by Dr. Bill Rawls
Posted 8/2/18

Your doctor may say Lyme disease doesn’t exist in your area, but odds are, it’s there. In fact, a new report from Quest Diagnostics found that Lyme has been detected in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Learn how widespread and underreported Lyme is from Dr. Bill Rawls in this video.

Video Transcript

Question: Where Is Lyme Disease Found?

That’s a question a lot of people are trying to answer. They hear about it up in the Northeast, or in certain parts of the country or around the world, but are told, “No, we don’t have Lyme disease around here.”

Even though I had all the symptoms of Lyme disease, I was told, “Ah, it couldn’t be Lyme disease.”

I’m from North Carolina, and during the time that I was becoming quite sure that I had Lyme disease and eventually had a positive test, I was hearing, “No, we really don’t see much Lyme disease in the state of North Carolina.”

What I can tell you is, with all the research that I’ve done since then, Lyme disease is wherever you look for it.

The problem is that the testing is often unreliable, and there are many species of borrelia bacteria that can cause Lyme disease or Lyme-like syndromes. We know right now that there are at least 12 species that do, but we’re thinking that there are probably a whole lot more, and the testing doesn’t test for all of them.

Then you’ve got all the other illnesses that can be carried by ticks. So this idea that some ticks carry Lyme disease and other ticks don’t carry Lyme disease – well, it’s true. Some ticks don’t carry borrelia, but all ticks carry microbes. In fact, they found that even one species of tick can carry several hundred species of different microbes that can potentially infect humans.

I can tell you, every tick bite is an invitation for microbes to enter your system. Every tick bite.

As far as borrelia is concerned, you just have to look for it. They have found ticks with borrelia all the way at the top of the Arctic Circle in low-lying bushes. They’ve found ticks with borrelia in the tropics.

Borrelia has been around a long time. They found ticks with borrelia buried in amber, in the Dominican Republic, that are 15 million years old. So this is a very, very common microbe. It’s out there. It’s very widespread.

Yes, it’s in North Carolina. Yes, it is throughout the country. In North Carolina, people commonly have the bullseye rash and a negative Lyme test, and it has been called a separate illness: STARI [southern tick-associated rash illness]. It’s supposedly not Lyme disease, but now recently they are finding, “Well, we think STARI is caused by borrelia, too, just a different species.”

Just because you’ve had a negative test, if you’ve got all the symptoms of Lyme disease and you think you have a history of a tick bite, you are carrying microbes that have been carried by ticks. There’s absolutely no doubt about it. And yes, Lyme is much more widespread and much more undiagnosed than anyone can possibly imagine.

Dr. Rawls is a physician who overcame Lyme disease through natural herbal therapy. You can learn more about Lyme disease in Dr. Rawls’ new best selling book, Unlocking Lyme.

You can also learn about Dr. Rawls’ personal journey in overcoming Lyme disease and fibromyalgia in his popular blog post, My Chronic Lyme Journey.