by Dr. Bill Rawls
Posted 3/18/22
Mycoplasma is a common Lyme disease coinfection, and it’s the smallest of all known bacteria. It may be implicated in a range of symptoms, including respiratory issues, ringing in the ears, bladder irritation, and joint pain. Here, Dr. Bill Rawls discusses Mycoplasma, how it enters and hides in the body, plus targeted herbal therapy to suppress it. Learn more about Mycoplasma here.
Video Transcript
Question: Should I test for Mycoplasma if I think I have it?
Tim Yarborough: One from Betty: You touched on Mycoplasma as one of the common coinfections that is related to a lot of joint issues. And she is wondering if she should ask her alternative doctor for some sort of testing to figure out where the Mycoplasma is in her body. It seems to have targeted her lungs.
Dr. Rawls: Well, Mycoplasma does enter the lungs pretty commonly. Sometimes it hangs around there, but no matter what microbe you’re talking about, and this is something that I’ve really come to in my current research, when we look at a microbe, we tend to describe the microbe by the way it gets in the body.
So COVID enters through the lungs, Mycoplasma often enters through the lungs, ticks, tick-borne, but they all want to get to the bloodstream. And so the lungs are just an entry point, and sometimes they hang around there. But if they can hit the bloodstream, things scatter throughout the body. So Mycoplasma pneumoniae is often, you know, we get it, we pick it up as children, but it ends up in our joints. And interestingly, it can even be spread sexually.
So microbes are a little bit choosey, but they’ll get in any way they can. And if they can hit the bloodstream, the bloodstream is the highway to all of the cells in the body. So they want to do that. Once a microbe is disseminated through the body and peppered in cells in the body. it’s harder to find. And not only that, there are dozens of species of Mycoplasma. So, to me, the most common: Mycoplasma pneumoniae, Mycoplasma fermentans, and those are the ones that are most commonly found in different forms of arthritis.
But finding them is sometimes tough. Mycoplasma is the smallest known bacteria. It’s really, really small. It’s much smaller than Borrelia. It’s kind of right over between a bacteria and a virus, almost. And so it’s really small. And because it doesn’t have a cell wall like other bacteria, and it has other features that make it more viral-like; it doesn’t respond to antibiotics well at all.
Doxycycline? It can knock it down if you have pneumonia where you’ve got high bacterial counts. But, you know, if you had a mycobacteria pneumonia, Mycoplasma pneumonia, when you were a child, and they gave you antibiotics, it may have gotten rid of the pneumonia, but it didn’t necessarily eradicate it from your body. So it is hard to find out where it is.
There are a lot of herbs, even some on the list that I mentioned, including Chinese skullcap at the top of the list that has some good activity against Mycoplasma. Other herbs that are often used, there’s one called anamu, A-N-A-M-U, anamu. It’s from the rainforest. About 1,000 milligrams twice a day. So there are other kinds of herbs that are really nice for Mycoplasma, and it’s like all the microbes: It’s just persistence and staying on these herbs for a long time to wear them down.
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.
