Lyme Disease and Holistic Healing: One Practitioner's Path

By Clinton Greenlee · Founder, IESA Healing Arts

This piece is harder to write than the others. It's the story of how I got sick, what every system I trusted failed to fix, what eventually did work, and what I tell people now when they show up at the studio describing symptoms they can't get a doctor to take seriously.

Two things upfront, in clear language so we don't have to hedge later:

This is my personal experience, not medical advice. Lyme disease is a serious, complex, and underdiagnosed condition. If you suspect you have it, get tested. If you have it, work with qualified medical professionals. The protocols I'll describe were the part of my recovery I controlled — alongside, not instead of, the medical care I received.

I'm not anti-medicine. Several of the doctors and nurse practitioners I worked with kept me alive during the worst stretches. The frustration I'll describe is with a particular set of structural limitations in how chronic, multi-system conditions get treated. Those limitations are getting better but they're still real.

With that on the table, here's what happened.

How It Started

I was performing professionally in New York City — a working musician, several gigs a week, the kind of urban hustle that masks early symptoms because everyone is tired all the time.

The first signs were easy to dismiss: persistent fatigue that didn't improve with sleep, joint pain that moved between knees and shoulders, a brain fog that made me lose my place mid-sentence on stage. For a while I attributed it to the lifestyle — late nights, irregular eating, the toll of constant performance. I was in my twenties. I expected to bounce back.

I didn't bounce back.

Over about eighteen months, the symptoms compounded. Sleep stopped feeling restorative. The joint pain settled in. I developed sensitivities to foods I'd eaten my whole life. My capacity for sustained focus collapsed. Most disturbingly for a musician, the timing in my playing began to drift — small but unmistakable, the kind of thing only another musician would catch but a thing that meant my instrument was no longer fully obeying me.

The Conventional Path

I went to doctors. Multiple doctors. The first round of testing came back largely normal — slightly elevated inflammation markers, low vitamin D, the kind of unremarkable mosaic that gets you told you're under stress. Take some vitamin D. Try to sleep more. Maybe see a therapist.

I tried all of that. The symptoms continued.

Eventually, a specialist ran the right tests. The Western blot came back positive for Lyme. By then I'd had the condition long enough that the standard initial protocol of two to four weeks of doxycycline was not, in my case, sufficient. We did the antibiotic course. It helped, somewhat. The acute crisis passed. But the chronic, low-grade aftermath of post-treatment Lyme — what the medical literature now sometimes calls "post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome" — settled in for the long haul.

I don't want to oversimplify the medical experience. Some practitioners I saw were excellent. The system as a whole struggles with conditions that present as a constellation of symptoms across multiple body systems without a clean diagnostic test or treatment protocol. That's a structural problem, not a moral failure of the doctors I saw.

The Turning Point

The turning point came obliquely. I'd relocated to Miami — partly chasing warmer climate that I now understood my body needed, partly chasing community. Through a friend in the music world, I was introduced to a holistic practitioner who had trained directly under one of Dr. Sebi's protégés.

I want to be careful about how I describe what followed, because I don't want to feed anyone's expectations of a miraculous turnaround. There wasn't one. What there was, instead, was a different framework for understanding what my body was doing — and a different set of tools for supporting it.

The framework: chronic infection, mineral depletion, and systemic inflammation are connected problems, not separate ones. Addressing one without the others is what creates the cycle of partial relief and recurrence. The body has the capacity to heal itself, but only when given the materials and the conditions.

The tools: deep nutritional restoration with whole-food herbal protocols, mineral repletion (this was my introduction to the substances that would later become central to my own practice — Shilajit, Ormus, Oil of Ormus), specific breathing and movement practices, and a strict elimination of inflammatory inputs.

What I Actually Changed

I want to be specific, because vague claims like "I started a holistic protocol" don't help anyone trying to evaluate this story. Here's what I changed, in order of impact as I remember it:

Mineral repletion. Daily Shilajit (Altai Mountain sourced, lab-tested) for nine months continuous. Daily monoatomic gold (Ormus) in small doses. The mineral picture, when I had it re-tested six months in, looked dramatically different from where it started.

Anti-inflammatory eating. Plant-based, alkaline-leaning diet aligned with Dr. Sebi's nutritional principles. Eliminated gluten, dairy, refined sugar, alcohol, processed seed oils. Re-introduced foods one at a time after extended elimination to identify what my system tolerated.

Sleep restoration. Strict circadian rhythm. In bed by 10pm, up by 6am, regardless of weekend or weekday. Morning sunlight on the eyes within 30 minutes of waking. No screens after 9pm.

Breath and movement. This is where my Alexander Technique training under Ann Rodiger became foundational. Daily breathwork. Gentle, sustained movement (walking, swimming, no high-intensity exercise during recovery). Open-focus meditation work.

Frequency exposure. 528 Hz playing in the background of the studio space, in the bedroom, during meditation. I wrote about this in more depth in our piece on the Solfeggio frequencies. I won't claim the frequencies were the cure. I will claim that working in a 528 Hz environment changed the quality of my attention and rest.

Community and contemplative practice. Isolation makes chronic illness worse. Weekly time with people who understood what I was going through, regular contact with my teacher, daily journaling.

Where I Am Now

Recovered, but defined differently than I would have defined that word before all of this.

I no longer have the symptoms that defined my late twenties and early thirties. My sleep is restorative. My focus has returned, often clearer than before the illness. The timing in my playing is back. I work eight or nine hours a day on this practice without depleting myself.

But "recovered" isn't "back to normal." I'm more attentive than I used to be to what I eat, how I sleep, what I'm exposed to, what kinds of stress I take on. I take Shilajit daily. I take Ormus daily. I move every day. I don't drink alcohol. I get full bloodwork twice a year. The discipline that emerged from getting sick is the discipline I live in now.

If that sounds like a constraint, it isn't. It's a structure that makes the rest of my life possible.

What I Tell Clients Who Show Up With Similar Stories

This happens at the studio more often than I expected when I started this work. Someone shows up with a vague constellation of symptoms — fatigue, brain fog, joint pain, food sensitivities, mood instability — that no one has been able to fully explain or address. They've been to multiple doctors. They've been told it's stress, anxiety, depression, "in their head." They're frustrated and scared.

Here's what I say to them:

First: get the right tests. Insist on full thyroid panels, full mineral panels, inflammatory markers, autoimmune screening, and yes, the Western blot for Lyme if there's any history of tick exposure. Find a practitioner who will run them — a functional medicine physician, a naturopath licensed in your state, or a chronic-illness specialist. Don't accept "everything looks fine" without seeing the actual numbers.

Second: don't go it alone. Whatever protocol you ultimately follow, you need a practitioner who can monitor progress, adjust as needed, and catch warning signs. I can do this in our 40-Day Healing Protocol for some clients. For others, what they need is medical care I can't provide, and my job is to refer them to someone who can.

Third: support the foundations. Sleep, nutrition, movement, breath, sunlight, community. These aren't supplements to medicine. They're medicine. The mineral and herbal work I do builds on these — it doesn't substitute for them.

Fourth: the timeline is longer than you want it to be. I've never met someone with multi-year chronic illness who got out in three weeks. The honest framing is months to years of consistent practice. The good news is that the practice itself becomes a way of being that's worth having regardless of the original reason you started.

Frequently Asked Questions

I wrote this piece because the version of me at 28 — sick, scared, frustrated, told the same things by too many people who couldn't help — would have wanted to read it. If you're in some version of that place now, please know two things: it can get better, and you don't have to figure it out alone.

If working together would be useful, book a free 15-minute consultation and we can talk through whether the 40-Day Healing Protocol would be a fit. And if it wouldn't, I'll tell you that too — and try to point you toward someone who can help.

— Clinton

About the Author

Clinton Greenlee

Founder · IESA Healing Arts & Sound Works

Educator, herbalist, and lifelong musician based in Miami Beach. Trained in the Alexander Technique under Ann Rodiger, in sound healing under Dr. Glenn Smith, and in holistic herbalism under a Dr. Sebi protégé. Recovered from chronic Lyme disease through ancestral protocols — now teaches the methods that brought him back.

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