10LymeB said...
I'm herbal only. I've had a few prescription antifungals, however.
Mold, candida, and fungus needs to be addressed if you're going herbal. You also need to work on your gut. Start slow, go easy. I don't like antibiotics. They mess up your gut. Far as I'm concerned, I'll just work on my gut now, instead of having to deal with an even bigger problem later. I'm also not in critical condition.
Great comments about
GI health, mold, candida, fungus - that really need to be addressed before most people will have success with any treatment - herbal or antibiotic.
Some people cannot handle abx - probably for various reasons, some of which include:
- Sometimes, that's because they already have GI imbalance, maybe including yeast/fungus overgrowth, which the abx can make worse. ETA: This is FAR more common than people and the medical industry understands - first, 80% of the abx sold in the US are sold to food producers of live animals almost ENTIRELY because of the filthy and unhealthy conditions in which the animals are grown/kept so anyone eating animal proteins have been consuming abx for years and have likely already experienced GI imbalance. And second, the typical American diet is horrifically unhealthy with an abundance of processed foods
- Sometimes it's due to other bacterial imbalances, which abx make worse because they kill all bacteria, even the good ones that help promote balance in the gut biome.
- Some people are sensitive or even allergic to the abx.
- Some people unknowingly have other infections going on that the abx also hit, and so the impact of the die off, toxins, etc. is just toooo much to handle.
- And some people develop c-diff, which is very difficult to resolve. But not everyone is contracting c-diff, and certainly not everyone is dying from it and not everyone contracting c-diff does so from abx use.
The issue is COMPLEX.
There are some people who simply cannot tolerate abx use and they do very well on herbal protocols. Many of those people are also really struggling with GI problems and I was one of them.
The truth is that GI issues also interfere with efficacy of herbal protocols - if you can't properly absorb anything because of GI problems, you're wasting a lot of time and money with herbals too.
And many people, once they heal their GI issues, are very wary of anything that might compromise that. That's why I avoided oral abx and did IV abx, which had its own set of complications and risks. For me, it was important to circumvent the GI altogether (or mostly - abx still enter the GI but not directly) to make progress on reducing the pathogen load as quickly as I could, while I continued to work on GI and I also introduced an oral herbal protocol as quickly as I could.
The larger issue in many of these situations is that most often, abx are used incorrectly (and this is the burden of the patient but really the responsibility of the practitioner! Yet most MDs are also clueless about
GI health). To reduce confusion, I'll focus my comments mainly on people trying to treat Lyme & Co:
- Probably the biggest problem w/ abx use is that people are put on abx before properly preparing their body, primarily their GI.
- On top of that, they aren't properly supporting the GI during tx.
- Additionally, the y/f overgrowth potential is not given consideration, or other GI imbalances.
- And very few people are detoxing appropriately before or during abx use.
- And as many of us has seen here first-hand, some LLMDs are throwing way too many abx or high doses at people without allowing their body a chance to acclimate, which is also where effective detoxing comes into the picture.
And I'm sure I'm missing a few issues but each of us is different and one of the reasons this forum works is that there is so much discussion about
what each of us is doing - this Lyme journey is reliant upon finding that unique protocol that works for each of us. And learning from each other is the key.
-p
Post Edited (Pirouette) : 10/14/2017 2:24:26 PM (GMT-6)