lymetips

Rife: Notes from a newbie

“Be very careful or you could make things worse.”

With that advice in mind, I began my Rifing for Lyme journey. It’s now a few months and 27 treatments later and nothing terrible has happened, so that’s good. And I feel I’ve learned enough to make it worth sharing my experiences.

For those not familiar with Rife, the idea is that every living thing has a frequency. In the case of Lyme and its coinfections, the Rife machine sends a frequency aimed at a specific microbe, and this frequency resonates with the microbe, causing it to vibrate, and in the process either get damaged or destroyed.

It is called Rife because a pioneer of this technique was named Royal Raymond Rife. This guy, a scientist and inventor in the early 1900s, was a definite genius.

Today, there are many types of Rife machines named in his honor. I use the Doug Coil machine, which was created by Doug MacLean. Back in the 1980s, MacLean, a mechanical engineer, constructed this machine and successfully treated his own Lyme case, which had not responded to antibiotics.

I started my Rife odyssey cautiously, by doing lots of research – Rife websites, a couple of Rife books, and then reading thousands upon thousands of posts in various online forums. From those sources, I chose what I felt sounded like the four most promising frequencies – 432, 612, 840 and 2016.

My first rule was to Rife as often as possible, but only to start the next session after I thought I’d finished detoxing from the last one. So I did 13 sessions in the first 23 days, but then I found I was getting tired more quickly than usual after exercise. I guessed that the treatments were taxing my adrenals, so I took a few weeks off to adjust my adrenal support so this tiredness was no longer an issue.

The problem, it seemed, was that while I thought my body had recovered from a session, I really hadn’t given it quite enough time to recover. While I first thought the sweet spot for me was four sessions a week, it’s really two or three times weekly depending on how things go with each treatment.

So lesson one for me was wait until I’m sure I’m sure I’m ready for the next session. Lesson two was that each Rife treatment is an experiment, and you never really know how it’s going to turn out.

In any case, I felt that Phase 1 was a moderate success. Overall, I felt a bit stronger, and I could see this at the gym, where I noticed a substantial gain in how much I could lift on the leg machines. And the herxes were only mild, but there were enough symptoms, like gas, stomach gurgling, neck and joint pain, to let me know the Rife machine was working every time I turned it on.

I’d say I’m now in Phase 2, with another 14 treatments behind me to go along with the initial 13. What I’ve done lately is to better sort out which frequencies are most useful for me. My goal was to first treat just the Lyme Borrelia organism before moving on to the coinfections, but a belated look at a cross-referenced Consolidated Annotated Frequency List (CAFL) gave me a hint as to perhaps why treatments in the first phase were more taxing than I had expected.

The problem with 432 for me is that it also hits Babesia and is also an immune booster. This is a good thing for some people, but my system is easily overly boosted, and while I found the 432 had beneficial effects it also seemed to cause autoimmune-like symptoms such as knee pain.

The 612 frequency not only hits Borrelia, but it also hits the Coxsackie and Echo viruses, both of which I believe I have. The 840 also resonates with Bartonella and Klebsiella pneumonaie, which are two more suspects in my pile of microbes. So since I wanted to focus at first on Borrelia, I’m now working solely on 2016.

Here’s a thumbnail sketch of how each frequency has gone for me, noting what symptoms they’ve provoked. I’d say all the frequencies have been positive, ranging from mildly positive to moderately positive, with the total effect being a moderate net gain in strength. You’ll note the run times are fairly short, but it’s my understanding that the Doug Coil is one of the most powerful machines available, and generally a beginner needs to stick with short sessions.

432 – 8 sessions totaling 37 minutes: improved stool, feel bit tired, bloating, heat in back and chest, stomach gurgling, gas, strange feeling in brain, right knee and thigh soreness, red stripe rashes on back, nausea, nasal congestion, muscle soreness, shoulder pain, urinary irritation.

612 – 4 sessions totaling 14 minutes: vibrating feeling during session, urinary irritation, shoulder soreness, nausea, morning fatigue, sleep longer than usual, unusual feeling in head, spacey feeling, sore neck and back.

840 – 5 sessions totaling 6 minutes, 15 seconds: stomach gurgling, nausea, shoulder soreness, cool feeling in back, sleep longer than usual, dark urine, bloating, warm feeling in back.

2016 – 10 sessions totaling 11 minutes, 30 seconds: strange feeling in head, gas pain, bloating, heat in chest and back, tiredness in evening, sleep longer than usual, gas, spacey feeling, foot pain, mild dizziness.

All that doesn’t sound like a ton of fun, but like most people with Lyme, I’ll gladly trade a pack of mild detox symptoms for overall improvement. So after 27 treatments, I’m glad I took that initial warning seriously. I can’t say I’m a whole lot better than when I started Rifing, but I feel that solid progress has been made.

And at least I can say I haven’t made things worse.

Lyme’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.

Small herb doses work against Lyme

Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

Please forgive the abrupt headline, but it’s needed to debunk a dangerous myth out there in the Lyme world.

During the countless hours I’ve spent scanning Lyme forums, I’ve seen dozens of posts from people saying they think treating Lyme and its coinfections with herbs can’t be working because they can only tolerate a drop or two of tincture without feeling too sick to continue.

Personally, I wasn’t sure if small doses could slay one of these dragons. Until recently.

What changed was a webinar I watched hosted by Dr. Marty Ross. Ross, a well-known Lyme literate medical doctor based in Seattle, has treated thousands of Lyme patients over the past two decades. He explained that he has seen some of his patients get over Lyme or a coinfection taking as little as a drop or two a day of an herbal tincture.

“People need to move out of the idea that you need so many drops,” Ross said. The key, he continued, is to have a dose that is killing the bugs. For most people that dose is 30 drops or more. But for those who are extremely sensitive to herbs and medicines in general, it can be a fraction of that.

Ross uses both traditional antibiotics and antimicrobial herbs in his practice. Usually, he lets the patient choose.

Sometimes in his webinars, he can be seen pulling one of master herbalist Stephen Buhner’s books out of his desk drawer. He bases his herbal protocols on Buhner’s books.

For example, the primary herbs he uses to treat Bartonella are Houttuynia and Sida Acuta. His standard dose of each is 30 drops twice a day for 4-6 months. But if a patient can only tolerate a small dose, he finds they can still overcome the infection in 6-12 months. In all cases, he suggests patients gauge their progress after a couple of months, and ask themselves if the treatment is working. If it isn’t working, it’s time to try something else.

He says he’s not sure why some people can’t handle large doses, but thinks it’s because their bodies are having difficulty detoxifying. As a result, the herb isn’t removed from the body as quickly as would normally be the case. Because of this, the level of herb in the body stays high and retains a good killing effect.

Since treating Lyme and co-infections varies so much from one individual to another, two drops twice a day in one person could have the same effect as 30 drops twice a day in someone else.

Take me for example. I am treating Bartonella. I started at one drop of Houttuynia once a day, then added a drop of Sida Acuta. Slowly, over the course of two weeks, I moved it to two drops of each twice a day.

Then I started to feel impatient and wonder if I could tolerate a lot more. I suspect many in the ranks of those highly sensitive to herbs and other meds can relate to this. “What would happen if I just tried a normal dose?” I asked myself.

Fortunately, I kept the increase to three drops of each twice that day, making a total of four extra drops. Predictably, I woke the next day feeling like I had a hangover. It took about eight hours to wear off, enough time to convince me to keep further increases to a drop a day at a time.

Even that has been a challenge. After going back to the two drops of each twice a day for a few days I decided to dip my toe back into the pool. An extra drop of Sida Acuta and I woke the next morning feeling totally spaced out for an hour or so.

Okay. Back to two of each twice a day. A few days later I tried an extra drop of Houttuynia. That produced a night filled with nausea.

So, I’m back at two drops twice a day. It’s been nearly a month since I started treating the Bartonella, and I have seen some improvements like less foot pain, fewer rashes, and better mood. So, I choose to believe Dr. Ross. I’ve watched dozens of his webinars and he clearly knows his stuff. And I will try very hard not to lose my patience again. It’s not much fun getting hangovers, especially when you haven’t had a drop to drink.

7 things people with Lyme need to know

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

Having Lyme can be very confusing. You read about this, you hear about that, people tell you a whole bunch of other things. Well, here are seven things you absolutely need to know if you have Lyme.

You can get better. Few things seem more hopeless than being in the midst of a bad case of Lyme and/or its associated co-infections. I know. For seven years, I spent 23 hours a day in bed barely able to do anything. I remember telling my ex-wife I felt doomed. But now I’m about 85 per cent back to normal. In most cases, you return to health slowly, with the guidance of an experienced Lyme practitioner. It can be extremely difficult, but thousands and thousands of people get their lives back from Lyme.
You can do a lot to help yourself. Even when you have next to no energy, you can focus on eating a clean diet, taking measures to make sure your sleep is as good as possible, getting as much fresh air and sunshine as you can, and working to ensure your relationships stay strong. Many find a faith practice helps as well. As you start to get better, you can gradually increase exercise to tolerance, try to build your relationships, and, of course, increase your efforts to treat and overcome the infections.
You are not a bad person if you feel like yelling at everyone. Lyme and some of the co-infections mess with your nervous system. Bartonella is particularly famous for causing rage. If this happens to you, keep telling yourself this is not the real you, it’s a chemical reaction in your body caused by an infection. It will pass. But while the anger is hot, stay away from other people as best you can. Go to the bedroom and punch pillows, or hang a towel on the shower rod and whale away at that. One well-known Lyme practitioner, Dr. Lee Cowden, suggests going off by yourself into nature and screaming your head off. Whatever way you choose, it’s good to get the emotion out of you as long as you don’t hurt other people doing it.
Some people will let you down. People are human. Lyme often seems like way too much to handle for those suffering from it. It is also way too much for some loved ones and once-trusted friends to handle. Sometimes they say hurtful things; sometimes they leave you. Often they don’t understand. Your job is to forgive them. You’re usually the one left with working to keep the relationship together. It seems totally unfair, but it’s worth it.
Chronic Lyme is a real disease. For some reason, mainstream medicine doesn’t want to acknowledge this fact. There are a lot of political factors involved with this that go beyond the scope of this blog post, but the main thing you need to know is that the chronic Lyme deniers are flat out wrong. Considerable science exists that shows chronic Lyme is real. If you’ve had Lyme for a long time, you may well have a problem with immune dysfunction. Lyme causes immune dysfunction. But you likely continue to have Lyme too. In the majority of cases, people still feel like they have an infection because they still have an infection.
Treating yourself with kindness is very important. It’s easy to get frustrated when your body isn’t able to do the things it used to do. And it’s easy to get mad at yourself when you feel your body has failed you. But it isn’t for lack of trying. Fighting Lyme is extremely demanding and your body is working very, very hard. It may not seem like it sometimes, but it’s on your side. It badly wants to get back to balance. You need to help it by treating it well, and realizing you actually have a heroic partner that is doing its absolute best.
This is not your fault. When something goes terribly wrong, people often blame themselves. It can be hard not to when those around you are suggesting you can’t really be that sick. But in most cases all you did wrong was get bitten by an insect. Everyone has been bitten by an insect at one time or another. It can’t be avoided. The truth is that it is not your fault. In fact, the truth is that you have survived this hell so far, and you can get through it. So hold your head high. You are a brave person, and you need to know that too.

Muscle testing: 7 big things to know

Muscle testing sounds pretty easy.

First, test to see if a food or supplement agrees with you. Then, if your body responds positively, pop that thing in your mouth.

Well, not so fast.

I’ve done muscle testing roughly a thousand times over the past few years and I’ve found it’s a bit more complicated than that. Every muscle test is a snapshot of a moment in time. What your body says yes to this morning, it may say no to this afternoon.

This post isn’t about which muscle testing method to use. I’ve tried several, and it’s a matter of finding out which one works best for you.

And since muscle testing isn’t mainstream, here’s a brief explanation. When you test a substance such as a food or supplement, you’re looking to see if that substance makes you a bit weaker or a bit stronger. Strong is a positive result. Weak is a negative.

The most common muscle test is done by chiropractors and other alternative practitioners. You hold the substance in one hand and you hold your arm out sideways. Before you pick the thing up, the practitioner pulls down on your arm to gauge its strength. Then when you’re holding the substance, he pushes down again. If your arm is weaker this time, that means the substance made you weaker.

There are several other methods and several machines that measure the body’s response. Frankly, I like the machines better because it lessens human error, but, again, that’s another story.

A lot of people think muscle testing is quackery, but as you may have guessed, I disagree. Results of my own testing haven’t been 100 per cent accurate, but in most cases they’ve provided valuable information that’s helped me better decide which foods and supplements to consume.

Now, on to the 7 big things:

1. Don’t rely on a single test: The human body is an amazingly complex organism. Countless adjustments are going on over the course of any given day. Maybe in the morning taking a whack of zinc might throw your body out of balance and you don’t want it. But an hour later, you come into contact with a flu virus and your body says, “Gimme that.”

I like to test a few times to determine whether or not something agrees with me. That may be a bit much. Two probably would be sufficient.

2. Time of day matters: I like numbers, so you’re going to see a bit of math, based on a study I did of about 700 recent tests. I’m 74 per cent likely to test positive to a substance in the morning and 63 per cent likely to test positive in the afternoon. I’m guessing this is because I tire as the day goes along and I’m less likely to want to deal with one more thing.

3. Some days you’re more receptive than others: A few days ago I tested five things and wanted all of them. Today I tested four and didn’t want any. This happens regularly. I don’t bother asking why. My body is smarter than I am. I trust it.

4. Some weeks are better than others: Stat time again. The first week of this year, I only wanted 42 per cent of the things I tested. The second week, I wanted 74 per cent of them. I felt the same both weeks. Go figure.

5. Some seasons you want it, some seasons you don’t: I tested more than 100 substances. In the fall, Vitamin D had one of the worst results. Since winter started, it’s had one of the best. Easily explainable this time. Vitamin D levels tend to drop with the reduction in warm sunshine that comes with winter.

6. Make food thy medicine: This applies to me, maybe not to you. I was positive for 98 per cent of the foods and beverages I tested, and 65 per cent for supplements. The foods also usually had much stronger positive results.

7. Keep track of test results: If you do a fair bit of muscle testing, you can learn a lot from keeping score. I’ve discovered that I like some brands much better than other brands, that I prefer tinctured herbs to capsules and tablets, and that I’m more likely to react positively to minerals than I am to vitamins.

So, you see, muscle testing isn’t all that simple. But it is helpful, as long as you use your brain and not just your body to make decisions on how to apply test results.

Photo: Linelle Photography

Rife: Notes from a newbie

“Be very careful or you could make things worse.”

It is called Rife because a pioneer of this technique was named Royal Raymond Rife. This guy, a scientist and inventor in the early 1900s, was a definite genius.

840 – 5 sessions totaling 6 minutes, 15 seconds: stomach gurgling, nausea, shoulder soreness, cool feeling in back, sleep longer than usual, dark urine, bloating, warm feeling in back.

And at least I can say I haven’t made things worse.

The Lyme Equation: God = Hope

For many years, Lyme disease made me seem like a hopeless case to my family, my friends, and just about everyone who knew me.

I believe God changed that.

Looking back, I feel my main job in those days was to hold on to hope while I tried everything my doctor and I could think of to get better from Lyme. That was seven long years of being basically housebound, and when I was occasionally well enough to go outside for a walk, I moved at the speed of the average 90-year-old.

This span covered my late 30s to early 40s, as I was forced to live with my parents because my wife left me. It was day after day staring at the bedroom ceiling.

Most days I had to spend about 23 hours in bed. I once heard my mother telling a friend she was taking care of her invalid son. Invalid. What an awful word. I told her to never say that again. And I told her and others that someday I would get well. I doubt anyone believed me.

One morning my dad came in to my room and asked if I wanted an itinerant pastor to come pray for me. He mentioned the guy worked partly as a preacher and partly as a lumberjack.

At that time, I had been saving up my energy so I could get a badly needed haircut, so my first response was, “Dad, what I really need is a barber, not a lumberjack.”

But then I thought again. Why should I turn down an offer of healing prayer when I so desperately wanted to be well. Bring on the lumberjack.

This pastor didn’t understand what I was going through, but he was a dedicated man who spent an hour praying with me, and then promised to go home and start fasting and praying that I be healed.

I’m not sure if it was his efforts that made the difference, as many people were praying for me, but soon after he visited, things suddenly started to happen.

Neither my doctor or I had made any significant changes in how my Lyme was being treated, but shortly after that prayer session, I felt well enough to go outside and stand in the backyard for 10 minutes. My legs had been so wobbly that I hadn’t stood for more than a couple of minutes at a time in years.

Then I started to stretch out my walks, and found I could go further and further without paying any price for it. I can still remember the day I was walking past a mechanic’s garage on our street and noticed that my legs felt solid. Eureka!

Things quickly fell into place. In the matter of a month or so I put on about 15 pounds after being underweight for many years, and started doing normal things like watching TV. This had been impossible for me to do for more than a few minutes, but now it became easy. I could watch an entire movie, no problem. And I could stand for as long as I wanted.

I didn’t get fully well, but I went from being that invalid to being functional. For those who don’t have Lyme, it would be hard to understand the joy you feel after being a prisoner in your own body for seven years, and then finally being released.

I’m still working at getting back to 100 per cent, and I believe I’ll get there, with God’s help.

So I can’t prove that God healed me, but I can’t think of any other explanation. Mainstream medicine would tell you that people who are practically bedridden for seven years don’t often all of a sudden get a whole lot better.

For me, the moral of this story is to hold on to hope. You just never know when prayer is going to produce great results; you never know when God is going to step in. Scripture tells us that all things are possible for God. Even though Lyme may make things look totally hopeless at times, the truth is that holding on to hope makes a lot of sense.

Is Chronic Lyme Curable?

The question on my Facebook group this past Sunday morning was “When you have chronic Lyme Disease, is it possible to cure at 100 per cent?”

Quickly, someone wrote “No.” I disagreed, so I posted “I believe the answer is yes.” The first poster shot back with “Well, you’re wrong,” and someone added one of those ha-ha-ha options on the Like button, just to rub that in.

It seemed like an innocent question at first, but now I could see there was a long, emotional argument taking shape.

The last time I checked, 93 people had weighed in. There were a few main camps – no, yes, and remission is possible but not cure.

My position didn’t fit into any of those categories. I further explained that because there is no 100 per cent accurate test for Lyme, there is no way of knowing if someone is cured or not. This is why I said, “I believe the answer is yes,” rather than saying yes.

How you look at this debate depends on how you define cure in the sense of the question asked. I took cure in this instance to mean that a person is fully well and no longer has Lyme in his or her body.

I’ve done a lot of Lyme research and read articles by and listened to podcasts featuring many Lyme-literate medical doctors (LLMDs), and the majority disagree with me. Most LLMDs I’ve heard answer by saying they think remission for people with chronic Lyme is very possible, but that being fully cured isn’t possible. Still, I’ve heard some LLMDs say they think being fully cured is possible.

I agree with them because that while getting fully well from chronic Lyme can be incredibly difficult, many people have done just that. Are those people in remission or are they cured with the Lyme being fully eradicated from their body? Again, we have no way of knowing because the testing isn’t perfect.

Some of the patients who say they believe Lyme is curable talk about various modalities they feel got them well. Some point to Rife machines, some to Bee Venom therapy, some to Chinese medicine, some to other treatments. But no one can say for sure they were or weren’t cured.

This is where belief comes in. While I would be very happy if I achieved full remission and fell short of cure, my goal is to be cured from chronic Lyme, to become fully well, and to have Lyme fully eradicated from my body. Because there is no way to prove if this is possible or impossible, I choose to believe it is possible.

One of the reasons I choose to believe this rests on recent scientific research pointing to the power of belief. Probably the best known work in this area, Dr. Bruce Lipton’s book, The Biology of Belief, describes how believing in something can lead to the creation of beneficial brain chemicals that foster well-being and healing.

Obviously there is no cure right now for chronic Lyme in the sense of a treatment that will guarantee that Lyme can be eradicated from a person’s body. But what I think is possible is that if a person incorporates treatments that work for them, lives a lifestyle that strongly promotes healing, physically, mentally and spiritually, and works through any spiritual or emotional blockages that may be hampering their immune system, then they would be the ones most likely to have a shot at being 100 per cent free of chronic Lyme.

Some would say I’m mistaken in giving myself false hope. Hope is a precious thing for those of us with chronic Lyme and not something to be taken lightly. I spent seven years practically housebound, only occasionally well enough to get out for a very short and very slow walk. Most people had written me off. My own mother once referred to me as an invalid. But I chose to retain hope I could get well.

I’m not fully well but I’m way better now and functioning at a fairly high level. If I’d given up hope I might not be alive today.

Still, I understand why many people with chronic Lyme don’t want to get their hopes up. After trying and failing treatment after treatment, going year after year feeling wretched, and having their hopes dashed time after time, they understandably want to guard against false hope. I get it. I’ve been there.

Maybe I’m wrong in believing that it’s possible to be 100 per cent cured from chronic Lyme. Maybe my hope is false hope. But I’d much rather have false hope than no hope at all.

LDI: Success! A Case Study

I hadn’t had night sweats like this for years. The kind where you wake up several times with a T-shirt so soaked you have to change it.

I’m still not sure what happened, probably me getting overly aggressive using antimicrobials to treat Lyme disease. But suddenly one morning I felt like I had the flu – feverish, racing pulse, no energy, sore throat, muscle soreness and that profuse sweating.

Symptoms continued for just over a week, until, fortunately, it came time for my LDI (Low Dose Immunotherapy) treatment. The night I took the LDI dose, my sweating reduced dramatically, and over the next couple of days the other symptoms disappeared.

So what the heck happened?

Well, it looks as if LDI worked just the way it is supposed to work.

For those of you not familiar with it, LDI has been around for several years now for the treatment of Lyme and other conditions. Patients are given extremely low dose antigens (we’re talking one part per one hundred millionth and less) of deadened pathogens or other substances and this process is supposed to prod the immune system to produce a more measured response and thus reduce or eliminate symptoms.

I’ve been doing LDI for three years and I can tell you it doesn’t always happen that way. The trick is getting the dose just right. Too strong can mean increased symptoms, sometimes causing serious problems, while too weak often produces no benefits.

This was my 22nd LDI treatment, and for the most part it has helped keep my immune system in balance and has been a key player in helping me slowly get a lot better. But while it has been a good treatment for me, it hasn’t produced the miraculous results some people have enjoyed.

This time my doctor seems to have nailed it with her dosing choice. Those who do LDI might be curious to know what that was (18C for the Lyme mix and 10C for the yeast mix. The C is a standard measure of homeopathic dosing.) From what I understand, that is a fairly weak dose for Lyme and a fairly normal dose for yeast.

So, once again, what the heck happened?

I think it started with my attempt to follow Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt’s retroviral protocol. I have followed Dr. Klinghardt’s work closely and consider him a brilliant Lyme doctor, so I paid attention when he recently said treating retroviruses was a key to overcoming Lyme.

I slowly started taking supplements from the protocol, such as broccoli sprouts, selenium, nettles, bitter melon and cistus tea.

I’m pretty sure it was the cistus tea that caused the reaction. It is known as a strong antimicrobial and it was the last retroviral supplement I took before the flare-up hit.

I didn’t expect anything to happen because I’d taken it many times before, but anyone with Lyme and co-infections is aware that you never know what is going to cause a die-off (aka Jarish-Herxheimer or herx) reaction.

Fighting Lyme is a war and those of us waging it have lots of land mines inside of us in the form of hidden microbes. Take the right (or wrong) antimicrobial at the right (or wrong) time and it can interact with that land mine and Boom! you’re lying on the couch wondering what hit you.

For me, a herx usually lasts a day or so and I haven’t had a severe one in a long while. Not so this time. One day turned into nine and the sweat just kept on coming.

That’s another problem with chronic Lyme. Sometimes when your immune system gets ramped up, it doesn’t calm down once the microbe that started the fuss has been dealt with. This can be dangerous, as an out of control immune system can produce out of control inflammation and other symptoms and has the potential to turn a one-day herx into a relapse.

This is where I feel LDI is most valuable. It can calm an out of control immune system, shut down symptoms and stop a negative spiral.

I think that’s what happened this time. Just how it managed the trick I’m not sure.

It was almost as if my immune system changed the channel. When it saw the LDI antigens, it was like it let go of its death grip on whatever it had latched on to and shifted to working on the Lyme and yeast mixes.

Whatever the case, I went from feeling less well than usual to feeling well in about a day’s time. That didn’t cure me, but it was a considerable relief. Any time you start going in the wrong direction in your fight with chronic Lyme it provokes a lot of stress and worry.

When it first came out, many people hoped LDI would be a breakthrough treatment for a wide swath of chronic Lyme patients. But while it hasn’t produced remissions for as many people as hoped, it is now generally seen as a helpful adjunct treatment for most patients who use it. In fact, I’ve heard it recently described that way by both my own doctor, and by noted Lyme doctor Neil Nathan.

“Helpful adjunct treatment” would accurately sum up my LDI experience, but that’s nothing to dismiss. Anything that works against Lyme is highly valuable. And after my latest LDI experience I would add the word “very” to helpful adjunct treatment.

LDI: Glad I didn’t quit

Okay. Raise your hands. How many of you doing Low Dose Immunotherapy have thought of giving up on it?

I know I did, and I think I’m far from being alone. LDI can be a fantastic treatment for Lyme Disease and other illnesses, but it can be very hard to get it to work.

Finding the core dose is key, and that can take a painfully long time to settle on. It took me more than a year of tries that often ended up with me feeling a lot worse than I wanted to feel.

For those unfamiliar with LDI, it’s a relatively new treatment most often used for Lyme and its co-infections, but it also can be applied to many other things. The idea is to get the body to stop overreacting to whatever the problem is and react in proper measure.

This is done by giving patients incredibly diluted substances (we’re talking one part per one hundred millionth and less). These dilutions are made from deadened pathogens and prepared in homeopathic fashion. The most commonly used one is the Lyme mix, which consists of 74 species that include the Lyme bacteria (Borrelia), along with species of Bartonella, Babesia, Ehrlichia and Coxiella.

I started nearly two and a half years ago with the Lyme mix at the 15C dose, which caused a moderate aggravation of symptoms. But I was told this was good news, as a reaction meant I was responding to treatment, and that eventually I’d find the right dose.

One of the difficult things about LDI is if you have a symptom aggravation, known as a flare, you have to wait seven weeks until you can take the next dose. The theory is that the immune system is not ready for another dose until this period is up.

What keeps you going during these long stretches is hearing stories of others who’ve had phenomenal results with LDI. And these are fairly common tales of people who had all but lost hope, and then suddenly started to get much, much better. Very good things can happen when an out of control immune system gets back in sync.

So I went down to 17C the next time. This time the results were mixed. Some things were better, some things worse. My doctor called it a mild flare.

Following that came 19C. It didn’t seem to do much, so we tried 18C. That was on the whole positive and I felt somewhat better, but we thought we could do better.

By this time, more than half a year had passed. I was starting to wonder if my efforts couldn’t be better spent focusing on other treatments. All in all, I felt my condition had modestly improved, but was it enough to bother continuing?

We decided to reduce the dose to 17C again. This is where LDI can get confusing. This time 17C worked better than it had the time before, and since I continued to feel a bit better it seemed this might be the core dose.

But why was 17C more effective this time? Maybe my body had become stronger and better able to handle a stronger dose. Maybe my microbial load had dropped.

And maybe it was one of a million other possible reasons. LDI uses a homeopathic dose, and in my experience with homeopathic dosing I’ve found it highly unpredictable. It is to medicine what the knuckleball is to baseball pitching. When you let it fly, you can never be sure what’s going to happen.

So next came 16C and that was too strong. Nothing dramatic but I felt like I was carrying a heavy backpack around the next 10 days.

At this point, I’d tried everything from 15 to 19C, and it looked like there was going to be no miracle for me. I fell into probably the same category as most people. For me, the LDI Lyme mix had become a helpful treatment that reduced my overreactivity and brought about improvement in my condition.

So after conferring with my doctor and looking back over my symptom journal many times, I decided to make a conservative move and go back to 18C. That seemed to work well. I clearly felt better taking that dose than I would have if I hadn’t taken it. A 17C dose might have been slightly better or slightly worse. But looking over my journal it looked like the results from 18C were slightly better than 17C, so 18C it would be. The core dose was finally decided.

I also wanted to settle on a core dose for the Lyme mix, because I wanted a clear field to try the yeast mix, which was also said to bring about big gains for many people.

After taking a year to find the right number for the Lyme mix, I lucked out on the yeast. This time 10C was our first choice and I clearly felt a lot better on it. We decided that we’d found the core dose on try number one.

Like I said earlier, I’m glad I didn’t quit because while I haven’t experienced any jaw- dropping results, I have made steady progress on LDI. I’m considerably stronger than when I started and better able to handle whatever life throws at me. I’m also less likely to overreact to either pathogens or to allergens, so I have far fewer bad days than I used to and the bad days are a lot less bad.

I’ve come to believe LDI is a valuable treatment primarily because I agree with many Lyme doctors (Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt being one of the most notable) who in recent years have concluded that the biggest problem with this disease isn’t the bugs, it’s the body overreacting to the bugs.

If you can’t get your body to stop overreacting, then even if you kill some bugs and that gives you a spurt of energy, your body is likely going to fritter that energy away by overreacting to something. It’s like giving a compulsive gambler a whack of spending money. Pretty soon it’s all gone.

The other reason I like LDI is that there are very few other things that can reliably get my body to stop overreacting. So mark me down as a satisfied customer.

But like I said, LDI can be very unpredictable. Next week, I’m going to add in the antigen for Mycoplasma. I’ve tested positive for the nasty fermentans strain of this bug, and I’ve been hesitant to take it on. Still, after nearly two and a half years of doing this treatment, I feel confident that I’ll be able to handle this one. Wish me luck.