Interesting interview with Dr. Cowden on Lyme protocol

[Guest guest]

I believe it has a lot of good information but I wonder why he

doesn't mention endotoxins released by one the infections. He does

not mention the genetic inability to filter toxins but I think what

he says has merit and he covers why it is so hard to cure Lyme.

I don't have Lyme disease I have mold exposure which is also very

hard to cure and a lot of what he says overlaps with Lyme disease but

we get mycotoxins. Lucky us!

http://www.lyme-disease-research-database.com/index.html

W. LEE COWDEN, M.D., University of Texas Medical School, is board

certified in internal medicine, cardiovascular disease, and clinical

nutrition. Dr. Cowden is currently teaching seminars to help medical

practitioners treat their patients with Lyme disease. He is

collecting data and information from patients using his protocol with

the aim of publishing so that more doctors can learn that there is a

less toxic and more effective treatment for Lyme disease. I spoke

with Dr. Cowden in August, 2006.

I'm talking today with Dr. Lee Cowden, and we're very excited to have

you as a guest here. We would love to know about your protocol for

Lyme disease. Currently, what is the protocol that you are using with

patients?

Yes. Thanks for having me on your program, first of all. I would say

that since we did the Lyme pilot study back in 2003, we've learned a

lot of new important things about Lyme disease that weren't obvious

from the study. I guess the most important thing we've learned is

that if you don't continue to work on getting the physical toxins out

of the body, the few remaining microbes that can survive the

aggressive therapy with herbals or pharmaceuticals, or whatever is

used, those surviving microbes will usually regrow and form a

completely new population of Lyme-related microbes in the body

because of the toxins stimulating their regrowth.

So, it's so critically important, in my opinion, to work as hard on

getting the toxins out of the body as on working on getting the

microbes out of the body.

When you say toxins, could you say what you mean by that?

Yes, I will. The worst culprits usually are the heavy metals, it

takes the longest amount of time to get the heavy metals out of the

body. The most common source for heavy metals that I see usually is

mercury from the silver mercury amalgam fillings in people's teeth.

And usually, if they continue to have the silver mercury amalgams in

their teeth then you can't make any good progress on getting the

mercury out of the body, because every time you chew you release more

mercury back into the body. And mercury does stimulates the growth of

Borrelia and several other microbes. And it also blocks the release

of other toxins, including other metals and other pesticides and

solvents, herbicides and so on.

So, it's so important, in my opinion, to find and find a dentist

that's knowledgeable in the proper technique to get the mercury

amalgam fillings out of the teeth, and to go through that process in

a very cautious and methodical way. And then once the mercury's out

of the teeth, to then gear up the detoxification for mercury, so that

the mercury can be removed from the body over time.

That detoxification varies from patient to patient. For children,

usually if they have mercury fillings it is not as strong a treatment

as the treatment for adults who've had it in their teeth for forty or

fifty or sixty years. We'll sometimes use a peptide chlathrating

agent for children, it's a clear spray that you spray in the mouth.

You do that daily for several months to try to get the mercury out.

Back in 2001, I co-developed a technique to get the toxins out using

the principle of complex homeopathy and laser, ecolaser therapy, and

that's been a great advent in getting the toxins out of the body, and

the doctors I've taught how to do that are very impressed about the

results that they can get. Unfortunately, there are so few doctors in

the country that are trained in that protocol, that there are more

people wanting it than doctors who can deliver it. I'm now in the

process of giving seminars to doctors to learn how to do that, so

that we can have faster detoxification. We have a seminar coming up

in November in sdale, Arizona, to teach doctors that technique.

Anyway, the mercury is one major issue that blocks the ability to

clear Borrelia from the body in the first place, and other Lyme-

related bugs. And it also makes it easier to get the Lyme-related

bugs back.

Mercury is just one part of the challenge. Some people are loaded

with other man-made toxins, other metals, for example, aluminum, from

underarm deodorants and antiperspirants, and from eating food out of

aluminum pots and aluminum dishes, or from even their toothpaste. A

lot of the toothpastes in the United States are made from boxite, and

boxite is primarily aluminum oxide salt. So you have to be aware of

those things, and change to different types of tooth care so you

don't continue to load your body up with more and more aluminum. Once

you stop putting the aluminum in you can start getting the aluminum

out, with chelators and with the laser detox technique and so on.

The pesticides are an issue. A lot of people have switched over to

eating organic vegetables and fruits, but they continue to eat

conventionally-produced meats, failing to realize that there are five

to twenty times as much pesticides in non-organic meats as there are

in the non-organic fruits. So they're not spending their money in the

right place, they need to change where they spend their money. Buy

the organic meats first, then if there's money left over, then buy

the organic fruits and vegetables.

I see.

All those are detoxification issues. Don't use pesticides inside your

house, there are natural things that can be done to get rid of pests

inside your house where you don't have to poison yourself and your

family. Just have awareness about things that we put in our body and

on our body.

So many patients I see are loaded down with petroleum by-products

that are poisoning their system and predisposing them to microbial

growth. And a very common source for that is skin care products,

chapstick, other types of lip balms, lipsticks have a petrolatum

base, petrolatum by-product base. Creams and lotions and stuff like

that have a lot of that petroleum stuff in it from some companies.

Some companies don't have that. So you seek out the companies that

don't have petroleum base, and you stop loading your body up. Once

you get a lot of that toxic load out, then it becomes easy to get rid

of the microbes.

What we found on getting rid of the microbes is that if a person has

an acute Lyme disease infection, like in the first three to six weeks

after exposure, that antibiotics do seem to work fairly well in a lot

of patients. But, if they've had the illness for longer than six

weeks, the chance of antibiotics getting rid of the infection, in my

experience, is pretty unlikely, pretty remote. So, they're basically

just guaranteeing that they'll stay on antibiotics for the rest of

their life.

The problem with staying on the standard pharmaceutical antibiotics

longterm is that you kill off the friendly bacteria in your gut, and

you cause an overgrowth of fungus in your gut, so then you trade one

problem for another. Fungal overgrowth can be just as bad a problem

as Lyme disease in the first place. A lot of the treatment that we've

been using to get rid of the bugs in patients with chronic Lyme

disease, don't tend to cause that problem because they kill the

funguses as much as they kill the Lyme disease and the Lyme-related

bacteria and protozoa and whatnot, without, in many cases, killing

the friendly bacteria in the gut. So it's more of a fine-tuned

antimicrobial approach.

In the study we did the Samento, quite a bit, and we still use that

some. But we've found that there are some other herbal therapies that

have been brought from Peru by Nutramedix that work just as well or

better than Samento.

Cumanda is an extremely powerful anti-Lyme treatment, as well as an

excellent anti-fungal. And also is a pretty good antiviral, and anti-

parasitic. So you eliminate a lot of different bugs with one therapy.

It's a different philosophy than the philosophy used by conventional

medicine, which is one bug, one drug. So if you have six bugs, you

have six drugs.

I don't like that approach because it destroys a lot of the friendly

microbes in the gut. Then people end up with other problems, the

inability to absorb and many allergies because of leaky gut, created

by the funguses poking holes in their gut wall.

The other thing we've learned since the study, is that the enzymes

that we were using in the study are critically important in breaking

up the fibrin that covers over the bugs and hides them from the

immune system. The fibrin is a protein produced by the body in

response to infectious illnesses. And those bugs can hide very well

if the fibrin is coating them over, but if you give a proteolytic

enzyme about thirty minutes before food with water only, a couple of

times a day, enough of that enzyme gets absorbed and breaks down the

fibrin coating on the surface of the bug so that the immune system

can find them and get rid of them.

In addition to that, the fibrin that is being produced gets plastered

up against the capillary walls, the blood vessel walls and restricts

the movement of oxygen into the tissues. So the tissues become oxygen

starved, and start producing lactic acid and go into anaerobic

metabolism and create all kinds of other trouble from that. So the

proteolytic enzymes have been very helpful to resolve that.

I use now, bromelain, as a proteolytic enzyme, bromelain is derived

from pineapple. And also use carnivora, which is derived from Venus

Flytrap. These two seem to be fairly well-tolerated and not likely

contaminated and not very allergenic. A lot of the other enzymes that

are on the market are either contaminated or allergenic. But those

two work really well.

I usually rotate those, I'll give even days one of those products,

and odd days of the month, the other type of product, so that the

person's less likely to develop an allergic reaction.

One other important thing we discovered about antimicrobials, besides

Cumanda we have Banderol, which is a very powerful herbal

antimicrobial from Peru also through Nutramedix company, and Quina,

which has been used in Peru for many centuries for treatment for

malaria, but is also an excellent anti-Lyme treatment as well as a

pretty good anti-fungal and anti-parisitic.

We've found that if you rotate remedies, that you're less likely for

the microbes to develop a sensitivity or resistance to the treatment,

and less likely for the patient to develop an allergy or sensitivity

to it.

So what we're doing now is we're giving one of those remedies for

twelve and a half days and then we stay off for a day and half, and

then go back on a second one for another twelve and half days, and

then come off. And we might even go onto a third one, for another

twelve and half days, and we just keep that rotation going. The bug

can never really figure out what's hitting them because you're

changing so often.

The day and a half off during a two week period is just as important

as the twelve and half days on because during the day and a half off,

the microbes think that the coast is clear, so they start

transforming from the granule forms, 4-form, L-form, cyst-form, or

other hiding forms and come back into the spirochetal form and start

trying to invade cells. When they do that, that's when you hit them

again with another round of a different antimicrobial, so you knock

out a whole bunch of additional microbes that previously were hiding.

Very nice.

So pretty soon there's no more hiding forms left. They've all been

hatched, if you will, and killed off in the adult form.

How long does that type of treatment go on for?

It varies from patient to patient. We've had a few patients who were

treated four as little as four or five months, and then came off

those antimicrobials and never had a relapse. But during that time we

were aggressively detoxifying them and giving them the enzymes,

giving them plenty of detox support with Burbur. Burbur's been a

great advent since the study because during the study we were using

five different substances to try to assist the detoxification of the

carcasses of the dying microbes in the patients. But the Burbur was

able to replace all five of those.

So this is in an effort to keep the detox from creating such an

uncomfortable situation?

Yes, it's to avoid the Herxheimer reaction. What we do on the Burbur

in the beginning when they're first starting out at a low dose on the

antimicrobial and building up, if they start feeling a Herxheimer

reaction they change from taking three or four doses of Burbur a day

to taking it every ten or fifteen minutes until the symptoms resolve.

After the symptoms have been resolved they go back to taking it three

times a day.

In most cases, with advanced, chronic neuroborreliosis, where it's

gone into the brain, especially, we start with just one drop of

whichever one of those herbal antimicrobials that I mentioned,

Cumanda, Banderol, Quina and Samento, and then every day or two, add

another drop. So it takes maybe a month or so to build up to full

dose, depending on how fast you can tolerate building up. Then once

you get up to a full dose, then you start doing that cycling process

that I mentioned a while ago: twelve and a half days on, one and half

day off, twelve and half days on a second product, twelve and half

days off, and so on.

I see. So you're talking about alternating between all four of those.

What I do practically, in patients, when the patient is able to be

tested energetically, we can actually test to see which ones are

going to be effective against the microbes that they have, using

energetic testing. Either electrodermal screening or some type of

kinesiology, will predict fairly reliably, over ninety-five percent

predictive accuracy, which herbal antimicrobials are going to work

best for that patient, so you don't have to guess. You do exactly the

one that that patient tests best for, or the two or three or four,

and you rotate them, depending on what the energetic testing

suggests. That's how we've been able to get the best results.

I'm really impressed and excited to hear about this protocol. But I'm

wondering how people who don't have you as their doctor go about

getting help. Are there other doctors who have been trained this way,

or is this a unique system that you have?

Yes, we have doctors who have come to our seminars, there's not a lot

of them yet, unfortunately. But hopefully, if the people who are

listening to your program can tell their doctor that there is another

possibility, another way that works, then maybe some of their doctors

will come to our seminars and learn these ways so that there will be

more and more doctors scattered through the country, that can help

their patients.

That's what we really want, is to try and get as many doctors as

possible familiar with these protocols. They're working well, they're

non-toxic, they're not giving the adverse reactions like a lot of

people see, with the fungal overgrowth from standard antibiotics. And

the patients are getting well and staying well even though the basic

protocol is stopped at some point. You don't see that with standard

antibiotics. With standard antibiotics, unless you start treating the

infection during the first three to six weeks, the patients tend to

have to get repeated rounds of antibiotics longterm, for years and

years and years.

Yes, I've noticed that. What would you say to the patient who has

been tested positive for Lyme, and has been told that their problem

was all in their head. I know you've probably come across patients

who've been told that by other doctors.

Unfortunately, a lot. But just because a doctor doesn't have the

knowledge to understand what causes the condition doesn't make it a

psychiatric illness, doesn't make it an idiopathic illness.

Idiopathic is the Latin word that means " cause unknown. " One of my

patients was told that he had an idiopathic illness. And the patient

responded to that physician, " Well, doctor, does that mean that

you're an idiot? " The doctor didn't like that, but unfortunately

there's some truth to it.

Most illnesses have a cause, unfortunately a lot of times conditional

medicine doesn't know the cause yet, but energetic medicine does

often time get at some of the causes that underlie a disease, so that

you start working those causes so that the label, the condition that

the patient is labeled with, goes away. And that's what I think more

doctors should be moving toward, is don't spend so much time time

trying to give the patient a label, just try to figure out what the

underlying causes of that condition are so that you can start

resolving the causes systematically so that finally the condition

goes away.

I was wondering about people who may suspect they have toxins, either

from mercury fillings, or use of aluminum pans, or whatever it is,

what should they do if they suspect that they have a toxic overload

and that it's exacerbating the problem or making the Lyme worse. How

do they get tested for that? Are there home tests available? Or

should they go to a doctor for those?

Sadly, a lot of the mercury that comes out of the teeth goes into the

brain and is tightly bound there, and if they do the wrong kind of

test to look for the mercury, it won't show up in their body. It

won't show up in their bloodstream, for sure. It might show up in

their hair, if they've done a detoxification for a time, trying to

get the mercury out of their body, sometimes it will get mobilized

from the brain and end up going out in their scalp hair, and a hair

analysis for heavy metals will show it up. But if they haven't been

doing a detoxification for heavy metals it won't show likely show up

in the hair analysis either.

Sometimes the only way that you can find the mercury in the body, is

to do what's called a challenge test. But if the person still has

mercury amalgams in their teeth, the challenge test has some risks,

because you also start mobilizing some of the mercury off the

fillings that are still in the mouth, into the bloodstream, and some

of that ends up going into the brain, in the wrong the direction. So,

it can become a challenge to try to prove that that's a problem.

In the Alternative Medicine Definitive Guide that I contributed to

back in 1993, and also the update that came out in 2002, the

Alternative Medicine Guide had a section on dentistry and the effects

on health. And there was a chart in there of 1500+ patients whose

mercury amalgams were removed, and the results of that were reported

to the FDA. They found that well over eighty percent of the patients

had a significant improvement in a variety of symptoms, just by

having the mercury amalgams out. A lot of those had had the tests

done, to look for mercury in their body before they had the mercury

out of their teeth, and the tests were negative, but they persisted

anyway and got a dentist to take the mercury out of their teeth.

In a lot of states if a dentist tells the patient that they're toxic

from the mercury amalgam in their teeth, the dentist can lose their

license. So, in some states you have to take the mercury out for

cosmetic reasons, because you don't like the look of that nasty black

gray stuff in your mouth. And that's okay as long as you get the

stuff out in the right way. I usually have my patients take

chlorella, which is a cracked algae, before the dental procedure, and

during, and after the dental procedure to try and keep the mercury

from moving from in the mouth from where it's being drilled out into

the bloodstream and into the brain. And that works pretty well.

Chlorella in large doses?

Well, yes, you if you've had mercury amalgam in your teeth for a long

time you start by taking just one capsule per day and you build up,

adding another one every day as long as you're tolerating it well,

and until you get up to about 1,500 – 2,000 mgs of chlorella per day,

and you keep doing that during the dental amalgam extraction process,

and for several months thereafter.

A lot of dentists are not familiar with the proper techniques to get

the mercury amalgam out, so they will take a large burr or a large

drill bit, if you will, and kind of pulverize the whole mercury

amalgam filling in the tooth and convert it into liquid and gas, and

that's the wrong way to do it because then the maximum amount of

loading of the mercury into the body occurs. But if you use a very

fine burr, and make a tiny crease in the amalgam, and then put an

instrument in there and pop those chunks out one at a time, and

dispose of them into a bio-hazard container where they belong in the

first place, then you don't have the problem as much with it getting

worse, with the amalgam removal.

Mercury amalgams are about 55% mercury, and the government makes

dentists handle them like nuclear reactor material before it goes

into the mouth, and when it comes out of the mouth they have to

handle it in the same way, in a bio-hazardous container. But the

American Dental Association still tells the dentists and the patients

that it's safe when it's inside your head. And I think that's

oxymoronic. It doesn't even make sense.

That means that our heads are considered bio-hazard containers.

There's a device called a mercury vapor analyzer, that device that

can be stuck in your mouth after you chew a piece of gum, and it can

show you how much mercury is coming off your gum every time you chew.

But a lot of people who use that vapor device find that the mercury

content in their mouth exceeds the Environmental Protection Agency's

recommendation for safe air.

What percentage of Lyme patients, if you just want to take a guess,

have this mercury amalgam filling problem?

There are a lot of patients who have mercury in their body, who don't

have any mercury in their teeth. I see patients, even adults, who

have a massive amount of mercury, and I ask them, well do you eat

fish? Which is another source of possible mercury. No, I don't eat

fish. Did you ever play with mercury with your hands? No. Did you

ever live close to a smelter? No. Did you ever live close to a place

where they burned coal for fuel? No.

And so, when we trace it back we find is that a lot of those

patients, that the mother had so much mercury amalgam in her teeth,

that while she was pregnant with that patient of mine, the mercury

moved from her teeth, into the bloodstream and into the patient while

they were in the womb, and so they The mother had so much mercury in

her teeth, that born with a load of mercury, because they can't find

any other source of mercury from their history or from their

environment. So it doesn't have to be in your own teeth, it can be in

your mom's teeth.

And it just doesn't go away.

No, mercury is bound by the tissues and it doesn't leave easily. So,

it's so important to start taking things like the chlorella, that

bind the mercury and if you have mercury in your teeth, if you have

it in their teeth. Because I don't see patients who are leaving the

mercury in their teeth getting well from Lyme disease. They continue

to have to take treatment on an ongoing basis. But those who have

made the decision to get the mercury and the other toxins out of the

body, are getting to the point where they can stop treatment and

getting well. And that's the goal, is to not have to take treatment

for the rest of your life.

I'll say.

There's one more thing that helps to get the mercury out of the body

after you get the mercury out of the teeth. That's a plant called

algas. Algas helps to energetically shake mercury from the cells.

Patients who have had chelation therapies, when they start taking

algas, the mercury starts coming out, more than before they started

taking it.

What is it?

It's an algae taken from off the coast of Peru that's been extracted

in a certain way and energetically imprinted with energies to help

mobilize mercury and other heavy metals. So that's particularly

helpful product. And a lot of patients I see with Lyme disease have

brain fog, and there's a great product for help for that, that's

called Pinella. It's another Peruvian herb that's been used for a

long time, for detoxification of the brain.

Is that also available through Nutramedix?

Yes, they have the Algas and the Pinella as well. You know, that's

been one of the main focuses for the Nutramedix company over the last

two or three years, trying to come up with solutions for Lyme

sufferers. It's an epidemic in this country, well over half the

population are infected, and maybe a quarter of them are having

symptoms from it. It's a big problem.

You could probably talk about this for a long time, but what do you

think about the way Lyme is spread? Since you just said that half the

population of the country has been infected. How do you think we're

getting it?

Only a very small percentage of those have contracted Lyme disease

through a tick bite, the way conventional medicine thinks. I think

the most common way of spreading it is through sexual intercourse.

But I think it's also spread, and is proven in peer review medical

literature, to be spread by mosquito bites. It's likely spread by

drinking unpasteurized milk from mother's breast, or from the cows or

goats, and it's probably contracted by consuming poorly cooked meats,

as well. Vertical transmission from the mother to the fetus through

the placenta has also been documented, as well.

I want to thank you for sharing your knowledge and information with

us today, this has been really fabulous. I hope that many more

doctors come and study with you so that people start to get well.

Yes, I hope so too. We're very interested in trying to do what we

call multi-center clinical trials. Basically, just treating patients

the right way, evidence-based medicine and treatment-based medicine,

and collecting information from the patients as they're going through

the process, and pooling that data, if you will, so articles can be

written, and so that more and more doctors can see that there is

another way, and learn that way. That's why I'm so interested in

teaching whichever doctors who want to come to our conferences.

By the way, I should tell any of your listeners that want the contact

information for our conferences. The ways that you can learn about

the conference, is through http://www.abeim.net/ that stands for the

Academy of Bio-Energetic and Integrated Medicine. And they can also

contact my assistant, , at (480) 361-8320 .

Or they can send her a fax at (480) 361- 8725. Or they can send her

an email: ksa4drc@....

Hopefully some of the patients will be able to convince their health

practitioners to check into this and learn that there are other ways

to help their patients.

Lyme disease causes so many symptoms, and it's probably a root cause

for a lot of diseases that are considered incurable by conventional

medicine, like autoimmune diseases, and neuro-degenerative diseases,

and cardiovascular diseases, cardiac-arrhythmias, gastrointestinal

diseases, MS, ALS, Parkinson's, ADDHD, autism. Most of them have some

kind of Lyme component. And so I've found that if you can start

working on the Lyme and the toxins, then a lot of these labels go

away.

I feel better already, just knowing there is hope. That there is some

kind of real, empirically proven, or being proved, anyway, herbs,

materials and medicines that we can take, not just the typical

antibiotics.

I just recently saw one of my patients that was in the Lyme study,

starting in January of 2003. Before she came into the study, she was

eighteen years old, she'd been housebound since three years of age,

she could not dress herself, she had to walk with a walker, she was

having frequent anaphylactic allergy reactions, which all endangered

her health. A lot of challenges with Lyme disease.

Anyway, during the course of the study she got to a point where she

could actually go out of the house on dates with a boyfriend. She

just recently married, she went off to college by herself in less

than four years, and worked twenty-five hours a week to put herself

through college. So this just shows you that you don't have to stay

sick just because you've been sick.

Good for her! I'm so glad to hear that. What a great model, and a

great image to end our conversation with. Very hopeful. Thank you so

much, I hope we can speak with you again. We'll keep up with you and

keep up with your studies.

I'd be glad to speak with you again. I hope that everyone who is

listening and has Lyme disease can take hope from this, and not be

discouraged, and just keep seeking answers and move forward.

I really appreciate speaking with you today. Many blessings to you!

And to you.

....

Suzanne Arthur ©2006 Lyme Disease Research Database