Herbs for Lyme Disease

10 Evidence-Based Options Backed by Johns Hopkins Research

Dr. Kyle Warren
Meghan Feir Walker

If you are sick with chronic Lyme and searching for answers, you have probably hit the same wall many of our patients hit before they found us. Maybe you tried antibiotics already, and the course ended without you getting well, or you got a little better, relapsed, and got handed a longer, heavier round. Maybe no one has ever given you a real Lyme workup, and you have been told it is stress, anxiety, or all in your head. Or maybe you are staring down a long antibiotic course right now and wondering if that is the only way through. 

Somewhere along the way, you start asking the same question so many other Lyme patients ask me:  “Do I have to use antibiotics to get my life back, or is there another way?”

I’m going to give you a straight answer, backed with research, not just opinion. 

You do not have to rely on long-term antibiotics to recover from chronic Lyme

In other words, two things can be true at once. Antibiotics are excellent medicine when Lyme is caught early. If you are still within the first three months of a bite and you get the standard two- to four-week course, that often takes care of the problem before it enters a chronic state. The problem is not acute Lyme. The problem is what happens when that window is missed, or the course runs, and the infection does not clear. 

When acute Lyme isn’t taken care of promptly, the bacteria change forms and evolve into what we call chronic Lyme, also called post-treatment Lyme disease.  It starts behaving differently after the initial stage has passed. 

From where I sit, doing long, heavy antibiotic rounds for chronic Lyme does not work faster than a natural approach, and it tends to come with a lot more gut, liver, and kidney trouble along the way. Heavy antibiotic use for long periods of time can leave people worn down and stuck in a relapse loop. Our whole approach is built to do the opposite.

The patients who come to our clinic, after having already failed antibiotics, are the fastest-growing group we serve. They did the rounds, lost ground, and came looking for a different way once the loop wore them down. Many of them assumed they were out of options. They were not.

Why antibiotics struggle to finish chronic Lyme

Here is the piece almost nobody explains, and it is the key to the whole thing.

The Lyme bacteria, Borrelia burgdorferi, do not exist in just one form. There is the active, growing, corkscrew-shaped form, the spirochete, and there are dormant forms that the bacteria shift into under stress, including round bodies and clumped, sticky biofilm-like colonies. Researchers call these dormant survivors "persisters." Standard antibiotics like doxycycline and cefuroxime are very good at killing the growing form, but they don’t do well at killing the dormant persister forms. The Johns Hopkins team has shown this repeatedly in their studies.

That difference is the leading explanation for why about 10-20% of Lyme patients stay sick after the standard antibiotic course. The drugs clear the active bacteria that a person can feel improving against, and then leave behind the dormant forms that quietly wait, reactivate, and bring the symptoms back. The biofilm colonies make this worse because the bacteria physically shield themselves inside a sticky, aggregated structure that the antibiotics have a hard time penetrating. That is the relapse loop, and chasing it with more of the same drug is part of why so many people feel like they are running in place.

There is one more idea worth holding onto, and it is not controversial in medicine. Antibiotics never kill 100% of an infection. They are not designed to. Whether you take them for strep, a gut bug, or Lyme, the goal is to knock the population down far enough that your own immune system can finish the job. There is always a handoff. With chronic Lyme, when the immune system is already depleted, and the bacteria are hiding in their dormant forms, that handoff often does not happen. We dive deeper into this idea here.

The answer for taking care of Lyme isn’t as simple as "antibiotics or nothing." It’s about what reaches the dormant forms that the antibiotics miss.

There is a step that comes before any of that, and it’s where many people get stuck. Standard Lyme tests miss many chronic cases. If you have been told your bloodwork looked normal and there was nothing there, that may say more about the test than about you. A thorough Lyme and co-infection panel is often the first real answer a person ever gets, and you cannot build a recovery plan based on a diagnosis you were never given.

What Johns Hopkins found when they tested the herbs

Across three studies, the Johns Hopkins team grew Borrelia burgdorferi into its hard-to-kill stationary phase, the dormant persister state, and tested natural agents against it in the petri dish, with doxycycline and cefuroxime as the comparison. They were asking a simple question: Against the form of Lyme that survives antibiotics, can these herbs do better?

For a long list of agents, the answer was yes. Several of the herbs matched or outperformed both doxycycline and cefuroxime against the dormant bacteria. A handful did something the two antibiotics could not do at all in these experiments: they sterilized the culture, meaning that when the researchers washed the herb away and gave the bacteria three weeks to regrow, nothing came back. The doxycycline and cefuroxime samples regrew.

I want to be honest about what this is and is not, because honesty is the whole point of how we work. These are laboratory studies, done in a dish, not in the human body. The researchers themselves say the next step is studying these herbs in living systems, and they are right. Lab results are not proof that an herb will resolve your infection. These results are strong, independent confirmation of something I have watched happen in real patients for over a decade, and a good reason to take using herbs for Lyme disease seriously instead of dismissing them as the soft option.

Here are the top 10 herbs, drawn from three separate Johns Hopkins studies published in 2017, 2018, and 2020. This is not one cherry-picked paper. These results are from three studies, grouped by the study each herb came from.

Five of them did something the antibiotics could not. Oregano, clove, cinnamon, garlic, and cryptolepis completely wiped out the Lyme bacteria with no regrowth in the dish. The other five still matched or beat doxycycline and cefuroxime against the dormant form, which is no small feat.

From the 2017 essential oil study

The 2017 Johns Hopkins study screened 34 essential oils from common spices and culinary herbs.

1. Oregano (Origanum vulgare). One of the three standouts, oregano, completely eradicated the dormant Lyme bacteria with no regrowth in subculture, and it did something the antibiotics did not: it dissolved the clumped biofilm-like colonies the bacteria hide in. Its active component, carvacrol, carried most of that activity.
2. Clove (Syzygium aromaticum). Clove bud oil reached the same top tier as oregano, fully clearing the stationary-phase culture.
3. Cinnamon (Cinnamomum, cinnamon bark). Cinnamon bark oil was the third of the three top hits. A later study traced much of its power to cinnamaldehyde, the compound that gives cinnamon its smell.

From the 2018 essential oil study

The 2018 Johns Hopkins study screened another 35 oils and surfaced a clear winner.

4. Garlic (Allium sativum). Garlic essential oil was the most potent agent in that screen. It completely killed the dormant Lyme bacteria with no regrowth, even at a very low 0.05% concentration, a level where most of the other oils could not finish the job. Garlic has been used as an antimicrobial for thousands of years, and this study put a hard number on what it does to the form of Lyme that survives antibiotics.

From the 2020 botanical study

The 2020 Johns Hopkins study tested the herbal tinctures most familiar to Lyme practitioners. Seven came through with strong activity. These six are the ones we lean on most.

5. Cat's claw (Uncaria tomentosa). Outperformed both doxycycline and cefuroxime against the dormant bacteria in the dish. It also has a long, well-documented safety record in human studies for other conditions.
6. Japanese knotweed (Polygonum cuspidatum). A source of resveratrol, and one of the two most active herbs in the 2020 study, Japanese knotweed showed strong activity against both the growing and the dormant forms of the bacteria.
7. Chinese skullcap (Scutellaria baicalensis). This beat the antibiotic controls against the persister form. Its constituent baicalein has separately shown activity against several morphological forms of Lyme bacteria.
8. Sweet Annie (sweet wormwood, Artemisia annua). This is the plant that gave us the Nobel-winning antimalarial artemisinin. In the Johns Hopkins testing, it outperformed both doxycycline and cefuroxime against the dormant bacteria.
9. Black walnut (Juglans nigra). This showed strong activity against the stationary-phase bacteria, nearly clearing the culture at low concentrations. It’s long been used in this space and now has lab data to back it up.
10. Cryptolepis (Cryptolepis sanguinolenta). Cryptolepis was the single most impressive result in the 2020 study. It was the only agent tested that completely eradicated the Lyme bacteria with no regrowth after a 21-day subculture, and it was strong against both the growing and dormant forms. Doxycycline and cefuroxime could not match it. It is an African plant traditionally used for malaria, which is part of why it also tends to help with the Babesia co-infection, which is a parasitic infection and a cousin of malaria

Herbs can reach Lyme and its co-infections at the same time

Most chronic Lyme patients are not fighting Lyme alone. Co-infections like Babesia and Bartonella usually ride in on the same tick, and they are a big reason people stay sick after treating Lyme. One of the quieter findings in the 2020 study speaks directly to this. Several of the most active herbs, including cryptolepis, black walnut, and sweet wormwood, were already being used by Lyme practitioners against Babesia, a malaria-like co-infection. The study found them strongly active against the Lyme bacteria, too. 

A single, well-chosen herb can work on more than one front. There is a structural reason for that, and it is worth understanding. A whole-plant extract is not one compound; it is many, working through several mechanisms at the same time. That makes it harder for the bacteria to adapt, which lowers the risk of resistance, and it is part of why combining botanicals tends to increase the effect rather than cancel it out. The research also notes what we see in the clinic every week: These herbs generally carry a gentler safety profile than long, high-dose antibiotic courses. That is no small thing when someone has already spent years recovering from what the antibiotics did to their gut, liver, and kidneys.

Not every popular herb held up, and that matters

The same 2020 study tested several agents that get marketed hard for Lyme and found they did little or nothing against the bacteria in the dish, including stevia, colloidal silver, monolaurin, grapefruit seed extract, and andrographis. I point this out for a reason. The Lyme world is full of programs that hand you a long stack of supplements and hope volume does the work. That is not how we practice. Knowing which herbs for Lyme disease reach the infection and which ones are ineffective is vitally important in helping people get better. Also, testing for various species of Lyme and the co-infections is imperative for building the right protocol and knowing which herbs will work the best for your situation.

Killing the infection is only half the job

I have to widen the lens because the studies above only measure whether an herb kills the bacteria. While killing the bacteria is essential, it’s not the same as recovery.

I explain it to patients like this. If you have a knife in your leg, you have to pull the knife out. But you still have a hole in your leg. Killing the infection is pulling the knife. If that is all you do, you are not done, and the recovery will not hold. This is why people buy a generalized herb kit online, follow it for months, and end up frustrated and still sick. The herbs may be reaching the bacteria, but nothing is rebuilding the body after the infection wears down, and nothing is checking whether the protocol is working.

Our whole method runs on these phases. 

1. Get accurate testing done before building a protocol, so we know what infections need to be addressed.
2. We kill the specific infections your testing reveals, using customized herbal protocols that we rotate over time so the bacteria cannot adapt. 
3. We have you take a micronutrient test to see what your body is missing or needs more of, and we support the body with supplementation. This helps the immune system join the fight.  
4. Retesting throughout the protocol helps us know how we’re doing.

We then rebuild the body so it can get strong again. These infections can wear a body down, and strengthening it prevents you from relapsing. 

Regarding retesting: Recovery is something we measure instead of something we hope for. We retest at intervals, usually somewhere around seven to eight months, then again near fourteen months, and we only reorder the panels that have not yet cleared. That means the testing costs go down as you improve,  and we always know where you stand instead of guessing. That sequence is a big part of why we see a 1% recurrence rate, compared to the 50% we saw back when we relied on using antibiotics.

This is not just lab science to us

Holly came to us from Ohio after a PICC line and a long round of antibiotics, and the infection came right back. In her words, "A few days of doxycycline is not going to do it. I had a PICC line in for six weeks, and it came back." She did not arrive sold on the natural route, but she is now. "I did not come into this being a believer. I'll say it. But it absolutely works." Holly is exactly the person this research is for, someone the antibiotics left behind who found another way to heal.

What this means for you

If you have been afraid that going natural means going soft, the research should put that to rest. Through these studies conducted by one of the most respected research institutions in the country, along with real-life cases to back those up even further, we know that specific herbs for Lyme disease have now matched or beaten the standard antibiotics against the exact form of the bacteria those antibiotics leave behind. That is not a fringe claim anymore.

It is also not a magic bullet, and I would be doing you a disservice to pretend otherwise. These are lab findings. Recovery in a real body takes time, and most chronic cases take 12 to 18 months on an effective protocol like ours to overcome these infections. That is the honest average, not the fastest case we could put in front of you. Some people move quicker, a few take longer, and the right starting point is discovering exactly what you are dealing with.

If that is where you are, the next step is to schedule your free 15-minute discovery call with John, who runs our intake. He will hear your story, look at what you have already been through, and tell you straight whether chronic Lyme is likely what you are dealing with and whether this program is the right fit. If it is not, he will point you toward something that is. There is no cost and no pressure. You have spent enough time and money on answers that went nowhere, and this is a chance to start with real data and a path that has worked for people who were right where you are.

To learn more about Lyme disease, co-infections, and other drivers of chronic inflammation and immune responses, check out our Lyme page and blog. 

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Sources

Studies referenced: Feng et al., Frontiers in Medicine (2017). Feng et al., Antibiotics (2018). Feng et al., Frontiers in Medicine (2020). Restorative Health Solutions runs a structured chronic Lyme recovery program. We do not use the words cure or treat, and we make no guarantees. Outcomes vary by person, duration of illness, and the complexity of co-infections.