Inflammation caused by Lyme disease can damage healthy tissues, cells, and organs. There are two types of inflammation: acute and chronic. Acute is the type of inflammation you see immediately following an injury or insect bite. Redness, swelling, and pain occur. This is a good thing, however. It means your body is fighting the infection or injury and working to heal the area affected.
Chronic inflammation, however, is when these symptoms persist. It has gone from healing an area to attacking the tissues and cells around the area. Chronic inflammation can eventually lead to heart disease, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and much more. Many times, people with chronic inflammation also have low platelet counts.
What Are Platelets?
Platelets play a huge role in healing an injury and reducing inflammation. They prevent blood loss by clotting at the injury site, promote tissue repair, and influence inflammation that aides the immune response. It also signals white blood cells to travel to the infection or injury and begin the repair.
Lyme disease and co-infections can cause low platelet count and low white blood cell count, preventing repair and restoration. When this happens, chronic inflammation occurs, and Lyme disease symptoms can worsen.
Platelet activation is essential for natural healing. There are ways to improve platelet activation in the body, but it can’t be done without plasma.
What is Plasma?
Plasma is the liquid part of the whole blood that carries things like proteins, water, salts, fats, hormones, vitamins, enzymes, red and white blood cells, and platelets throughout the body. It takes necessary nutrients to the parts of the body that need it. Plasma also removes waste from the body.
Platelets, Plasma, and Lyme Disease
Lyme disease is a blood infection. The bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi enters your bloodstream after being bitten by an infected deer tick. Ticks can also carry co-infections which means you can also be infected with co-infections, all of which live in your bloodstream.
When infected, your body will cue its immune defense system to activate and fight the Lyme bacteria. However, Lyme bacteria are very stubborn and find ways to avoid being detected. Even when you are treated with antibiotics, some bacteria hide in the walls of blood cells or become resistant to antibiotics.
Several factors can contribute to chronic Lyme disease, like when general physicians misdiagnose it for other disorders. Lyme disease is called “the great imitator” because it can mimic conditions like lupus, multiple sclerosis, and mood disorders, to name a few.
To further complicate things, the tests used to check for Lyme disease are mostly ineffective. The ELISA and the Western-blot tests are created to test your blood for antibodies of Lyme disease. However, antibodies are not always active, and they are good at hiding within the lining of your blood. This means if you take a Lyme test when the antibodies are inactive or hiding, your test results will come back negative. You can still have Lyme disease even if you get a negative result.
The longer you go without proper diagnosis and treatment, you will see an increase in Lyme disease symptoms the longer the bacteria remain in your bloodstream.
Lyme Disease Symptoms
Lyme disease symptoms appear in three stages: early localized, early disseminated and late disseminated.
In early localized Lyme disease, symptoms can include fever, chills, fever, sweats, headaches, stiff neck, and swollen lymph nodes. You may also have joint and muscle pain, sore throat, and fatigue. While many people notice a bullseye rash, many others do not have a rash.
In early disseminated Lyme disease, you can experience all of the previous symptoms, as well as inflammation of brain membranes, confusion, mood disorders, sleep disorders, and facial paralysis. These symptoms may persist and lead to late dissemination of Lyme disease.
In late dissemination stages, additional symptoms can include inflammation of the brain and spinal cord, impaired coordination, short or long-term memory loss, skin disorders, heart rhythm problems, and increased joint pain. Some later symptoms may also include hearing loss, vertigo, and tingling sensations.
Throughout this time, your body has been activating inflammation responses, trying to fight the disease. Your bone marrow has produced platelets, red blood cells, and white blood cells. Once produced, they entered your bloodstream.
Unfortunately, your platelets and blood cells are being depleted. If your plasma cannot circulate healthy platelets throughout your body, Lyme disease will persist.
In such cases, a plateletpheresis may be necessary.
What is Plateletpheresis?
Your plasma needs to be rich in healthy platelets that can travel and heal the body to fight inflammation and infections. A low platelet count means you do not have enough healthy platelets at any given time in your plasma to reach the areas needing healing.
Plateletpheresis is the process of collecting a large group of platelets that have growth factor proteins. After collecting tens of thousands of these growth factors, the doctor will inject them directly into the joints, tendons, or muscles that need healing.
Alleviates Inflammation and Pain
Because the platelets are from your own body, you don’t run the risk of the body rejecting them. For many, this process offers relief right away. Plateletpheresis reduces or eliminates the need to take anti-inflammatory medicines. Some have been able to reduce or stop taking opioids for pain.
Other techniques involving plasma can also be given to alleviate symptoms associated with Lyme disease.
Plasmapheresis
When you have Lyme disease, your body cannot always remove toxins and waste on its own. Plasmapheresis is becoming more popular due to its ability to outperform intravenous antibiotics in some cases.
If you have co-infections, your doctor may choose therapeutic apheresis or red cell exchange as options because it can clean whole blood. The process involves removing your unhealthy, infected blood and replacing it with a donor’s screened, healthy blood.
Therapeutic apheresis eliminates physical and psychiatric symptoms shortly after the procedure.
You can experience these quick results too. Reach out to your Lyme literate doctor today to get started with a healing process that works.