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Muscle testing: 7 big things to know

Muscle testing sounds pretty easy.

First, test to see if a food or supplement agrees with you. Then, if your body responds positively, pop that thing in your mouth.

Well, not so fast.

I’ve done muscle testing roughly a thousand times over the past few years and I’ve found it’s a bit more complicated than that. Every muscle test is a snapshot of a moment in time. What your body says yes to this morning, it may say no to this afternoon.

This post isn’t about which muscle testing method to use. I’ve tried several, and it’s a matter of finding out which one works best for you.

And since muscle testing isn’t mainstream, here’s a brief explanation. When you test a substance such as a food or supplement, you’re looking to see if that substance makes you a bit weaker or a bit stronger. Strong is a positive result. Weak is a negative.

The most common muscle test is done by chiropractors and other alternative practitioners. You hold the substance in one hand and you hold your arm out sideways. Before you pick the thing up, the practitioner pulls down on your arm to gauge its strength. Then when you’re holding the substance, he pushes down again. If your arm is weaker this time, that means the substance made you weaker.

There are several other methods and several machines that measure the body’s response. Frankly, I like the machines better because it lessens human error, but, again, that’s another story.

A lot of people think muscle testing is quackery, but as you may have guessed, I disagree. Results of my own testing haven’t been 100 per cent accurate, but in most cases they’ve provided valuable information that’s helped me better decide which foods and supplements to consume.

Now, on to the 7 big things:

1. Don’t rely on a single test: The human body is an amazingly complex organism. Countless adjustments are going on over the course of any given day. Maybe in the morning taking a whack of zinc might throw your body out of balance and you don’t want it. But an hour later, you come into contact with a flu virus and your body says, “Gimme that.”

I like to test a few times to determine whether or not something agrees with me. That may be a bit much. Two probably would be sufficient.

2. Time of day matters: I like numbers, so you’re going to see a bit of math, based on a study I did of about 700 recent tests. I’m 74 per cent likely to test positive to a substance in the morning and 63 per cent likely to test positive in the afternoon. I’m guessing this is because I tire as the day goes along and I’m less likely to want to deal with one more thing.

3. Some days you’re more receptive than others: A few days ago I tested five things and wanted all of them. Today I tested four and didn’t want any. This happens regularly. I don’t bother asking why. My body is smarter than I am. I trust it.

4. Some weeks are better than others: Stat time again. The first week of this year, I only wanted 42 per cent of the things I tested. The second week, I wanted 74 per cent of them. I felt the same both weeks. Go figure.

5. Some seasons you want it, some seasons you don’t: I tested more than 100 substances. In the fall, Vitamin D had one of the worst results. Since winter started, it’s had one of the best. Easily explainable this time. Vitamin D levels tend to drop with the reduction in warm sunshine that comes with winter.

6. Make food thy medicine: This applies to me, maybe not to you. I was positive for 98 per cent of the foods and beverages I tested, and 65 per cent for supplements. The foods also usually had much stronger positive results.

7. Keep track of test results: If you do a fair bit of muscle testing, you can learn a lot from keeping score. I’ve discovered that I like some brands much better than other brands, that I prefer tinctured herbs to capsules and tablets, and that I’m more likely to react positively to minerals than I am to vitamins.

So, you see, muscle testing isn’t all that simple. But it is helpful, as long as you use your brain and not just your body to make decisions on how to apply test results.

Photo: Linelle Photography

A Tasty Way to Kill Lyme

I certainly wasn’t expecting my Easter dinner to attack a bunch of Lyme spirochetes, but that seems to be exactly what happened.

Bear with me, because this is going to be a bit unusual. Now how, you ask, did an Easter meal have any affect on Lyme Disease? Did the chocolate bunny kick butt?

OK. Here’s my answer. It was a really nice meal – ham with baked beans, yams and broccoli. As an added touch, I drizzled about a teaspoon of maple syrup over the ham.

I would have used more, but those of us going through Lyme treatment are told to keep sugar to a minimum.

Just before bed, I noticed that my urine was extremely murky. I rarely see that, and for me it is a sign of Lyme spirochetes being attacked.

I’ll back up a bit. I’ve tried many approaches to treating Lyme, and one of those was a trial with Rife machines. For some of you this may seem even more weird, but there are scores of Lyme sufferers who have been greatly helped or even achieved remission using Rife.

In brief, a Rife machine directs an electromagnetic current at specific frequencies in the body. The Lyme bacteria, borrelia, can be found at some of these frequencies. Zap the borrelia and you kill some Lyme. You’ve got to do a lot of zapping over a long period of time to get results, but it works very well for some people.

When I did a trial with the Rife machine, something funny happened. Right afterwards, my urine was very murky. I tried the machine again a month or so later and the same thing happened. Up until that point, I’d never noticed having really murky pee.

I didn’t further pursue Rife then, as other treatments seemed better suited to my situation. But I did make a mental note that there seemed to be a correlation between killing borrelia and murky pee.

So that brings me back to Easter 2017. Not only was my urine murky before bed, but it was even murkier when I peed in the middle of the night. “Weird,” I said to myself and went back to sleep. I didn’t think it was significant, as I put it on the list of the dozens of strange and inexplicable things that have happened to me on my Lyme journey.

Then on Easter Monday came a surprise.

I was reading the book How Can I Get Better? by famous Lyme doctor, Richard Horowitz, MD. On page 79, he lists several substances that break up Lyme biofilms and in the process kill borrelia. Biofilms are colonies of bacteria that grow in various places in humans. Dental plaque is an example.

Anyway, one of those substances on Horowitz’s list was maple syrup extract.

So it was the maple syrup!

Intrigued, I Googled maple syrup, Lyme Disease and biofilm, and I came upon a 2015 study from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. It found that maple syrup was an effective antibacterial substance, and when used along with antibiotics it could make the antibiotics more potent. The study also discovered maple syrup was an effective biofilm buster.

The McGill research was done in the lab and not on human subjects, but it is still very promising. And in recent years, more and more natural substances have been found useful for treating Lyme.

The natural sweetener Stevia has recently been shown to have powerful effects on biofilm. There are also, of course, several effective natural approaches to treating Lyme that have already been developed, such as the Buhner, Cowden, Zhang, Byron White and Beyond Balance protocols.

So the moral of this story is not that a little maple syrup is going to cure you of Lyme. It’s that there are probably many other natural things that are effective at treating Lyme. What’s needed is more research to find out just what these are and how best to integrate them into protocols. We need as many weapons as we can find in this war, and if they taste good, that’s very good indeed.

Stephen Buhner vs. The Lyme Conventional Wisdom

You can approach treating Lyme Disease in two basic ways. First, you can look at it purely as a science. Or, you can look at it as partly a science and partly an art.

The conventional wisdom says go strictly with science. Over the past few decades since Lyme hit the map, Western medicine has developed treatment strategies that for the most part fit the disease into its existing paradigm.

It goes something like this. We’ve discovered Lyme is a bacterial infection. We test for it. If the test is positive, we throw antibiotics at it.

This works great for some people, but it doesn’t work very well for a lot of other people.

Enter Stephen Buhner, master herbalist and author. He is far from the only proponent of the science plus art approach, but no one has done more to champion it.

Among his books are two editions of Healing Lyme, plus two books on treating coinfections associated with Lyme. If you read these works carefully, you’ll clearly see how different his way of treating Lyme is from the conventional wisdom.

It’s not that Buhner isn’t scientific. He worked from 1980 to 2005 as a clinical herbalist and psychotherapist and also has treated many Lyme patients since. In Healing Lyme, Second Edition, he says that he has had contact with more than 25,000 people with Lyme and has read more than 10,000 peer-reviewed papers on Lyme.

In this book, he also gives some stats on his Lyme protocol’s success, saying that from the feedback he received from 2005-2015. he estimates that 75 percent of people experienced what they considered a cure from the program, 15 percent needed to continue with a reduced form of the protocol, 5 percent had some relief, and 5 percent got no help.

The purpose of this blog is to highlight the differences in the two approaches. As mentioned earlier, the conventional wisdom has worked well for many people, while Buhner’s way has helped many others.

I should mention that I’m referring to the conventional wisdom for treating persistent, or chronic, Lyme. It should also be noted that not all Lyme doctors fall completely into one camp or another. Some are a totally conventional, some a bit unconventional, and others quite a bit unconventional in their treatment methods.

But, for the sake of comparison, here’s how I see the main differences between Buhner and the conventional Lyme wisdom.

Conventional wisdom: Only antibiotics will cure Lyme.

Buhner: Lyme can be cured by using herbs and other natural products. Several natural protocols have been developed by Buhner and by others, and one particular protocol may or may not work for one person, and another protocol may or may not work for another person.

Buhner is not against antibiotics. In fact, he recommends people take them when they have an acute case of Lyme.

Conventional wisdom: Fighting Lyme is like fighting a conventional war. You have to keep blasting away at the bugs until they are defeated. Sometimes this means taking high doses of antibiotics for a year or more.

Buhner: The goal isn’t to bludgeon the enemy into submission, it’s to understand what the bugs want and need from their hosts and to find ways to deny those needs and prevent them proliferating.

Conventional wisdom: Strong and highly unpleasant die-off (Herxheimer) reactions are an unfortunate, but necessary, part of getting well from Lyme.

Buhner: Herxheimer reactions aren’t necessary. They sometimes happen, but you should try to avoid them.

Conventional wisdom: The doctor creates the protocol and the patient doesn’t deviate from it.

Buhner: Patients should listen to their bodies and tweak their protocols according to what works best for them. Having patients educate themselves and develop a feel for how herbs and natural products interact with their bodies can be very beneficial.

Conventional wisdom: Patients need to push themselves and fight through difficult patches in treatment.

Buhner: Only go as fast as your body is telling you to go. If an herb is making you feel significantly unwell, back off and cut down on the dose.

So now that I’ve gone through the main differences in approaches, I’ll admit to having a bias. The conventional wisdom didn’t work well for me. Buhner’s protocols haven’t gotten me fully well, yet, but they have contributed to substantial improvement.

I also find the Buhner model more sustainable. Going on long-term antibiotic programs wreaks havoc on many body systems, especially the gut, and nobody knows what long-term effects that will have.

The conventional wisdom approach is also hard on the human spirit. The consequence of taking antibiotics long-term is often feeling awful day after day, month after month. Many times the treatment feels worse than the disease.

A lot has changed since the first edition of Healing Lyme came out in 2005. The trend in the conventional wisdom among leading Lyme doctors has slowly been moving in Buhner’s direction.

Herbs and other natural products are more commonly used as many doctors are now willing to look beyond solely an antibiotic approach. And this makes sense to my mind. Buhner has studied Lyme Disease as thoroughly as anyone and understands it as well as anyone, and people should look closely at his work.

The Lyme World’s Unsung Hero

Did you realize there’s a guy who’s spent decades figuring out precisely how Lyme Disease and its coinfections work, and precisely how to treat them?

More than that, did you realize the same guy has had considerable success in getting people well from these miserable diseases?

My guess is that most people with Lyme don’t know this, and that is regrettable. I, for one, owe this man some major gratitude.

I’m referring to Stephen Harrod Buhner, the author of many books including Healing Lyme (two editions), Healing Lyme Disease Coinfections: Complementary and Holistic Treatments for Bartonella and Mycoplasma; and Natural Treatments for Lyme Coinfections: Anaplasma, Babesia, and Ehrlichia.

I call him the unsung hero because there are several other Lyme heroes that also have made tremendous contributions to understanding and treating the disease – people like Dr. Richard Horowitz, Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, and Dr. Joseph Burrascano. But they all have a relatively high profile, and, if you have Lyme, chances are you’ve heard of them.

Buhner stays mostly under the radar. He doesn’t run a world-renowned clinic or give lectures all over the globe. He’s a master herbalist living in an American culture in which the medical system places far less value on herbalism than it should.

You can gauge his lack of fame by the way people butcher his name. I’ve seen him referred to as Stephen Bruhner on many occasions, and on others as Stephen Harold Buhner. Then again, herbalism is known for taking a humble approach.

Despite the praise I’ve been laying on here, I want to be clear that I’m not telling you to dive right into the protocols that Buhner has developed for Lyme and coinfections. I think they are brilliant, but herbal medicine can be very complicated. If you choose to go on them, you might consider seeking the guidance of an expert herbalist or holistic medical practitioner extremely familiar with herbal medicine. That said, many people have successfully done the protocols on their own, as Buhner has laid them out with great clarity.

I tried the Buhner protocol for Lyme several ago and it didn’t produce results. That wasn’t the protocol’s fault; it was my fault for not having enough experience working with herbs. But now that I’ve taken more herbs and read many books on the subject, including the above-mentioned works and several others Buhner has written, I have a much better feel for the process. Thus, fortunately, the herbs Buhner recommends are working well for me and are making me feel better and better.

In his writings, Buhner stresses the need for people to tweak his protocol to meet their individual needs and circumstances because nobody has precisely the same case of Lyme Disease as anyone else does. Treating Lyme this way is scientific, but there’s also a lot of art to it.

Some people are wary of his methods because Buhner is not a medical doctor. But he worked from 1980 to 2005 as a clinical herbalist and psychotherapist and also has treated many Lyme patients since. In Healing Lyme, Second Edition, he says that all told he has had contact with more than 25,000 people with Lyme and has reviewed more than 10,000 peer-reviewed papers on Lyme.

In this book, he also gives some stats on his Lyme protocol’s success, saying that from the feedback he received from 2005-2015. he estimates that “75 percent of people experienced what they considered a cure from the program, 15 percent needed to continue with a reduced form of the protocol – generally small doses of knotweed and cat’s claw to keep symptoms from returning, 5 percent had some relief and 5 percent got no help.”

Backing for his claims comes from other sources as well. In his book, “Suffered Long Enough“, Dr. William Rawls says “thousands of patients have followed his protocols with exceptional results.” Dr. Klinghardt has noted that Buhner’s contributions to herbal treatment for Lyme have made him “the outstanding man in his field.”

I’ve always believed in giving recognition to people who deserve it but don’t seek it, and who don’t get as much of it as they should. This is what makes an unsung hero, and, for his exceptional work with Lyme Disease the past few decades, Stephen Buhner certainly deserves the title.