Bell’s Palsy: A misdiagnosed Lyme Disease or Periodontal Disease Possible Cause?

Periodontal disease and Lyme disease both are caused by spirochetes. The literature indicates that oral spirochetes can be a false positive or misdiagnosed for Lyme disease. This post shows spirochetes that were found in the gingival sulcus (or diseased gums) of a Lyme diseased family.

This was a family of three; a husband, wife and child. The wife, Joan, had the Lyme symptoms; however, even though the husband, Joe, and daughter, Annie, had the positive diagnosis of Lyme, they did not exhibit symptoms.

Joan’s story goes as follows; she had a tooth ache in the upper right first molar. When she sought treatment, her dentist found an abscess and performed a root canal procedure of the tooth. Shortly there after, she developed symptoms of constant gagging pain and twitching of her face on that right side. During the few months following the root canal procedure, this didn’t subside but gradually got worse. The dentist extracted the tooth and made Joan a dental fixed bridge that cemented on the tooth in front of the missing tooth and the tooth behind it.

Unfortunately, the pain and altered sensation progressively got worse until a physician diagnosed it as Bell’s palsy. She developed all the milder forms of the Lyme disease symptoms, as well. Later, she was diagnosed with Lyme disease.

When I examined her, I sampled gingival sulcus of the lingual, tongue side, of the second molars where there is consistently four millimeter pockets that shelter plaque very effectively in most patients. I found nothing. Then I remembered she story of Bell’s palsy on the upper right and re-sampled her plague. This time I found spirochetes. The video below is of these spirochetes.

Joe, was the more remarkable subject of the family and much more puzzling. His job required him to be an international traveler and was about to deploy as a civilian to the Middle East that following week. When I examined his dental plague, it was loaded with ugly looking extreme fast moving “large type” spirochetes. Even though he had more and more virulent looking spirochetes, he exhibited no symptoms. His “gums” however showed the “tell tail” bleeding findings signs of periodontal disease, however, no bone loss as yet. He had heavy accumulation of calculus.

The daughters had spirochetes, as well, but these were very sparse and inactive. I treated all with the Life Guard Protocol which will be discussed later.