Kristin Reihman, MD, Author Of Life After Lyme

Lyme disease isn’t just a physical illness; it’s a journey of resilience, as survivors navigate the complex maze of symptoms and seek to reclaim their lives. In this episode, Timothy J. Hayes welcomes Dr. Kristin Reihman, the author of Life After Lyme, to share her profound personal and professional transformation. Dr. Kristin shares her journey battling this debilitating illness and offers invaluable insights into the challenges of diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. She brings a unique perspective to the conversation, discussing the importance of integrative medicine and the power of holistic healing. Her story is a testament to resilience and the power of a comprehensive, integrative approach to healing.

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Kristin Reihman, MD, Author Of Life After Lyme

Dr. Kristin Reihman is a physician, a mother, and the author of Life After Lyme, a comprehensive do-it-yourself manual for making a complete recovery from an all-too-common illness. Having recovered from a debilitating case of Lyme over a decade ago, Dr. Reihman knows all too well what it is like to live with a body that feels like it’s falling apart, a brain that’s forgotten how to do simple math, and the fear that you’re going to die from an illness that is invisible to most people. 

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Kristin, welcome. It’s great to see you again. 

It’s good to see you too. I’m happy to be here. 

I’m excited to have this conversation. I’m hoping you could get us started by telling us a little bit about how you got involved in the work you’re doing and what drives your passion for it. 

Starting with the small stuff. 

Dip a toe in and then we’ll go from there. 

I’m a physician by training. I’m a family doctor, an MD. I’m trained and certified by the Board of Integrative Medicine. I got to this position because I wanted to help people. I wanted to find a path in the world that would allow me to use my gifts in service to my fellow men and women. Doctoring seemed the way to do it. I went to med school to become an OB-GYN. I thought that that would be the best use of my skills.

I love the idea of supporting women in labor and helping families move through that sacred transition of becoming a family, and enlarging their families. I thought seriously about midwifery school because the more I leaned into learning about what OB-GYN looked like, the more I felt like there’s not a lot of normalization of this beautiful normal natural process which, in more cases than not, is very healthy, easy, and intense, but safe. 

Ultimately, I decided I needed to be a doctor to change the world in the way I wanted to change the world. Looking back, I’m like, “How did I know that there wasn’t much power for change agency within the larger context of Western medicine for midwives?” It seemed pretty clear from the midwives I was speaking to in Texas where I was at the time that it wasn’t going to be a pathway that I could use to make a change around how birthing was done. I felt again that it was often medicalized where it shouldn’t be.

I did that. I went into family medicine. I went to Stanford, my medical school, and then I came to the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania to do a residency in Family Medicine because I had learned along the way that family medicine was a perfect meeting place for someone like me, a midwife in doctor’s clothing. I could do birthing in the way I wanted to do it, supporting women naturally, helping them labor, being by their side, and not being rushed to the system in the way that I would have to be if I were doing it as an OB.

I loved that. It was what made my soul sing. My patients had my cell phone number and they would call me when they were in labor and I would get up in the middle of the night and go be with them as they delivered it was beautiful. It was a high point of my early career until I got Lyme disease. Lyme disease changed everything for me. I couldn’t wake up in the middle of the night anymore. I had to sleep twelve hours a day. I could barely focus on my life such as it was. I was a young faculty attending my program. I was creating all these different group acupuncture visits and centering pregnancy and birthing groups. It took everything in me to be alive for twelve hours a day. I was in a lot of pain.

I ultimately gave up OB and my practice of delivering babies because I couldn’t even manage my own health. That was a hard loss. Ultimately, what that led me to is what I’m doing now, which is supporting people in another sacred transition, which is a transition between being ill. Most of my patients have some complex mystery illness like Lyme, back to a version of themselves that is vitally robustly alive. I feel like in some senses, I’m still being a midwife, but in a very different way. 

 

Journey With Lyme Disease

Assisting rebirths. You got an eBook about this journey and where you’ve come from. I remember reading things like it had such intense mental components for you, that forgetfulness, looking for your car keys, and then finding them in the car that’s still running. I’m wondering because the symptoms didn’t just come and stay. They would come and go and then you were left wondering about your sanity. How did you find out that this is it, “This is why I’m doing this?” How did you start the journey to build your own health back? 

I feel fortunate. I had been prepared for that illness and the discovery of what it was by a patient of mine. She was a woman in her 50s who had been an artist model and still was an artist model, but found she couldn’t do that work because she couldn’t pose without urinating. She had no bladder control. She had a lot of other symptoms too. She had severe brain fog, panicky feelings, a racing heart, terrible pain in her feet, and exhaustion.

She came to see me in the clinic I was then working in as part of the residency in this inner city clinic. She had been to many doctors in the network. We had the whole intake. I heard all of her story and I heard all of her symptoms. I had no idea what was going on. I told her that I didn’t, but I was willing to partner with her to try to figure it out.

She said, “From all my research, I’m confident that I have Lyme disease plus some co-infections. That word was new to me, but other things that travel with Lyme, Babesia, Bartonella, no doctor I’ve seen believes me. If you want to be my doctor, you have to read this first.” She pulls out this stack of internet research that she’d printed out and hands it to me. There was this moment where I was like, “Am I going to take this? If I take this, I have to read it.” Everything in me said, “Yes, you must take that and you must read it,” so I did.

It was eyeopening and horrifying because I realized as I was reading these published papers of people who’d had Lyme disease, a diagnosis of Lyme, treated for 1 month or even 10 months with ceftriaxone for Lyme disease, which in terms of the Western model is considered overkill, and ten years later, culturing live Lyme spirochetes or bacterium out of their knee. My head was exploding and my heart was breaking as I was thinking about all the people I had dismissed saying, “You can’t possibly have Lyme because you’ve been treated,” or because the test is wrong. Also, the test was missing 60% to 70% of Lyme.

I was having this shocking and rattling awakening and realized I wanted to help her, but I wanted to learn what I needed to learn to reeducate myself about this and be the doctor she needed from me. In the process of working with her in the first couple of months, I was bitten by a tick. A couple of days after that I had a bullseye rash, which is considered the classic or “can’t be anything else” sign of Lyme disease. I was like, “Here I am. I guess I’m going to learn it by myself too.” 

 

Wide Range Of Symptoms

It’s the serendipity, as some would say or as fate would have it. Not only did you get to help her but you also got to help yourself and then lots of others. One of the things I’d like to have you talk about is the wide range of physical, mental, and emotional symptoms that can come from Lyme. Most people, unless they’ve been researching Lyme disease, won’t be aware of this. 

It’s one of those things that can affect every limb of your tree as I’d like to say. In that regard, it was a wonderful education for integrative medicine. Integrative holistic medicine looks at the whole person, not just the physical organs, tissues, and pathways, but the person as a social being and the person in their community, the person in their spiritual world, the person in their mind, what they are thinking, what thoughts are they thinking that are contributing or detracting from their ability to heal? In a sense, it was the perfect step for me and synchronicity and something that I’m grateful for because it was a wonderful education for me as a budding integrative doctor, but any symptom that you can imagine.

Lyme is classically thought of as something that affects the joints, the heart, and the nervous system. That’s a lot right there. Think of all the joints we have in our body, and it can affect any joint. It often moves between the joints, creating inflammation, redness, pain, and swelling at different joints at different times. It can impact your brain or any nerve in your body. Sharp stabbing pain in your left toe could be Lyme disease, as could brain fog, speech problems, or what appears to be a transient stroke, heart attacks, more commonly, arrhythmia. New right bundle branch blocks, for example, are considered classic for Lyme, which is a type of barrant pathway of the rhythm of the heart.

Those things are the common textbooks things that physicians learn to recognize and answer questions about on their board exams. It can also create out-of-the-blue mental illness with no other physical symptoms, so depression, anxiety, and OCD. It can create panic attacks. It can create pots disease, which is a problem with the autonomic nervous system that leads to people’s inability to stand up without feeling very faint or passing out, and sometimes passing out while sitting down. Their blood pressure and heart rate can’t respond to changes in position because the autonomic nervous system nerves that feed and innervate those organs and those blood vessels and heart don’t respond appropriately as they should.

It can create all sorts of physical pain syndromes, including things that are very discreet like an ache in the back of your left leg or your right leg in the muscle, headaches, or bone pain anywhere. Lyme is a close cousin to the spiral keet or the spiral-shaped bacterium that causes syphilis. In its time, syphilis was known as the great imitator because it could imitate pretty much any other known pattern of disease out there. Lyme disease is fourteen times more complex genetically than its cousin syphilis and is the new-age great imitator. 

Most people, myself included until I read your book, think that the only way you get Lyme disease is if a tick bites you. 

That’s also a board’s question. You have to know the deer. That’s a vector in nature and you have to know the actual vector, which is the tick and also the mouse that’s involved. The truth is that’s a very reductionistic approach because the bacterium that causes Lyme has been found in bird poop, fleas, horse flies, and black recluse spiders. It’s been found in all the different ticks, not just the black-leged tick or Ixodes scapularis. It has also been found in semen, breast milk, and the placenta of miscarried babies. To imagine that just because we don’t remember a tick bite or we don’t live in the part of the country where this particular tick likes to roam our symptoms can’t equal Lyme is problematic. 

 

Treating Lyme Disease

Let’s say that somebody is lucky enough to find a description like this or to land on the option that it might be Lyme and then they find someone like you. How do you help them? Assuming that you’re talking to people who know nothing about Lyme and how to treat it, where do you start? 

Start with my eBook because that was a labor of love and an effort to download everything I knew at the time. That was 2018 that was published and 99% of it is still what I’m doing and thinking. It’s such a helpful framework that integrates a lot of naturopathic medicine. I’m not a naturopathic doctor. I’m a medical doctor, but I’ve learned a ton from the naturopathic community about the importance of the body’s ability to detoxify itself and how to support the organs of elimination and detoxification. Treating Lyme disease at its core is a balance. You’re trying to empower the immune system to do its job. It should be able to fight off infection.

We saw this with COVID. Some people were exposed to COVID got COVID, and never felt a symptom. Whereas others died or had incredibly difficult journeys through COVID. It comes down to a series of host factors that determine whether someone gets super sick from Lyme, doesn’t notice they have Lyme, and wall it off and harbor it for life, or whether they need support, antibiotic support, herbal support, or some other support to kill the bugs because their immune system should be killing the bugs.

It’s a journey and it’s a dance. It involves thinking about the immune system as your primary vehicle for dealing with the Lyme infection, and then everything you can think of to do that will support it on all limbs of your tree. Physical support for the immune system looks like adequate sleep, excellent nutrition, getting the allergens out of the diet, getting the inflammatory foods out of the diet, and making sure you’re exercising. 

There are all these other pieces that can help your immune system thrive. That includes how socially connected you are. Are you hanging out with a bunch of people who raise your fear level or who dismiss your symptoms and gaslight you? That’s not helping you heal. That’s undermining your own immune system because of all the stress that causes. Conceptually, what thoughts are you thinking? Are you telling yourself a story that you’re going to die or that you can’t possibly heal? That’s not going to help you get better. There are much better stories that are going to be more effective for healing if that’s your goal and so on.

It’s important for people to embrace the holistic approach that they can give their immune system every little nugget of nourishment that it needs to do its job. Sometimes there’ll be antibiotics involved. Sometimes there’ll be herbal or other therapies involved. I describe my favorite ones in my ebook. You probably remember that I didn’t get to those therapies until chapter nine. I believe everything else is foundational. I have patients for whom they never need to get antibiotics or herbs because they did an elimination diet, which I covered in chapter four, and they got the allergens out of their food and they got the inflammatory things out of their foods, and their immune system jumped back to life and then did the job. 

 

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When you say that, I flash back to what you were talking about earlier when you’re saying that the symptoms from Lyme can look like no physical symptoms and all of a sudden, a mental health issue. The best guess around that is what’s happening is inflammation in the brain that is promoting what we call mental health issues, anxiety, depression, obsessive thoughts, etc. Is that what we’re guessing? 

Yeah. There’s some evidence for this as well. You can do a spinal tap and look for evidence of white blood cell count raising or even bacteria in the spinal fluid. That’s pretty clear evidence that there’s inflammation in the brain. There’s also a test called the Cunningham Panel out of molecular labs that looks for five different antibodies that are made against different areas of the brain. Often in response to an underlying infection in the body. You could have an infection directly in the brain. You could also have an infection in the body that creates an antibody response.

Those antibodies or proteins that are designed to search, find the intruder, tag it for removal, and kill it can also cross-react with different areas of the blood-brain barrier. If the blood-brain barrier is leaky as it often is these days because of all the cell phone use and the inflammation in general in our bodies, then you have a real problem. You can get new onset ticks. For example, with tick disorders, you can get OCD, anxiety, panic, and things that are completely new for you because you now have new inflammation in the brain. 

I suppose it’s been only about a few years since I ran into some functional medicine specialists, psychiatrists, medical doctors, and functional medicine train who were talking about inflammation in the brain leading to a lot of the symptoms that they’re trying to tamp down with things like antidepressants or anti-anxiety agents, and getting very limited success because they’re not reducing the inflammation. 

There’s good research on this now. If you’re looking for it, you’ll find the research that shows that there is pretty much always inflammation in the brain of someone who’s depressed. 

Are there standard blanket approaches to try to eliminate that inflammation other than things like the elimination diet or getting rid of foods that might have an allergic-type response in a person? 

Standard is an interesting word. In the community of people who operate in the functional medicine space, absolutely. An elimination diet is probably top on the list. Removing the toxic things from your body or brain in that case can create and drive that inflammation. Food is one of those things that a lot of us have mixed emotions about and connections to and strong feelings about changing, but it makes a difference what we put in our mouths three times a day or more.

If we’re putting in things that are going to inflame the gut, the lining of the gut, stir up and produce different pathogenic categories of microbes in our microbiome, all these things talk to the brain back and forth through the vagus nerve and the bloodstream. It’s important to realize that we are dosing ourselves with either chemicals and harmful toxins every day or with nourishing foods that are going to create a much better milieu for health. 

That milieu is the actual soup that our brain has to function in. One of the weirdest things about us as people is that if the organ that we’re using to interact with the world gets affected, we may not even notice. That’s why we’re walking naked through the streets at 3:00 in the morning, thinking we’re perfectly normal and people are saying, “What’s the matter with you?”

To the person who is in that space, it seems like the perfect thing to do. That’s why people who have real serious depressive issues have thoughts that a year or two before, if they’d had that thought, they would’ve run to the doctor. Now a year later, they’re having that thought all day and they’re thinking, “This makes sense.” It’s a negative dismissive thought that whatever is going on in the brain chemistry seems perfectly normal. 

It’s a difficult problem to get around, which is why I like to encourage people to build their healing team. Surround yourself with people who know you, who love you, who can speak the truth to you even when you’re resistant. One of the people who was on my healing team was a fellow integrative doctor, a friend of mine who when I was in the throes of my Lyme disease experience, I became hopeless. I became defeatist and fatalistic about it like, “This is who I am now.” She was like, “No, this is not who you are and we’re going to get you some help. You need to see my chiropractor.” She took the reins and started managing my schedule a little bit until I could come out of the weeds and be like, “That’s not who I am.”

 

Build your healing team. Surround yourself with people who know you, who love you, and who can speak the truth to you, even when you're resistant. Share on X

 

I often wish that people could view what’s going on in what they take in both through their eyes, ears, mouth, and skin and view that with as much importance as a couple shots of alcohol or a hit of a toxic influential drug like cocaine or heroin. When you get that shift in the body chemistry or inflammation, it has as much distorting factor in your thinking as being drunk or high. There you were thinking, “This is it, I’ll never get any better.” It made perfect sense to you to sit there in misery. It took somebody else who wasn’t under the influence of everything that was going on in your system to be able to look at it and say, “This is a separate thing. This isn’t your true nature.” 

I worked with the Family Hope Center. I’m their medical director. In that capacity, I provide oversight for the programs of children with special needs and brain injuries of all kinds. We call any brain not functioning optimally, a brain injury or a hurt brain, with the idea that anything that’s hurt can get well again, but you have to know what to do. It’s a conversation that I often have with parents who are coming in. I have a lot of families who come in from Norway and Denmark. They say, “In our country, at eighteen, this person is an adult. We want to let him drive. We want to let him drink alcohol now. We want to let him.”

I said, “You know from your work with us that his brain is not an eighteen-year-old’s brain. His brain is hurt and he’s still an eight-year-old. Would you let an eight-year-old drive a car? Would you let an eight-year-old drink alcohol? We have to respect what the brain is showing us in terms of its capacity, and strengths, and work with where we’re at until we can get that brain back online.”

 

A lot of people don’t want to hear that because it’s not a family hope. They’re on the path with us. A lot of people have been raised to believe that once a brain injury, it’s always a brain injury. I’m living proof that you can recover from a brain injury. My brain was offline for a lot of my Lyme illness. As you said, I would leave the keys in the car like, “Should I have been driving a car?” That’s a whole other question. I couldn’t remember where they were. The car is still running. I was seeing patients for much of that time and not good. 

Eben Alexander, do you know that name? He had an infection all through the brain that completely shut him down. He was legally dead for seven days in a coma and all that. He came back. Jill Bolte Taylor had the same thing. As a brain scientist herself, she was trained to believe if you had a stroke and you got stuff back in the first month to six months, that would be all you’d get back. If it hadn’t come back by a year, you’re never getting anything back. Yet she has watched herself 7, 8, and 9 years after her stroke regain functioning. She’s rewriting what the truth is about brain injury. 

In medical school, I remember learning that the right answer for the boards is 60 days to 6 months is what your brain has in terms of its ability to recover. That’s such a clean number. Really? The brain just stop recovering? It turns out that’s what insurance will pay for. it’s usually 60 days. 

That’s it. It looks like the brain heals itself. In the past 15 to 20 years, the progress they’ve made is trying to overcome the old idea that one location is responsible for one function in the brain. Now, it’s practically a buzzword to talk about neuroplasticity, but to understand at different levels that the ability of the brain to fix itself, heal itself, and learn new things is far more robust than it imagined. 

It’s not rocket science. It doesn’t take that much. It’s a lot of basics. Pretty cool. 

I’m noticing the time here and thinking I don’t want us to be too rushed here at the end. Let me ask you to get centered and think. Considering your ebook and the other work you do, is there something that we’ve already talked about you want to go back and highlight or something we haven’t even touched on yet that you want to bring into the conversation? 

We had a good start on the brain-healing conversation. There might be more to say about that. I’d be happy to share the story of my second brain injury if you’d like to hear it, and what I did. In 2022, I decided to have surgery on my neck because I’d had about a year and a half on and off of incredibly painful left arm, left back, and left shoulder symptoms. I thought they were musculoskeletal for a while. It turned out I had some herniated discs and they were impinging pretty strongly on some nerves. I did physical therapy for six months and it got better, then it got worse again. Long story short, I opted for surgery, which I never wanted to do because I’m over the belief that I need surgery ever again.

I was in excruciating pain and I was on my couch for two weeks. I’m not working and sleeping with my head hanging off the couch so that I can open up that space. I was on four medications. I was doing all the other things I do. I was doing energy work and I had a shaman. I was doing all my things and it was not even touching it. My eyes were crossing because it was painful. I had surgery and my pain was instantly gone, which was great. My voice was also gone, which was a bummer. It came back.

What also happened is that my ability to multitask was gone. My ability to stand upright with my eyes closed and my arms out in front of me was gone. I would fall over to the right. My ability to walk downstairs with my dogs around my feet without panicking was all gone, and my right eye was turning out. I had some little strokes during surgery or close after. 

It’s nice that you can say little. It wouldn’t seem little to me if all of that was going on. 

They were small enough that the MRI didn’t see them, but they were significant for me. Another one of those moments where I was like, “I don’t need my brain anymore. I’m not retired. I’ll be a fun grandmother eventually and I’ll garden.” My family was like, “No. You need to get back to yourself and then you can make decisions about whether you want to retire and garden only.”

That same doctor who had pushed me the first time was instrumental in getting me to see a functional neurologist. Within a week or two of intensive therapy with this neurologist, my motivation came back. My lights came back on. I was like, “We’re going to heal this,” then I embarked on a nine-month program that was based on the work that I’m familiar with from my work at the Family Hope Center, which we do with mostly kids. 

I had used that program for my own last two children. I have four. I used this program for a couple of years on and off to help their brains get a little more focused and tighter and lose diagnoses like ADHD. I believed in it. I knew it worked. It wasn’t easy. I think that was part of my resistance before I jumped into the ring with it. I knew it was going to be hard and I was tired like, “I don’t want to do that.” 

When you have all that, you don’t have the motivation or the energy to take on something hard. 

The functional neurologist jumpstarted me and then I came home for 8 or 8.5 and 9 months. In 2023, I did the program, which I’m happy to tell you what it was, but long story short, my eyes are straight now and my multi-tasking is back. I can stand and close my eyes and shampoo my hair in the shower with my eyes closed without falling over and getting another head injury. It totally worked. My brain is back. What I would want people to know is that there’s never a dead end. If you’re alive and you have a pulse and your brain’s still there, there’s a lot you can do. 

 

There's never a dead end. If you're alive, you have a pulse, and your brain's still there, there's a lot you can do. Share on X

 

Norman Doidge was the author I was thinking about The Brain That Changes Itself. He’s got a couple of other books too. In reading those books, I was enheartened and uplifted by the thought that this is getting out there. People are bringing the message that you ended that story with. If you’ve got a pulse, if you’re still alive because there are all kinds of stuff that can happen and change for the better. Even in the brain where they were saying for years that any loss of brain functioning and that’s it. I remember being in undergrad school and being taught that the nerves in your body are the only cells that don’t heal or recover. You could damage anything else, but if you damage a nerve, that’s it.

I remember the same teaching. What’s interesting is that halfway through medical school, that story changed because a couple of papers came out front page of Cell, Nature, and Science I think. It was like, “Never mind. Rat brains are healing. Rat nerves are regenerating.” I remember taking one of those magazines to my neurology rotation as a med student and being like, “What are we doing about this? This is amazing. Are you psyched? This is your field.

 They were like, “Pipe down, medical student. Nothing will happen with that for twenty years.” I was like, “What? It seems relevant to people now. Why are we not doing what needs to happen?” It turns out that, all the while, they were doing that at the Family Hope Center. They were doing that at other places. I wish people knew more about the simple tools you can use to effectively invoke neuroplasticity and heal your brain.

Feldenkrais was doing it decades ago. The Handle Center was doing things like that. The various ways that simple things can help people get stimulated are helping boost my optimism. On the one hand, there is still the old school that says, “For new scientific knowledge to take over, the old scientists have to die off.” That’s slow-moving in its progression.

There are all kinds of things that have been demonstrated even in the realm of quantum physics that have yet to make it into the medical field, or the recognition of the energy levels rather than thinking of this as solid physical, which then puts people’s brains in a little trap that says, “If you’re just physical, there’s only much you can do.” As you were saying, there are all kinds of stuff that can happen, all kinds of growth and healing and repair. 

As long as the old guard doesn’t move to TikTok and try to take over there, people are sharing so much of this information now on social media. The old generation is not going to be able to participate in the conversation in the same way, which has its downsides. We’re losing a lot of elder wisdom that might also be transmitted there, but fresh ideas and grassroots empowerment are pretty awesome. 

It was sometime in graduate school when I’d gone through yet another round of being taught in school, “This is what we know,” then a year or two later, “That’s not quite right.” By the time that happened in high school into college, and then college into grad school, and then from grad school and post-graduate studies, I finally reached the point where I started saying, “It’s so much better for me to say when anybody asks me a question, ‘This is what we think we know now based on the best we have, but it could change because it does change.’” 

It likely will change. A lot of people don’t like that. They want certainty. They want the pill. They want the thing. The pill is the illusion of certainty or control. They want to have that thing where they can tuck it away in their head and be like, “Mischief managed. I don’t have to think about that. I don’t have to be anxious about that.” Maybe that works for some people, but I like to dig in and find out. I like to explore, experiment, and try new things. It won’t hurt you, but could help. 

 

I love the little Harry Potter Easter egg you dropped in there.

That was for you.

 

Big Message

We are getting close to time here. We are going to promote and tell people about your ebook and we are going to offer you a way to let people know how to reach out to you. What’s the big message going out the door you want people to take? What’s the empowering position that you want to offer people? 

You’re never too far gone to heal. It’s never too late to learn something new and try something that might be completely transformative. When I was sick with Lyme, I was in my bed and lost 30 pounds that I didn’t have to lose. I couldn’t think or remember anything. I thought it was over and it wasn’t over. I couldn’t see that then. I want people to know that they’re not over either.

The journey that you’re on, if you’re in a particularly yucky place right now and you feel like you’re falling apart and you don’t see the options out, that doesn’t mean there are no options. It just means that right now you can’t see them. There are always options. There are always people who are eager to help you on your path and join your healing team. Don’t give up hope. 

When you say there are always people, I was thinking that when you’re in the position where you can’t see it, but you’ve heard enough people like Dr. Reihman tell you, “There is hope,” you can remember that, and then find some other people who can be your cheerleaders, coach, transportation, or be your set of eyes and ears when you’re looking at these articles or getting information from doctors. As you talked about pretty well, it takes a team, especially when the person who is at the center of it is feeling out of sorts. Their resources are unavailable to them until they start to heal more. 

You are the quarterback of your game, but sometimes you need someone else to whisper the plays in your ear and give you a pat on the shoulder and be like, “You got this.”

If people want to reach out to you, what are the various ways that you’d like to have them connect with you? 

They’re welcome to come find me on Instagram. I’m there and I usually answer questions and chat with people there a lot. It’s @KristinReihmanMD. I have a website, which is KristinReihmanMD.com. There, you can find my ebook. You can also find access to the various offerings and services I provide, including coaching programs for people looking to find their way out of mystery illness. 

Congratulations on both recoveries from the brain injuries and for doing the work you’re doing. It’s great to finally get connected. I know that we had a run at trying to get connected a few years ago. I’m glad that there are people like you out there doing this work, and that you’re willing to share your time with us. Thank you. 

Thank you.

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Dr. Reihman’s Passion

Dr. Kristin Reihman is a physician, a mother, and the author of Life After Lyme, a comprehensive do-it-yourself manual for making a complete recovery from an all-too-common illness. Having recovered from a debilitating case of Lyme many years ago, Dr. Reihman knows all too well what it is like to live with a body that feels like it’s falling apart, a brain that’s forgotten how to do simple math, and the fear that you’re going to die from an illness that is invisible to most people. 

She also knows how to make a complete recovery and has done that for herself. Now, she is on a mission to help as many people as possible recover their own most vibrant versions of themselves and get back to living their amazing lives. She shares her favorite tools, practices, and mindset shifts for the whole person healing process. In her book, on weekly episodes of her Healing Grove Podcast, and in the online community, she cultivates, including the Healing Grove membership on Instagram and in her latest offering, the Life After Lyme coaching program. 

 

Important Links:

• Life After Lyme
• The Brain That Changes Itself
• @KristinReihmanMD – Instagram
• KristinReihmanMD.com 
• Healing Grove Podcast – YouTube
• Life After Lyme
• https://www.Facebook.com/KReihmanMD

 

About Kristin Reihman, MD