After Justin Bieber recently announced that he has been suffering from Lyme disease and had been trolled by fans over his appearance, it brought a lot of attention to this debilitating and widespread disease, according to Business Insider.
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According to the CDC, more than 300,000 new cases of Lyme disease are diagnosed in the U.S. each year, but that's about 10 times higher than the officially reported number of cases, and is indicative of severe underreporting.
The life-threatening disease is primarily transmitted by deer ticks and black-legged ticks found in grassy and wooded areas throughout the U.S. and in at least 60 other countries. It is often misdiagnosed because many people don’t realize they’ve been bitten by a tick, since some are as small as a poppy seed.
Diseases such as Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis and chronic fatigue are all expressions of chronic infections, and Lyme disease appears to be a major, yet oftentimes hidden, player.
Lyme disease used to be confined to the area of New England, but now the tick-borne disease has spread and is being diagnosed in every state, including Florida and California. Last year, 10,001 cases of Lyme were in Pennsylvania alone, the state with the highest prevalence.
Lyme disease typically starts with unrelenting fatigue, recurring fever, headaches and achy muscles or joints, which may progress to muscle spasms, loss of motor coordination and/or intermittent paralysis, meningitis or heart problems.
Even though Lyme disease is becoming more widely recognized as a real disease, and one that can have chronic consequences, sufferers still meet plenty of resistance from the medical community and insurers, which sometimes treat it as psychiatric: In essence, they’re saying the symptoms are "all in their head."
The disease is expanding rapidly all over the world, with new research showing that Lyme outbreaks are creeping steadily into northern countries with less temperate climates.
Likewise, by the end of 2018 eight northern U.S. states had more Lyme disease cases than southern states like Florida or those with moderate climates like West Virginia and North Carolina.
Lumbrokinase, an enzyme sourced from earthworms, while best known for its role in helping combat blood clots, has also garnered praise for its usefulness in treating Lyme disease.
While conventional medicine often turns to long-term antibiotic use for the treatment of Lyme disease, more natural solutions are available, including lumbrokinase.