The Life Cycle of the Lyme Spirochete

My doctor explained to me that there are three stages in the Bb organism’s life:
1. Spirochete. This is when the spirochete (again, a coil), just kind of rides your body’s metro system, as a presence in the blood vessels. My understanding is that this is how the infection begins, though the stage is not exclusive to early infection.

Antibiotics such as doxycycline and minocycline are best used to treat the Lyme organism in this form.

2. Cell-wall-deficient form. My doctor told me that once you start using an antibiotic that is effective against the spirochete form, Bb sheds its cell wall and retreats into your body cells—your neurons, your muscle cells, et cetera. Now those antibiotics can’t penetrate your cell’s membranes to get at the Bb. The presence of Bb in your cells is what commonly causes the wide array of symptoms you might experience. Bb is especially drawn to fatty cells, like the glial cells in your nervous system, causing any number of psychiatric, cognitive, or neurodegenerative problems. In your muscle cells, it might cause pain or weakness, for example.

My doc said the best antibiotic—and perhaps the only one—to penetrate the cells and kill the Bb is azithromycin, also known as z-pack.


3. Cyst. Once you have z-pack penetrating the membranes of your cells to kill the Bb, it will actually mutate, which I believe means that its genetic material will change. The Bb becomes something called a cyst, or, put simply, a tiny ball. Several hundred or thousands of these cysts get together and surround themselves with a membrane called a biofilm. Neither the antibiotics (penicillins, cephalosporins, etc) that get the spirochete nor the z-pack can penetrate the biofilm, and the cysts can lurk there, undetected, for months, years or even decades. When you do blood tests for Lyme disease, they will not detect the cysts, so you can have a false negative on a blood test and still be infected.

According to my doctor, the best drug for breaking down that biofilm and getting the cysts is flagyl. Alternatives include plaquenil (an anti-malarial) and tinidazole.
The take-home message here is that you can’t just use penicillin or clarithromycin and hope your Lyme disease will go away. If anything, doing so will just make it worse, since the Bb will convert to its cell-wall-deficient form to evade the medicine, and will start causing lots of body symptoms you didn’t have before.

My doctor recommends starting with a spirochete-killing antibiotic, and once you’re handling that okay, adding z-pack, and a couple months after that, adding flagyl. That way, the Bb can run, but it can’t hide.