This article was originally published in the Winter 2023 issue of Wise Traditions.
Over the past few years, there have been a lot of requests for us to say something about Lyme disease, so I decided it was time to dedicate an article (and a video) to the topic. In this case, the alleged bacterial pathogen is introduced into the body by a tick, and the claim that ticks cause this disease through bites is considered under the germ theory umbrella. But what does the scientific evidence actually reveal? Have the bacteria been shown to cause sickness, and is Lyme disease even a legitimate entity?
The truth is more shocking than many would imagine. It is also a timely topic, as a new fear campaign has been launched in the form of the alleged deadly Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever poised to come to the United Kingdom, also said to be spread by ticks. Additionally, a tick “bioweapon” gaslighting campaign supposedly implicating the Pentagon was also playing on corporate media platforms in July 2019.
As my husband, Dr. Mark Bailey, summarizes:
“The introduction of the term ‘Lyme disease’ in the 1970s was a win for establishment medicine but a grave loss for the public. A label was attached to a nonspecific range of symptoms and signs and the bug hunters then falsely accused Borrelia, a bystander bacterial species. If a doctor says you have Lyme disease, they do not know what they are talking about— get out of there before they run non-diagnostic tests or worse, try to ‘treat’ you.”
United States versus New Zealand paradox
Part of the reason we have taken this long to publish something about Lyme disease is that it is said not to exist in our home country of New Zealand. In fact, the Ministry of Health states: “Ticks have the potential to pose public health and biosecurity risks because they can carry and transmit human and animal diseases. However, the Ministry is not aware of any cases of people catching a disease from a tick bite in New Zealand. The main diseases of concern in some other countries are not currently present in New Zealand.” This is an interesting situation, because if we have ticks and humans coming and going, then on these officials’ own terms, why would we not have Lyme disease?
They give an explanation that states, “The ticks present in New Zealand have shown the ability to transmit pathogens, such as bacteria and viruses. Fortunately, the pathogens are rare in New Zealand and damage is mainly isolated to economic loss caused by heavy infestations.” This is all rather wishy-washy. They are claiming that there are ticks that can transmit pathogens and that the pathogens are present, albeit rare, yet there is no Lyme disease. As expected, the New Zealand Ministry, which is notorious for churning out health disinformation, provides no scientific references on its webpage, and the article has been authored anonymously.
Over to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Lyme disease page, which claims: “Lyme disease is the most common vector-borne disease in the United States. Lyme disease is caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi and rarely, Borrelia mayonii. It is transmitted to humans through the bite of infected blacklegged ticks.” There are no citations provided, simply a note at the end of the page that cites the “content source” as the CDC’s “National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, Division of Vector-Borne Diseases,” but that link doesn’t provide specific citations either.
What is “Lyme Disease?”
Before we go on a search for scientific evidence of the alleged causal agent of Lyme disease, first we should investigate how the disease is defined. And this is where the whole thing becomes scientifically unhinged. The CDC states that the early signs and symptoms could be “fever, chills, headache, fatigue, muscle and joint aches, and swollen lymph nodes.”
On Wikipedia, it is even worse; the Lyme disease entry states, “Lyme disease can affect several body systems and produce a broad range of symptoms. Not everyone with Lyme disease has all of the symptoms and many of the symptoms are not specific to Lyme disease, but can occur with other diseases, as well.” This is a farcical state of affairs because the diagnosis is supposed to be based on a history of tick exposure (not even a confirmed bite) and symptoms—but these symptoms can be just about anything.
What about erythema migrans, the famous rash said to be specific to Lyme disease? Once again, this is not a specific type of rash, and the CDC even has a page called “The Many Forms of Lyme Disease Rashes.” This page suggests that the rash can be faint, could be crusted and can appear in different shapes and colors, whereas other indistinguishable rashes can be dismissed as not erythema migrans because they are classified as “allergic reactions” to insults such as insect bites and drugs. At this point, we are likely to get some practitioners protesting that they know Lyme disease when they see it. But what exactly are they referring to? They would have to be making up their own diagnostic criteria as well.
What “pathogen”?
In terms of the alleged pathogen involved, we can consult the “big book” of Lyme disease called Lyme Disease and Relapsing Fever Spirochetes published in 2021. In particular, Chapter 13 titled “Lyme Disease Pathogenesis” states the following:
“Lyme disease was first recognized in 1976 when a cluster of cases of juvenile arthritis was recognized in Old Lyme, CT. Many of these patients also reported cutaneous skin lesions that were similar to those reported in Europe that were previously associated with tick bites. There was a strong suspicion that an infectious agent was the underlying cause of both cases in Old Lyme, CT and in Europe, but it was not until 1982 that a spirochete found in Ixodes ticks was suggested to be the cause (Burgdorfer et al., 1982). The role of this bacterium, named Borrelia burgdorferi, as the causative agent of Lyme disease was quickly established as the bacterium was recovered from patients as well as from reservoir hosts, such as the white-footed mouse.”
The single listed citation by Burgdorfer et al. is the 1982 paper with the title “Lyme Disease—A Tick-Borne Spirochetosis?” (Note the question mark at the end of the title.) The paper describes how the researchers collected one hundred twenty-six ticks from Shelter Island, New York in 1981 and found that 61 percent of them had spirochetes (a type of bacterium) in their gut. On this basis, the authors unwarrantedly concluded, “The degree of infection varied; some ticks contained only a few spirochetes, others contained large numbers.”
Finding bacteria in a gut system is not evidence of an infection. We have trillions of microbes in our gut and, like all animals, the microbes are required for our life processes. In any case, it is nonsense to claim that microbes found in tick guts are the smoking gun for the cause of Lyme disease. To make the case for bitten transmission even weaker, the paper’s authors admitted, “No other tissues, including the salivary glands, contained spirochetes.”
In the same paper, Burgdorfer and his coauthors proceeded to describe a study where they allowed about three hundred ticks to feed on eight New Zealand White rabbits. This was an uncontrolled experiment—simply an observational study—rather than an experimental one capable of testing their hypothesis with an independent variable. If they were suggesting that Borrelia caused Lyme disease, then some of the rabbits should have been bitten by ticks “infected” with the bacteria and other rabbits bitten by ticks not carrying the bacteria. Unsurprisingly, the biting onslaught by almost forty ticks per rabbit, attached to their shaved abdomens in metal capsules, caused some of them to develop rashes. However, despite testing the rabbits’ blood daily and taking skin biopsies, they found Borrelia bacteria in exactly zero. The reality was that they failed to demonstrate transmission, let alone any ability of the bacteria to cause disease.
“Antibodies” and more pseudoscience
We can pause at this moment to emphasize the fact that there is precisely no evidence that Borrelia species cause Lyme disease, and yet this 1982 paper is supposed to be one of the studies—if not the foundational paper—for the case. It is an example of the germ theorists’ desperation to make nature fit their model when the science does not back it up; in fact, we can see that they refuted themselves. So, how on earth is this foundational paper accepted as “evidence” to this day?
Due to the patent failure of their experiments, the researchers resorted to an antibody study. The antibodies were created by using an assay that reacted to an antigen contained in a tick specimen mixture. They reported that the antibody was present in all rabbits that had been exposed to ticks, although keep in mind, they are talking about a titer or concentration here—the protein could have been present in the rabbits not exposed to ticks as well, but they set the cut-off for a “positive” at a one in twenty dilution. Then they tested blood from nine patients clinically “diagnosed” with Lyme disease—which leads us straight back to the problem of, what does this even mean? In any case, they reported that the antibody was found in higher levels in these people than in people not diagnosed with Lyme disease.
It is beyond the scope of this article to dive into the deeper problems with antibodies, such as their specificity and the relevance of their detection in a complex organism. You can watch my video series, “The Yin & Yang of HIV” or read Virus Mania to learn about the scandalous claims that the medical establishment has made with regard to these dubious laboratory assays. Suffice to say, they do not constitute evidence for a pathogen, and all we can say is that the apparent presence of proteins termed “antibodies” in higher amounts may be an indication of tissue inflammation and damage (or healing attempts).
It has been an ongoing offense committed by the germ theorists to claim antibodies relate to “pathogen” exposure or “immunity.” They resort to this trick because they cannot fulfill Koch’s postulates or provide the required foundational evidence through the scientific method. To be fair, the authors of the 1982 paper did use the word “may” when stating that their “observations suggest that the treponema-like organism. . . may be involved in the etiology of Lyme disease.” But this is the paper that the seven hundred fifty-page tome on Lyme disease provides as the evidence that Borrelia bacteria cause Lyme disease—and almost everyone in the medical industry parrots the fraudulent claim.
Koch’s Postulates fail
In Lyme Disease and Relapsing Fever Spirochetes, Chapter 24 (“Lyme Disease in Humans”) ventures to state, “Lyme disease is the prototype of an emerging infectious disease”—apparently “emerging” out of the germ theorists’ minds only, not out of nature. The authors claim, “The isolation of its etiologic agent, Borrelia burgdorferi, from humans in 1983, capped an intensive hunt for a pathogen that just a short time before had been cultured from a black legged (deer) tick.” Here, they cite another pivotal paper with the title, “Spirochetes isolated from the blood of two patients with Lyme disease,” published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1983. The headline sounds impressive until you read that they “isolated spirochetes from the blood of 2 of 36 patients in Long Island and Westchester County, New York, who had signs and symptoms suggestive of Lyme disease.” Two out of thirty-six patients “thought to have Lyme disease” means that thirty-four out of thirtysix did not have any detectable bacteria! The logical gymnastics in the paper are incredible; they even suggested that this result “provides the most direct evidence to date of their [spirochetes’] etiologic role in this disease.”
And how did they reconcile their abysmal statistical findings with germ theory? By claiming, without any evidence whatsoever, that “Because of the low frequency of isolations (2 of 36 patients), the spirochetemia is probably transient and of low density in this condition.” Here, they are one step away from the virologists who claim that despite the microbes wreaking havoc in the body, the microbes can’t be found anywhere. The icing on the cake comes when the authors of the 1983 paper bizarrely assert that their paper means that “three of the four Koch’s postulates for establishing the role of the spirochete as the causative agent of Lyme disease have been largely satisfied.”
Utter nonsense—not one of Koch’s postulates was satisfied, as analysis of these foundational papers reveals.
Moving on from allopathic medicine
The last aspect to address is the mainstream claim that antibiotics are useful for treating the disease. If this were true, it cannot be due to any antimicrobial action because, as we have just seen, there is no evidence that any of this is
caused by bacteria. However, even mainstream practitioners admit that they don’t have sound evidence that antibiotics are effective. If we consult the article titled “Diagnosis and Management of Lyme Disease” in American Family Physician, it states that “doxycycline is effective for the treatment of early Lyme disease” but then lists the evidence rating as a lowly “C,” which equates to “consensus, disease-oriented evidence, usual practice, expert opinion, or case series”—in other words, not established through the scientific method.
Having worked in the system for two decades, I know that doctors hope that one of their prescription medicines will be the magic bullet. Unfortunately, this hope stems from the chronically ingrained and misplaced belief in germ theory and pharmaceuticals. There are other factors as well; a recent video about “medical self-delusion” by Roman Bystrianyk, the co-author of Dissolving Illusions, summarizes the phenomenon.
We have a conundrum here because the term “Lyme disease” is so well known, it seems to most people that it must be real. However, the term should be relegated to the archives of pseudoscience. And, as “terrain” proponents, we should be careful about being drawn into discussions along the lines of, “What causes Lyme disease, if not bacterial infection through tick bites?” It is not something that can be diagnosed because the signs and symptoms are non-specific, the microbiology is non-specific and the so-called “tests” (blood antibodies) are non-specific. I have heard Dr. Tom Cowan say that labelling a patient with “Lyme disease” is completely unhelpful, and I would wholeheartedly agree, as that is what the scientific literature reveals. Symptoms and signs may be real, but the fictional concoction known as “Lyme disease” is an allopathic germ theory cover story. We need to reject the label and attend to each individual’s situation. Focusing on whether they may have been bitten by a tick in the past few months is probably not going to provide the answer to restoring health.
Every case will be different, and the various symptoms and signs are manifestations of the body’s attempts to heal itself. The answers are found in addressing factors such as environmental toxins and dietary errors. And, it should be pointed out, we do not have pharmaceutical deficiencies, so that will not be the answer either.
Some time ago, I moved away from the medical model involving alleged specific disease entities with the realization that the body simply has various conditions. The condition of the body should be perfect, and this can be achieved through ignoring fear narratives and focusing on right living and right thinking. These principles are covered in detail in the book Terrain Therapy, as well as in my weekly content and through the Weston A. Price Foundation
Dr. Samantha Bailey
Sam is a content creator, medical author & health educator.
