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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

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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

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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.

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.

LDI: What I’ve learned

Okay.Here are the stats. Eight months of Low dose immunotherapy. Five injections for Lyme and co-infections. Two instances of moderate flaring of symptoms, one mild to moderate flare, one mild flare, and one very mild flare. Seem to be closing in on the target dose.

So what have I found out on this long and sometimes baffling journey? One thing for sure is that it can be very difficult to find the target dose. Beyond that, here are some other observations.

Take it easy and get your rest after taking the LDI dose. It’s a tiny looking amount you’re taking, but it’s packed with dozens of Lyme and co-infection antigens. If you have a lot of co-infections, your body could be in for some heavy flaring if it’s not your target dose. The antigens are essentially homeopathic nosodes (made from micro dilutions of dead microbes), which can stimulate your immune system to fight. Dr. Ty Vincent, the founder of LDI, says that if you’ve found the core dose, you shouldn’t have any flaring. But finding the core dose takes time, and flaring is a lot more common than not flaring.

Take it especially easy once you’ve determined that you are flaring. I learned this with a recent dose. I could see a mild flare had started, but I had a lot I wanted to do that day. By 7 p.m. I felt dreadful. I scheduled extra rest in the following days, and from then on the flare caused no serious distress. Lesson learned: My body needed extra energy to handle the flare.

LDI doesn’t work as well for me in winter. I live in Canada where even mild winters like this past one are plenty cold. I found it much harder to tolerate a flare in January than I did in September. The reduction in fresh air and sunshine negatively affects immunity, as does the increased number of viruses and other other bugs kicking around in mid-winter.

Some flares may have a silver lining. In two instances, I felt better after the flare was over than I had before the flare started. This is not the way it’s supposed to work, according to what Dr. Vincent has said in interviews. This isn’t criticizing Dr. Vincent, who has done tremendous work with LDI, but in just about every field sometimes the general rules don’t apply to everyone. Several other people on the LDI for Lyme Facebook group noted they’d had the same experience of feeling better after the flare than before the flare.

If you’re very sensitive or have had Lyme for a long time or have a lot of co-infections, it’s probably best to do one set of antigens at a time. Along with LDI for Lyme and co-infections, you can add in yeast, mold and other antigens. I fit into all three categories mentioned in the heading of this paragraph, and I’ve had plenty to handle with the LDI for Lyme and co-infections antigens. I can’t imagine moving on to other things until I’ve found my core dose.

It’s a good idea to work on reducing microbial load before doing LDI. This is especially true if you have a lot of co-infections. As I mentioned above, an LDI dose can give your body a lot of work to do if you’ve missed the core dose. I’m very glad that I’d taken a lot of antimicrobial herbs and done other microbial load reducing work in the time leading up to my first dose. If I hadn’t, the process so far would likely have been a lot more problematic.

Napping can be an effective weapon once you’re determined you’re flaring. I’ve found I can save myself a lot of misery if I take a nap as soon as I’m certain a flare has started. I don’t like napping, so I didn’t do this in my early days of LDI. But I have since found that my mother was right years ago when she told me that if you’re feeling sick, lie down and rest. Works for colds, flu and LDI flares. It’s probably good to increase fluid intake too.

I probably wouldn’t have wanted to try LDI when I was really sick. Finding your target dose can be an intense process that includes a lot of flaring. I’m at a point in my recovery where I can handle that, but in earlier days when I felt dreadful all the time, having a lot of flares may have placed too much stress on my body and provoked a serious setback.

Different batches may affect potency. This is controversial. Some people on the LDI for Lyme Facebook group say the doses don’t lose any strength if they were made many months before injection. Others disagree. All I can say is I initially reacted more strongly to an 18C dose from a fresh batch than I did to a 17C dose from an old batch (18C is weaker than 17 C, so I should have had a stronger reaction to the 17C).

Don’t assume the flare period is over when you start feeling better. I’ve had two instances where it looked like the flaring process was finished after seven days. But then on days nine and ten after taking the dose, I had my most intense flares.

It can be a good idea to take a break in treatment. This happened to me this past winter. I had a near three-week flare, and it was time for my next LDI shot, and I still wasn’t feeling great. The picture wasn’t clear, so I decided to wait a few weeks until I felt better before resuming LDI. Things soon settled down, and now I’ve taken my next shot and things appear to be back on track.

It’s important to be very patient. An LDI flare can make you feel so sick you want to quit. And sometimes it can be a good idea to quit if the treatment is clearly not working and does not look like it ever will. But for most people, it’s a matter of realizing this is a new thing that can be both very difficult to figure out while at the same time offering a real hope of substantial improvement and even complete remission from Lyme. Knowing that makes patience a lot easier to muster than would otherwise be the case.

Cutting the cost of Lyme

I’ve always been pretty good at finding ways to keep my wallet stuck inside my pocket, but since getting Lyme disease I’ve been forced to further refine the art of not spending money.

Make no mistake, getting well from Lyme can be very costly. There are often physician visits, antibiotics, lab tests, supplements, sometimes top-quality herbs, etcetera, etcetera. So I’ve found that creativity is needed to save some of those ever-shrinking funds.

You can always cut out frills, but you have to eat. When I first got sick, I had to change my diet and it was strange and difficult. But once I made the paradigm shift, I found the new normal to be far superior, and cheaper.

Successfully making these changes required seeing through a couple of food myths. The first: Vegetables and fruit are expensive. The second: Going gluten free is really expensive.

Eating lots of vegetables, health experts agree, promotes better health. And while some veggies are costly, many of the ones most helpful for people with Lyme are cheap, such as garlic, onions, leeks, cabbage, parsley, and carrots.

When I go to my fruit and vegetable store (a much better option than the supermarket) I aim at 30 cents per serving of veggies, and I easily meet that goal. And if you want to spice things up, you’ll find that spices are often the cheapest foods you can find.

Staying within that price range with fruit is tricky, often requiring buying sale items. I also buy the smallest pieces of fruit available, as this reduces both cost and sugar intake.

It’s not a myth that organic produce is expensive. If you can afford it, great, but even if you think you can’t, sometimes you can. My store sometimes has specials where the organic version of a veggie is cheaper than the conventional one.

I find it difficult convincing people that gluten free doesn’t have to mean breaking the bank. If you can’t imagine a world without packaged food, then gluten-free prices are ridiculous. But if you shift to eating fresh veggies, fruit, eggs, nuts, seeds, non-gluten grains like brown rice, quinoa and buckwheat, and moderate amounts of meat and fish, you’ll be off gluten with substantially reduced cost.

I’ve also learned that I can save a lot by eating prebiotic and probiotic foods. There are dozens of them, usually common everyday items, and you can find their names with a quick web search.

This reduces my need for expensive probiotic supplements. And some experts, like Dr. David Perlmutter, author of the bestsellers Brain Maker and Grain Brain, and Jeff Leach, author of Rewild, say that while bottled probiotics are good, eating a wide variety of probiotic and prebiotic foods is also important for gut health.

I’ve found several other areas besides food where I can fight Lyme inexpensively or without cost.

Lyme patients must handle exercise cautiously. If your body is exhausted, it’s foolhardy to do anything but light stretching. But for many, exercise can produce significant health gains. Dr. Joseph Burrascano, a leading Lyme physician, is among those who advocate substantial regular exercise for Lyme patients.

Fortunately, I can exercise, but I can’t afford gym memberships. So instead of paying hundreds of dollars, I bought a $10 book off Amazon outlining dozens of body weight exercises. These exercises use your body’s natural resistance as weights. Push-ups are one example.

Making this approach more valuable is the option to do it outside – in your backyard, at a park, or best yet at the beach or ocean. I’m allergic to mold and several other things, and the breeze coming off the water clears away a lot of the allergens.

That brings me to two of my favorite free Lyme helpers – fresh air and prayer.

No one would dispute fresh air’s benefits. Studies suggest outdoor air is generally much cleaner than indoor air, so I get outside as much as I can – of course guarding carefully against further tick bites. I also open my windows as much as possible, as long as there are no allergens around and as long as it doesn’t put me in the way of a draft.

Prayer, on the other hand, has its believers and its doubters. I’m a believer. Some studies say prayer promotes healing; others say it doesn’t. But in my experience, I feel I’ve seen important benefits.

The act of prayer itself usually promotes a state of calm, similar to what would happen in meditation, and being in a peaceful state helps everyone. And meditation, of course, can be free too. One method is a simple breath meditation, where you still yourself and follow your breathing.

Healing prayer with laying on of hands has many skeptics, but I feel I have received a considerable health boost as a result of it, and it hasn’t cost me a cent. If interested, you could find out about this option by asking around at local churches or by checking the web. Healing prayer by phone is also offered through many sources, one of which is well-known Lyme author Connie Strasheim, who has regular prayer calls. Information can be found at her website – www.conniestrasheim.com.

Perhaps the widest variety of useful, free resources can be found at the local library. I can get not only free printed books, ebooks, and audiobooks, but also free movies and music and free computer and internet access.

An ongoing battle with Lyme means that you never know when you can use that extra cash you kept in your bank account. Maybe you can try a new treatment that shows promise, or travel to see a top-notch physician. And while holding on to money may not be as much fun as spending it, I think I’m one of many people who derive no small amount of joy from finding new ways to save the stuff.

LDI: Part 2. On hold

For me, LDI started out well, and I believe it’s going to end well.

But lately, it hasn’t been going very well, so for the reasons I’m about to share I’m taking a break from Low Dose Immunotherapy.

I’m not sure why, but at about four months into treatment, the positive trend I had been enjoying started to shift. I hoped this would quickly pass, but it didn’t. I’d feel a bit better, then a bit worse, or maybe a lot worse.

Some days were okay, others dreadful. “This reminds me of something,” I thought to myself. “The year when I first got sick with Lyme.”

Before going further, I should briefly explain LDI to those not familiar with it. It’s a treatment for Lyme disease and co-infections developed two years ago by an Alaskan doctor, Ty Vincent, that seeks to improve patients’ immune system tolerance and effectiveness. Many have seen fantastic results, and the use of LDI is rapidly spreading among Lyme physicians.

But while response has been mainly positive, some patients have had mixed results or even seen their situations get worse.

After investing a significant amount of time and money in LDI, it was hard to admit to myself that I was starting to go backward health-wise and that I had to do something about it.

Fortunately, I chose the right something – antibiotic herbs. I started with a microdose and gradually upped it from there. I’m happy to say that I’m now feeling a whole lot better.

I realize that Dr. Vincent says patients had best not take microbial killing protocols while doing LDI because that makes it more difficult finding the correct dose, but sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.

I didn’t think it would happen this way, because, as I said, my LDI adventure had a good start.

My first dose was a fairly standard 15C (doses are diluted homeopathically and contain a minute amount of dead microbes). I had moderate flaring the first week or so, but the symptoms weren’t problematic. Following this came about a month of feeling pretty well, a bit better than I had been feeling in the months before starting LDI. Then came a couple of weeks where things slid a bit, although that was barely noticeable.

This is called a mixed reaction. I felt a bit worse when flaring, then a bit better afterward.

Because I had flared, the LDI rules said I had to wait at least seven weeks for the next shot. My doctor weakened the dose to 17C, and again there was some flaring, this time milder, and again lasting about a week. And again, I then experienced a month or so of feeling pretty well, followed by a couple of so-so weeks.

I hadn’t hit the magic target dose, but overall I was making progress. Until just before I was scheduled to take the next injection. I woke in the middle of the night feeling a bit nauseated, and my doctor decided later that morning to delay the shot until that cleared.

Good call. That bit of nausea turned into a two and a half week flare that I had an awful time shaking off. When I did, I received an 18C injection.

Again, a week or so of flaring followed. But then there was only one week of feeling a bit better. Following that, I felt like the flare had come back. That added up to nearly a month of nausea, body aches, and a general malaise to a degree I’d hoped I’d never experience again.

What went wrong? I’m almost positive it wasn’t some flu, because no one I was in contact with had anything like that. And I’ve had enough Lyme flares in my life to be almost certain that this was the culprit.

My main theory is that I was biting off more than I could chew. The LDI doses are homeopathic nosodes of Lyme and co-infections, and the purpose of a nosode is to stimulate the body to fight the microbes. I also found it interesting that an energy medicine practitioner I know said he was seeing strong evidence that LDI patients he worked with were significantly reducing their loads of the Lyme bacteria.

So I think I was killing more Lyme than my body could comfortably handle. It may have been a cumulative thing where I reached a tipping point where I could no longer manage the die-off nearly as well.

I believe winter was also a problem. I live in Canada, and even mild winters like this one mean that my immune system gets a lot less help from sunshine and fresh air and a lot more challenge from spending extra time indoors and from having to deal with the various colds and other bugs that circulate this season.

For the time being, I’ll continue taking antibiotic herbs. But the reason I decided to try LDI was because it has the potential to bring me from a point of being shy of fully well to being fully well. So I plan to resume LDI sometime in the spring when conditions seem more favorable.

For some people, LDI works right away, like magic. But it’s my sense that the majority of patients find it a winding road. That’s certainly what my path has been like, and I’m hoping that the bumpiest part of the journey is now behind me.

LDI: The great Lyme hope

I am a guinea pig.

By this, I mean I’m early on the boat when it comes to Low Dose Immunotherapy or LDI, which is considered by many to be the most promising new Lyme treatment to come along in years.

In a nutshell, these are the LDI facts. It was pioneered nearly two years ago by an environmental medicine practitioner named Dr. Ty Vincent, who hails from Alaska. He had been having difficulty getting his Lyme patients well, so he tried a new approach that spun off a treatment called Low Dose Allergen Therapy (or LDA).

With LDI, patients are given by injection or under the tongue an incredibly small dose of dead particles of many strains of the Lyme bacteria, Borrelia, as well as many strains of co-infections like Bartonella, Babesia, and Ehrlichia. Along with this, the patient is given an enzyme called beta-glucuronidase, a substance that helps build T regulatory cells, an important part of the immune response.

The idea is to develop more immune tolerance to the microbes. Vincent’s theory is that most people with persistent Lyme are sick mainly because their immune systems are overreacting to the bugs and causing a negative cascade of chemical reactions in their bodies.

Somehow, in a way that I don’t fully understand, the combination of the low dose dead microbes and the enzyme can cause the immune system to deal more efficiently with the microbes. The trick is getting the dose just right. When that happens, patients feel much, much better, and don’t experience any flaring.

It’s Vincent’s view that millions of people carry these bugs without getting sick, and that a lot of people ill with Lyme and co-infections could carry them too if their immune systems were properly regulated.

There’s more to it than that, but that covers the basics.

The question is: Does it work?

Early results looked fantastic, as, after several months, Vincent was saying 90 per cent of patients on LDI were improving, and many were totally better. That percentage has dropped substantially as the technique has spread and more doctors have incorporated it into their practices, but no one knows what the batting average is now.

I am not the guinea pig type, and rarely try a treatment until it has an established track record. But I tried LDI because for a long time I’ve felt that immune overreaction has been a major problem for me, and because many well-respected Lyme doctors speak highly of it and use it on their patients.

And, because it offers hope. I’ve gotten a lot better, but I’m stuck at a point shy of being fully well. LDI could change that.

So how am I doing? It’s nearly six months since I started, and I’d say I’ve been helped a bit in some ways and made worse a bit in others.

My first dose was a 15C potency. That’s a pretty normal starting point. The range is usually between about 5C and 23C depending on how sensitive your practitioner thinks you are. The potencies are homeopathically diluted, and according to Vincent, a 5C potency is equal to one part in 10 billion of the actual substance. Now that’s low dose.

I hoped my immune system would react to the treatment by shutting off inflammation and responding to the Lyme and co-infections in a more effective way. Then I’d feel great. This happens to some people. Not to me.

My reaction was mixed. You’re told to give it 10 days from the day of treatment before making any judgments, and after that period had finished, I had gone through some moderate flaring of symptoms, but overall I felt a bit better. But the mild improvement could have resulted from other factors.

One of Vincent’s rules is if you flare at all, you should go to a weaker dose after a seven or eight week period is up. The waiting period is because the dose, he says, is educating the T regulatory cells, and that process takes about 55 days.

So I tried 17C next. This time, there was mild flaring, and I felt much the same after 10 days. After another break of about two months, it was 18 C with very mild flaring, and at the end again I felt much the same.

The main question I have is this. When is a flare a good thing and when is it a bad thing? Vincent’s goal is to get patients not to overreact to the microbes and not have a flare, but he says getting a flare means your body is reacting, and that should mean that eventually you’ll find the right dose. He feels the worst thing is no reaction at all, which probably means the treatment won’t work for you.

But I wonder if perhaps a flare can in itself be positive. The diluted dead microbes are essentially homeopathic nosodes, and my neighborhood homeopath tells me the purpose of nosodes is to stimulate your body to fight the germs you are carrying.

In this case, a flare could mean that I may feel lousy, but my body is whittling down the microbial load I’m carrying. And that’s a good thing, as long as I’m strong enough to handle the flare. Having a severe flare when you are in a highly weakened condition is usually a very bad thing in my experience, as it can lead to serious setbacks.

My other question is that while getting the dose right means you’ll start reacting to the microbes more effectively, does missing the right dose lead to your body to deal with the microbes less effectively? I sometimes get the sense that since starting LDI my body has become more likely to overreact to the germs.

There’s also the opportunity cost of LDI. Vincent recommends patients stay off killing protocols until they’ve found the correct, or target dose, which will be given regularly once it’s been established as a way of keeping patients well. But I’m six months in and really at much the same point as where I started. Would I have been better off now if I’d gone with other treatment options?

As guinea pigs go, I’m a stubborn one, so I’ll give it at least one more try. There are many cases where people go many months searching for the target dose, and once they find it, it’s like sticking a key in the ignition switch. Vrroom, vroom, and life is all of a sudden a whole lot better. Knowing that makes it very difficult to give up on the great Lyme hope.

The double-edged sword of exercise

Exercise. Sometimes it’s been my best friend and sometimes it’s been my worst enemy.

I’ve always been an athletic person, so it’s difficult to admit that exercise was probably one cause of my getting sick with Lyme.

Here’s what I mean. It appears I was carrying Lyme and various coinfections for years until the perfect storm hit and several stressors gave the microbes the upper hand.

Things like picking up a bad flu bug, working in a sick building, living in a moldy house, and doing too much exercise.

There were few activities I enjoyed more than cross-country skiing. I’d go for miles and miles, and I’d always feel exhilarated when finished. Until suddenly I started feeling exhausted.

I had no clue the last thing I needed was to further wear out my adrenal glands, which Lyme was stealthily battering. The doctor said I was fine, but I soon knew I had to stop knocking myself out on the ski trails.

As my health began spiraling downward, I gave up exercise altogether. The Lyme took off, and I quickly found myself bedridden.

My first mistake was too much exercise. My second was too little. While the idea of expending energy for anything besides essentials seemed preposterous, doing no exercise contributed to my getting weaker and weaker. At one point, I had to switch from 16-ounce water bottles to eight-ounce bottles because the larger container was too heavy.

Eventually, I decided I’d do whatever exercise I could manage. It was a good move, if you’ll pardon the pun.

I started with the invisible nautilus. I figured I had enough strength to do exercises I once did at the gym – things like arm curls, bench presses and leg raises – if I used zero weight.

Slowly I advanced to wall pushups. Then I could start walking again. One day to the first telephone pole on my street, a few days later to the second telephone pole and so on. I was walking at the speed of a 95-year-old, but I was walking.

In retrospect, I credit exercise as a factor in a return to much-improved health. The arm curls advanced to two-pound weights, then three pounds, four pounds and upwards and onward. The walks got a bit longer and longer. Moderate exercise became possible once again.

I haven’t strapped on the cross-country skis yet, but I look forward to the day when that happens. The key for me with exercise is always, always, always, do only what I feel confident I can manage and no more. So now that I have a grasp of what my limits are, exercise has once again become a real good buddy of mine – all the time.