A Little Light Reading

I think I need to order The Lyme Disease Solution by Kenneth Singleton, and Pamela Weintraub's Cure Unknown. Those were the two books most strongly recommended by respondents our survey that I don't already own.

I decided we were ready for a break from all these heavy topics, and it was time to pull out the lyme reading list.  So here we have a lighter topic for the day, the survey answers to what books we have read and how helpful we found them.

It would have been hard to survey about all the books out there. There are actually a surprisingly wide array of them available these days... which is in sharp contrast to just a few years back.  (Note that most of the books on this list were published 2009 or later.)

I picked the books for the survey in a very scientific manner: I went on Amazon and looked for the most popular books on lyme, figuring they'd be the most likely to have been read. (Of course, just a few months later, this list already seems a bit out of date, and doing the same search on Amazon today yields a somewhat different list. Sorry if your favorite wasn't included!)

Here is that list of books:

The Lyme Disease Solution by Kenneth B. Singleton M.D. (2009)

Healing Lyme: Natural Healing And Prevention of Lyme Borreliosis And Its Coinfections by master herbalist Stephen Harrod Buhner (2005)

Cure Unknown: Inside the Lyme Epidemic by Discover magazine executive editor Pamela Weintraub (2009)

The Lyme Diet: Nutritional Strategies for Healing from Lyme Disease by Nicola McFadzean ND (2010)

Insights Into Lyme Disease Treatment: 13 Lyme-Literate Health Care Practitioners Share Their Healing Strategies by Connie Strasheim (2009)

Checklists for Bartonella, Babesia and Lyme Disease by James Schaller M.D. and Kimberly Mountjoy M.S. (2011)

Nature's Dirty Needle: What You Need to Know About Chronic Lyme Disease and How to Find the Help to Feel Better by Mara Williams (2011) which wins the "most provocative cover award in my book

Everything You Need to Know About Lyme Disease and Other Tick-Borne Disorders by Karen Vanderhoof-Forschner (2nd edition, 2003)

Healing Lyme Disease Naturally: History, Analysis, and Treatments by Wolf D. Storl, Matthew Wood and Andreas Thum M.D. (2010)

The Lyme Diet: Nutritional Strategies for Healing from Lyme Disease by Nicola McFadzean ND (2010)

Recipes for Repair: A Lyme Disease Cookbook by Kenneth B. Singleton, Gail Piazza and Laura Piazza (2010)

Beating Lyme: Understanding and Treating This Complex and Often Misdiagnosed Disease by Constance A. Bean and Lesley Ann Fein (2008)

Out of the Woods: Healing Lyme Disease--Body, Mind & Spirit by Katina I. Makris  (2011) 

Treatment of Chronic Lyme Disease: Fifty-One Case Reports and Essays in Their Regard by Burton A. Waisbren, MD (2011)

The Baker's Dozen & the Lunatic Fringe: Has Junk Science Shifted the Lyme Disease Paradigm? by PJ Langhoff (2009)

And finally, a trio of book by journalist and lyme patient Bryan Rosner: 

When Antibiotics Fail: Lyme Disease and Rife Machines, with Critical Evaluation of Leading Alternative Therapies also by Michael Huckleberry, M.A. and Karin Driesen (2005)

The Top 10 Lyme Disease Treatments: Defeat Lyme Disease with the Best of Conventional and Alternative Medicine (2007)

Four Immune-Supporting Supplements Every Lyme Disease Sufferer Needs to Know About, And Where to Buy Them (2010)

The Envelope Please!

So without further ado, here are the ratings for the 17 books I surveyed about:

In this rating scale, a 3 would have been the top rating possible.

It occurred to me that we could get a second set of data by going back to Amazon and looking at the ratings for these books there, so here's Amazon reader's perspective on these same books (remember that Amazon uses a 5 star system so their scale is different than mine):

Rosner's Four Immune Supporting Supplements had not yet been reviewed, so it doesn't show up here.

Taking these two data sets together, it seems like Cure Unknown is the most universally beloved lyme book out there right now. I'm looking forward to reading it and seeing what you all are so excited about! And it is always fascinating to me when one thing is at the top of one list, and the bottom of another, like The Baker's Dozen on these. 

That said, we like a lot of books, and we are blessed to have had so many new titles come out in the last few years--a decade ago, it was a lot harder to find good information (note the publication dates of the books, above.)

Given the choice between trusting one list or the other, I'll just remind folks that the list we generated with the survey was fellow lyme patients only. Anyone can write a review on Amazon (and I hear about folks publishing a book and then encouraging folks to write glowing reviews about them, even if they aren't so hot.) So view these ratings within that context. 

And if you do have a book you really love or really disliked, go ahead and write an Amazon review. The more lyme voices we get in there, the more folks will have good guidance in what can really help them. (And Amazon, whatever its faults may be has a lot bigger audience than y blog.)

I'm inviting people to talk about other books you love in the comments area. My survey was hardly exhaustive! Or tell us why you rated the books the way you did if you took the survey.

Transparency: What's on my bookshelf and how much I liked them

Buhners Healing Lyme is my favorite so far. I love having more of the real science available, and love how the protocol is specific to different symptoms and co-infections. I find him to be very real, balanced and clear (even if I struggle a little to understand the more technical stuff.) Very helpful!

Rosner's Top Ten book was also very helpful for me when I was figuring out what direction I wanted to take my healing process. I got insight from it that helped clarify what I was looking for in a doctor. It is proving less helpful now... but only because I am deeper in now and have had enough experience with things to be moving on to making my own conclusions about it. 

Rosner's writing style is very accessible and easy on a lyme-ridden brain, and I'd call this one a very useful resource for folks new on their lyme journey. (I also feel a bit of the kindred spirit thing with Rosner, as we are both non-medically trained patients writing for the benefit of other patients.)

Because of the Top Ten book, I started considering more seriously going the rife route, and so I got Rosner's Lyme and Rife Machines. After having read the Top Ten book, I must say this one didn't add a lot for me. More detail, yes, but I'm not sure I needed it. 

I figured rifing was either going to work for me or not and knowing more didn't really effect that experience for me. So this goes into the somewhat helpful category for me; if I'd gotten it first, my assessment might have been different.

Strasheim's Insights into Lyme Disease has a brilliant premise behind it: write up the protocols of 13 doctors who have had good success treating lyme and do it differently. Unfortunately, the way the book is set up made it really hard for me to read it... not enough connecting the dots within most of the chapters for me to really grok what they do and why, or even understand the terminology different doctors use. 

Because each doctor wrote their own sections, the writing and format are very inconsistent. I think it would have been a lot better to make it more consistent, while still preserving each person's voice. (That is the challenge that magazine editors face every time they publish an issue.) 

I got a few tidbits out of it, but never even finished reading it (which is incredibly rare for me-- books are like a relationship to me, and when I open the cover, I've committed!) So also only somewhat helpful.

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So... tell us what you think of the books you have read! I'd love to see comments on the blog about different books.