Posted 5/26/2019 11:15 AM (GMT 0)
I have seen enormous gains very quickly after 4 years of being infected.
4 years ago, within a few months of being infected I had initially treated 2-3 months using doxy, ceftin and tinidazole.
I saw very minimal if any success, and I wasnt sure if it was the drugs or the disease causing my symptoms at that point as I had never really taken antibiotics in my life.
So for the next 3 and 1/2 years I did zero treatment whatsoever and just hoped i would get over it, or that it would just go away.
It didnt. I got much worse progressively over time to the point I had very little quality of life. I wasnt bedbound or immobilized, but I was severely hindered mentally, physically, spiritually and emotionally, and I was a complete shell of my former active healthy self. I felt like walking dead for 4 strait years.
I also had chronically elevated liver enzymes, very high ferritin, cardiac abnormalities and neurological issues. I was being farmed out to different specialists to try to nail down a cause. A cardiologist, neurologist, 3 infectious disease doctors, a gastroenterologist and a General practitioner. All these were dead ends, but still quite scary because they all found various issues with me.
Eventually I decided I couldnt take it anymore and had nothing to lose so I decided to start treatment using doxycycline 400 mgs a day, as well as several Buhner recommended herbal tinctures and capsules (Japanese knotweed, Cat's claw, Andrographis, teasel and a few other herbs and supplements.)
Within 2 weeks I was feeling unexpectedly better, and after just four weeks of treatment, I had an amazing breakthrough and i felt more like my former self than I had in four years (I go in to great detail about all of this in a VERY LONG post I made here a couple weeks ago titled "great things are happening" that you can find by clicking my username if you are interested.
I have had so many positive gains in such a short time that its almost scary and very unexpected based on the experiences I have read of most people who treat longstanding lyme infections. Like you I have seen overwhelmingly negative treatment experiences people have described not only here but all across the internet.
I have concluded it's basically a "sampling bias" for lack of a better term. I understood this even before I started treatment, but still when you are facing something as uncertain and poorly understood as this disease is, you look at all the information you can find, and most of what you find is negative. I wasnt even sure treatment could work at all based on what I read. I have come to believe its really the exact opposite of what we see online mostly. I think a vast majority of people do get better with treatment, they just dont write about it online. Its kind of like product reviews. Most people who are satisfied with a product or service dont take the time or effort to leave positive comments, but if people are dissatisfied, they are more likely to make the effort to leave a negative review.
I have been completely taken aback and dumbfounded how quickly and effectively my minimal treatment has worked so far. I dont want to jinx it, and i have a long way to go still, but I have gotten many aspects of my mind and my life and my health back that i really thought were gone forever.
I really have no idea why my treatment has been so successful so quickly. I can only theorize. In his book Healing Lyme, Stephen Buhner describes how Lyme bacteria are constantly adapting to their environment (your body) and passing on information about the 'terrain' to their offspring. Its almost like a microcosm of human evolution. Traits are bred into each generation to help them survive the landscape as it exists. In my body, multiple generations of bacteria lived out full life cycles completely unhindered without any threats whatsoever, so perhaps when I introduced herbs and antibiotics into the terrain so suddenly after three and a half years, the current generation of bacteria in my body simply werent evolutionarily equipped to deal with it. They nor their ancestors had never seen it. So perhaps in a weird way, it may have been beneficial for me to withhold all treatment for so long. I can say that most people wouldnt have just not treated with the type of symptoms I had for so long especially if they were as sure as I was that it was lyme.
There are TONS of variables when it comes to lyme and lyme like diseases. Not only the other tick borne coinfections, but somehow parasites and mold have been lumped in with Lyme as well. Testing is so unreliable its hard to say who really has what and who doesnt, or what they may be actually suffering from and trying to treat.
This is why i strongly believe treatment should be focused and simplified as possible. It should be a process of elimination.You eliminate variables by trying a strategy. If that doesnt work you look at other possibilities and modify your approach. You cant really know until you take action and try one approach or another. Many doctors will use a persons response to treatment to actually make the diagnosis. Seems backwards but it works.
So as they say your results may vary, but I have gotten so much back in just 40 days. I am just mad at myself fr not trying sooner. To think I sat through 44 months of such a poor quality of life when I could have turned it around so much in just 1 of those months. Part of my hesitation to treat was based on what I had read from others. Most people said treatment took at least a year and that seemed so daunting to me. Plus many people I read claimed little or no gains after treating longer than a year, so I figured "whats the point. If they cant do it why could I?" This was a HUGE mistake on my part. Each persons treatment is different. I wanted a more precise answer than that, but this really is the truth.
I would just suggest blocking out the negativity and focusing exclusively on YOUR treatment experience. It's good to have others experience and knowledge, but treatment is so individualized it's really all about your experience. Dot assume you will have same problems others did. You never know until you try how your body will react.
You may be very pleasantly surprised as I was.