After three weeks of suffering with fever, chills, headaches and muscle aches in 1996, Daniel Kinderlehrer began to suspect he had Lyme disease, the most common vector-borne disease in the United States. As a medical doctor, he knew that his symptoms and his Massachusetts location pointed in that direction. So after a lab test confirmed his suspicions, he began standard antibiotic treatment. But the drugs failed to help—in fact, after six weeks, he felt even worse.

Concerned, he contacted the head of the Lyme Disease Clinic at the New England Medical Center. When Kinderlehrer described his case to his fellow physician, "he told me I never had Lyme to begin with," Kinderlehrer remembers. "He told me the test results were wrong. Basically, because the treatment didn’t work, I couldn’t have the illness."

Kinderlehrer would soon learn that this tunnel-vision approach to Lyme disease was pervasive. He began doing his own research and found many controversies surrounding Lyme—controversies that only have intensified over time. Basically, two camps exist, he says. One believes chronic Lyme disease is hard to get and easy to treat, and the other, which he belongs to, believes it’s easy to get and hard to treat.

Over the next few years, Kinderlehrer’s symptoms improved, but severe emotional distress in 2000 brought their return, and he became subject to panic attacks. He even became suicidal, which forced him to close his practice for a time.

Now, nearly 10 years later, Kinderlehrer continues to deal with Lyme disease—both his own and others�? He makes his home in New Mexico, not Massachusetts, and his part-time medical practice there is solely devoted to treating patients with the disease. And for good reason: there are an ever-increasing number of them. More than 23,700 cases of Lyme were reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2004, with estimates of up to a million total new cases, if those that go unreported are counted.

Conventional treatments
Lyme disease was first named in 1977, after a mysterious breakout of what was thought to be juvenile arthritis in Lyme, Conn. In the early 1980s, researchers identified the cause: Borrelia burgdorferi, a spiral-shaped bacterium (called a spirochete) carried in the guts of tiny ticks who feast on the blood of deer, dogs, other animals and humans. The conventional diagnosis and treatment for the disease goes something like this: A patient gets bitten by a tick, develops a bull’s-eye rash (technically called erythema migrans), is diagnosed with Lyme after a positive blood test and is cured with a week or two’s worth of antibiotics.

But Lyme activists disagree with every aspect of the conventional diagnosis and treatment scenario. According to the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS), less than half of all Lyme patients remember a tick bite or develop the classic bulls-eye rash. In addition, the available tests are unreliable; ILADS data show that the standard screening test for Lyme misses at least 35 percent of all cases. ("Can you imagine anyone recommending a pregnancy test with that rate?" Kinderlehrer asks.) And a week or two of antibiotics is not enough. ILADS says any course shorter than six weeks results in a 40 percent relapse rate.

While medical experts may disagree on duration and dose, most do agree that early antibiotic treatment can eradicate the disease. But unfortunately, people often suffer with Lyme for years before discovering they have it. (Many Lyme-literate doctors believe hidden Lyme is responsible for many diagnoses of fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome and even rheumatoid arthritis.) Herein lies the rub, because the longer you have Lyme, the more entrenched your symptoms become—and the harder the disease is to treat with antibiotics. That’s why many people have turned to alternative therapies to address their Lyme symptoms. Literally dozens of options exist. If you know (or suspect) that you have Lyme, you’ll need to do your homework to learn more about the disease and find the right doctor and/or therapies for you. (See "How to find a Lyme-literate Doctor" below.) To get you started, here’s a review of the leading alternative treatments being used by Lyme-literate practitioners today.

Homeopathy
The homeopathic approach to treating Lyme pays particular attention to the details of patients�?symptoms: the time of day when fatigue sets in, for example, or whether their joint aches feel better when they apply heat or when they apply cold. Medications are then prescribed, based on ‘the law of similars�? the ill person is given an extremely diluted amount of a substance that would elicit the same symptoms in a healthy person.

There are also preventative homeopathic medicines called nosodes, which are made with a tiny amount of specific disease-causing bacteria in a diluted solution. In theory, they work somewhat like modern vaccines: The immune system recognizes the bacterium as an invader and creates antibodies to fight it. In classic homeopathy, nosodes are considered a form of first aid; ideally, a Lyme nosode would be administered almost immediately after a tick bite.

While any health practitioner can prescribe nosodes, general practitioners often are not trained to provide the full benefit of the homeopathic approach. And finding a qualified homeopath can be challenging, according to Ronald Whitmont, an MD and homeopath in New York. He recommends looking for a ‘classical homeopath�?with some formal medical training. For listings of homeopaths in your area, contact the National Center for Homeopathy at (877) 624-0613 or [www.homeopathic.org]; the American Institute of Homeopathy at (888) 445-9988 or [www.homeopathyusa.org]; or Classical Homeopathic Physicians in the USA at [www.homeopathic-md-do.com].

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