Dietrich Klinghardt, MD, PhD
Sophia Health Institute, Woodinville, WA

Editor Note: This article is the first half of Chapter 2 from Connie Strasheim’s book New Paradigms in Lyme Disease Treatment: 10 Top Doctors Reveal Healing Strategies That Work. Part 2 will appear in the August 12 e-letter.

How I Became Interested in Lyme Disease

My interest in Lyme disease was born out of my own suffering and struggles with poor health, which began at age 12. These struggles led me to become interested in medicine and psychology, although I did not find the answers to my healing in medical school, through psychology, or even by going to India to meditate for several years. But my experiences eventually lead me to discover that I had Lyme disease and, subsequently, to help others with Lyme.

In 1991, many years after becoming a doctor, I got a Borrelia culture test through a friend, Nobel Prize nominee Lida H. Mattman, PhD. This was long before there was any reliable commercial test available for Lyme disease, and the results came out positive. I then tested all of my chronic pain patients and discovered that about 80 percent of them also had Lyme disease. So I began treating people for Lyme in 1991 and was amazed at how often the antimicrobial therapy cleared up their intractable pain and many other symptoms. I have since treated many chronic Lyme disease patients.

Lyme Disease: Not Just Microbial Infections, But a Disorder of the Immune System

On a molecular level, most of the symptoms that we call Lyme disease are really due to the immune system’s reaction to microbes and toxins, rather than the microbes and toxins themselves. The immune system’s reaction to Lyme disease is far more destructive to the body than Lyme microbes or antigens. On average, it is estimated that more than 93 percent of all Lyme symptoms are caused specifically by the immune system attacking the tissues in places where the microbes hide out. For this reason, the practitioners at the Sophia Health Institute and I use a technique to modulate the immune system as an important part of our treatment approach (more on this later).

Environmental Toxins Set the Stage for Disease

There are an estimated 82,000 man-made toxic compounds in our environment. If appropriate detection methods are used, all of these compounds can be found in our bodies. We all are contaminated with huge amounts of toxins, and it’s the unhealthy “terrain” of our bodies that sets the stage for us to become sick from pathogenic microbes and other factors. This is because these toxins act as a favorable growth medium for the wide variety of microbes that we are all infected with and which we in the medical community lump together under the term “Lyme disease.” The toxins that I have found to be key in contaminating the body and weakening the immune system are mercury, lead, aluminum, and glyphosate. Glyphosate is a chemical that is sprayed on food and which is ubiquitous in the environment; it’s also the key ingredient of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide.

What’s more, the damaging effect of these toxins is far greater when the toxins are combined. For instance, there is a synergistic effect between aluminum and mercury, and aluminum and glyphosate. When these are all present in the body, they really damage it.

This, in turn, causes the microbes to become aggressive and pathogenic and ultimately cause chronic illness as the body’s terrain becomes increasingly contaminated. Glyphosate plays a key role in this process. It is found everywhere in the environment and is very damaging to the microbiome (or the community of beneficial microbes that live in the body). It is, among other things, a chelator, which means that it removes precious trace minerals from the body so that the body can’t absorb them. However, glyphosate acts as a “door opener” for aluminum, rather than a chelator, and so facilitates the absorption of toxic aluminum from the gut into the body, which then causes the body to become aluminum-toxic.

So in addition to glyphosate, we all are exposed to high amounts of aluminum, which is found in our food, water and air supply, in addition to our personal care and household products. Consequently, it is found in high amounts in our bodies. If we had no glyphosate in our bodies, our guts would act as a pretty effective barrier against aluminum and prevent its absorption into all of our cells. But because we are all contaminated with glyphosate (even organic food in the United States contains 80 percent as much glyphosate as what is found in commercially grown food), it enters our gut through our food and binds to the aluminum there. Both it and the aluminum are then carried into our brain and pineal gland, where they damage these organs, along with the rest of the nervous system.

This, along with the damage that these toxins cause to our healthy gut bacteria, seems to be the basic mechanism through which chemical toxins damage the body and weaken the immune system so that Lyme pathogens can flourish. This is further evidenced by the fact that there is a correlation between the increased use of glyphosate in the environment and an increased rate of Lyme among the general population. Aluminum as a growth and virulence factor for Borrelia has been supported in published studies on lab animals.

The air is one important means through which we are exposed to these environmental toxins, especially toxic heavy metals. Rainwater contains astronomical levels of aluminum, titanium, barium and strontium. Additionally, through my and others’ research, we have discovered glyphosate in rainwater samples. Inhaling these toxins is particularly dangerous because our bodies have no effective biological barrier to protect us against them when we breathe them in. The lungs, which take in the toxins, are the most damaged organs in most people, and lung cancer has now become the most prevalent cancer in women (and this has been after we have all realized the dangers of smoking and stopped doing it!).

In one experiment, my colleagues and I measured the heavy metal content of 120 of our patients’ blood using a procedure called “double membrane filtration apheresis,” which is a new blood-washing procedure that is done in Japan and Germany, and which consists of separating the blood components and/or toxins out of the blood. The results of this test showed that on average, our patients had 94 times more aluminum in their blood than any other toxin, including lead, cadmium, mercury or any other heavy metal or chemical.

We also discovered that nanonized aluminum was the most abundant form of aluminum in the patients’ bodies. This form of aluminum is known to cause generalized inflammation, as well as endothelial (blood and lymphatic vessel lining) and mitochondrial dysfunction. It also creates an environment in which Lyme pathogens can flourish.

Fortunately, there are tools that we can use to help cleanse our bodies of these toxins so that they become a less hospitable environment for infections and disease. These will be described later in this chapter.

Aluminum Protects Microbes in the Blood Vessels

Several published studies on inflammation of the inner lining of the blood vessels, such as “The infectious etiology of vasculitis,” which was published in Autoimmunity in 2009, have shown that Lyme-related organisms such as Rickettsia (especially Ehrlichia and Anaplasma), Borrelia, and Mycoplasma—as well as just about every other microbe common to symptomatic patients—are found in abundance throughout the blood vessel lining. The results of these tests read like the “Who’s Who” of microbes and are proof that just about any microbe can be found in the inner lining of the blood vessels, and that perhaps this is their preferred domicile in our bodies. Here, they are well protected by a solid layer of fibrin and biofilm. Fibrin is a fibrous protein involved in blood clotting, while biofilm is a “slime” of sorts comprising extracellular DNA and proteins that the microbes use to cloak themselves and hide from the immune system.

At the same time, researchers have discovered that toxic aluminum settles largely in the endothelium, or the inner lining of the blood vessels. The approximate length of the blood vessels, if they were to be strung together, would measure about 200,000 kilometers, or 124,300 miles. If you were to open them up and measure their surface area, it would equate to about two square miles. Now, imagine that all of your blood vessels are covered with that much nanonized aluminum!

From this, we’ve learned that microbes, which primarily grow in the blood vessels, are protected from the immune system by aluminum and other heavy metals. This means that when you remove the aluminum from the blood vessels and detoxify the body of aluminum, you will remove one of the microbes’ protective mechanisms and greatly increase the number of Lyme-related pathogens that can no longer have a “foothold” in the body and remain protected by the endothelium.

This fact is relatively unknown by the medical community. Borrelia spirochetes also exist in the body’s connective tissue and insidethe neurons of the nervous system (intra-neuronally) as well as inter-neuronally (or between the neurons). But where the Lyme pathogens primarily affect and upregulate the immune system and create havoc is inside the blood vessel lining.

Further, I’ve discovered that there’s a direct correlation between the severity of our patients’ Lyme disease symptoms and the amount of aluminum that they have in their blood and which we can detect via apheresis. So the first thing that I do with all of my Lyme disease patients is clean up their inner terrain and get as much of the aluminum out of their bodies as possible, while also decreasing their bodies’ burden of glyphosate and other chemicals. This is a new treatment approach that we have followed for a few years now and found to be necessary and successful, especially for the most persistent forms of Lyme organisms.

Organic and inorganic mercury are similarly damaging to the body, but the results of a relatively successful treatment that was used to treat syphilis until 1945 (syphilis is a Borrelia-related illness) showed that mercury is actually a medicine for spirochete illnesses because it actually keeps the microbes from replicating. Mercury has also been used until recently as an effective anti-inflammatory remedy, and it is used in medications such as Mercurochrome and Preparation H. So interestingly, the more mercury that there is in the body, the less inflammation there is and the less active the microbes will be. Mercury destroys the brain and neurological system, but not through the process of inflammation, so people who have high levels of heavy metal toxicity can slowly die without a lot of pain or symptoms. But I’ve found that once we remove the mercury from the body, the Lyme spirochetes actually become more active—and paradoxically—easier to treat. There are some interesting things that we’ve learned, and this is one of them.

Cilantro and Ionic Footbaths: More Effective than EDTA for Heavy Metal Removal

The detoxification agents and toxin binders that have typically been used within the medical community to remove aluminum and other heavy metals from the body have proved to be disappointing and somewhat ineffective. In the past, I would find that our patients would get some improvement as a result of taking them, but that it wasn’t enough.

The good news is that I have recently developed a method for removing aluminum and other heavy metals, which has proven to be very effective for our patients over the past couple of years. The seeds for this method were birthed out of what I learned from one of my teachers, Yoshiaki Omura, MD, one of the few living geniuses of our time. Dr. Omura did wonderful studies on animals and proved through these studies that he could decrease the amount of aluminum and lead in the animals’ brains and long bones by half in 39 days, just by giving them regular doses of a cilantro extract.

In a similar research model, intravenous sodium EDTA, which doctors have conventionally used for heavy metal chelation (or detoxification), was given to lab animals in the same dosages that are currently recommended for heavy metal chelation, once per week for three hours. In this experiment, it took seven years to get the same amount of lead out of the animals’ brains and long bones as what cilantro accomplished in only 39 days. So I paid attention to these studies and tried to find ways to replicate Dr. Omura’s results. I found that I was able to get positive results in my patients by giving them cilantro, but initially, it wasn’t enough.

Then, I learned something important from a German neurologist named Dr. Margareta Griesz-Brisson, a Harvard graduate who lives in Germany and England. Dr. Griesz-Brisson conducted an experiment on 20 patients to determine which detoxification agents would be most effective for removing heavy metals from the body. She discovered that when the patients regularly took cilantro tincture and combined that with an ionic footbath, that this dramatically increased the amount of mercury, lead, cadmium, nickel and especially aluminum (basically everything toxic) that the patients excreted in their urine and hair.

The ionic footbath has been greatly misunderstood and misrepresented because of false advertising and confusion about what the color of the water means and what it’s supposed to look like. According to some ionic footbath advertisers, the dark color of the water that some footbaths produce is supposed to represent the toxins that come out of the body and, thereby, prove the effectiveness of the footbath. However, I have found that the color of the water is irrelevant and inadequate for determining whether the footbath works.

What researchers have overlooked is actually measuring the toxins that get excreted in the urine after the footbath, but Dr. Griesz-Brisson did this and discovered that the footbath caused her patients to excrete significantly higher amounts of toxic metals, which she confirmed by measuring their urine and doing a hair analysis test on them after the footbath. Yet, she found that the footbath caused only a slight increase in their bodies’ excretion of essential minerals.

From this research, we can conclude that cilantro-ionic footbath therapy preferentially eliminates toxic chemicals from the body, and we have found that the kidneys secrete the greatest amount of toxins on the third day following a 30-minute footbath. Therefore, it may be best to do this treatment only twice weekly in order to prevent overwhelming the kidneys with toxins.

It’s also noteworthy to mention that in Dr. Griesz-Brisson’s study, the amount of aluminum in her subjects’ urine was so “off the charts” that she had to change the scale for measuring aluminum excretion so that it would fit on the same chart as the other toxic metals! I’ve since adopted her method for heavy metal removal over the past couple of years, so we’ve been giving our patients cilantro tincture and then having them do ionic footbaths afterward. The results have been very dramatic and positive. What’s more, it’s an inexpensive and simple treatment that’s affordable for most.

How to Do Cilantro and Ionic Footbath (CIF) Therapy

To do the cilantro-footbath treatment, start by taking two droppers of cilantro tincture in a little bit of water before each meal. I recommend using a pure product such as BioPure’s Cilantro, which is cultivated and grown in such a way as to provide excellent detoxification benefits to the body. Then, after dinner, do a 30-minute footbath. Your body will excrete the majority of the mercury and other toxic metals on the third day following the footbath.

We do not know whether the type of footbath that you use for this procedure really matters. Depending on our patients’ needs, we offer them two differently priced footbaths at our clinic (both available from SophiaNutrition.com). They range in price from $1,300– $2,300 US dollars.

The cilantro-ionic footbath (CIF) treatment has been to-date the most successful detoxification therapy that we’ve ever done; far more effective than DMSA, EDTA, DMPS or any other heavy metal chelation therapy, although most of these modalities can be combined.

Yet CIF beats all of these heavy metal treatments at a fraction of the cost and causes few side effects.

Detoxifying Glyphosate with Humic and Fulvic Acids, Berries and Other Substances

As I mentioned, glyphosate is another important toxin that enables Lyme disease microbes to flourish in the body. Unfortunately, the medical community still doesn’t know with certainty how to effectively remove glyphosate from the body, but at our clinic, we have developed a protocol that we have found to be helpful for reducing our patients’ body burden of this toxin. This protocol is partly based on published research, which shows that certain compounds, such as humic and fulvic acid minerals, bind with glyphosate in the gut and help to carry it out of the body. We give our patients BioPure’s Matrix Minerals product, which contains these minerals, for this purpose. For more information on Matrix Minerals, see BioPureUS.com.

Secondly, studies have shown that three types of berries are able to turn on the body’s natural detoxification mechanisms and better enable it to remove glyphosate. They are pomegranate, the North American plum, and acai. BioPure’s Deep Purple product contains all three of these berries in freeze-dried form, so we recommend this product to all of our chronically ill patients. We also use Deep Purple to heal the inner lining of the blood vessels and have seen fantastic results from it. For more information on Deep Purple, see BioPureUS.com.

As a third glyphosate detox treatment, we recommend sauna therapy because many of the organophosphates and fat-soluble chemicals that are stored in the body are heat volatile and will evaporate out of it through the sweat.

Other published studies have shown selenium, vitamin C and vitamin E to be helpful for detoxifying glyphosate. To mobilize toxic chemicals in the gut, we also recommend that our patients take a special form of zeolite. Not all zeolites are created equal, so it’s essential to use the right form. By definition, zeolite is aluminum silicate. Most zeolites on the market contain a 1:1 ratio of silica to aluminum; meaning, they comprise 50 percent silica and 50 percent aluminum. It is dangerous to take these zeolite products because the stomach acid liberates some of the aluminum in them and allows it to be absorbed into the body, making the body more toxic. Liquid zeolite is even worse because the aluminum in it is very bioavailable and easily absorbed into the body.

Instead, I recommend a product called ZeoBind™, which has a 6.5:1 ratio of silica to aluminum. It is very safe because silica has a high affinity for aluminum, which means that it bonds strongly to it. Therefore, the aluminum from the zeolite does not get released into the gut or absorbed into the body. Rather, the silica absorbs a lot of the aluminum out of the bloodstream and removes it from the body. Famous zeolite researcher and former university professor Dr. Karl Hecht studied over 200 zeolites from around the world before he discovered this one, which he found to be the most effective. For more information on BioPure’s ZeoBind, see BioPureUs.com.

Electromagnetic Pollution and Its Role in Lyme Disease

Another major factor that influences recovery from Lyme disease is electro-smog (or electromagnetic pollution) and exposure to manmade electromagnetic fields (EMFs). The negative effects that EMFs have upon the body are cumulative and twofold. First, EMFs—particularly the microwave radiation from cell phones and cell phone towers—are highly immunosuppressive. Secondly, electromagnetic pollution drives the growth of microbes within the body, so that, as if anticipating their own death, these microbes replicate much faster and produce more virulent toxins.

A Swiss mold researcher once conducted some simple experiments to measure the virulence and prevalence of mold and mold toxins (myco-toxins) in high EMF environments. He exposed molds to a Wi-Fi router and found that the production of mycotoxins was dramatically increased by the energetic frequencies. The virulence of the toxins also increased 600-fold. That means that not only did the mold and mycotoxins multiply more rapidly, but they also became much more potent in the presence of EMFs. There’s an increasing body of research that links many chronic illnesses to microwave and radio wave exposure.

Of course, there are different types of mold and mycotoxins, and the virulence and pathogenicity of mold varies, in part, according to the environment in which it is found. For example, the Swiss researcher found that aflatoxins can exist in the body in an in-between state, in which they are neither very pathogenic nor benign, or they can become absolutely cancer-causing and devastating to the body, especially when exposed to EMFs.

How to Reduce Electromagnetic Pollution in the Home

Because EMFs affect the behavior of microbes and ultimately influence recovery from Lyme disease, we educate all of our patients on their dangers and provide them with recommendations for reducing EMFs in their home and work environment. The short list of recommendations includes:

• Removing all Wi-Fi routers and cordless phones from the house
• Using a hardwired Internet connection
• Turning off all circuit breakers in the home at night
• Plugging Graham-Stetzer filters into all of the home and workplace outlets during the daytime. These filters are a very inexpensive way to make the home and workplace biologically healthy. (For more information, see: Stetzerizer-us.com.)
• Using cell phones intelligently. I recommend doing lots of texting and making very few calls. If possible, use the speakerphone option and/or a blue tube radiation-free headset. For more information on blue tube technology, see: EMFnews.org/store.
• Removing Smart Meters: A Dangerous Source of Electro-smog

Smart meters, which are now being installed on most homes across the United States as well as in other countries, are one important source of electro-smog. They are actually digital surveillance devices that are falsely marketed as devices that calculate energy consumption and which are purported to lower monthly energy bills. However, the energy companies’ promise to save consumers money has so far proven to be false.

I recommend watching the documentary Take Back Your Power to learn more about the problems with smart meters and how the frequencies that come from these meters damage the body. I also encourage you to mobilize others within your local community and get them to fight the electric company for the removal of all smart meters from the homes within your community. This is the long-term solution to the problem of smart meters. The old analog meters worked well without problems, so there is no reason why these should not be reinstated.

The short-term fix for reducing the harmful effects of smart meter frequencies upon the body is to take four layers of sturdy aluminum foil and place it between the smart meter device and the outside wall of your home. This will block the harmful effects of the smart meter frequencies that come through the wall wiring. It’s possible to prevent the smart meters from creating radiation inside of your home by simply using this strategy alone.

I also recommend creating a sleep sanctuary by draping a mosquito net-like silver-coated cloth from Swiss Shield® over your bed at night. The cloth creates a Faraday cage that blocks the electromagnetic fields that radiate from microwave towers, your neighbors’ Wi-Fi, and other sources of high frequency radiation.

Graham-Stetzer filters also are beneficial. They don’t decrease the amount of radiation in the home, but instead modulate the harmful frequencies that come into it from the wall wiring and other sources so that they become less destructive to the body biologically. They can make a huge difference in your health. For more information on Swiss Shield technology, see: LittleTreeGroup.com.

Other Detoxification Therapies at Sophia Health Institute

Colon/Lymph Drainage/Massage Therapies. In addition to the things that I’ve already mentioned, during the initial phase of our patients’ treatment, we recommend that they do colonic and lymph drainage treatments, along with massage and sauna therapy. These therapies are most often highly beneficial as part of any Lyme treatment protocol and can greatly facilitate the healing process.

Apheresis. To detoxify our patients of chemical toxins, heavy metals and inflammatory cytokines, we also do a modified version of the Japanese/ German apheresis treatments. This treatment, which I briefly mentioned earlier, is a blood-washing technique that involves removing the blood from the body, filtering the toxins out and continually recycling the blood back into the system over a three-hour period. ELUAT, the filtrate used for this procedure, is ideal for identifying and quantifying the toxins that are found in the blood.

Summary of Detox Treatments. In summary, the pre-conditions for the effective treatment of Lyme disease include practicing radical electro-smog hygiene and removing mercury, glyphosate, aluminum and other chemicals/toxins from the body and home. All of these steps are a must. Only after my patients commit to doing these things will I even consider treating their persistent Lyme disease infections.

Lyme Disease Treatment Approach

My Lyme disease treatment approach hasn’t really changed over the past 20 years. The only aspect that has changed dramatically over the past few years has been recognizing that it’s not the presence of the bugs that makes us sick, but rather, the reactions of our immune system, which are driven not only by microbes, but also by electro-smog, glyphosate, aluminum and all the other toxins that we are exposed to, which make our bodies completely dysfunctional. The toxins cause the immune system to attack every tissue in the body that looks like a Borrelia spirochete.

Other than this, my antimicrobial strategy has always been to treat the creatures in the patient’s body from the largest to the smallest; so that means parasites first, and viruses and nano-bacteria, last. This is because parasites are themselves invaded by, and incubate, spirochetes, viruses, bacteria and other microbes. So it makes no sense to treat the Lyme infections and viruses first because the bigger organisms also harbor them, and you won’t be able to fully eliminate them until you eliminate the bigger microbes. Otherwise, you will only be killing the infections and viruses that are outside of these organisms because Lyme-specific treatments do not penetrate into the parasites.

Therefore, because smaller organisms survive inside of larger ones, my treatment sequence involves going after the larger creatures first. These are multicellular creatures that largely comprise parasites, roundworms, tapeworms, and hookworms, as well as the larval forms of these organisms.

Then, the treatment sequence is as follows:

1. Yeasts
2. Molds
3. Protozoans
4. Bacteria
5. Mycoplasma (which are cell wall deficient bacteria)
6. Nanobacteria and viruses

Published July 29, 2023

About the Author

Dietrich Klinghardt, MD, is the founder and medical director of Sophia Health Institute in Woodinville, Washington, as well as the founder of the Klinghardt Academy (USA), Klinghardt Institute (UK) and the American Academy of Neural Therapy. He is the medical director of the Institute of Neurobiology and Founder and Chairman of the Institute for Neurobiology in Germany and Switzerland. The Klinghardt Academy teaches about biological treatments and Autonomic Response Testing (ART) assessment techniques.

Dr. Klinghardt has been treating a wide variety of chronic and degenerative health conditions for more than 40 years and is internationally known for his successful treatment of chronic pain and illness. He combines non-surgical orthopedic medicine with immunology, endocrinology, toxicology, neural therapy, hypnotherapy and energy psychology, and has a unique approach to diagnosing and treating diseases and disorders on both the physical and mental-emotional levels.

Dr. Klinghardt studied medicine (1969–1975) and psychology (1975–1979) in Freiburg, Germany, and completed his doctorate on the involvement of the autonomic nervous system in autoimmune disorders. His research and work have been documented in several publications. Early in his career, he became interested in the sequelae, or involvement of toxins (especially lead, mercury, environmental pollutants and electromagnetic fields), in illness.

While working in India as a junior physician, Dr. Klinghardt learned about Eastern concepts of disease etiology and combined these with his Western training to better help his patients. This laid the foundation for his five-level system of integrative medicine, for which he is well known.

After immigrating to the United States, Dr. Klinghardt spent three years working as a full-time emergency physician before becoming the medical director of the Santa Fe Pain Centre. Increasingly aware of the limitations of conventional medicine for chronic conditions, he also trained in Ericksonian hypnotherapy and began to incorporate body-oriented psychotherapeutic and counseling approaches into his work, along with neural therapy, mesotherapy injection techniques and applied psycho-neurobiology (psycho-kinesiology and mental field therapy).

Since the 1970s, Dr. Klinghardt has contributed significantly to the work of understanding heavy metal toxicity and its connection to chronic infections, illness and pain. He is considered an authority on this subject and has been instrumental in advancing various fields within biological medicine, including non-invasive pain management, injection techniques for pain and orthopedic dysfunction, anti-aging medicine, toxicology, pediatrics (particularly neurodevelopmental disorders), energy psychology and biological dentistry. He has also developed Autonomic Response Testing (ART), a comprehensive diagnostic system that has helped many practitioners to be-come accomplished holistic physicians.

Dr. Klinghardt has lectured at the universities of Illinois, Utah, Freiburg and Adelaide, as well as at Capital University in Washington, D.C., among others, and at Swiss medical schools in Geneva and Zurich. From 1996–2005, he was an associate professor in the Department of Applied Neurobiology at Capital University.

Dr. Klinghardt is regularly invited to teach workshops at the prestigious Medicine Week in Baden-Baden, Germany. Among his books is the groundbreaking Psychokinesiology: A New Approach in Psychosomatic Medicine, which is a comprehensive book about musclefeedback-guided psychotherapy.

To learn more about Dr. Klinghardt’s work, see: KlinghardtInstitute.com. To schedule a consult at his clinic, contact Sophia Health Institute in Woodinville, Washington: 425-402-4401 or SophiaHi.com.