November 2016 – lymetipsdotcom

LDI: Does The Weather Affect Your Dose?

As if Low Dose Immunotherapy isn’t complicated enough, I’m going to toss in another variable.

I’ve been doing LDI for nearly 15 months, and there’s one factor that affects how a given dose will work for me that I’ve never heard anyone mention.

I doubt this applies to everybody, but I also doubt that it only applies to me.

The factor I’m referring to is the weather. More specifically, the season I take the dose. And, to be more precise, how humid it is when I’m taking the dose in that season.

I’ve had chronic Lyme for a long time now, and it’s become clear that high levels of humidity push my immune system to react more strongly than usual.

This can be a good thing and a bad thing. It reduces my chances of getting a cold, but it also sometimes pushes my immune system out of balance. Combined with the Lyme bacteria doing its best to screw up my immune system, it can cause problems with overreactions. In this scenario, I’m more reactive to a lot of things.

So, how does this relate to LDI? Well, during an extremely humid period, I am more likely to react to a weaker dose and have a flare of symptoms.

The difference in my reactivity to LDI in a humid period as compared to a dry period seems to equal about a 1C difference in the dose.

In other words, let’s say I’m asked to take an 18C dose in late November when the relative humidity in my part of the world is high. I’m likely to react to it and have a flare of symptoms. In early June when humidity is low I probably wouldn’t react to it at all or I might react to it to a lesser degree. So an 18C dose in November is roughly the same to me as a 17C dose in June, although the 18C dose is actually weaker.

Some people may not think of November as a humid month, but in Central Canada where I live, it is. As in many parts of North America, people don’t feel the humidity much this time of year here because it’s cold outside. But since the sun shines only about nine hours a day and has very little heat in it, there’s not much to drive down the relative humidity.

Because weather affects me, I follow Internet weather sites closely. In late November, humidity is often at 100 percent overnight and usually between 70 and 80 percent during the day.

Compare that to June, when the sun is hot and sticks around for about 16 hours a day. Then, humidity averages around 70 percent overnight and 40 percent during the day.

Making all this even trickier is the fact you can have humid spells during dry periods and dry periods during humid spells.With this in mind, in my case, it’s a good idea to talk to my doctor near the time of my dose and tell her how the humidity during that period is likely to have a slight affect on what dose will work best for me.

So I hope I’m not making LDI even harder to get a handle on. All I’m saying is that there is a subset of patients (at least one, anyway), and probably more, that will be more likely to react to a given dose if the weather is very humid.

I suspect this might apply mostly to patients who are extremely sensitive by nature or who have had Lyme for a long time, and, as a result, have had their nervous systems made highly sensitive. I believe I contracted Lyme in childhood but didn’t see it manifest until I was under a lot of stress in my early 30s.

LDI is still in its early stages of development and I don’t think anyone has fully figured it out yet. As the guinea pigs, we LDI patients are the ones who have to tell practitioners how we are affected by it. With this in mind, I hope that taking humidity into consideration in some cases might be added to the myriad of factors that go into the greater understanding of LDI dosing.

The Best Thing About Lyme

I’m not one of those people who say they’re glad they’ve had Lyme. No matter how many life lessons it teaches me, I’ll always wish this miserable disease had never become part of my life.

Lyme has stolen an unbelievable number of things from me, mostly the most important things. If I could sue Borrelia, I’d ask for millions upon millions of dollars in damages.

But the truth is that having Lyme can make a person better. And I’d say the best thing about Lyme is that it gives you tremendous incentive to be the best you can be.

It’s like an athlete training for the Olympics. Every day you focus on doing exactly what you have to do as well as you can, sometimes just so you can survive. When I was really sick, I used to divide the day into three-hour blocks. The goal was to make as few mistakes as possible in each block and perform each task as well as I could.

Those things were often pretty mundane. Make sure I had three glasses of water in the morning. Do a brief series of stretches, because that’s all the exercise I could do. Make sure I took my supplements exactly as I was supposed to, and at the times I was supposed to. Check mark in box on this protocol sheet. Check mark in box on that protocol sheet.

I’m in much better health now in, so all this isn’t as intense as it once was. But I’m still not fully well, so the incentive to max out in all realms of life is still there.

Probably the most important area is simply trying to be a good person. Whether you believe in God or karma or the universe of whatever, anyone with chronic Lyme who aims for 100 percent wellness is going to need some wind at their back.

Christianity teaches that what you sow you reap, and much of karma is about what goes ’round comes ’round. I believe in this, and I badly want to be fully well, so my incentive to goodness is powerful. Let that driver in the traffic jam in front of me? Glad to. Practice random acts of kindness? With pleasure. I’m no more perfect than anyone else, but trying to do the right thing has become a habit.

When your heart’s desire is total wellness, it does wonders for your discipline. Before getting sick, I ate a lifetime’s worth of junk food. Now you’re going to have to wrestle me down and jam that crap down my throat to get me to eat it. If I feel tempted, I remember how wretched I felt, month after month after month, and my appetite for sweets quickly fades away.

Exercise? Now I see it as a privilege. For a long time, it was a struggle to walk the eight steps from my bed to the bathroom. Compared to that, going for a pleasant stroll is bliss. Are you kidding? Fresh air. Sunshine. Seeing people, animals, trees, clouds. Unbelievable! After being released from prison Lyme, you start to see the world as a small child would.

Even something like cleaning the house. For a long time, I wasn’t very good at that. But now I know a few things about microbes, and frankly, I don’t want a lot of them hanging around.

The potential downside of all this incentive is that it could lead to perfectionism. But after doing a ton of Lyme research, I know that perfectionism is a stumbling block to healing. So I remember to take it easy on myself, laugh a lot, make time for relaxation, and meditate every day. Still checking off those boxes.

So like an Olympic athlete, my habit is to maintain a laser focus on my tasks. For Olympians, everything they do right day in and day out is one step closer to a medal podium. For Lyme patients like myself, the steps are much smaller but they lead to an even bigger goal – getting back a better life than you had before Lyme entered your life.

The Lyme World’s Unsung Hero

Did you realize there’s a guy who’s spent decades figuring out precisely how Lyme Disease and its coinfections work, and precisely how to treat them?

More than that, did you realize the same guy has had considerable success in getting people well from these miserable diseases?

My guess is that most people with Lyme don’t know this, and that is regrettable. I, for one, owe this man some major gratitude.

I’m referring to Stephen Harrod Buhner, the author of many books including Healing Lyme (two editions), Healing Lyme Disease Coinfections: Complementary and Holistic Treatments for Bartonella and Mycoplasma; and Natural Treatments for Lyme Coinfections: Anaplasma, Babesia, and Ehrlichia.

I call him the unsung hero because there are several other Lyme heroes that also have made tremendous contributions to understanding and treating the disease – people like Dr. Richard Horowitz, Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, and Dr. Joseph Burrascano. But they all have a relatively high profile, and, if you have Lyme, chances are you’ve heard of them.

Buhner stays mostly under the radar. He doesn’t run a world-renowned clinic or give lectures all over the globe. He’s a master herbalist living in an American culture in which the medical system places far less value on herbalism than it should.

You can gauge his lack of fame by the way people butcher his name. I’ve seen him referred to as Stephen Bruhner on many occasions, and on others as Stephen Harold Buhner. Then again, herbalism is known for taking a humble approach.

Despite the praise I’ve been laying on here, I want to be clear that I’m not telling you to dive right into the protocols that Buhner has developed for Lyme and coinfections. I think they are brilliant, but herbal medicine can be very complicated. If you choose to go on them, you might consider seeking the guidance of an expert herbalist or holistic medical practitioner extremely familiar with herbal medicine. That said, many people have successfully done the protocols on their own, as Buhner has laid them out with great clarity.

I tried the Buhner protocol for Lyme several ago and it didn’t produce results. That wasn’t the protocol’s fault; it was my fault for not having enough experience working with herbs. But now that I’ve taken more herbs and read many books on the subject, including the above-mentioned works and several others Buhner has written, I have a much better feel for the process. Thus, fortunately, the herbs Buhner recommends are working well for me and are making me feel better and better.

In his writings, Buhner stresses the need for people to tweak his protocol to meet their individual needs and circumstances because nobody has precisely the same case of Lyme Disease as anyone else does. Treating Lyme this way is scientific, but there’s also a lot of art to it.

Some people are wary of his methods because Buhner is not a medical doctor. But he worked from 1980 to 2005 as a clinical herbalist and psychotherapist and also has treated many Lyme patients since. In Healing Lyme, Second Edition, he says that all told he has had contact with more than 25,000 people with Lyme and has reviewed more than 10,000 peer-reviewed papers on Lyme.

In this book, he also gives some stats on his Lyme protocol’s success, saying that from the feedback he received from 2005-2015. he estimates that “75 percent of people experienced what they considered a cure from the program, 15 percent needed to continue with a reduced form of the protocol – generally small doses of knotweed and cat’s claw to keep symptoms from returning, 5 percent had some relief and 5 percent got no help.”

Backing for his claims comes from other sources as well. In his book, “Suffered Long Enough“, Dr. William Rawls says “thousands of patients have followed his protocols with exceptional results.” Dr. Klinghardt has noted that Buhner’s contributions to herbal treatment for Lyme have made him “the outstanding man in his field.”

I’ve always believed in giving recognition to people who deserve it but don’t seek it, and who don’t get as much of it as they should. This is what makes an unsung hero, and, for his exceptional work with Lyme Disease the past few decades, Stephen Buhner certainly deserves the title.

How LDI Works In Me

My 14 months on Low Dose Immunotherapy have been a good news-bad news kind of thing.

The good news is that it’s working.

The bad news is that it isn’t working as well as I’d like, and it definitely isn’t working the way LDI’s inventor, Dr. Ty Vincent, says it should work.

LDI is used for many diseases and disorders, but primarily for Lyme Disease and co-infections. Patients are given, by injection or sublingually, minute doses of deadened microbes such as Borrelia, Bartonella, Babesia, and Ehrlichia.

Doses are prepared in homeopathic dilutions, and range from about 6 C to about 30 C. With the 6 C potency, the actual substance of the deadened microbes is one part in a trillion, according to Wikipedia. By the time it gets to 30 C, it is believed there is no substance left at all, only energy. Many scientists think this is hogwash, but countless people who’ve taken homeopathic potencies will tell you the effects are very real.

Finding the correct dose is key. Hit it just right and a very sick Lyme patient can see symptoms reduce or even disappear. This is known as the core dose, and if everything goes well, taking that core dose repeatedly over seven-week periods can lead to complete remission.

So that’s how you write it out on the blackboard.

Here’s how it works in me.

LDI isn’t technically homeopathy, it’s an immunotherapy technique that aims to treat a variety of diseases. Its goal is to get the immune system to react properly to Lyme or co-infections or whatever it’s troubled with, and not overreact.

But the doses are formulated in homeopathic fashion, and as well-known Lyme physician, Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, has remarked, using homeopathy to treat Lyme and co-infections is not new. The way Dr. Vincent developed it, however, using a batch of 74 different deadened microbes (representing many species of Lyme and co-infections) all at once in a dose is new.

I’ve taken eight doses now, ranging from 15 to 19 C (some of these have been halfway doses like 16.5 and some have been the same potency taken twice), and I’ve written detailed notes each time of how my body has reacted. So I think I have a decent read on what’s happening.

I have yet to meet Dr. Vincent’s criteria for hitting the core dose, which is feeling better and not having any flaring of symptoms. I’m not sure why this is, but maybe it’s just the way I am. There’s a good chance I’ve had Lyme since I was very young, and it’s contributed to making my system highly sensitive. I react to just about every medication or treatment thrown at me. I once had a flare-up after eating a peppermint.

The way LDI has worked in me, however, is more in line with how things work in traditional homeopathy.

Homeopaths call these potencies of deadened microbes nosodes. I’ve talked to a number of homeopaths, and they’ve told me the purpose of nosodes is to activate the immune system to take on pathogens. The idea is to gradually reduce the number of pathogens in this way.

This seems to be what’s happening with me. Each time I’ve taken a dose, I’ve felt an increase in symptoms, things like rashes, mild nausea, sore neck and shoulders, and temporary increases in fatigue. Generally speaking, the stronger the dose, the more symptoms I’ve experienced.

These symptoms, fortunately, haven’t been extreme, and I haven’t experienced any setbacks. The symptoms tend to disappear after a week or 10 days, and then I seem to feel better than usual for the next little while. This period of improvement has lasted anywhere from a few days to a month depending on the injection. It’s in these times I notice that my immune system is less overreactive.

After 14 months on LDI , I’ve had several noticeable improvements. My strength and stamina are better. I can do more exercise. I have less brain fog. In fact, I have practically no brain fog now. Overall, my health has improved, although, again, not as much as I’d like. I have reason to believe that I am indeed slowly reducing the pathogenic load that I’m carrying.

So I hope this offers some encouragement to others like me who haven’t found the elusive core dose. I may just be an outlier, but it seems to me that LDI can still work even when it isn’t working the way it should work.

Photo: Mike Licht, notionscapital.com