With summer just around the corner, tick bites are bound to happen, which means the chances of getting Lyme Disease increase, which raises the question, can CBD help with symptoms of Lyme disease?
Every year, there are approximately 30,000 cases of Lyme disease reported to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). This number doesn’t even account for all the cases of Lyme disease that are undiagnosed. Caused by the black-legged tick, commonly known as the deer tick, a bite can cause symptoms such as fever, headache, chills, fatigue, swollen lymph nodes, muscle aches and pains, and a characteristic skin rash called erythema migrans, characterized by a red bulls-eye rash around the bite site.
Since symptoms of Lyme disease are so similar to that of the flu, it often goes undiagnosed, and the ticks that cause the infection are so small that it wouldn’t be unlikely that a bite went unnoticed. Nymph (young ticks) deer ticks, for example, are only the size of a poppy seed. Adult deer ticks are about the size of an apple seed. If Lyme disease goes undetected, symptoms are likely to get worse before they get better.
There are countless stories of those who have lived with the disease, some with mild cases, some with far more serious accounts of how this disease affected their life. For those who have struggled to find a treatment that works, or anyone looking for alternative options to treatment they’re currently receiving, CBD could help.
How CBD Could Help with Symptoms of Lyme Disease
While we’re not suggesting you try to treat your own Lyme disease, we do believe that there is promise that hemp products could help manage some of the symptoms associated with Lyme disease. There are several reports of cannabis showing to significantly help with the often-debilitating symptoms associated with this disease. However, since Lyme disease is something that’s under-researched and the antibiotics that are commonly prescribed don’t always work like they’re intended to, has left many patients to seek out alternative treatments such as CBD.
Leonard was one of them. After testing positive for Lyme disease two months after getting sick, the oral antibiotics she was given weren’t helping. When she took her doctor’s advice and began researching alternatives, she came across CBD, and it proved to be life-changing. She now takes 10mg of CBD a day, which Leonard says “completely eliminates the low-to-medium grade nausea” she has early in the day most days, as well as the “inflammation-caused pain” in her joints, chest, and back. What’s more, is she’s stopped taking painkillers at night just so she could sleep.
In a 2018 article on LymeDisease.org (an organization committed to the advocacy, education, and research of Lyme disease), Dr. Daniel A. Kinderlehrer, a specialist in the treatment of tick-borne diseases in Denver, Colorado, explains how CBD hemp oil can benefit Lyme disease patients.
For pain relief, Kinderleher also recommends hemp derived CBD applied topically in the form of a balm or salve to troubled areas. He says that, “whether taken systemically or applied locally, these products can help many patients significantly decrease their need for pain medication..”
CBD in particular can help with Lyme disease symptoms such as being used as an anti-inflammatory, to mitigate anxiety associated with the disease, for nerve, muscle, and joint pain, for seizures or seizure-like symptoms, muscle spasms, tremors, muscle stiffness, and to decrease the use of narcotics to control pain.
Final Thoughts on Lyme Disease and CBD
CBD should not be considered a “treatment” for Lyme disease. Antibiotics are used to successfully treat the disease, and there simply aren’t enough studies to back up any claims of CBD being a “cure” for Lyme disease. While this could change as more research is conducted, as things stand right now, CBD should only be used to help ease the troubling symptoms associated with the disease, NOT to cure it. If you’re interested in an all-natural way to help ease several of the symptoms associated with Lyme disease, CBD could offer the relief you need.
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