antibiotics only kill germs in the blood? please help explain

This is my understanding. Lyme takes three forms, the spirochette which is like a spiraling corkscrew worm, the form that drops it's cell wall moving into your cells, and the cyst which is in a dormant protective shell. It is my understanding the lyme prefers your tissues to blood especially your collagen, the brain and the spinal cord. There is a lot of collagen in your joints and eyes. In an experiment on mice, they were treated until they tested negative (after being infected) and then killed and analyzed. The bacteria were found in their collagen. Spirochettes have also been found in brain tissue of animals and humans. In fact, to develop the most viralent strains of Bb, scientists fed the brains of dead infected mice to baby mice.
Certain antibiotics kill when the bacteria are reproducing, called bacterialstatic (maybe not exact word) while others kill it outright, called bacteriacidal (again not exact work I don't think). When you take certain bacterialstatic abx in high doses they become bactericidal. Doxy is one of them. Also certain drugs are better at crossing the blood brain barrier and penetrating tissue better than others. When you attack lyme, you need to address going after all three forms which is why you are given a combination of drugs. I don't know how much of lyme is actually living in your blood rather than just using the blood for transport to other areas of the body. With babesia and bartonella you are more likely to see the bacteria in the blood but it is very hard to find Bb bacteria in blood.
I welcome corrections as this is my lyme brain memory recalling what I have read.

Dowa,

Lack of lyme in the blood would result in a negative blood PCR test. Antibodies can be created against any infectious organism, regardless of where in the body it lives. Lyme is very skilled at evading and suppressing the immune system, such that the body has a hard time developing antibodies. Also, once the body does manage to create antibodies to the Lyme, the bacteria changes the proteins on its outer surface and then the antibodies that were created won't recognize it anymore...this causes the body to constantly need to create new antibodies to the Lyme. But cell-wall deficient and cyst forms of Lyme are immune to antibodies attaching to them (at least, that's my understanding...). Also, it is known that Lyme live in biofilm communities, and biofilms are known to be resistant to the body's attempts at generating antibodies and attacking the bacteria. So when a suppressed immune system, which has an impaired ability to even create antibodies in the first place, is combined with such an elusive and tricky bacteria, the number of antibodies created is likely pretty small. Also, there is another theory that says the antibodies are bound up already (called immune complexes, which is a combination of an antibody and an antigen such as Lyme bacteria or a fragment of Lyme bacteria), leaving very few available free antibodies to attach to the test medium in the lab, thus making the results artificially lower than reality. PCR tests are supposed to get around this, but if the critters are only present in small numbers in the blood stream, then the PCR test is inaccurate too. And something that can make immune complexes circulate in the blood stream without there being very much Lyme itself in the blood is when the bacteria are killed, the body has to get rid of them somehow, and the main way this happens is through the blood stream to the liver (for excretion via bile into the bowel) and kidneys (for excretion via urinary tract).

I hope this helps...take care,

Great information, thank you Razzle! D

There are several different classes of antibiotics. Some only work in the bloodstream, but there are others that are able to penetrate the blood-brain barrier, and there are some that are able to get out into the tissues. Also, there are medications that appear to be more effective against cyst forms of Lyme, and these medications may not be officially in the category of antibiotics....For example, Flagyl is an anti-parasitic medication that does have some anti-bacterial activity, and Diflucan is an anti-fungal medication that some seem to find helpful for more than just fungal infections. And finally, some antibiotics are better for breaking up biofilm community-based bacterial infections.

I hope this helps...take care,