Category: health

Seven Things My Lyme Doc Taught Me

It took me a long time to find her, but I am fortunate to say that I have a good Lyme-literate medical doctor (LLMD) who has taught me a lot of important things.

If my count is right, she was the 14th doctor I saw before finding someone who was able to help me. Sounds like a lot, but many Lyme patients have a longer list. She could help because she had been through something similar herself, and had the knowledge and compassion to be able to help others get through their ordeals.

So what has she taught me? Probably more than I’m outlining below, but these are the things that come to mind.

#1 – A LOT OF THIS IS ABOUT TOTAL LOAD – Total load means the total amount to stressors your body is facing. Obviously, Lyme is a big stressor. So if you have Lyme, you have to reduce the other stressors.

Doctors who subscribe to the total load theory use the rain barrow analogy. Stressors are like rain that falls into a rain barrow. As long as the rain stays in the barrow you’re OK. But too much rain (i.e. stressors) and the barrow overflows. That’s when you get symptoms.

There’s no shortage of stressors – Lyme, other infections, emotional and physical stress, heavy metals, pesticides, poor diet, dental amalgam fillings and other dental problems, candida, etc., etc. One of the keys to getting healthy is eliminating and reducing stressors and keeping the water from spilling out of the barrow.

#2 – B VITAMIN SHOTS CAN HELP A LOT – One doctor told me not to bother with B12 shots because he said I didn’t need them. Another doctor told me B12 shots were quackery. But my doctor said I should try both B12 and B complex injections. She was right. They helped a lot, giving me some energy at a time when that commodity was worth about a million dollars an ounce to me.

#3 – CATCHING COLDS OFTEN MEANS YOU MADE A MISTAKE – During one of our visits, my doctor was chastising herself for getting a cold. Turns out she felt she made a mistake.

I’d always thought catching a cold or the flu was an accident that couldn’t be helped. But I now see it as something that’s an unavoidable accident about half the time and an avoidable mistake the other half.

Maybe I forgot to wash my hands after being in public during cold and flu season, maybe I skimped on sleep and my immune system suffered, maybe I got stressed out on a day when I felt the first sign of a tickle in my throat. Or maybe something else. This doesn’t mean being a germophobe, it just means that when you have a serious illness like Lyme, you need to be careful to not pick up other infections.

#4 – YOU CAN IMPROVE YOUR EYESIGHT – I’ve always been looking for ways to improve my vision, and I’ve asked several eye doctors this question. They all say there’s nothing you can do.

Not true, says my doctor. She had a strong prescription of -5.50 that fell to a moderate -2.50. That’s a huge drop. She said she did it by gradually healing infections in her body and eyes, taking a lot of antioxidants and intravenous vitamin and mineral infusions.

#5 – PUT THE TOILET LID DOWN EVERY TIME YOU FLUSH – This thought had never occurred to me. But one day I noticed a clipping on her office billboard showing results from a study that showed flushing with the toilet lid up results in a slew of often pathogenic bacteria flying around your bathroom. I’m not sure how much effect this has on total load, but every bit counts.

#6 – EAT ALL YOUR FOOD DURING A SHORT PERIOD OF THE DAY – I’m not sure if this works for everyone, but it works for me. The theory is that your body likes having a decent sized mini-fast every day. I’d mentioned I was having gut symptoms, so my doctor suggested trying to eat all my food in an 8-12 hour window each day.

Eight hours is tough to manage, but most days I eat my food in an 11-hour period and give my body 13 hours to fully digest it and work everything out. Doing this has helped reduce my gut symptoms.

#`7 – NEVER GIVE UP – My doctor has told me stories of her own desperate efforts to stay alive so her young son wouldn’t lose his mother. She never gave up and taught me the same.

The truth with Lyme is you never know when things are going to turn around in your favor. There are umpteen ways of treating it, and if you keep trying, you’re likely to find one that will work for you. So there’s good reason not to give up. It also helps, a lot, to find a doctor who won’t give up on you. When I was down and out and bedridden, my doctor made 10 house calls to try to get me back on my feet. That’s right. House calls. I told you I was fortunate.

Healing Lyme God’s Way

Imagine what it would be like if most Christians placed their main focus on Christ every day and not just at Christmas?

I think it’s a very important question, particularly if you are a Christian with Lyme Disease.

I don’t know about you, but when I first got sick with Lyme, my focus was squarely on me. I felt far worse than I’d ever felt before, I was scared, and I was running around from doctor to doctor to try to find someone to save me.

When you know in your gut that something is seriously wrong with your health, you tend to put your own needs in front of others. It’s a crisis, and you feel God will understand your selfishness.

This is what I thought, and it took me nearly a year to even start shifting my main focus away from doctors and treatments to prayer and looking to God for answers.

During this 10 month or so period, all the running around didn’t do anything but dig a deep hole that took me a long time to dig out of.

Now, what if I’d focused more on God from the day I got sick?

I’m not saying I shouldn’t have sought medical attention. Doing that was clearly appropriate. But the problem was a matter of focus. What was I placing my faith in and Who was I not placing my faith in?

What if I’d spent a lot more time praying and asking others to pray for me? What if I’d sought out healing prayer? What if I’d put my primary focus on God?

In most healing stories you read about in the Bible faith plays the major role. In Luke 17:19 (Amplified Bible), Jesus says this to a man he has just healed of leprosy. “Your faith (your personal trust in me and your confidence in God’s power) has restored you to health.”

So I ask myself, in those early days of Lyme, was I showing personal trust in Jesus and confidence in God’s power? Or was I immersed in a panic?

And what if I had decided not to be a bit selfish? My thinking went something like this. I have a wife and a small child and I need to get better for both my family’s sake and my own sake. So, in this case, I felt justified in the times I put my needs ahead of others.

But doesn’t the Bible stress putting others first? Does it say anything about that approach being suspended when you’re sick?

No, what the Bible says in Matthew 6:33 (NIV) is “Seek first the kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” To paraphrase, Jesus is saying put me first in all circumstances and you will be rewarded for it.

Please don’t misunderstand me. Lyme is a very serious disease and it requires placing a substantial portion of your overall focus on treatment. But that doesn’t require moving your primary focus away from God.

Focusing on God and placing complete trust and confidence in Him was the key to healing in New Testament days. Is it any different today?

Photo: Eric Davidson

Seven easy ways to not delay your healing

I was going to compile a list of “don’ts” here, but nobody likes to be told don’t do this and don’t do that. So why don’t I make it a list of “avoids”?

We people with Lyme are usually so focused on making sure we do this and take that and see so and so that we don’t pay enough attention to what we should steer ourselves away from.

It’s all about not accidentally shooting yourself in the foot and setting yourself back. Many times what you don’t do is as important to getting well as what you actually do.

#1 – AVOID watching a lot of TV news.  People underestimate the importance of keeping their headspace positive. I’ve worked in television, so I know that TV exists primarily to sell advertising.

To help further this, many things are sensationalized and made to appear more extreme than they actually are. You may have noticed this during the recent U.S. election campaign. It appears the trend will only worsen.

A little TV news can help keep you informed, which is a good thing. A lot can get you depressed and carrying a negatively skewed view of the world in your head. Not so good.

#2 – AVOID eating (much) crappy food. In recent years, health researchers and doctors have been increasingly stressing the importance of a good diet to maintaining health. I’ve seen in my own life what an incredibly positive difference eating the right foods makes. But let’s not go overboard. Healthy food is often tasty, but unhealthy food is often really tasty. So go ahead and cheat, a bit, especially now that we’re in the holiday season.

#3 – AVOID arguing unless you have to. This might be a difficult one for the politically inclined this holiday season in the wake of the recent U.S. elections. But love has an awful lot to do with getting healthy and positive relationships generate love. Arguing has a way of tearing apart relationships, and really, what purpose does it serve 99 percent of the time? Sometimes you have to take a stand, but those times are rare.

#4 – AVOID believing that you’ll never get well. I remember early in my Lyme journey when I just couldn’t see how I could get better. I felt doomed. Big mistake. In his landmark book, “The Biology of Belief,” written in 2005, Dr. Bruce Lipton wrote convincingly of how a person’s beliefs play a huge role in what actually happens to them. This concept is becoming so mainstream that National Geographic just wrote a cover story on it.

The truth is that many, many Lyme patients have emerged from seemingly desperate circumstances to get fully well. Sometimes it’s a new treatment that works for you when previous ones didn’t. Sometimes it’s finding a different doctor who figures out your problem when others couldn’t. In short, there’s good reason to AVOID giving up.

#5 – AVOID pushing yourself too hard. This is especially important to remember during the holidays. One of the most valuable skills a person with Lyme can master is learning how to say no. When your energy level will allow you to do only so much, politely explain to people that this is the case, and it’s very important for you not to overdo it.

Not pushing yourself too hard also comes into play when it comes to treatment. Lyme medications can often cause serious die-off (Herxheimer) reactions, but many doctors in the field are now saying that it’s best not to promote these Herxes as a good thing to be aimed for as has often been done in the past. I believe the newer message is better. It says that Herxes are sometimes unavoidable but that you should try to avoid them.

#6 – AVOID getting down on yourself. I belong to several Lyme Facebook groups and I see a lot of people expressing their dismay at not being good enough wives or husbands or mothers or fathers or sisters or brothers or whatever.

For those who feel this way, give yourself an important gift this Christmas. Look in the mirror and repeat these words. “It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.” You got sick with a serious illness that limits what you’re able to do. IT IS NOT YOUR FAULT.

#7 – AVOID focusing too much on Lyme. Fighting Lyme is such a full-time job that this one can be difficult. But it helps a lot if you can work towards having as full a life as possible with Lyme being only one component of it. Maybe try setting aside one day a week when you don’t say the L word or even think about it. Maybe Christmas day would be a good day to start.

Photo: shonna1968

7 Easy Ways To Help Yourself Heal

I didn’t want to make the title too long, but it could have been 7 easy ways to help yourself heal that most people don’t do at all or don’t do nearly enough of.

Most of these are no-brainers, so obvious that they really shouldn’t need to be mentioned. But do I have to be reminded to do them? Yes. Do you? Well, let’s find out.

#1 – WASH YOUR HANDS!– Now that it’s cold and flu season this is more important than ever. I’ve done an admittedly unscientific survey about handwashing and it suggests serious problems. Lyme Disease has forced me to move many times and to live with many people. The common denominator. Nobody washes their hands before they eat.

Experts say the most important factor in avoiding colds and the flu is handwashing, and that we should wash our hands frequently, especially after using the washroom and before eating. My survey hasn’t included bathroom habits, but I suspect the worse.

#2 – EARLY TO BED! – Science tells us that the hours of sleep before midnight provide the greatest benefit. Does 10 p.m. sound reasonable? Can you squeak in 9:30 without feeling like a boring old fart? So you’ll miss a bit of TV. Nobody ever went to their deathbed regretting that they hadn’t watched enough TV.

#3 – GET OUTSIDE! – We were not built to spend 90 percent of our time indoors like most of us do. Studies show that outdoor air is generally much healthier than indoor air. The air is even better if you can get out to the country, or to the beach, or to a mountain. Of all the things that have helped me in my journey to getting well, fresh air is near the top of the list.

#4 – FLOSS YOUR TEETH! Are you kidding? No. This is no joke. Doctors who specialize in chronic illness are increasingly stressing the importance of oral health. Some go so far as to say that cavitations, root canals, hidden dental infections, and the like are some of the primary things that cause recalcitrant health problems.

The good news is that fixing dental problems in a careful way and paying strict attention to oral hygiene can be major factors in getting you well. So think floss before bed, and while you’re at it, brush those choppers two or three times a day.

#5 – GET OFF YOUR BUTT! – I understand that this doesn’t apply to many people with chronic illness who can’t get off their butts. But if you can, go for it! Doctors are nearly unanimous in pointing to our sedentary lifestyle as the cause of a myriad of ills.

We were built to move, so move as much as you can. If all you can do is stretch, then stretch. If you’re stuck at a desk, get up and take as many breaks as you can get away with. Go for walks as often as you can.If you can do it, park the car a short distance from your destination and walk in. Take the stairs instead of the elevator. You’ve heard this all before. Just do it! Nice slogan, eh?

#6 –  SMILE! – I’ve had severe chronic Lyme to the point where it almost killed me, so I know that sometimes it’s next to impossible to smile. But if you can, it’s going to help you a lot. Studies suggest smiling can cut stress levels, lower your heart rate, and even make you look younger and more attractive.

#7 – LAUGH! – Again, a tricky maneuver when you’re really sick, but worth the effort. By now, most everyone knows that laughter produces endorphins, which make you feel good and are good for you. My unscientific household survey also shows that most people don’t laugh much.

So lighten up everybody, for your own good! If you have an Internet connection, there are scads of funny things available on YouTube, iTunes, and other outlets. If you’re not big on the web, how about telling jokes? My elderly mom is a big fan of joke books. Most of the jokes are corny, but who cares? It’s not about winning Nobel prizes for Literature. It’s about making you laugh, and, more than that, it’s about helping you to get well.

Photo: Douglas Scortegagna

Stephen Buhner vs. The Lyme Conventional Wisdom

You can approach treating Lyme Disease in two basic ways. First, you can look at it purely as a science. Or, you can look at it as partly a science and partly an art.

The conventional wisdom says go strictly with science. Over the past few decades since Lyme hit the map, Western medicine has developed treatment strategies that for the most part fit the disease into its existing paradigm.

It goes something like this. We’ve discovered Lyme is a bacterial infection. We test for it. If the test is positive, we throw antibiotics at  it.

This works great for some people, but it doesn’t work very well for a lot of other people.

Enter Stephen Buhner, master herbalist and author. He is far from the only proponent of the science plus art approach, but no one has done more to champion it.

Among his books are two editions of Healing Lyme, plus two books on treating coinfections associated with Lyme. If you read these works carefully, you’ll clearly see how different his way of treating Lyme is from the conventional wisdom.

It’s not that Buhner isn’t scientific. 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 he has had contact with more than 25,000 people with Lyme and has read 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, 5 percent had some relief, and 5 percent got no help.

The purpose of this blog is to highlight the differences in the two approaches. As mentioned earlier, the conventional wisdom has worked well for many people, while Buhner’s way has helped many others.

I should mention that I’m referring to the conventional wisdom for treating persistent, or chronic, Lyme. It should also be noted that not all Lyme doctors fall completely into one camp or another. Some are a totally conventional, some a bit unconventional, and others quite a bit unconventional in their treatment methods.

But, for the sake of comparison, here’s how I see the main differences between Buhner and the conventional Lyme wisdom.

Conventional wisdom: Only antibiotics will cure Lyme.

Buhner: Lyme can be cured by using herbs and other natural products. Several natural protocols have been developed  by Buhner and by others, and one particular protocol may or may not work for one person, and another protocol may or may not work for another person.

Buhner is not against antibiotics. In fact, he recommends people take them when they have an acute case of Lyme.

Conventional wisdom: Fighting Lyme is like fighting a conventional war. You have to keep blasting away at the bugs until they are defeated. Sometimes this means taking high doses of antibiotics for a year or more.

Buhner:  The goal isn’t to bludgeon the enemy into submission, it’s to understand what the bugs want and need from their hosts and to find ways to deny those needs and prevent them proliferating.

Conventional wisdom: Strong and highly unpleasant die-off (Herxheimer) reactions are an unfortunate, but necessary, part of getting well from Lyme.

Buhner: Herxheimer reactions aren’t necessary. They sometimes happen, but you should try to avoid them.

Conventional wisdom: The doctor creates the protocol and the patient doesn’t deviate from it.

Buhner: Patients should listen to their bodies and tweak their protocols according to what works best for them. Having patients educate themselves and develop a feel for how herbs and natural products interact with their bodies can be very beneficial.

Conventional wisdom: Patients need to push themselves and fight through difficult patches in treatment.

Buhner: Only go as fast as your body is telling you to go. If an herb is making you feel significantly unwell, back off and cut down on the dose.

So now that I’ve gone through the main differences in approaches, I’ll admit to having a bias. The conventional wisdom didn’t work well for me. Buhner’s protocols haven’t gotten me fully well, yet, but they have contributed to substantial improvement.

I also find the Buhner model more sustainable. Going on long-term antibiotic programs wreaks havoc on many body systems, especially the gut, and nobody knows what long-term effects that will have.

The conventional wisdom approach is also hard on the human spirit. The consequence of taking antibiotics long-term is often feeling awful day after day, month after month. Many times the treatment feels worse than the disease.

A lot has changed since the first edition of Healing Lyme came out in 2005. The trend in the conventional wisdom among leading Lyme doctors has slowly been moving in Buhner’s direction.

Herbs and other natural products are more commonly used as many doctors are now willing to look beyond solely an antibiotic approach. And this makes sense to my mind. Buhner has studied Lyme Disease as thoroughly as anyone and understands it as well as anyone, and people should look closely at his work.

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

5 things that got me out of Lyme hell

I can’t recall the name of the comic strip, but I remember this hairy little troll living in a dungeon. You’d always see him on his knees digging in the dirt, trying to make a tunnel out of prison.

This is what it’s like being stuck in the middle of a really bad case of Lyme. Every day you try to gain two inches of ground and try not to lose more than one.

I know. I was there. For a long time.

Bedridden week after week, housebound month after month. Things would occasionally get a bit better, and I could go outside and walk at the pace of the average 95-year-old for 20 yards or so, but rarely more than that. This went on for seven years.

How bad was it? First of all, my doctor thought I might be dying.

Beyond that, I spent years not being well enough to see friends, not well enough to go anywhere, not able to talk on the phone or read for more than 10 or 15 minutes a day, not able to watch TV for any longer than that, not able to do much of anything but lie in bed thinking mostly about ways to get out of this predicament.

Worst of all were the times when I wondered if I was dying.

After falling asleep exhausted, I’d sometimes wake up a few hours later and still be so exhausted I’d have to lie there motionless for a half hour or more to get the strength to make the seven-step walk to the bathroom.

There was one hot night when I felt I would pass out, and I staggered across the hallway into my father’s room to where the window air conditioner was.

So how did I get out a hole as deep as that?

I can think of five main things that made a huge difference. They are as follows:

PRAYER:

I come from a Christian family. My father is a preacher and has many preacher friends. I never stopped praying, and neither did my mom or my dad or their friends or people at my church. My name was on the church prayer list every week for years.

Several times prayer warriors drove more than an hour to pray with me, and one preacher friend not only prayed but fasted to try to aid my cause. I believe God answered those prayers because I started getting well very suddenly.

I started by making my walks a bit longer, and soon I found my legs had normal strength for the first time in nearly a decade. The whole process took several months, but I went from maybe 10 per cent of normal to about 70 per cent of normal.

Now I could see friends, I could talk on the phone all I wanted to, I could exercise, I got my driver’s licence back, I could do a whole bunch of things I hadn’t been able to do before. Bedridden no more, housebound no more. And I hadn’t made any significant changes to what I was doing.

This sort of thing just isn’t supposed to happen after seven years of being so low. Did God heal me? I believe he did.

BELIEVING I’D GET WELL:

I must admit there were days when I fought off feelings of hopelessness, but I truly always believed that I would get well. I told people that many times and could see from their expressions they didn’t believe me. Once I overheard my mother talking on the phone with a friend, referring to me as “an invalid”. My mother acted heroically for me in many ways, but I sternly told her never to call me that again.

I remember back in the dark days I bought a pair of running shoes. At that point, I couldn’t have run if the house had been on fire, but I did it because I believed I would run again. I don’t know the science behind belief very well, but I do know that many studies have shown that the mind is extremely powerful and so is simple belief.

HAVING SOMEONE TO LIVE FOR:

This may be a cliche, but having someone or something to live for can save your life. In many concentration camp stories, survivors point to that as what got them through.

For me that someone was my son, who was one when I got sick. My illness coupled with a stressful job made life extremely difficult for my ex-wife, and she decided to leave.

Because I couldn’t take care of myself at the time, I was forced to move in with my parents who lived three hours away from where my son lived.  I tried every possible arrangement to stay in the same city as my son, whom I have always loved like crazy, but nothing worked.

I did not see my son for seven and a half years, but I thought about him every day. I’d call him on the phone regularly, usually on Saturdays. Friday was a total rest day. I would do nothing that wasn’t necessary, so I’d have enough energy saved up to talk for the 10 or 15 minutes I was able to manage.

There was no way I could give up. I had to see him again. There was nothing I wanted more than to be a proper father to him, and I was determined that was going to happen.

KEEPING IN TOUCH WITH A GOOD DOCTOR:

I was very lucky to find a skilled, compassionate doctor who had gone through a similar experience herself. When I still lived with my wife and son, she made at least a dozen house calls, and when I moved to live with my parents, we had short phone consults every two months.

There wasn’t a lot she could do from a distance, but she monitored my situation and made many helpful suggestions. Maintaining contact with her was vital for me because I knew that I wasn’t fighting this alone, and that an experienced doctor could guide my steps.

MOVING IN THE DIRECTION I WANTED TO GO:

I mentioned buying a pair of sneakers earlier. That was one example of keeping my brain thinking that I would get well and preparing my body for the day I would be well.

It also meant doing everything I knew of to live as healthy a life as I could, whether that meant only eating healthy foods, getting as much fresh air into my room as possible, being as active as I could be under the circumstances, or spending a lot of time thinking about what I needed to do step by step to get through each day as well as I could.

That meant if I felt well enough to walk for even 10 feet, then I’d walk for 10 feet. If it meant I could do a bit of light stretching without feeling negative consequences, I’d do a bit of light stretching. If it meant having someone come to pray with me even if I felt wretched, then I’d do that. Digging that tunnel out of jail bit by bit by bit. And, finally, freedom came.

Photo: Eric Davidson