It has taken me five years to complete an exhaustive book on Lyme disease.
I finished my internal residency in 1979 but never opened an internal medicine practice. I didn’t want to spend all day prescribing drugs to people whose illnesses I could never cure, so I opened a practice in holistic medicine and nutrition while I supported my family as an emergency room physician.
There were not many holistic practitioners back then, but some pioneering and intelligent folks such as Jonathan Wright, Jeff Bland, Alan Gaby, Leo Galland, Theron Randolph and Sid Baker guided me.
I ended up seeing folks who had fallen through the cracks. They didn’t get relief after seeing multiple practitioners so I suddenly found myself on the fast track of learning nutrition and environmental medicine and found that I am adept at doing the detective work necessary to understand chronic illness.
One of my teachers pushed me to look even deeper. I signed up for four years of energetic healing training with Barbara Brennan then three years of training in Kabbalistic healing with Jason Shulman, two years of training in Sufi healing and two years in Guided Self Healing, a body centered psychotherapy to clear trauma.
All that changed when I became sick with Lyme in 1996. It was bad, really bad. I was suicidally depressed and had given up. But like I say in my book, it was the worst and the best thing that could have happened to me.
There were times I felt so poorly that the only way I could get through the day was to tell myself that tomorrow I could commit suicide. But Lyme has also blessed me with deep compassion and empathy for others who are suffering. Lyme has stirred in me a passionate commitment to help others who are challenged with this illness. Lyme has filled me with hope that each and every patient coming through my office door will get well. I can’t think of anything more rewarding or more gratifying than helping people restore their well being.
I believe I am in a unique position to write what is the most comprehensive book on Lyme to date. In its 400 pages I outline all the problems we see in this long-suffering population of patients. My own experience has given me insights into what my patients are going through; my internal medicine training has trained me to understand how to evaluate the multi systemic nature of this illness; my experience with environmental illness has enabled me to evaluate the immune dysregulation in these patients with their multiple sensitivities; and my training in energetic, spiritual, and trauma has yielded insights in how to help patients shift their belief systems to feeling well.
I have been training practitioners in my office, but I realize I will not live forever. I decided to write this book to pass on what I have learned. While it was initially intended as a sort of text book for practitioners, I quickly realized that the majority of people that would buy the book will be patients who are seeking more answers.
In other words, this book is oriented like a medical textbook but written in lay language that hopefully will be understandable to lay people so that they can gain insights into their issues and know where to seek help.
Every year Dr. Kinderlehrer gets together with his three daughters and six grandchildren in the Colorado mountains. All three of his daughters and three of his grandchildren have had Lyme disease.
