LymeKnowledge

When it comes to water intake, you may have heard the recommendation that you should drink 8 cups per day, but for Lyme patients, it can be a different story. It’s common for Lyme patients to experience excessive thirst as one of the earliest symptoms of tick-borne illness, and it is often overlooked. Well-known Lyme literate doctor, Dr. Lee Cowden (who originated the Cowden protocol) recommends his patients drink three liters or three quarts of clean water, evenly spaced throughout the day. He makes the point that patients need to drink this amount of water per day and not substitute drinks like coffee, caffeinated teas, and soft drinks because all those beverages can be dehydrating. Pure, clean water is recommended.

If you’re already being triggered by the headline of this article, this article is for you. Who isn’t ready to heal? What a stupid question!

But if you’ve been bouncing from treatment protocols and haven’t been experiencing the improvements you’re looking for, it might be time to ask yourself a few probing questions. You may have overlooked some basic principles that can help you into more focused, intention-based healing.

If you are experiencing long-term plateaus in your physical treatments and you are looking to break that cycle, an energy healing modality might be the most effective way to help you reach improvement. There are several major factors that can bring about disease and have it become chronic, and energy treatments can address all of them. However, they are particularly good at relieving emotional, energetic and spiritual stress.

If you are a Lyme Disease patient in the middle of progressing through the illness, you’ve probably been through a variation of the following scenario.

Some time ago, you started experiencing a range of non-specific, hard-to-explain symptoms that caused you to seek help from your regular doctor. He or she put you through a battery of tests that didn’t reach any clear diagnosis, so you continued testing for years or even decades. At some point, almost by accident, you were diagnosed by a doctor who was more versed in Lyme Disease, and you heaved a sigh of relief. Now you knew what you’re dealing with, so now you could treat it and get it over with. The problem is, you’ve been on a range of treatments and your doctor only seems to be trained in antibiotics, pharmaceutical pain relievers and mood enhancers. Most of these things have only brought about short-term improvement or haven’t worked at all; and some of them have caused symptoms of their own. Your symptomology is either plateauing or getting worse, which is causing you to feel upset. Your doctor notices this and suggests you see a psychiatrist.

Now what do you do?

Whether you call it Stone Breaker, Phyllanthus niruri or Phyllanthus amarus, the herb best known as Chanca Piedra has been traditionally used throughout Latin America for centuries to naturally support the kidneys and urinary tract.

However, because it grows in tropical regions all over the world — from China to India to Peru — it has also been an herbal staple in Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine for thousands of years.

What follows is a short list of nine of the more important benefits from this ancient herbal treatment:

Glutathione is an antioxidant that is made by the liver. It is best known for its ability to remove hormones, medications, and toxic chemicals from the body and deal with oxidative stress. It does this by taking substances that are fat-soluble and “stuck” in our tissues and making them water-soluble, which is much easier for the body to eliminate.

Glutathione also helps the body make important enzymes, hormones, new genetic material, and supplies a neurotransmitter called glutamate, which is important for mood, learning, and memory.

Besides treating symptoms and the disease itself, most chronic Lyme patients understand the importance of ridding the body of toxins generated from killing bacteria. Other toxins may also be present in the body from heavy metals, mycotoxins (from mold), normal metabolism or from the environment itself. The point is, in order to give your body a chance to heal properly, these toxins must be removed in a way that doesn’t disrupt your system.

This is where toxin binders can be helpful. A toxin binder is a supplement that can attach itself to a toxic substance and render it harmless while escorting it out of the body through the digestive or urinary tract. Many of these binders are so effective they can actually render various poisonous substances harmless.

Back in 2007, I was in the first phase of my Lyme treatment struggle. I had been on straight antibiotics and pharmaceuticals for two years and I was beginning to feel these treatments were causing me more harm than good. I experienced a CDIFF infection from a PICC line treatment, and I found that certain oral antibiotics either made me suicidal (minocycline) or started causing tendon damage, muscle twitching and heart palpitations (Levaquin and Azythromycin). None of my doctors recommended any detox tips when I complained of herxing and these ancillary symptoms, but I had an intuitive feeling that I needed to do something to get these toxins and cytokines out of me. Thank god for intuition!

When it comes to Lyme disease and exposure to the biting bugs that carry the disease… i.e. ticks, fleas, mosquitoes, horseflies, etc. … your dog may be your “canary in a coalmine.” In other words, because your furry friend is rambling through areas of higher exposure to these bugs than you, it may get exposed to Lyme disease before you do.

Consequently, you may notice your dog exhibiting the following symptoms, and if you do, you should contact your vet to have your pet tested for Lyme disease… Stiff joints, Sudden lameness & limb atrophy, Partial facial paralysis, Fatigue & sluggishness, Depression, and Gastrointestinal problems

There seems to be a debate that rages every day on whether it is a good idea to take antibiotics when treating Lyme disease and co-infections. While there is strong evidence that 4-6 weeks of antibiotics taken within the first 60 days of infection has the potential to completely eradicate persistent infection, there is also evidence that taking them for any length of time after this period can have wildly different effects on patients and the infections themselves.

The purpose of this article is not to debate these facts. Instead, it is to inform any patient or doctor considering prescribing any of the following antibiotics that they can have potentially dangerous side effects on patients with the following pre-existing conditions. Both patient and doctor should be well informed of these facts before embarking on these treatments for any length of time.