Lyme and CPN
Lyme and cpn
The reason why many Lyme doctors use heavier doses [of abx] may be because that’s what’s necessary to deal with Cpn if you don’t hit all parts of its life cycle at once. Since Cpn is so common, it is doubtless a co-infection in many of their cases; they must have a lot of experience with it, even if they didn’t know exactly what they were dealing with. Since they don’t target the EB form of Cpn, they have to hit the other stages of its life cycle harder, in order to cure people.
Cpn is very insidious, because of the way that it tends to colonize injured places, riding in on white blood cells. With physical injuries, people tend to blame the original injury for any lingering problems they have at the site of injury, rather than blaming a stealth infection. The same thing may be at work with Lyme: as a spirochete, which can swim through body tissues in the same sort of way that a snake swims, it is capable of infecting new areas of the body. Cpn isn’t capable of that — it has no means of locomotion of its own, and must be passively carried around by body fluids or cells. But once Lyme does infect an area, white blood cells are sent into that area to deal with the infection; they can carry Cpn in. Cpn has been found in the white blood cells of about twenty percent of healthy blood donors; so this must happen a lot. But since the original infection was Lyme, it’s natural for doctors and patients to think that the continuation of that infection must be Lyme, too, even if really it’s mostly or entirely Cpn.
