How do you figure out when to increase a dose?

I'm slowly ramping up my herb doses for infections. I know Buhner has said that doses are "made up" and variable to the person. But I still don't know how to determine how much to use. I find myself almost jealous of people who are really sensitive to things because they can find out what their upper limit is easily. But how do you find it otherwise?

- If you find a dose that works for you, do you keep increasing it anyway?
- More importantly, how long do you even take an herb before you decide it is working or not? Or before you decide you need to increase a dose? (I'm assuming you would get feedback on whether to decrease fairly obviously). 1 week? 1 month?

Thank you. It does help a bit (and luckily I'm exactly 150 lbs) but he also says that the doses in his books are just guidelines. That those limits aren't really limits, just a number set down due to clinical experience and historical use of the herb. This is early in the protocol section of healing lyme but I forget where he says it specifically. Something about seeing a tiny woman being able to handle and also need tablespoons of herb, where a really big guy could only manage drop doses.

So I guess I'm trying to figure out how he determined the woman needed huge doses. Like, would it have been after a given amount of time and not seeing any improvement? And if so, what would a good amount of time be to judge that?

Anyone who has experience figuring this out, either for themselves or others--your input would be greatly appreciated it.

Thanks, Garzie. Even this explanation is truly very helpful. Having never really progressed deeply in my healing yet, it's really helpful to hear what to expect and consider from others who are veteran in this. Even things like Herxs lasting about a week, for example. I'll try to keep all this mind and see if I can figure out some way to track progress. If you have any recommendations here, also, that would be helpful.

For mold, for example, retesting is easy, but for lyme and bartonella, not so much (especially since even just their presence is hard to determine in the first place--I can't even confirm I have bartonella right now, just going off of symptoms). I think for these, subjective will be all I have.

Lyme Treatment tracker chart

Before I describe how I do this I would like to highlight that key thing to appreciate is that the value to be obtained from such tracking approaches is not from some magic or technology in the app, but in the reasoning and logic applied by the user –
what i mean by that is any app or program will produce colourful charts – but these have no value in themselves - the actual usefulness will only be as good as the care and thought you put into setting it up to suit your particular situation - it does take some thought and effort to set it up - but once set up it takes only minutes to complete each day - and pays you back indefinitely.

i use MS Excel - keep data in a table – and fill in 1 column of data per day - and then plot that in a simple line chart - but you can do the same thing in Google Sheets(free), Microsoft 365 online(free) or whatever the Linux based equivalents are – like Libreoffice sheets etc

the key aspects to take care of when setting up such a tracker are
1, start by establishing a baseline - so you have a useful reference point for your health status starting from before interventions

2, measure / record both inputs/interventions - and - outcomes ( you need both to see what causes what)

3, make great effort to make the outcome measures objective (things you can objectively measure - rather than subjectively observe –ie things you “feel”) the former are independent of your mood, the weather, etc - the later vary a lot from day to day dependent on a lot of variables you will not always be aware of– like mood, feelings or hope or hopelessness, how well you slept, how much social contact you have had etc etc

4,keep the way you measure inputs and outcomes consistent over time - both day to day - and over the long term to avoid drift devaluing your tool (I recommend writing down exactly how you score and record each measure as a reminder to yourself)

5, use charts to visualise trends, delayed effects, unexpected effects, and incremental improvements you cannot notice subjectively – you will likely find simple moving averages are useful in helping to smooth lines and spot trends.

6, consider combining several of the measures of objective outcomes to give yourself an “overall wellbeing” score as your main metric - so you can see if your overall condition is improving in a concrete measurable way over time – as an example fatigue was my most life limiting symptom – so I used measures of
• How early I was able to start my day
• How many tasks of 15minutes or more I could get done in a day
• How many hours sleep I got the previous night
• How long it took me to complete my daily walk
• How much exercise if any I was able to do that day
Each of these objective measures were turned into a score out of 10 - so now If you then take the average of all of them you have a quite reliable and repeatable measure of your physical health that day - that you can use to track progress over the long term

7, you will find that its helpful to keep all of your measures as scores out of 10 or 20 or 5 or some round number - so that everything is easier to reason - and fits on the same chart easily.

Also give some thought to how you score each measure - eg directionality - ie make higher numbers "good" for all measures - or higher numbers "bad" - as this will be important when trying to combine scores for an "overall measure" ie for determining "am i improving or declining over time?"

I did provide one of the other members a excel template with a chart to help them get started with the above approach - I can find and repost that if it would be useful

i hope its of some help

Wow, thank you so much for this Garzie! This is truly a great resource. Hopefully I will be able to have enough energy and focus to be able to stick to tracking all this consistently.

most days i simply copy and paste columns to the right for the new day's data

then i can quickly update the few things that have changed vs yesterday

my chart is pretty big now - but it still only takes me 20mins a day to maintain like this

good luck!

hmm -sorry about that - i tested them before posting - i think the forum software is configured to mess with the links in some way that breaks them.

will try to find the originals an re-post

checked and they are definitely opening for me fine now