What is Herxheimer reaction?
Lyme can hide anywhere in your body. Your joints, your brain, your nervous system. When you intake medication to attack Lyme or its coinfections, you experience Herxheimer reaction (the die-off). Basically your body is trying to detoxify the large amount of bacteria that is killed with medication. In the case of Lyme disease, because of the aggressive treatment the body experiences a major die-off and it is not able to detoxify the toxins quick enough,
The die off starts with the flu like symptoms. As you continue the medication your symptoms extends to joint pain and eventually you start to experience nervous system reaction. It gets worse, before it gets better. When fighting Lyme disease, the “it gets worse” part can last anywhere from 2-10 years. This is of course valid especially for cases that had gone without diagnosis for a long time.
Well how do you help the Herx?
You cannot rely on the natural detoxification process your body goes through, so there are options to support the process. Even when you take supplements or exercise to help the detox process, you cannot fully eliminate the symptoms. It still helps a whole a lot though.
There are 2 ways to detox:
- Through our skin:
- Unleaded Clay: This is something you can find in health stores. Spread it to your skin topically, let it dry and wash off.
- Sweat: Go to a sauna (Lyme does not do very well in high temperature, which is a good thing) or exercise (this one is very important, but very hard to accomplish since you feel too weak).
- Through our digestive system:
- Green drinks: Again can be found at health stores. I use green superfood and found it very helpful.
- Parsley or Burluy herbal drops
- Pinella: Relieves the symptoms of neuro-toxins.
You have to remove the toxins from your body as fast as possible, otherwise it gets reabsorbed into your body, instead of being eliminated.
You might be a person that is like me and have a hard time with these type of supplements. Trust me when I say this, you’d rather drink a green nasty looking mixture than not have the ability to control your arms.
Here are some pictures to give you an idea:
UPDATE: I wrote a more detailed list of detoxification techniques. If you are interested, click here.
Spirulina and Chlorella are amazing detoxifiers. They are both algaes that are considered super foods, and one super food that actually deserves the title “super”. They, especially Chlorella, are renowned for their ability to permanently bind to heavy metal atoms and usher them out of the body, but are also highly adept at general detoxification and scouring.
I make a green smoothy with about 50 grams of fresh cilantro, 20 grams of chlorella, 20 grams of spirulina, some celery, spinach, olive oil, V8, and a touch of water. Its consistency is thick, like a pesto. If you dont want the heavy metal mobilization that cilantro is responsible for, substituting all spinach is just fine too.