyme, and I want to pass this information on to you.
My Story Starts
EVEN AFTER A hard day’s work, the mile-long walk to our mailbox was pleasant. The deep woods smelled earthy and primal, and some wildflower was blooming. Often I saw deer, and sometimes a bobcat or a coyote crossed the dirt road ahead.
Some years ago the walk became difficult. “I know you’ve heard it a dozen times,” I said to my husband, Raven, one day when we set out to fetch the mail. “Both my hands are asleep.” I held them out. They looked like normal weed-pulling, hole-digging, firewood-stacking hands. Inside they tingled and burned, as if the circulation had been cut off.
The first goldenrod waved from the ditch.
“My feet are asleep too,” I said. “Something’s not right.” I stopped and stamped my boots against the ground. “They’re asleep,” I said, my voice shriller.
Raven was quiet.
He had been hearing me complaining of freakish health for so long that he threatened to hide our medical manual. I was seeing double. My skin crawled. I had a headache and a scratchy throat. I wasn’t sleeping well.
That evening I switched on the computer and searched “symptoms & tingling hands and feet.” Seven or eight illnesses popped up, and one by one I worked my way through them.
Then I got to Lyme disease.
Lyme Disease
Lyme disease is a vector-borne bacterial infection usually transmitted to humans by ticks from deer, white-footed mice, and chipmunks. 1
The bacteria is Borrelia burgdorferi (Bb). Individually these are called spirochetes because of their corkscrew shape. A tick, either in the nymph or the adult stage, latches on to a host. As it saws into the skin it injects saliva containing compounds that act as cement, binding the tick to the mammal host. The tick feeds until it gets its fill and falls off, but in the meantime infects the host with a disease.
As a naturalist, I’m often in meadows and woods, and truth be told, I’ve been nonchalant about ticks. When they bit me, which was often, I picked them off, squashed them between rocks, and went on bush-whacking. I figured a strong immune system would protect me. That was my first mistake.
I knew enough about Lyme disease to look for a bull’s-eye rash, however. Therein lay my second mistake.
How I Became Infected
I remember, about five years before, pulling off a tick and watching an angry red circle grow around the bite-wound. For a few days it worsened. I held my arm up to my husband, who trained as an EMT. “Does that look like a bull’s-eye?”
“Not really,” he said. That was another mistake.
Fewer than fifty percent of Lyme-infecting tick bites result in a rash, and of the ones who do, only a portion of those form a bull’s-eye.
Soon flu-like symptoms arrived—chills, aches, fevers. I should have been poring over the medical manual then, adding two plus two. A $10 bottle of doxycycline might have saved me thousands of dollars. I thought I’d caught a virus.
Some people never see the tick that bites them. The tick can be small as a spinach seed. A tick can take the blood it needs and drop off.
Some sources say that a tick must latch on for twelve hours in order to be dangerous. Others are treating a tick-bite more seriously, saying that a tick can inject pathogens in as little as four hours.
A friend of mine interned for three weeks one summer at a New Jersey farm where Lyme is rampant—the rule there was that if anyone found a tick stuck on their body, no matter how long it had been there, they had to take a prophylactic dose of antibiotics. During my friend’s sojourn, despite all precautions, she did two rounds of antibiotics.
Lyme is serious.
Lyme is found in every state.
Lyme infection is epidemic.
Lyme disease left untreated becomes a severe chronic condition. Total disability and even death may occur.
Furthermore
Lyme isn’t the only tick-borne illness. There’s also
Babesiosis
Ehrlichiosis
Powassan virus disease
Rocky Mountain spotted fever
Anaplasmosis
Tularemia
Alpha-gal syndrome (makes you allergic to red meat)
Chlamydia
Spotted Fever Rickettsiosis
And more.
Below I’ll finish the story about my treatment. If you only have limited time, however, I want to get you to the important information.
My Advice About Ticks
If you are bitten by a tick that latches on, seek help immediately. Don’t wait for symptoms. Get treatment, especially if you experience a bull’s-eye rash. Your doctor may be nonchalant about tick bites, uneducated about Lyme, and resistant to treating you with antibiotics. Find another doctor. Find an underground way of getting antibiotics. Take charge. Learn as much as you can. Be well. Stay well.
No Fear
However, do not let ticks stop you from reaping the healing and life-giving properties of nature.
10 Tips for Prevention
Educate yourself about Lyme. (You’re doing that already, right now.)
Do frequent and thorough tick checks after being out-of-doors.
Use tick repellant (containing DEET, picaridin, IR3535, oil of lemon eucalyptus, para-menthane-diol, or 2-undecanone) on shoes and clothes. Some of these are not recommended for children. (From Mark Ray—"We use organic repellents on children as they may be orders of magnitude more sensitive to organochlorides.”)
Wear light-colored clothing in places you may encounter ticks. I recommend long pants.
Tuck your pants into your socks, then your shirt into your pants. Wear a hat.
Treat clothing and gear with products containing 0.5% permethrin. Boots, clothing, and camping gear that has been treated can remain protective through six weeks or six washings. You can also buy permethrin-treated clothing and gear.
While in nature, avoid high grass, low-hanging trees, or brushy areas. Stay to the center of paths.
Take soapy showers after outdoor activities to perhaps wash off unattached ticks.
Launder clothing before wearing again.
Make sure that pets that go outside are also treated for ticks.
P.S. A fabulous suggestion from a reader, Lor—"May I suggest buying a pack of the old fashioned lint rollers, the kind with a roll of tape attached to a hand-held wand. Each piece of tape has a perforated line to rip off the used piece. Keep one in the car, backpack, etc. For example, if you see a tick on yourself or your pet that has not embedded yet, simply use the roll to lift of the tick, then fold the tape over it, nice and secure. If you are removing an embedded tick, do the same. It is always reassuring that you have a place to securely dispose of the tick or a place to keep it if it needs to be identified.
Proper Removal of Ticks from Humans, Pets, and Livestock
A TickKey or pair of tweezers is as important as your pocketknife.
Grasp tick with pointed tweezers as close to the skin as possible and pull straight out. (Or use a TickKey—see postscript below.)
Do not squeeze the tick. (TickKey ensures that you don’t squeeze.)
Use alcohol on tweezers and the wound to kill bacteria.
Wash your hands thoroughly. (Some recommend wearing gloves.)
Do not burn or use any substance on the tick to get it to unlatch as this may cause the tick to inject infected material into you.
Save the tick in an air-tight container with a moist cotton ball.
Postscript
My friend Cathy Payne wrote and advised us not to remove ticks with tweezers. Here’s what she wrote:
I’m concerned about using tweezers for removal because of awkwardness, portability, and avoiding injecting blood or saliva into the victim.
Here are options. The TickKey is the gold standard. It’s plastic-free, fits on a key chain or in a pocket, is precise and easy. When the tick is removed you can easily see skin tissue in its mouth, indicating that nothing was left embedded in the human or dog.
You put the wide opening over the tick, press gently, and pull until you hear a pop.
I just wanted you to know about this. It’s gentle for infants and children, too.
Back to My Story
Lyme is a stealthy, wily coyote. What happens with Lyme is that first it courses around in your bloodstream, growing. Then it starts to burrow into your organs and joints—hard to reach places. It attacks whole systems. It crosses the brain barrier, causing cognitive damage, and Lyme sufferers start forgetting words and transposing syllables and forgetting the way home. (Borrelia-like bacteria have been associated with Alzheimers.) Then it attacks your immune system, so that finally your body no longer resists.
After I understood that I had Lyme, I went looking for help. There are doctors, I learned, and then there are Lyme-literate doctors, and those in the final category are few and far between.
How I Got Help
I made an appointment with my primary care physician. The morning of the appointment I awoke with a urinary tract infection so acute that I was peeing threads of blood. My doctor was a short, thin-haired man with thick glasses who kept his charts online and, bad for me, on this day the clinic’s computers were down. I peed in a cup and it tested positive for infection. I enumerated my symptoms to the doctor and told him what I had concluded. “Maybe you have carpal tunnel,” he said.
“My feet are tingling too,” I said. “Right now they’re tingling.”
“Do you have joint pain?”
“No,” I said.
“I don’t think you have the Lyme,” he said. Then he paused, desperately trying to remember his computer notes. “You’re the one with the anxiety disorder, right?”
“Not that I know of,” I said. “You mean panic attacks?”
“That’s part of it,” he said.
“I’ve never had a panic attack in my life,” I said. “I’m losing feeling in my hands and feet.”
He refused to do a test.
Don’t Tell Me No
I don’t do well with “no.” I’m also not the kind of person who believes what I’m told by any establishmentarian, including corporations and the organizations that uphold dominant narratives. I kept researching.
The best test for Lyme is the Western blot, which measures the body’s antigenic response to bacteria. But how to get one?
Someone told me about a university epidemiolost in my region who was testing people for free. He said to send blood. To get that blood, I found a clinic that, without a doctor’s signature, would perform any medical test needed. I drove three hours, walked in, waited until a phlebotomist could draw four vials of blood, and paid for a test to be sent to Quest Diagnostics.
Half of the blood I delivered to the epidemiologist.
I heard first from the scientist. He had not found Lyme. But that meant nothing, he pointed out. “The spirochetes tend to disseminate throughout the body,” he wrote. They hide. They change forms.
However, he wrote, while looking through his microscope he had found another bacteria, Babesia microti, a co-infection of the Borrelia and easier to detect because it is a red-blood-cell parasite.
I later learned that Babesia is one of many possible coinfections, which means that ticks don’t simply transmit Lyme infection. They transmit many other infections.
When the Quest test returned, of the seven bands of protein antigens tested, two were reactive and five were not. By the standards of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the test was negative.
“The CDC specifically states that the diagnosis of Lyme is not dependent on laboratory results,” wrote Ginger R. Savely in her article “Update on Lyme Disease” in Clinician Reviews. “In spite of this, there are still many practitioners who believe that negative results on Lyme testing reliably ‘rule out’ the disease.”
“The bottom line may read ‘negative,’” she wrote, “but if the test reveals at least one highly specific band, the clinician should be suspicious of Bb exposure.”
The Western blot sensitivity, in fact, is only between 30 and 50 percent.
You Need a Clinician
Lyme is a clinical diagnosis based on these factors:
1. Tick exposure, especially in an endemic region.
2. Presence of a rash. (There may not be one, as I said.)
3. Evolution of symptoms.
4. Results of tests.
5. Response to treatment.
Diagnosis of Lyme and its coinfections is complicated by the fact that Lyme mimics many other diseases, and by the hundreds of symptoms associated with the disease. These include anything from hair loss to chest pain, impotency to coma, vertigo to kidney failure.
I’ve heard this over and over: person after person goes from symptom to symptom, doctor to doctor, looking for a solution to ill health, and more often than not, they finally figure out the problems on their own.
Some regions of the country, too, are worse for getting treatment. “We don’t have Lyme disease in Georgia,” one physician’s assistant told me.
Yes, we do have Lyme in Georgia. Every state has it. Second, even if we didn’t, people travel. Deer travel. Pets travel. Birds fly.
I needed a Lyme specialist. You’d think I was wanting a seat on a space shuttle. That’s because two medical camps are in a violent battle with each other over Lyme disease.
The Controversy
At that point in time the Infectious Diseases Society of America had taken the baffling position that chronic Lyme disease did not exist. Starting in the early 1990s, in a kind of witchhunt, it went after doctors one by one, charging them before medical boards with overtreating patients, and in some cases, seizing their licenses to practice.
On the other hand, the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society was composed of physicians who acknowledged the existence of chronic Lyme and went about treating it. They healed very sick people, sometimes risking their very livelihoods to do so. I know a woman, for example, who was crippled by Lyme, unable to work and unable even to get out of bed. After a few years of intense antibiotic therapy, she now works seven days a week on a charter boat.
I won’t bore you with the details of finding a doctor and how many hours away from my home in southern Georgia he or she practices and how much she or he costs. That I had to apply to be seen, and before this doctor would even read my application, my local physician had to refer me. Suffice it to say that I knocked on many doors before finding someone local to refer me. Finally I found a doctor I’ll call Abe. He had a close friend who had been blinded by Lyme. He was willing to sign on to care for me locally, should I need it. I got my first appointment with the specialist.
IGeneX
The specialist sent more blood to a laboratory in California called IGeneX, which offered a more sensitive test, measuring the Lyme-specific bands of antibodies. The results, as I knew they would be, were positive. The doctor surmised that I had been carrying the infection for at least five years.
He began a rigorous treatment, layers of oral antibiotics taken in different combinations, pulsed. A doctor at our local hospital installed a PICC line in my left arm, leading to the aorta, and intravenous antibiotics began. Once a day my husband turned into my personal nurse. The protocol was particular—hand-washing, glove-wearing, line tips cleaned with three alcohol pads, line flushed with saline syringes, locked down with heparin.
When it comes to antibiotics, I am a doubter. I took my first antibiotics at age 31. I’ve tried to avoid them if at all possible because I want my immune system to be a topnotch and effective first defense against harmful bacteria. But I knew with Lyme disease that I would have to submit or watch myself die a slow death.
I began a slow journey to health.
One morning I walked to the mailbox, watching for migrant warblers, and I could feel my hands and feet again.
Other Treatments
In addition to antibiotics, I took probiotics and other supplements daily. We continued to eat our own farm-raised, organic produce and grass-fed meat. I did gentle exercise and made sure I got out into the sunshine.
Six months of IV antibiotics did not, in the end, rid my body of Lyme although I was much improved. Lucky for me I found the work of herbalist Stephen Harrod Buhner. His herbal protocol for treating Lyme, outlined in his book Healing Lyme, has saved me. I corresponded with Stephen before he died, and he told me that some people can use these herbs for a short while and be healed. Others will need to take them the rest of their lives. I don’t take them daily. But if I miss more than a week or so, I begin to feel symptoms that mimic fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue.
The herbs that help me personally (and these will be different, depending on infection and coinfection) are Siberian eleuthero, andrographis, cat’s claw bark, and resveratrol.
Other Lyme sufferers have treated themselves with interesting and sometimes effective non-antibiotic methods, including Rife machines, colostrum, Vitamin C infusions, and colloidal silver. These are not to be dismissed.
I want to be clear. I do not suffer from Lyme disease. I do not have neuropathy or nerve pain at all or headaches or fatigue or any other symptom associated with the disease. Most days I amaze myself with the quality of my life and health, how energized I feel and how many new ideas rush over me.
Since the last dose of antibiotics, I have been intent on restoring the wild bacteria of my gut.
Epidemic
A heart-breaking part of the disease is learning how many people are suffering from it. Everyone I speak with has some sort of relationship with the disease—they had it or know someone who had it or know someone who died from it—which means that it’s more far-reaching than we realize.
I plan to have a lot more fun in the fields and forests and wildernesses, as well as on the rivers of this world. I don’t believe in letting fear get in the way of life, adventure, nature, people, good food, and good fun.
Therefore, we are going to have to get a lot smarter about protecting ourselves.
Do You Have Symptoms?
Take this Lyme disease symptoms test.
Important Resources
Buhner, Stephen Harrod. Healing Lyme.
Buhner, Stephen Harrod. Healing Lyme Disease Coinfections.
Buhner, Stephen Harrod. Natural Treatments for Lyme Coinfections.
Burrascano, Joseph J., MD. Advanced Topics in Lyme Disease: Diagnostic Hints and Treatment Guidelines for Lyme and Other Tick Borne Illnesses. Download his pdf for free here.
IGeneX. 795 San Antonio Road, Palo Alto, CA 94303. (800) 832-3200. You can order a test kit, but you will still need a doctor to send it.
International Lyme & Associated Diseases Educational Foundation
Savely, Ginger R., medical treatment.
Under Our Skin. Video documentary. Available on YouTube and Amazon Prime.
www.cidrap.umn.edu/tick-borne-disease (recommended by reader William Boyd)
Check for lyme advocacy websites in your state.
A Horrible Powassan Story
Julie Tennis sent a message that one of her favorite authors lost his wife to a tick-borne disease, Powassan. The story is “A tick bite, the Powassan virus, and MaryAnn’s struggle.” (Thank you for sending this, Julie.)
Upcoming Webinar
IGeneX is offering a free webinar, Lyme Disease & Children, with Drs. Nancy O’Hara and Joseph Burrascano, Jr. Feb. 26, 2025 at 7 pm Central. You’ll need to register.
BEWARE
Folks who say that Lyme disease does not exist.
Folks who downplay Lyme disease.
A site called LymeScience.
Some new evidence is pointing to transmission by other insects, including mosquitoes, as well as by sexual partners.
So well done!!
We moved from Rhode Island to find a kinder place. We found that place in Western North Carolina. We moved from Rhode Island because the ticks outnumbered the chances of not getting Lyme.
Thank you for reminding us to be mindful as we love our place.🌱🌿💚
Lyme is well-recognised here and is endemic in the forest but despite this and treatment with antibiotics and herbs my son has had Lyme for 4 years adn the last test showed it still active in his blood. It's a terrible disease and thank you for highlighting it.