A few years ago Laura Indigo presented a program at the Chilmark library about her work as a Functional Nutritional Therapist. Though not able to attend, it piqued my interest and I reached out. I have been working with Laura ever since. Recently I learned she’d received training specific for Functional Nutrition Practitioners from one of the leading doctors working with Lyme disease. Here’s what I learned.
Laura Indigo grew up in Chilmark and attended Island schools through 10th grade before heading off-Island to boarding school. As an eighth grader around 1984, she did a 10-day summer hiking trip in New Hampshire and came home “with a mystery illness.” Her mother was shocked when she returned pale, having gained weight, and had “a lot of mystery symptoms including fatigue, neurological and cognitive issues, some anemia, and got exhausted easily.” “All the tests came back normal, with some signs something was off, but at the time they didn’t know to do any tick-borne testing. There was no tick testing.” Laura explains. Then she saw a lot of doctors both on and off-Island. One said, “We don’t know what is going on, but how about changing your diet?” Laura shifted her diet to an anti-inflammatory diet which led to significant improvement of her symptoms.
“A couple of years later, I had a giant bullseye rash from a tick bite in Lyme, Connecticut. I got a 10-day course of antibiotics and was still symptomatic afterwards,” Laura said. At that time while attending college in Ohio, she went to a local doctor who told her because she had finished the 10 days of meds she couldn’t have Lyme but must have another problem. She continued with her anti-inflammatory diet, which was “working well.”
Let’s jump ahead to when Laura was pregnant; she says, “I had my first ultrasound, they were looking for the baby . . . but couldn’t see clearly because of scar tissue. They could hear the heartbeat but could not see the baby.” The department head at MGH said the baby was okay, but asked, “Why do you have all this scar tissue?” Laura had no idea. She never had surgery or procedures that would create scar tissue. She replied, “That’s where my tick bite [and] bullseye rash was.” Maybe it was all from Lyme. A couple of years later Laura thought she should get checked to see “if [she] still had some Lyme thing going on.” She went to a specialist who sent her to Spaulding for Post-Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome (PTLDS) rehab. Laura says, “I filled out their questionnaire, submitted it” and they thought she had “active Lyme and should find a specialist.” Back to square one, but without a specialist, her primary care physician said, “You’re doing such a good job with all this holistic stuff why don’t you just keep going.”
“I ended up on a year of antibiotics to deal with whatever Lyme stuff it [was],” Laura says. That’s when she decided to get trained and searched for programs.
Laura decided to train in Functional Nutrition (FN) “because it could start to answer some questions about how your body is functioning. What I like about FN is that we do tests that don’t look for disease but look for optimal function. So [if] your detoxification system is really sluggish, maybe because of your history with Lyme, let’s make that work better. What are the things we can do to support that system?”
“What I learned is how to go through the body in a systematic way looking for hidden stressors to support [the] body in a way so it can function with whatever’s happening,” Laura says. She was trained in three different FN certification programs. One offered training in how to support people with Lyme in all the different stages. Prior, Laura’s work focused on helping calm the nervous system through music, teaching meditation, and through massage therapy. These tools helped her to stay calm through years of searching for answers, other than an anti-inflammatory diet. “We know an anti-inflammatory lifestyle prevents lots of other illnesses,” she says.
In February 2024, Laura studied with Dr. Tom Moorcroft, a longtime member of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS). “Lyme can trigger your sympathetic nervous system because it’s a disturbance to the microbiome,” Laura says. “Waking up during the night, not being able to sleep, can also be triggered by Lyme.”
Sharing skills Laura gained in her own Lyme journey and her deep FN training, she can now put into practice “with a really integrated lens, both as a client, as a practitioner, and as a person [who’s] been trained in all these different stress reduction modalities, and [can] bring all that into a really holistic clinical setting.”
Laura has clients with Lyme. “I cannot diagnose or treat, but I can assess and support,” she explains. “Previous to this training I found hidden stressors (in the hormone, immune, detoxification, digestive, energy and nervous systems as well as oxidative stress).” The latest training is more about “how do we support people who are in a protocol with a doctor, maybe they have antibiotics. How effective might that be? And what other supports might they need at the same time to make it more effective overall.”
Many doctors prescribe antibiotics for 10, 14, or 21 days, but do not look at the rest of the body. Laura can look at how the body is being affected by meds and by systemic imbalances, and help people manage what they can expect in the future. Many people have delayed diagnoses of Lyme, and may not have an intensive treatment. She cited three studies to explain that 75-80 percent of people getting standard of care antibiotics get better, but that also means that 20-25 percent have symptoms after six months.
She mentions the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where Dr. Zhang studied the efficacy of herbs that support long term Lyme. “These herbs can get you from a stuck place to moving forward,” Laura says. “My work is about integrating some of this new data into making more effective protocols, to make the process faster, rather than waiting years and guessing. In many cases chronic Lyme and autoimmune conditions are fairly similar, and there can be an auto-immune component to Lyme as well.” If Laura “can help address issues earlier then auto-immune components don’t blossom in the same way.”
Laura explains, “The CDC reports there are 476,000 new cases of Lyme annually, and that’s probably under-reported. Allison DeLong had projected by 2020 there would be two million people with PTLDS. There are lots of people out there who don’t know what to do next. And, doctors may not be aware of practitioners like Laura to refer their patients to.
Lyme unaddressed in the nervous system can become a part of an Alzheimer’s picture, depending where it lodges. “Spirochetes really like nerve tissue, they like brain tissue, the gut brain barrier can be disturbed. There’s a lot that can happen as a result of having this widespread body inflammation. It’s really exciting that we have ways to mitigate it,” including so much data from [blood work, urine, and saliva] test kits,” and though not diagnostic, it is really helpful information in knowing how to move forward.
Laura can look at what nutritional supports would help, or what pathways might not be working so well, what it means and how we can work with it. Lyme’s toxins can clog up one’s detoxification system, learning how to improve it makes one feel better. She can help address “more of the causal relationships.”
“My job is really to support how the body can work better, to support protocols you may already be on, how we can initiate some new protocols that might be supportive and helpful while looking at all the different interconnections. It’s really like being a health detective,” Laura says. So many people suffering from long-term Lyme accept the ongoing loss of function, and one really has to want to get that back. Laura learned in this last training how to look for “the more subtle signs of inflammation in the system and long term microbial overload.”
To sum up Laura says, “this kind of work is for people who are actively engaged in their health.” There is an empirically validated free questionnaire created by Lyme expert Dr. Horowitz on Laura’s website that can help you determine if you have symptoms that may be associated with Lyme. Laura can work with clients as part of their team, if you’re actively working with a doctor for Lyme or not. She can support health at any stage, before or after antibiotic treatment with a doctor. After antibiotics, it helps to clean up the gut and look at the whole picture, including tendencies toward autoimmunity. Laura offers free Discovery Calls and wants people to know there is a holistic integrative path available if you’d like a team approach.
Learn more at lauraindigo.com. Free Validated Lyme Questionnaire at lauraindigo.com/lymequiz.
