The effectiveness of Samento, Cumanda, Burbur, and Dr. Lee Cowden's protocol in the treatment of chronic Lyme disease

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, April, 2007 by Suzanne Arthur

The annual number of new cases of Lyme Borreliosis disease occurring in the United States is unknown due to many factors, mainly underdiagnoses and misdiagnoses. Harvard researchers and Lyme-literate physicians believe that as many as 200,000 new cases of Lyme occur in the US annually and that the number of people infected grows each year. As reported in the Townsend Letter ("What Makes Lyme Disease Tick and How Samento Eliminates It," July 2004), (1) Samento was the only herbal antimicrobial recommended for treatment of Lyme Borreliosis. Nutramedix now offers many additional products, some of which are currently undergoing clinical evaluation for effectiveness in the treatment of Lyme disease. Dr. Lee Cowden considers the use of Samento, Cumanda, Burbur, Quina, and other products to be a fine-tuned antimicrobial approach that addresses fungus and other problems that accompany Lyme disease (L.E. Crowden, oral communication, August 2006).

Dr Lee Cowden: Lyme Borreliosis May Be the Root Cause of Many Chronic Illnesses

Although many Lyme patients have had success with long-term antibiotics, Lee Cowden, MD, integrative medical researcher and physician, believes many patients being treated with antibiotics recover completely for months or years only to suffer a recurrence. "Lyme disease is an epidemic in this country," says Dr. Cowden. He believes most of the diseases "that are considered incurable by conventional medicine have some kind of Lyme component." Many chronically ill people have Lyme as a factor. Dr. Cowden not only suspects Lyme bacteria as a root cause for autoimmune diseases, he also lists neuro-degenerative diseases, cardiovascular diseases, cardiac-arrhythmias, gastrointestinal diseases, Multiple Sclerosis, ALS, Parkinson's, ADHD, and autism. "I've found that if you can start working on the Lyme and the toxins, then a lot of these labels go away," he says.

Dr. Cowden says that through the studies he has discovered the following:

  ... antibiotics do seem to work fairly well in a lot of patients. But,
  if they've had the illness for longer than six weeks, the chance of
  antibiotics getting rid of the infection, in my experience, is pretty
  unlikely, pretty remote. So, they're basically just guaranteeing that
  they'll stay on antibiotics for the rest of their life. The problem
  with staying on the standard pharmaceutical antibiotics long-term is
  that you kill off the friendly bacteria in your gut, and you cause an
  overgrowth of fungus in your gut, so then you trade one problem for
  another.

  In the pilot study in 2003, we used Samento quite a bit, and still use
  it. But we've found that there are some other herbal therapies that
  have been brought from Peru by Nutramedix that work just as well or
  better than Samento.

  Cumanda is an extremely powerful anti-Lyme treatment, as well as an
  excellent anti-fungal and also is a pretty good anti-viral and
  antiparasitic. So you eliminate a lot of different bugs with one
  therapy. It's a different philosophy than the philosophy used by
  conventional medicine, which is one bug, one drug. So if you have six
  bugs, you have six drugs.

  Now, besides Cumanda we have Banderol, which is a very powerful herbal
  antimicrobial from Peru also through Nutramedix, and Quina, which has
  been used in Peru for many centuries for treatment for malaria, but is
  also an excellent anti-Lyme treatment as well as a pretty good anti-
  fungal and anti-parasitic.

  I guess the most important thing we've learned since the pilot study
  is that if you don't continue to work on getting the physical toxins
  out of the body, the few remaining microbes that can survive the
  aggressive therapy with herbals or pharmaceuticals, or whatever is
  used, those surviving microbes will usually regrow and form a
  completely new population of Lyme-related microbes in the body because
  of the toxins stimulating their regrowth. So, it's so critically
  important, in my opinion, to work as hard on getting the toxins out of
  the body as on working on getting the microbes out of the body. The
  worst culprits usually are the heavy metals. The most common source
  for heavy metals that I see usually is mercury from the silver mercury
  amalgam fillings in people's teeth.

The simple act of chewing releases mercury back into the body, where it stimulates the growth of Borrelia and other microbes, and where, additionally, it "blocks the release of other toxins, including other metals, pesticides, solvents, herbicides and so on," says Dr. Cowden. He urges Lyme patients to have amalgam fillings removed "in a very cautious and methodical way. Then, once the mercury is removed from the teeth, the patient must gear up the detoxification for mercury, so that the mercury can be removed from the body over time."

Mercury is just one issue that predisposes patients to microbial growth and poisons their systems. Other metals such as aluminum, bauxite, and copper are also found in high levels in Lyme patients. Pesticides from household use and from conventionally produced meats, and petroleum by-products from skin care products and cosmetics represent further challenges. Dr Cowden continues: