Flower Essences for Lyme Disease and Co-Infections
An interview with David Dalton by Regina Weichert of Lyme Nation
It is 2009 when I first call David Dalton, founder of Delta Gardens in Hampton Falls, NH. After five years of Lyme misdiagnosis, I am in bad shape. My acupuncturist tells me about his flower essence remedies made from the teasel plant, saying that they are helping people recover when all else fails. I am skeptical, but with nothing to lose, decide to give his method a try.
After an initial intake with David, I meet with a practitioner whom he has trained. As I lie horizontal, she puts a few drops of essences under my tongue. A few seconds later it’s like someone unleashed a romping genie in my body! There’s a pretty strong pain in my head, which then roves all over. There’s no doubt — it works, and on a physical level. As I continue to go for treatments, I walk into a session with body pain and brain fog around 8 or 9 (with 10 being the worst), and I exit refreshed, feeling like the illness has released its grip, with a pain and fog level around 2.
I asked David about healing Lyme and plant-based energy medicine using flower essences. Here are his thoughts.
Lyme Nation: For people who may not be familiar, what are flower essences, and how do you make them?
David Dalton: Flower essences are liquid plant energy. They are made by placing flowers in a bowl of water and infusing that in the sun for three hours. Flower essences are not herbal extractions or oils, but rather a transference of the energy of the flower into the water. The original flower essences made by Dr. Bach in the 1920’s and 30’s were made from dewdrops on flower petals that had been in the morning sun. We consider it a miracle of nature that this phenomenon of transference of energy can occur.
LN: Are flower essences the same as homeopathy or different?
DD: Although flower essences may act in some ways like homeopathy, they are different. Homeopathic preparations are dilutions of physical substance. Flower essences are an energetic preparation in a physical form. They can be diluted homeopathically, but they are essentially different both in their origin and their action.
LN: How did you come to create the first Lyme kit?
DD: I started working with Lyme disease in the early 2000’s, when I contracted Lyme disease myself, and had difficulty understanding what it was and how to get relief. At the same time I was working with a flower essence made from the teasel plant. It is difficult to explain in words, but the teasel plant flowers in several rings around a central bristly comb. I had made preparations from all of these different rings, each of which seem to affect the symptoms of Lyme in a different way. As we began to work with people who had Lyme disease, we began to learn more about co-infections and other symptoms that seem to accompany this illness.
LN: Why are flower essences effective against Lyme and co-infections?
DD: Since flower essences are energy in nature, they affect the energy of the person taking them. Although there is no real way of conclusively explaining how they work, we can conjecture from the results that we see. My present conjecture is this: we know that healthy cells – even helpful bacteria – in the body have a cell velocity somewhere between 70 and 90 mV [mean velocity]. Destructive microbes like the Lyme spirochetes have a much lower cell velocity. When they get into the body, the immune system recognizes them as an invader because of their lower velocity, and begins to attack and destroy them. Lyme spirochetes are very intelligent and will migrate in the body to where places where the cell velocity is lowest. These are places of old injury, chronic symptoms or genetic weakness. The spirochetes will then colonize there and begin to destroy tissue to lower the frequency of the surrounding tissue. At a certain point, the immune system stops recognizing the spirochetes as invaders because there is little difference between the microbe and the surrounding tissues. This condition eventually spreads and the body becomes weak and unable to resist many other invaders, such as molds, fungi, viruses, and is unable to detox effectively. We believe that flower essences may raise the cell voltage of the healthy tissues, giving the immune system a signal that the invader is present. The increase in die-off after an application of the essences somewhat supports our conjecture.
LN: Some people with Lyme try many treatments (antibiotics, naturopathic medicine, other) to no avail. Why are essences effective for patients where other treatments have not worked?
DD: My sense is that each modality has some tools that work for some people in some circumstances. Flower essences provide an infusion of a specific kind of energy or life force into the energy field, which is then taken up in the cells. In this way, the body is supported to do what it is meant to do against illness. How much better and how soon depends on a number of factors: age; general health before Lyme; how many infections; how bad are the symptoms; presence of other health-challenging conditions, such as heavy metals, candida, molds, viral infections and the MTHFR gene. Clusters of these tend to make progress slow. Children tend to recover more quickly, as do adults with strong immune systems. Most of what we have discovered, working with Lyme for ten years, is how complex and elusive the illness is, and how many other factors influence recovery. I’m not even sure if Lyme can be gotten rid of completely. Getting rid of Lyme means strengthening the body’s ability to kill microbes. It also means getting rid of toxicity and creating a lifestyle and diet that are more self-nurturing.
LN: You are treating a lot of people with Lyme and co-infections. How do you understand what’s happening to people with Lyme today?
DD: This is a great question. Since most of the people I see have been through a lot of diagnostics and interventions by the time they get to us, they tend to be people who are very well educated about Lyme and also very frustrated and cynical about the lack of knowledge and understanding there is in the country about the illness. It looks like antibiotics have not succeeded in taking care of Lyme. They seem to work if taken right away after a bite, and are administered for 30 days. The long-term anti-biotic protocols seem to help some during the time they are administered, but symptoms often reappear after treatment stops. To some researchers and maybe to common sense, long-term antibiotics weaken the body, ruin the gut and make people drug dependent. Lyme patients are turning away from Western medicine and exploring their own combination of protocols, like diet change, herbs, naturopathy, homeopathy, Chinese medicine and other natural protocols that support the body to repel disease. I think the poor food choices and work-driven lifestyles in this country have made us susceptible to illness. I think the denial we see about how widespread and debilitating the disease is, comes from a refusal to look at facts, and the need to keep this Type A, money-driven culture alive and producing. The clearest way to put this is that Lyme is simply one symptom of our cultural insanity.
LN: In your opinion, are some people more prone to get Lyme than others, and if so, what are the implications for healing?
DD: Yes, I think history will bear me out on this. There are many people with Lyme, etc. in their bodies who are not symptomatic. Symptoms appear more readily in those who have weakened or compromised immune systems. Many people I see have several other conditions along with Lyme. It is not unusual to see acute food sensitivities, heavy metal toxicity, parasites, high stress, poor sleep patterns, chronic allergies, genetic weaknesses and chronic anxiety or depression in those with Lyme. We think that parents with active Lyme are passing the illness on in-utero to children, whose development is affected by the illness. We have forgotten some basic precepts about health and have gotten too dependent on pharmaceuticals to make things that are wrong better.
LN: You and your family had Lyme and co-infections. What was your experience with the disease and what did it teach you?
DD: I had a nasty case of Lyme about 12 years ago. I had some typical symptoms that would come and go: aches, pains, fatigue and a semi-nauseous feeling most of the time. The worst symptom was this strange paranoia, which would show up at night mostly. I didn’t feel safe anywhere. I wasn’t able to do much, because I didn’t know when this irrational fear would show up. From time to time I had some relief, but it would always come back. I tried a bunch of interventions before I thought it might be Lyme. I got a negative Lyme test, but the nurse practitioner I went to said it was indeterminate. My partner at the time also had symptoms. Her whole face on one side had lost muscle tone. Her Lyme test was negative also. Later she did the Western Blot test and got a full positive. This was when I had just created the teasel set and I began experimenting with it. Right away we got relief, using kinesiology to pick the essences each day, and gradually all the symptoms cleared up. Neither of us have these symptoms today.
See also:
Lyme Disease: A Survivor’s Lessons
Learning to Listen: Liberating Myself From Lyme
