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Bryan Rosner – Lyme Disease Journalist and Book Publishing Executive

By Admin | February 12, 2008

Bryan Rosner is a prominent Lyme disease reporter and recovering Lyme disease patient who has written extensively on the subject, including When Antibiotics Fail… Lyme Disease and Rife Machines and The Top 10 Lyme Disease Treatments. He also owns and operates BioMed Publishing (lymebook.com)

DailyInterview.com recently had a chance to speak with him.

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Where are you from?

I am from California, South Lake Tahoe. Up in Northern California.

Where did you go to college and what was your academic major?

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and my major was business. I specialized in finance.

What was your career path from college to your current position?

That is a long story. I will give you the short version. I graduated and started working with my dad. My dad owns a real estate company in South Lake Tahoe. I was the number one producing agent at the office at the time. And, then I got Lyme disease.

Through a series of about three years of trying to figure how to cure Lyme disease, I ended up writing a book about it.

And, writing a second book about it and doing it mostly just on the side to try to help people and it kind of took off into a career and now I own a publishing company.

I have written three books on Lyme disease and I distribute about 25 other books and DVD’s. I sorta backed into a career this way.

I really didn’t want to end up here and I am not even sure I still want to end up here. But, that is what I am doing right now.

How long have you had Lyme disease?

I think I probably got it when I was a kid. I don’t know exactly when. But, it didn’t really get ugly until about 2002.

Do you consider yourself cured?

I don’t consider myself totally cured, but in the Lyme community there are different levels of improvement. I would say I am at the highest level of improvement you can possible be without be totally cured.

No one knows if the bacteria totally leaves the body for sure. But, as long as I maintain a low level of using the treatments that I use and that I talk about in my books I stay 100% well.

I don’t really have any symptoms and, you know, as long as I keep doing that I continue to feel that way.

What do you think was the most important strategy for you to get better?

There would be two treatments that were most helpful for me. But, I would preface that by saying that everybody is different and people’s biochemistry and their bodies are different.

So, some treatments work better for some people and while some work better for other people.

But, the ones that helped me the most were Rife machine treatment and that was what my first book was about.

And, the Marshall protocol, which was just recently introduced to the public just a couple of years ago. The second book that I wrote has a long chapter about the Marshall protocol.

Why do you think there is so much rancor between many, if not most, Lyme patients and self-styled LLMD’s (lyme literature MD’s) against the insurance companies and more conventional treating physicians? Why can’t people get together on this issue?

That’s a really good question. I think what it essentially is.. I think there are some elements of money in there. Politics and money that aren’t mixing well right now.

But, I think mostly it’s just the current way medicine researches health problems is to put things into categories and to try to neatly classify symptoms and diagnoses and that type of thing.

And in Lyme disease, there aren’t really any good tests for the chronic form of it. The symptoms can really vary.

So what you have, you have a disease that is very elusive and really does not fit into the box that conventional medicine tries to put it in.

So, they are just missing it. The tests are missing it, the diagnostic procedures are missing it. The symptoms vary wildly, so the symptoms don’t fit into any box.

I think, you know, there are a lot of people out there that say this is a conspiracy – they are out to get us and that may be true. But, that is not what I think.

I am not quite so much of a doomsday conspiracy theorist. I just think that modern medicine, for whatever reason, is missing it.

But, the heat is definitely building on the medical establishment because there is more and more evidence and they are going to have to do something about it pretty soon.

Are you aware of the recent New England Journal of Medicine article authored by twelve very respected and reputable physicinas who said essentially there is no such thing as chronic Lyme?

Yeah, I am aware that. There is a friend of mine who is a Lyme advocate, his name is Veny Musum, and he is the Vice President of Business at Paul Mitchell Systems, the hair company that makes the shampoos. He is fairly up there in the corporate world and has a lot of contacts.

And, he recently sat down with one of the authors of that New England Journal of Medicine study and had an appointment with him.

He started asking him questions about the guidelines and where they got that information. The guy was pretty confused and had not even heard of alot of the mainstream research that is happening, such as what Brian Fallon is doing at Columbia University and Joseph Burrascano.

(In my new book) I present about twenty pages of science and it is sorta like a point counterpoint with the New England Journal of Medicine. They will say something like, ‘There is no evidence that Lyme disease can persist chronically in the body.’

And, then I pull out twenty studies that have been conducted by other… (researchers and published in) peer-reviewed journals and I just don’t understand why they are not looking at those. But, it remains a controversy and we will have to see what happens.

In one of your books you seem to suggest or agree with the many physicians who feel that long-term antibiotics are not the correct treatment for Lyme disease. Is that a fair assessment?

I would say that is a fair assessement. I think antibiotics can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, one of the edges of the sword is that they do cure early stage Lyme disease most often. They are the most helpful treatment.

So, in that case if I just got bit by a tick and had early Lyme I would go get antibiotics. Long-term antibiotics for someone who has treatment resistant Lyme disease (has) problems.

Number one, that length of using them leads to a lot of side effects.

Number two, is that they can be very inconvenient and expensive. IV antibiotics can be thousands of dollars.

So, that is a real consideration when you are doing something for two years or that long, you have to consider the convenience or else you will go crazy trying to keep up with the treatments.

Then, the third problem which I would say is actually the biggest problem is that the Lyme disease bacteria has defense mechanisms where they can convert to more dormant, more metabolically inactive states where they are no susceptible to antibiotics at all.

So, you are spending thousands of dollars and you are treating this bacteria with drugs that create lots of side effects in the body. Meanwhile, the bacteria are just hiding out in a form that the antibiotics are not able to reach.

So, you are left with a lot of money out of your pocket gone and your body is torn down and has a lot of different side effects from the antibiotics. Hopefully it doesn’t but it might.

I run two Lyme disease discussion groups and the total membership among them is about three thousand members. Most of them have used long-term antibiotic therapy and it hasn’t worked for them.

So, this is very real problem. There are some people that get well on long-term antibiotics. I don’t know many of them. I have spoken with maybe ten in my whole time researching.

But, if that’s what works, that’s what works. I am not really an advocate for treatments or given different treatment. I am an advocate for what works.

Are you concerned that a lot of Lyme disease patients try treatments that seem to be on the surface to be very dangerous? For instance, the Marshall Protocol severely limits a patient’s vitamin D levels. There is a lot of information that Vitamin D is good for you, not bad for you.

Yeah, there are lot of different experimental treatments that are dangerous. But, you have to realize that long-term antibiotic therapy is experimental. There are very few long-term studies that show that is safe.

Well, rifampin is used on a long-term basis for tuberculosis.

Right, I guess there is more research showing long-term use of antibiotics.

But, when you look at the science of the Marshall protocol, I am convinced that it is safe. I have used it with a lot of help. But, I will not claim it is safe and I would be the first to admit that it is experimental and that it could be potentially dangerous.

The only reason that I would even dare to advocate it or recommend it is that it has helped give me my life back. I can’t argue with the fact that it has helped me.

The opinions expressed in this interview are solely those of the person being interviewed and are not attributable to DailyInterview.com or the editors.

Copyright 2008 DailyInterview.com

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