One Tick. A Thousand Symptoms.

One of my favorite Substackers recently left a comment on one of my Substack articles that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. Not because I think it proves anything one way or another (they have their beliefs and I have mine…tomato…tomatoe), but because it perfectly illustrates how deeply one particular story has become embedded in our culture. The moment we find a tick, every symptom that follows suddenly gets funneled into one diagnosis, as though the mystery has already been solved before we’ve even begun asking questions.

She wrote:

“A while back now, 10 or more years, I started getting dizzy, then collapsing on the floor. The doc said I had Lyme disease, and I was not surprised. Not long before, I had found a tick in a certain place on my body.

The doc wanted to put me on some med or another, but I started using cat’s claw, an herb, and almost immediately the symptoms went away. I was on cat’s claw for two years, and when I stopped the symptoms did not return.”

If we’re honest, almost every one of us has been conditioned to think exactly the same way. Find a tick, develop symptoms weeks or even months later, and the conclusion seems obvious. Tick equals Lyme. End of story.

But is it?

I’ve started wondering whether that mental shortcut keeps us from exploring some far more interesting possibilities. What if the tick simply becomes the most memorable event in the timeline, causing us to overlook what may have already been happening inside the body? What if we’ve become so conditioned to associate one with the other that we rarely stop to ask whether the symptoms themselves point us somewhere entirely different? That’s what fascinated me about her story. It wasn’t the tick. It wasn’t even the diagnosis. It was the symptoms.

She described becoming dizzy and collapsing, and immediately my mind went somewhere completely different. Those are symptoms that can certainly appear under many different labels, but they are also symptoms commonly seen when the autonomic nervous system is struggling to regulate heart rate, blood pressure, circulation, and communication between the brain and the rest of the body. Reading her comment, I couldn’t help but wonder whether she had experienced a period of vagus nerve dysfunction or broader autonomic dysregulation. None of us can know that from a single comment, but the pattern immediately caught my attention because I’ve spent years reading about the vagus nerve and the astonishing number of symptoms that can emerge when it falls out of balance.

There is another piece of this puzzle that I find fascinating because it demonstrates just how powerful the vagus nerve really is. One of the most common causes of fainting is something called vasovagal syncope. It occurs when the vagus nerve becomes overstimulated, triggering a sudden drop in heart rate and blood pressure. As blood flow to the brain decreases, a person may suddenly become dizzy, nauseated, sweaty, develop tunnel vision, or lose consciousness altogether. These episodes can be triggered by emotional stress, pain, dehydration, standing too long, straining during a bowel movement, or sometimes seemingly out of nowhere. In more severe cases, the vagal response can be so profound that the heart actually pauses before resuming its normal rhythm.

I’ll never forget the first person I performed CPR on when I was only twenty years old. I had simply assisted the individual to the toilet when they experienced a severe vasovagal episode. Their heart actually stopped. One moment I was helping with what should have been a routine task, and the next I was performing CPR. It was one of those experiences that permanently changes the way you look at the human body because it teaches you that the vagus nerve isn’t some obscure anatomical structure tucked away in a textbook. It has enormous influence over heart rate, blood pressure, circulation, digestion, breathing, and consciousness itself. When it becomes dysregulated, the consequences can be dramatic.

That experience came flooding back as I read this commenter’s story. Dizziness. Collapsing. Feeling faint. Those aren’t symptoms that belong exclusively to one diagnosis. They’re symptoms that should make us curious about the body’s communication systems. The typical answer for symptoms like this is usually etiology unknown AKA who really knows why this is happening (but with a tick being found it allows for a good medical professional guess).

The vagus nerve is often introduced as the “rest and digest” nerve, but that description barely scratches the surface. It is one of the longest and most complex communication pathways in the body, connecting the brain with the heart, lungs, digestive tract, liver, pancreas, spleen, and countless other tissues. Roughly eighty percent of its fibers aren’t sending commands from the brain at all. They’re carrying information back to the brain every second of every day, constantly reporting on what’s happening throughout the body and helping regulate blood pressure, heart rhythm, breathing, digestion, inflammation, and countless unconscious processes that keep us alive.

When that communication network becomes disturbed, the symptoms can seem completely unrelated. Some people develop dizziness whenever they stand up. Others experience heart palpitations, digestive problems, nausea, overwhelming fatigue, anxiety, brain fog, or the unsettling feeling that they’re about to pass out. The body begins acting as though its internal communication network has become noisy and disorganized.

That brings me back to cat’s claw. Most people immediately assume cat’s claw helped because it somehow eliminated whatever the tick supposedly introduced into the body. But what if that isn’t the most interesting explanation?

Cat’s claw has been investigated for its effects on oxidative stress, intestinal barrier integrity, mitochondrial function, connective tissue health, and inflammatory signaling. Those are all systems that intersect with vagus nerve function. Healthy mitochondria provide energy for nerve cells. A healthier gut sends different sensory information to the brain through the vagus nerve. Reduced oxidative stress may create a calmer environment around nerves and connective tissue. Even fascia, the dense connective tissue surrounding every nerve, muscle, blood vessel, and organ, plays a role in how forces and fluids move throughout the body. The vagus nerve travels through this connective tissue highway from the brainstem into the chest and abdomen, so it isn’t difficult to imagine how changes in the surrounding environment could influence the signals traveling through it. Then there is the body’s electrical landscape. Every nerve impulse is electrical. Every heartbeat is electrical. Every muscle contraction is electrical.

Every cell maintains a voltage across its membrane, and every movement of sodium, potassium, and calcium depends upon carefully maintained electrical gradients. Even the water surrounding our cells behaves differently depending on the electrical characteristics of nearby proteins and connective tissue. Some researchers have explored how these charge relationships influence cellular communication, tissue behavior, and overall physiology. Cat’s claw hasn’t been shown to directly change biological zeta potential (major gap in research perhaps), but if it reduces oxidative stress within connective tissue and improves the environment surrounding cells, it raises an intriguing question. Perhaps its greatest benefit isn’t attacking something from the outside. Perhaps it is supporting the conditions that allow the body’s own communication networks to function more effectively.

Instead of asking whether cat’s claw killed whatever the tick supposedly brought into the body, perhaps we should be asking whether it supported the vagus nerve, improved gut brain communication, reduced oxidative stress, enhanced mitochondrial function, and helped restore a healthier bioelectric environment. Those are very different questions. Maybe the tick was part of the story. Maybe it wasn’t. Meh?

What I find far more interesting is how quickly we stop asking questions once a familiar narrative appears. Tick? It must be Lyme. Feeling faint? It must be Lyme. Brain fog? It must be Lyme. Joint pain? It must be Lyme. The label arrives so quickly that we often forget the body is capable of producing the very same collection of symptoms through multiple pathways. Perhaps the more interesting question isn’t, “What did the tick do?” Perhaps it’s, “What was happening within the body’s communication systems all along?” Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs don’t come from finding a new answer. They come from having the courage to ask a better question outside of the accepted mainstream narratives.