How Long After Starting Treatment Did You Start Feeling Better?

Hang in there. Prayers for Houston!


We are all different. We respond differently to different treatments. For me, 1.5 years of antibiotics, didn't bring much improvement. Then to herbals, which i think are starting to help. Hopefully, you'll see improvement soon and quickly.

It took me a year on abx and herbs before I started to feel any real improvement.

In fact I got allot worse during that 1st year of treatment, but once I got over the hump improvements did come.

Killing these bugs will be painful, no way around it, but you have no other real choice but to kill them.

Detoxing will be your best friend.

Post Edited (Kirky98) : 9/2/2017 8:12:16 PM (GMT-6)

Hi jmoore06
Sending our prayers and hope for better days ahead in Texas for all of you. I hope you are doing ok.

When I began treatment with antibiotic I did start to feel better about a month later. How ever that all changed as I continued treatment.

There have been lots of ups and downs. For some of us when we knock down one infection, for example Lyme, then sometimes the other infections show up with an increase in symptoms.

My Lyme symptoms have gotten better but then for me Bartonella came on strong. So it can be a challenge.

I do recall many members saying it took a good year for some of them to feel much better.

I do believe there are many factors that play into when we get better. How many infections we are fighting, how long we had them before beginning treatment, our previous health status, and how we follow through with treatment, diet, detoxing etc.

Hang in there the best thing is to keep treating and healing should follow. It does take time for many of us but we will get there.

Have a good night, Jo

With Lyme and co-infections, it will depend, in part, on what you respond to.

When I started feeling better before a relapse, it seemed to be Bicillin that made the difference after trying so many other meds. Felt 80% better for about 2 years then relapse due to stress, travel, surgery, etc...

Now the Biciilin is not having same impact because co-infections have increased on testing. But it will take longer than weeks, which is not meant to be discouraging. It's reality that makes me worry less that I will never feel good again.

Just keep working at it, keep diet healthy, stress as low as possible. That will help. And it may take changes in how you treat it. But know things can get better with patience, which I ma not good at.

There seems to be a world of 2 extremes when it comes to treating Lyme. Either you feel much better quickly, or you stay sick and progress is much slower. I have done A LOT of research scouring different forums and reading opinions of many different people, LLMDs included. I love hearing about people who have 'mild chronic' infections who are able to treat for 3-4 months and have noticeable improvement, but these types of cases seem few and far between.

I look for the middle ground where people get better in instances between these two extremes, because at this point I know I am chronic, and like all of us, hope to achieve the most uneventful quickest recovery possible. I know a couple weeks wont do it because im beyond the acute stage.

This is one of the hardest things about treatment is not knowing what to expect. Not having milestones or ways to evaluate treatment effectiveness. There is little information out there that I have found, that explains what improvement is even like. It seems that for most people that do get better, their symptoms slowly ease over time, and they notice one day that they no longer have the symptoms they once did. I rarely read about cases of drastic improvement unless treatment is begun immediately.

I wish there was a more formulaic step by step process of healing that we could all follow and expect to achieve, but you rarely find this reported. It would be nice to know what healing is supposed to feel like so we have a point of reference in our recovery. There are so many complicating factors with the ideas of herxing and detoxing and hidden pathogens to becoming more prominent as others are treated that for many healing doesnt seem linear at all, and that actually getting worse is a 'good sign'. But how can one possibly quantify what is a herx and what is a bad reaction to meds and what is a progression of the disease? All we have to go on is how we feel and many have convinced themselves feeling worse means feeling better, if that even makes sense.

You hear all sorts of timelines being thrown around. The most common I hear from most LLMds I have talked to and read about is 6 months to a year. This may be too optimistic, as you dont know if this a selling point or a realistic estimate. Others that claim to have healed say it took 3 years of treatment, others 5 years and others still, say treatment can be indefinite or forever.

This can all be very discouraging, and even enough for some to not even attempt treatment, but you never know until you try.

I try to keep in mind that most of these instances are self reported by people on Lyme sites, so there may be a 'reporting bias' meaning that people who do get better relatively quickly have no real reason to hang around Lyme sites, so their stories are under represented. This is my hope, and it does make some sense if you think about it. If my doc told me to treat for 3 months and I was healed, I wouldnt be on a Lyme site either to be honest.

Theres a million different suggestions and supposed reasons why you might not be getting better, and some doctors and many non doctors will talk about these factors as if they are just obvious and there is some well known chronic Lyme orthodox. There isnt. Some will insist diet, some will insist herbs, They will suggest Maybe a coinfection, maybe candida, maybe mold or parasites or EMFs maybe not the right antibiotic combo. Honestly who knows? While one doc may look at your symptoms and say you arent getting better because of not treating the right coinfection, another doc will look at the same set of symptoms and say its all lyme and you have to keep treating lyme and address biofilms and persisters. All you can really do is take it step by step and walk this path of trial and error and hope for the best. Stick to basic fundamentals everyone agrees on like probiotics.

Of the people I have read about who get better, there seems to be a common theme I have noticed. Ignorance is bliss. The more you know about Lyme the less you really know and success seems to come for people who follow simpler treatment methods and dont overcomplicate their treatment too much by confusing themselves and falling into various rabbit holes. You take it one step at a time and dont assume because someone else had a particular complication that you will too. You have to be patient and don't move on to the next protocol or theory until you have really given your current approach a good honest solid try. If after 3-4 months nothing is better or you are worse, then re-evaluate and change the approach.

This helps to narrow it down as people have their own experience, they may not know what works, but over time they can say what didnt work for them and after a few months, try something else. It really is trial and error, and you want to start from the most basic premise possible. I.E. I have a bacterial infection, therefore antibiotics should kill the bacteria and I should feel better. If you dont feel better then ask further questions and make slow subtle adjustments to address the possible reasons 1 at a time.

It's not a perfect plan by any means, and certainly not 'scientific' but unfortunately it's the best approach we currently have. Good Luck, and I hope later on you can answer your own question for the rest of us and share what healing was like for you.

It would be nice if there were a magic formula! I was feeling really good about 8 weeks in, following 4 weeks of a restricted diet and then 4 weeks of antibiox. It's been about 6 months of treatment now using various mixes of antibiox and herbs, sometimes one or the other, and my Bart symptoms are front and center. Some days are harder than others, but I have more good hours than I had before treatment.

I think it's important to have goals outside of lyme, and to keep on living your life the best you can.

I'm almost two months into ABX, but I'm a year into my herbal treatment. I started feeling better after a month but my symptoms are still hanging around. Two months in and I started having some "normal" days.

The hard part about ABXs is keeping the gut flora healthy. Please take copious probiotics and detox.

with CD57 of 16 and if youve had symptoms for a long time (years) before starting treatment, you are looking at at least 6 months...

6 months just to gain noticeable improvement, not cure. there is no cure once it is left to spread in all your tissues for years. however loads of research is going on so things are happening, there are new experimental drugs.

sorry but i think we all deserve to know the truth from start, counceling should come in second.....i believe this may help people understand the seriousness of this disease from the start.

otherwise, an attitude like "i take some drugs a few months, then some herbs, will make some new friends and in the end everything will turn out fine" is NOT going to make you healthy again.

i dont "have" the drugs, i just know about them

dapsone, pyrazinamide
/m.facebook.com/drrichardhorowitz/posts/1017491018339696

some oils
www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/17/130898

disulfiram
/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4827596/

crazy hard to get triple drug combinations
/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4373819/

there are many teams researching at the moment. we apparently are part of a very lucrative market, sick with no treatment and not dying any time soon. perfect....

this has all been produced by research clearly showing for the first time since lyne was discovered, that lyme does not die with current antibiotics

news.northeastern.edu/2015/06/researchers-discovery-may-explain-difficulty-in-treating-lyme-disease/

this infectious diseases group at northeastern is so famous (found a cure for MRSA and a new antibiotic that does not develop resistance, teixobactin) that nobody can deny their find and be skeptic, so several groups now are testing all types of s**t on these persisters to find something that kills them....

what u need to do now is take your regular pills just to keep you afloat, and WAIT. more help will be available soon. it already is in NY... there is a larger trial with 400+ patients on dapsone, by dr H...