A Naturopathic Approach to Chronic Lyme Disease – Sonia O’Donnell



A Naturopathic approach to Chronic Lyme disease


Imagine yourself as an old fashioned set of kitchen scales. To your right is the bucket that holds negative things that weigh your body down and to your left is the bucket that holds positive things that sustain you and help you stay healthy.

Everyone has a different balance point – because of inherited strengths and weaknesses- so some people can remain healthy even though their “bad” bucket is holding loads more stuff than their “good” bucket. It’s also easier to stay in balance when you are younger, as what’s known as our adaptive range (the amount of leeway we’ve got before we go out of balance) reduces as we age, because our bodies get less efficient at repair and recovery.



Your bad bucket also holds pathogens, that is to say infectious agents like bacteria, viruses and fungi and includes borrelia and the co-infections that are commonly identified in people that have clinical symptoms of chronic Lyme disease.


 Naturopathic treatment is a process of:

  1. Reducing your intake of things that affect you negatively.
  2. Increasing your intake of things that affect you positively.

 If you can achieve the above then anything can heal and repair. Think of your body as a collection of cells: Every one of those cells is in a constant process of breaking down and being replaced with a new one. On that level you grow yourself a whole new eyeball every 5 days!

All you have to do is get your good and bad buckets back into balance and your cells will start to repair faster and your level of health and function will start to improve, rather than carry on declining. As we are all individual, and will all have completely different combinations of negative factors to clear and positive factors to top up. Some form of testing, alongside analysis of symptoms, helps us to tailor treatments that will be effective and help us to reduce any negative effects (herxing). Bio-resonance testing is used by many naturopaths and is a fast means of identifying priorities in individual cases. When it comes to watching for changes in symptoms and understanding their significance, there is no substitute for experience and patience. 

 Chronic Lyme is very difficult to treat and that is possibly because of the nature of the pathogen. The complexity of these spirochetes is staggering, there are many different strains and many additional co-infections complicating the situation. This makes diagnosis practically impossible with current methods and without clear diagnosis how can we research what treatments are most effective?

The only thing that I am sure about personally, is that the better balanced and more functional your body is, the more chance a treatment to kill or control bugs has of being successful.


Sonia O’Donnell LCPH MARH
NTA Clinics – www.ntaclinics.co.uk