The Highwire with Del Bigtree - TIMBERLAKE, TICKS, AND THE TRUTH ABOUT LYME

Episode Date: August 19, 2025

Pop icon Justin Timberlake’s recent Lyme disease diagnosis is shining a spotlight on a condition mainstream medicine still refuses to fully acknowledge in its chronic form. Del sits down with Lyme-literate physician Dr. James Neuenschwander to break down the ongoing controversy—why standard testing often fails, why so many patients are misdiagnosed or dismissed, and how a comprehensive, integrative approach combining antibiotics, detox, immune modulation, and herbal therapies is giving hope to those battling chronic Lyme.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

We're talking about, you know, gain of function and, you know, what happened in the Wuhan lab with the COVID virus. But there's a long told story of another illness that a lot of people say was gain of function, that it was built in a lab just off in an island, just off the coast of Lyme, Connecticut. It was made to be, you know, handed out by ticks. And then if you caught one, oh my God, God forbid that happens. maybe a lifetime of issues. Well, Lyme disease for very long time, even when I was on the doctors, was said did not exist. But now it's getting some serious limelight because a superstar is speaking out. Take a look at this. It has been called the silent epidemic Lyme disease back in the spotlight after Justin Timberlake announced he has a debilitating case. Singer Justin Timberlake says

that he's been diagnosed with Lyme disease. Justin Timberlake revealed today he has been battling Lyme disease. In an Instagram post, he wrote, if you've experienced this disease or know someone who has, then you're aware living with this can be relentlessly debilitating both mentally and physically. He's been feeling a massive amount of nerve pain and quote crazy fatigue or sickness while he was performing. For most, the illness is easily treated with antibiotics, but for some, about 5 to 15 percent of people, symptoms can linger for months or even years. Trouble focusing or brain fog, chronic joint pain, even mental health symptoms, you know, problems with anxiety or depression. You may have inflammation of the heart muscle, heart block or electrical problems with the heart, neurologic changes, neuropathies, even meningitis.

This is most often transmitted in the United States by the deer tick in areas like the Northeast. We see Lyme disease in a lot of parts of the country. It's very common in summertime in the Northeast. And it's really strange because we're starting to see more cases as well over time. The numbers of ticks that we've seen this year are at least 30% higher than we've seen in previous years. That increase seen in America's emergency rooms. Lyme disease is actually really controversial. There have been these conspiracy theories about Lyme. As for a Lyme vaccine, Pfizer is working on one and says it hopes to apply for approval next year.

You know, they list those side effects to Lyme and you end up, you know, thinking, boy, that looks a lot like the COVID vaccine side effects. But I don't want to get into that. I don't want to get into, you know, whether or not this is some sort of cover up. There are people that for many, many years have been actually asking us to cover this issue of Lyme disease. And, you know, now that Justin Timberlake, I think, is making it so public, we thought it would be a good time to get started on this topic. And so we reached out to one of our good friends of the high wire, Dr. James Nguyen Schwander, who actually treats Lyme disease, amongst many other things that are causing all sorts of auto-examines. autoimmune diseases and havoc in people and their children. It is my honor and pleasure to be joined right now by Dr. New and swander. Dr. New, good to see you.

Good to see you, Del. All right. Well, let's start with the controversy for a second, which I think starts with any time the government might be involved with something. Now, I'm not going to ask you to destroy your career by, you know, saying this is gaining a function from a bio-weapons lab that somehow, flew over to Lyme, Connecticut. But could I ask you, it sure is suspicious, isn't it?

I mean, these stories, you know, it's sort of like the Wuhan Lab. I feel like it's like John Stewart. You know, the lab's named after it. It's right there where it happened. We have a lab that's right there where this whole thing seems to start. You know, so let me just ask this in dealing with it. Do you believe that this is the type of element that could be used as a bioweapon or something that they might have monkeyed with somewhere in the past.

Well, look, let's start with how long we've known about the Lyme disease, right? So Lyme disease was initially described in the 70s, the early 70s, but we know the spirochid, the Borrelia burgdorferi spiroch that causes Lyme disease, has been around for a very long time. You know, they dug that ice man out of the Italian Alps. It turns out he's 5,000 years old, and he had that spirochene in his body. Now, I like to say he didn't die a Lyme disease. He died of that arrow in his back, but he did have evidence of the spirochete.

So we've known the spirochate's been around for a few thousand years, at least. But why have we not seen the disease caused by that spirochete until the 70s? I always tell people, look, Lyme disease has a cousin. It's called syphilis. All right. Syphilis is the dumber, easier to treat, cousin of line. And it's also caused by asparagus. Now, we've known about syphilis for hundreds of years. Long before we knew what caused it, we recognized as common symptoms. We've known the diagnosis of syphilis for a long time, but it's only in recent times that we're able to identify the causative organism. So why is it that we've known

about syphilis for hundreds of years, but we haven't known about Lyme until 1974. So to me, there's one of a few possibilities here. A, our immune system has changed and we can't handle it anymore. You know, B, somebody monkeyed with it or C, something else. You know, so again, you know, I'm a big fan of a conspiracy theory as anybody else, but, you know, if you're doing research over here and right across the straight is Lyme, Connecticut, I don't know what to tell you. I'm not going to say we did gain of function research in the 60s and 70s and you know that's why we have an epidemic of Lyme disease I am telling you that there is definitely an issue with the recognition of chronic Lyme you know according to the infectious disease society of America according to our government

you know there is no such thing right I mean people I was going to ask you actually when I was working on the doctor's television show just back I think it was about 2015 maybe 2014 I I wanted to do a show on Lyme disease, and I was told not to do it because it was still too controversial, that there was a belief that this doesn't exist at all, that this is some form of Munchausen by proxy, or people looking for attention. Are we still in that space? Because it's sure, I mean, and I think, look, Justin Timberlake's probably about to blow that out of the water, but did it need a Justin Timberlake?

Are we still in a position where there's doctors that don't believe this even exists? Yes, and it's not just, are there doctors that don't believe this exists. It's most doctors don't believe it exists. Really? The official stance of the Infectious Disease Society. Yeah, the Infectious Disease Society of America. You know, I'm a member of the I-LADS, the International Lyme Associated Disease Society. You know, we call ourselves Lyme-literate doctors because we understand the physiology of these chronic problems that Lyme can cause, right?

And so, you know, we call the Infectious Society of America, IDSA, sort of call them the evil empire, because they still, to this day, deny that there is anything like chronic Lyme disease or post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome or whatever you want to call it. There's a lot of terms for it. But these are people that had Lyme disease were treated and still have symptoms, or they've had symptoms chronically and maybe for years. and then you do testing, and it turns out that they have line. I mean, if you're talking about, you know, why are we having trouble diagnosing this stuff? Why are we in trouble believing in it?

It's because we haven't made progress. It's really been difficult to move things forward. I live in the state of Michigan. Yeah, well, I would say this. I want to say this, Dr. New. You live in the state of Michigan. Go ahead. Go ahead and finish your statement.

Then I'll make my point. Oh, yeah, I was just going to say that. that in the state of Michigan, I mean, right up the road from where I'm sitting right now is the University of Michigan, right now, they still will say to patients, there's no Lyme disease in Michigan. I mean, that's just incredible. We know there are ticks that carry Borrelia on the west coast of the state. Why is there no Lyme disease here? We have more deer than anybody else on the planet. Why do you think there's no Lyme disease here? And that's part of the problem. You know, this is what makes me suspicious. I mean, again, what can we prove? But I find when, you know, Tony Fauci is telling me nothing to see here,

which is how this whole thing on COVID started, or, you know, everything's fine. There's no, you know, no such thing as Lyme disease. Every doctor, every scientist is fascinated by everything they can find, and they want to get in and they want to do something about it. And every drug maker wants to make a new drug for any disease. So suddenly there is no disease that everyone's talking about. That's a cover up. There's a cover up going on.

There's a suffocation of investigation into this, which makes absolutely no sense. So that tells me the government has got to have his fingers on this somewhere. Somewhere it feels responsible. Somewhere it feels guilty. Somewhere it funded a Wuhan lab, somewhere on this planet. And I think they recognize if we ever really get deep into this, we're going to see that our own government probably has. But that's just me. But that's how many times I've seen this story, and it doesn't make sense otherwise.

When you're watching scientists and doctors and universities in Michigan going against their obvious knee-jerk reaction, which is to investigate any damn thing they can think of, and to name any damn thing they can think of, and make a drug for any damn thing they can think of. When they don't want to do any of those things, something stinks. I want to go to a quick video by the guy that named this thing. He makes some interesting points. Take a look at this. The controversy in the Lyme disease research is a shameful affair.

And I say that because the whole thing is politically, politically tainted. Money goes to people that have the past 30 years for two years. produce the same thing, nothing. Cereology or Cerology Plus has to be started from scratch with people that don't know beforehand the results of their research just because they have to get the money. Without it, they cannot afford it. So, and I include, when it's a shame, I include physicians who don't even have the courage

to tell a patient, you got Lyme disease, and I don't know anything about it. There have lots of physicians around that wouldn't touch a Lyme disease patient. To tell the nurse, you tell the guy, to get out of here and don't want to see him. That interview came back from 2008. A couple of things he said there that I think are very haunting.

This is political. All of the funding for 30 years keeps going to the people that are achieving nothing. You could really replace what he was saying with autism. And I think that that's what really makes me lean in this direction, which is if they wanted a solution, they could find one. Why do they keep funding people to say, we don't know what's causing it? Or it doesn't exist at all. Usually it's because it's something that our government's doing,

something that they know that they don't want us to know. That's where I'm going to be. I'm not going to ask you to be there. But, you know, this is a guy that obviously feels like this thing's being shut down, that your, you know, physicians are afraid to go near it. Do you think that that's going to shift? How prolific is it, by the way? I'm starting to feel like all around me.

So many people are saying I have Lyme disease. Is it an underlying problem that is starting to rear its head? Is it something in our environment that's maybe making it worse for us? What's going on? Or is it that it's actually just started to be talked about more? I think it's that it's being talked about more. I mean, I've been seeing Lyme cases for, I started in the 90s and it's not shut down. So you have to look at that, you know, if you're asking how common is it, well, that's a very difficult question to answer if we have testing that's terrible.

Right. Right. What he was talking about, serology testing, it misses most chronic Lyme. You know, a standard hospital test for Lyme will miss about 70 or 80 percent of Lyme cases. Wow. So what's the incidence? I don't know. It's in the, you know, it's in the hundreds of thousands, but you've got a, you know, a lot of, you know,

a situation where we are very definitely under-diagnosing this disease. We have a situation where people don't think of this disease, especially in places like Michigan. If there's no Lyme here, then whatever symptom your patient has couldn't be Lyme. And so they don't even do the testing, right? And the testing is terrible. So, and it hasn't changed all that much. I mean, there's very hyper-specialized testing you can do.

And this whole idea that, you know, if it's chronic, it couldn't be Lyme disease because there's no chronic Lyme disease. You know, so again, you're you're talking about trying to figure out numbers that are impossible to determine because we don't have the statistics. We know that there are, that it's the most common tick-borne illness. We know that. Is it only ticks? Is it only ticks, by the way, that's a question of mine. Is it only no? No, I mean, there's some evidence that it can be spread by biting flies, you know, kind of makes sense. There's this thing called the deer fly. Maybe that can spread it. But, you know, there's also evidence that it could be spread by things like spiders, you know, where, you know, they're potentially going to be exposed and spread it. But, you know,

primarily we talk about tick-borne illness and spread by ticks. And certainly there are a lot more ticks than there used to be, regardless of where you're at in the country. You know, there's almost nowhere where you're not going to see ticks, but particularly, you know, in the northern States in the eastern seaboard, there's a ton of Lyme and a ton of ticks. So when we're talking about tick-borne illnesses, the big thing with Lyme, and this is what makes it so bad for people like Justin Timberlake, is, you know, in adults, maybe 10 or 15% of adults will have neural Lyme. So it involves their brain, and they've got all kinds of weird symptoms. And you're back in the same boat as what you hear from some of these vaccine injury patients, right? You get immune activation, you get brain

inflammation, you get fatigue, you get all kinds of weird neurologic symptoms, electrical pain, all that sort of thing. And with kids, the rates even higher. So instead of 10 or 15 percent, it's more like 20 or 30 percent. So it's a big problem. And we know that a lot of the kids that we see that have, you know, these Pans Panda syndromes, these brain on fire syndromes. They look they have autism, they're aggressive, they're obsessive, they have OCD symptoms, they're anxious. It's really brain inflammation from an underlying infection, and Lyme is one of the things that can do that. So again, without recognition, it's very difficult to answer any of those basic questions. How common is it? Who is it? How is it spread? You know, those kinds of things,

and we really haven't made progress since I started seeing Lyme patients in the 90s. That's the tragedy of Lyme disease. What are the symptoms? How do I mean, if someone is sitting at home wondering, is this what I have? And, you know, what is it you're looking for? Is it so broad, it'd be hard to say? But what should someone be thinking about? Well, I mean, there's the classic Lyme symptoms. You know, and the classic Lyme symptoms, you know, classical, you get bit by a tick, you develop a boll's eye rash. That's sort of primary Lyme disease. Yeah. And that bull's eye rash, that's the time to treat it aggressively. And I'm not a bit. big fan of antibiotics, but you show up with that, I'm going to be treating you with antibiotics

aggressively, usually three or four weeks worth of doxyclin or something like that, because you don't want this to go to whatever the next phase might be, which is secondary and tertiary Lyme. So that initial phase will go away, and then it'll come back maybe as a skin rash, it'll come back as joint pain. And again, if you have a painful swollen joint, one of them, we worry about is that Lyme disease. But it doesn't, the classic symptoms aren't there most of the time. And especially the neurologic symptoms because those aren't going to develop for three or four weeks after the bite, right?

So you're not even going to remember that you were bitten by something. And now you have a headache or you have brain fog or you have weird numbness, stinging, shooting pains. You know, you're having problems with your cognition. And it can even mimic, you know, the most classic. symptom of neural line is a sixth nerve palsy. So your eye turns in, right? You can't bring your eye back out. And so all of a sudden it looks like you, oh, did you have a stroke or something like that? No, that's neural line. But again, you have to think about it to diagnose it. The classic

patient that comes to my office, it's going to be somebody that sort of out of the blue started developing joint pain, started developing fatigue, started developing general malaise, got neurologic symptoms, brain fog, fatigue. If it goes on for a long time, you can get all this autonomic dysfunction pots where your heart rate goes through the roof because you stand up. You know, you can get all kinds of weird symptoms. And I hate even putting these symptoms on air because I know my phone's going to be ringing off the hook. But, you know, again, you have to think about this in this chronically ill patient. Could that be one of the underlying causes? Yeah. And it's, again, the classic lime is not really what we're talking about here.

because, and depending on where you're at in the United States, that's frequently recognized in the, you know, in the primary care setting, treated aggressively that primary Lyme, and that prevents the secondary, tertiary line from happening. It's when it's not recognized, when they don't have a bullseye rash. And over 50% of people who line don't ever have a bozai rash. So if Justin Timberlake was walking to your clinic, he's diagnosed, I guess, where anyone liked them, what is the treatment? What is, you know, what can someone expect is the way that you would go about treating this right now? Well, that requires a whole Ph.D. in managing immunology and infectious disease. So, you know, there is a role for antibiotics for some people. Even late, even if he is realizing years later, I got bit a long time ago.

But relying on antibiotics alone is a huge mistake. because that usually does not fix the problem. If you look at the statistics, antibiotics alone are less than 10% effective at treating that chronic Lyme type picture. And that's part of the problem. Why don't antibiotics work? Well, because at that point it's far more than just an infection. You know, at that point, it's morphed into this hybrid between an infection and really

an autoimmune disorder, you know, what we call loss of immunotolerance. You know, at some point that spirochid, because it's a very important, lives inside of cells. This is not just, you know, floating around in the blood. It's actually living inside of cells. It's taken up housekeeping in our actual cells. So how do you get rid of that with an antibiotic that becomes very, very difficult? The other thing is they tend to be very, very slow growing. So the rule of antibiotics is you want to get maybe 20 or 30 cell replications. So if you have something like strep that's dividing every two or three hours, well, 20 cell replications is a couple days. But if you're talking something like a chronic spirochee, like Lyme,

where it's replicating maybe once every month or a couple times a year, well, you're talking about doing antibiotics for 20 or 30 years. Nobody's going to do that. You know, so you really have to get the immune system on your side. A lot of people that have chronic Lyme have some type of other toxicity, heavy metals, mold toxins, environmental toxins, their guts a mess. You know, you have to treat them from that integrative, holistic perspective. Otherwise, they're not going to get better. And a lot of the really hardcore eyelids doctors that used to be all antibiotic, just more, stronger, longer type treatment, those are the doctors that are even now saying, yeah, we need more than just antibiotics to treat this because antibiotics are probably not going to get you better.

Now, having said all of that, I still will use antibiotics even on a chronic patient because if you're in that 10 percent, hallelujah, praise the Lord, the antibiotics will help you. Right. But if you're in the 90 percent, you know, by the time I see patients, they've already had antibiotics. It hasn't worked. You know, so they come to see me, what else can I do?

And that feeds into this whole idea of, you know, integrated medicine. What do we do for these patients? How do we detox them? How do we build an immune system? Can we identify the issues that might be not allowing their immune system to function the way you should? Because, again, if you're going to do it, you know, based on, you know, chronic Lyme is from the spire key. And the reason why we have trouble with it

now and we did in a hundred years ago is because the environment we live in, if you believe in that theory, then we should be able to do a lot to help those patients, right? I mean, this is what we do with vaccine injuries. This is what we do with any of our chronic diseases, our autoimmune things. You know, you fix the gut, you detoxify the patient, you support the immune response. And then maybe you use antiseptic herbs. That's another option because you can use those for a lot longer without having toxicity and the studies suggest particularly in these chronic infections they work as well as antibiotics if not better and those you can use for a long period of time so there's a lot of different layers to treatment and you know again

for physicians or for practitioners it's really about learning these skills about learning how do you take that systems biology integrative approach to a chronic health issue I am sure there's a million people watching this show right now and saying, I want that doctor. I want that guy. Obviously, I know you're very busy. But what type of doctor? There's a group of doctors, I'm sure, that sort of focus in this space and are continuing to train themselves, not just coming out of school and sticking with whatever the CDC says

or infectious disease and telling you there is no such thing as Lyme. How do I find those doctors that are using antiseptic herbs? I mean, that sounds amazing, like bringing in the whole cornucopia of both holistic, natural, and, if necessary, pharmaceutical products. How do we find that doctor? Well, I mean, first of all, you want to look for what's called a Lyme literate doctor. And this is really what the ILADS organization is about. Okay. So it's the international Lyme Associated Disease Society.

So I-L-A-D-S. Okay. You want to find a doctor that's Lyme-Literate. You know, as you know, on the president of the medical academy and pediatric special needs, we've been doing some of their pediatric talks at I-LADs, and we did a whole day of pediatric Lyme.

In our world, that's a big cause of some of these behavioral problems and immune dysfunction that we see in kids. So, you know, you want to get it, if you've got a child, that you're worried about, find a maps doctor. And that's, you know, MedMaps.org or go to iLads to find a Lyme literate doctor if you're talking adults. And, you know, again, we're all about training practitioners in these techniques because we need a lot more of that. You don't learn about this stuff in medical school. You just don't. And you're not going to learn it in

a infectious disease residency. You're going to learn about the drugs. You're going to learn about the medications and those can be valuable. But again, in this situation with chronic Lyme, you have to go so much beyond that to try and help these patients recover. You have a conference coming up now for MAPS doctors. When does that happen? Tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, so we're we have conferences twice a year. Our next one is going to be in Phoenix. I believe it's September 4th through the 6th. This is Thursday through Saturday after Labor Day. And we will be again, what we're all about is practitioners. I always say if you see kids in your office and you have a certificate hanging on the wall, you should be coming to a maps conference. But basically we teach these concepts of

systems biology of actual root cause, underlying cause medicine, you know, what's causing the problem, how do you treat it, and how to manage chronic health conditions. Now, we're focused on kids, but I like to say, you know, kids grow up and the physiology doesn't change that much. The principles we teach, work for adults as well, and we're really trying to expand the scope of who we're trying to contact. So we're all about systems biology. We're all about integrated medicine. We're all about root cause medicine, and we welcome everyone to our conference. I like to say this is the best conference you'll ever go to, although I might be a little bit biased on that opinion. So it's not just for doctors. Would parents be in their interest to go to this conference?

Maps is really focused on practitioners. So it's not just doctors, but we don't really have a parent track right now. We probably will have one in the spring. Again, we do a spring in a fall conference. Our goal is to have a parent track in the spring, but for the fall conference, we don't have a parent track. And it's hardcore medicine. Anyone can go to an eyelids conference, but you may find yourself a bit overwhelmed with the information that you're getting, you know, because it's really not for late people. All right, so let's bring this up for all those practitioners out there that are watching the highway. We have a special discount, 20% off to get the deep vast knowledge that these MAPs doctors are sharing there in the work that they're doing. You can take that QR code and check out that event. I highly recommend it. We definitely want to see a better education amongst those doctors that have open minds and want to treat our children. We need more of them out there because there's just not enough. who has got a line out the door.

He needs help. Dr. New, I want to thank you for taking the time today. That was very insightful. And it's something that I think we're going to be hearing a lot more of. And we should be asking the question. Any doctor that says these things don't exist or any hospital, I would say that's a good time to just decide. I'm not going back to that hospital.

These people aren't forward thinking they're living in the dark ages. Let's deal with the world that we're living in and move forward. So I really appreciate your work. And thank you. I know you're busy. You took time out of your schedule. So thanks for doing that today for us. Not a problem, Del. Always the pleasure. I'm always here for you guys. All right. Sounds great. Take care.