Houttuynia (HH) as I used it.

Yes, it will look similar to what you will see if you were to open a tea bag - only what you bought will likely be in slightly larger pieces.

3 grams of Houttuynia to 3 cups of water, steeped for only 10 minutes. When I started on this, I had to dilute by 1/2 (add 6 cups of water instead of just 3) for three weeks - I herxed quite hard on it even at that level. I must have had a high bacterial load. So do be careful and adjust as needed, keeping your goal at 3 grams to 3 cups of water. And detox like crazy!!

Everything you an figure out how to do! LOL! Here's what I do:
*Good diet (of course- because of a soy allergy, I can't use anything that is 'pre-made' or any foods with soy oil, including eating out)
*2 quarts of lemon water a day (that's my goal, during cold weather I have trouble meeting that some days)
*Daily oil pulling
*Epsom salt/peroxide soaks (I can only do the foot soaks - the full body soak releases too many toxins too fast for my body)
*Dry skin brushing

I would try the green coffee enemas, but those set off massive intestinal cramps for me that last days. Also because of healing from Addison's, my doc says no caffeine at all, not even decaff.

I wish I had access to a FIR sauna. From what I understand, its one of the best ways to detox from these toxins.

hmmmm I just saw that amazon sells the nutramedix Houttuynia tincture.I wonder if that would be easier for me than the tea. I will aleady be making the Misty meadows tea and rining 4 cups a day- maybe the Houtt tincture would be good- a few drops at a time. not sure.

Traveler----- Do you the the HH alone can totally get rid of bart?

Do you think sida acuta is necessary too?


do you think any of the other lyme herbs in the CT treat the bart also? or is it the HH alone that does it? thanks

Thanks Traveler! I know I keep kind of asking the same questions over and over :) Still waiting for all my herbs to arrive so nothing to report yet.

No, tinctures work differently than the whole herb. For some they work better because the alcohol and water have already pulled out the active compounds - I just can't advise at all on the use of tinctures and how they work on these infections as I've only used whole herbs and made medicinal teas.

I use tinctures for other things though (I actually make my own), so I know that they are very effective for things!

While I've not had to use an antifungal, I do have to use probiotics after a while, but I don't know that everyone will. I can assume that because these are antibacterial/antimicrobial herbs that we use, that there is a need for probiotics, but I also know that my innerds are very, very sensitive and so I have to have the probiotics. I use kefir, and it seems to protect me from having to use antifungals.

For example, the neem leaf in the Chronic Tonic has "...been demonstrated to exhibit immunomodulatory, anti-inflammatory, antihyperglycaemic, antiulcer, antimalarial, antifungal, antibacterial, antiviral, antioxidant, antimutagenic and anticarcinogenic properties."
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15777222

And there are other herbs that are in the Chronic Tonic that can be very helpful for the healing of any of these infections. You can see what purpose they have in the Chronic Tonic by following this link: www.mistymeadows.org/wendydocs/Lyme Disease.pdf
Starting on page 70, she goes through and explains the actions of many herbs.

As for what you should be using to treat these infections, remember that it is your body and is ultimately up to you to follow what you believe is right for you - and remember that you can change your mind!! You can use the abx at the same time as many of the herbs, although many have had good success with herb only approaches as well.

Detoxing needs to be done on a daily basis in order to keep up with the amount of toxins treatments can often release. Remember, it's when the bacteria dies is when it releases the most toxins - and of course that's what these treatments are designed to do - kill the bacteria. Most find that they must do many of the detoxing suggestions that you can find in the "New to Lyme?" thread.

Personally, I have found that these things help me the most:
Oil pulling, dry skin brushing, Epsom salt/peroxide soaks, activated charcoal, drinking 64 ounces of lemon water a day. Although if I had access to a FIR sauna, I would definitely use it too!!

Herxing is a Jarrisch-herxheimer reaction. It's a worsening of current symptoms or new symptoms showing up during treatments that are effective. This is due to toxins being released from the bacteria, and there are not many infections that have this as an aspect of their healing - but Lyme does, and although the researchers say that Bartonella doesn't release toxins, we still have the same experience (herxing).

There are two ways to deal with herxing. The first one, and the more preferable one is detoxing. This helps the body to remove those toxins. If a person experiences a herx even though they are detoxing, generally we tell them to increase their detoxing to help ease the symptoms.

If they have increased their detoxing, but it's just not enough, then we suggest lowering their doses of their treatments some for a bit until the body can catch up with detoxing out the toxins.

Once in a while someone will overwhelm their bodies with toxins - we refer to this as over detoxing. It's essentially the same issue -the body is overwhelmed with toxins. This happens when we are too aggressive with our detoxing and we wind up releasing more toxins from our soft tissues than the detox pathways in our body can removed them quickly - and so we herx.

So we look for that "happy balance".


In order to keep this thread from getting too long, we need to start a new thread for questions, please! Long threads are really hard on our servers!

Go to "Post new topic" on any page and click on it. It will take you to a new thread you can start.

Here is the new thread that I just started for this topic - part 2.
www.healingwell.com/community/default.aspx?f=30&m=3825601