Are you afraid to experience nature due to Lyme disease?

There’s a LOT of buzz on the internet and in the media about the explosion of tick populations and Lyme Disease – especially where I live on the east coast of the United States.

But, is what you are seeing and hearing in the media true? Or is it another media manipulation to make you afraid to go outside and enjoy nature?

I’ll give you an example.

I was at a retreat in Montana participating in a traditional sweat lodge. This is a spiritual practice used by Native Americans and Indigenous people around the world that uses intense heat and darkness to promote both physical and spiritual healing.

It’s akin to a VERY hot sauna (between 110 and 150 degrees) and participants sit through three or four rounds inside the sweat lodge. It pushes your body, mind, and spirit to the edge – so to speak.

The sweat lodge can clear your system physically as you are sweating your brains out (literally and figuratively), and it can help you find clarity and insight, spiritually and emotionally, while you sit in the dark without any distractions.

During the first round of the sweat lodge, the woman sitting next to me, yelled for someone to open the flap. She said she needed to get out because when she gets too hot, she becomes dizzy and throws up. The flap opened, the light streamed in, and she was let out of the lodge while we closed it and continued.

After the first round ended, the door opened and she came back in to try it again.

Before the door closed, enveloping us in darkness, I noticed she was wearing long white sweat socks. Not only was this an odd thing to wear inside a sweat lodge, it was also the middle of summer.

I said to her, “If you take your socks off and let your feet touch the grass and the earth, it’ll help you feel more grounded and bring the heat down while you’re going through this healing process.”

She said, “No, absolutely not! I can’t take my socks off. There are ticks in the grass, and I don’t want to catch Lyme Disease.”

To be nervous about ticks is a valid concern when you’re out in nature, but we were sitting inside a sweat lodge.

Ticks can’t survive that kind of heat. When the heats gets above 95 degrees ticks can dehydrate and die. That’s one of the reasons why experts recommend you remove your clothes after you’ve been out in tick-infested areas and put them into a dryer on high heat.

Not only can ticks NOT survive in that kind of heat, but the spirochete, Borrelia burgdorferi (tick-borne obligate parasite that causes Lyme disease), cannot survive in that heat either.

“Researchers identified in 2017 that Borrelia Burgdorferi has a low tolerance for high temperatures. More specifically, they discovered that at 102.2° F spirochetes became immobile, at 104° F they shed their outer membrane, and at 106.9° F for two hours, 100% of the bacteria died.”[1]

So, the gal with the tube socks on was in the right place (a sweat lodge), and at the right temperature (hot as heck!), to kill the ticks and Lyme bacteria at the same time.

To help keep you fearless and enjoying the great outdoors with your socks on or off, let’s look at some facts about Lyme Disease.

First and foremost, Lyme Disease is not the only infectious disease carried and spread by ticks.[2] [3]

• Babesia: a malaria-like parasitic infection that attacks red blood cells, resulting in bloody urine, anemia, and hepatitis.
• Rocky Mountain Spotted fever: the bacteria causes high fevers, headaches, pain in the limbs, skin rashes, and meningitis
• Ehrlichiosis: bacterial infection that causes headaches, chills and muscle pain. It infects and kills white blood cells.
• Early Summer Meningoencephalitis (ESME): flu-like with symptoms that include headache, sore limbs and fever. It can turn into meningitis.
• Alpha Gal Syndrome: allergic condition triggered by the bite of a lone-star tick that transmits a sugar molecule into the host, causing the immune system to develop antibodies that over-react to consumption of dairy and meat. Symptoms include digestive distress (nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, stomach pain), hives, itching, and swelling of the lips, tongue, or throat.

Besides the above conditions, Lyme disease is the most common tick-borne disease carried by ticks in the entire world.

Some symptoms of Lyme Disease include[4] [5]:

• Bulls eye rash – between 50-80% of people develop a rash that starts out as a small red dot and an outer ring that expands outward as the bacteria spreads
• Headache and fever
• Chronic Fatigue
• Enlarged lymph nodes
• Stiff neck
• Facial palsy/Bells palsy — loss of muscle tone in one or both sides of the face
• Arthritis and swelling in the joints
• Muscle, tendon, and bone pain
• Low vitamin D
• Poor immunity
• Nerve pain
• Numbness or tingling in the hands or feet
• Heart palpitations, anxiety and panic attacks
• Depression and mood disorders

I didn’t experience the classic bulls-eye rash when I had Lyme in 2012 through 2013, but I had 12 of the 14 symptoms listed above.

Interestingly, Lyme has been dubbed the great imitator because its symptoms overlap with so many other conditions: Lupus, MS, Parkinson’s, ALS, Rheumatoid arthritis, Alzheimer’s, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, Autoimmune conditions, and others.

Unfortunately, testing for Lyme is wildly inaccurate. Early Lyme cases are often mid-diagnosed because standard tests detect antibodies, which take 4 to 6 weeks to develop. Up to 50% of Lyme tests return false negatives.[6]

Once the Borrelia has invaded the body, it can be even harder to detect because it burrows in and evades the immune system.

“Borrelia burgdorferi is a remarkably sophisticated pathogen that employs multiple strategies to outsmart the immune system. By constantly changing its surface proteins, hiding within the body’s tissues, and forming resilient, antibiotic-tolerant clusters, the bacteria can cause chronic, long-term infections in the skin, joints, brain, and nervous system.”[7] [8]

Even if you catch Lyme Disease early, and take the recommended treatment of antibiotics, the infection can still persist undetectable inside your system.[9]

Holy crap! That’s one stealthy little bacterium that you don’t want roaming around inside your body and mind.

The best thing to do would be to prevent the bacteria from entering your system in the first place, before it gets a hold of you.

The first bit of good news is that not ALL ticks carry Lyme disease. Just because you get bit by a tick does NOT automatically mean you will get afflicted with Lyme disease.

The second thing to understand is that the tick needs to be attached and sucking blood for many hours before it can transmit the contents of its digestive system (where the Borrelia burgdorferi lives) into the host that it’s feeding on (you).

“In most cases, a tick must be attached for 36 to 48 hours or more before the Lyme disease bacterium can be transmitted. If you remove it within 24 hours, the risk is greatly reduced.”[10]

That means one of the best ways to prevent Lyme disease is to do a tick check.

When I was growing up in the 1970’s my parents would take us hiking upstate New York. Every time we returned home, my mother would check our scalps, underarms, and groin for ticks. She didn’t know any of the science about Lyme disease.

Heck, it hadn’t even been discovered and named until 1975, but she knew to do a tick check.

Ticks aren’t new to our environment, they’ve been around way longer than we have (about 100 million years).

And, if you do find a tick embedded in your skin, do NOT remove it by squeezing it with a tweezer. Squeezing the tick will cause it to expel the contents of its stomach directly into your skin while it’s still attached.

Purchase a tick hook or tick remover and pull the tick straight out.

You can also soak a Q-tip or cotton swab with Echinacea tincture, and place it on top of the tick and spin it to help release the tick from the skin.

Once the tick is removed, dab echinacea directly onto the bite site.

As an added precaution, get your body into a very hot sauna or steam room to kill the bacteria at the surface before it fully enters your system.

As mentioned at the top of this article, if you have been hiking or walking in a tick-infested area, throw your clothes into a hot dryer for 45-50 minutes to kill any ticks that are clinging to your clothing.

And, if you were like me, and didn’t find a tick on your body, or you didn’t get the classic bulls-eye rash, you’ll need a deeper dive into healing Lyme disease. You can learn more about that in this Article: My Journey Healing Lyme Disease

Or you can save yourself time, energy, and money, by joining my Health is Wealth Community to watch my Prevent and Heal Lyme Disease Naturally class.

You’ll also get the unparalleled support you need to optimize your detoxification systems to heal Lyme and feel your best.

 

[1] https://projectlyme.org/whole-body-hyperthermia-for-treating-lyme-disease/

[2] Healing Lyme Naturally, Wolf D. Storl, North Atlantic Books, 2010, pg. 44

[3] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/alpha-gal-syndrome/symptoms-causes/syc-20428608

[4] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/150479#symptoms

[5] https://projectlyme.org/lyme-basics/

[6] https://www.hopkinslyme.org/lyme-disease/diagnosis-of-lyme-disease/

[7] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9324940/

[8] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17600717/

[9] https://news.feinberg.northwestern.edu/2025/05/12/post-treatment-lyme-disease-syndrome-may-be-driven-by-remnants-of-infection/

[10] https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/ticks-and-lyme-disease-symptoms-treatment-and-prevention