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Our Family - Behavioral Outburts, Acne, Urinary Problems, Hormones...Oh My!
I'm thinking a lot about ticks. We pull them off of ourselves daily: big ones, small ones, fast ones, slow ones... One of us has noticed that he now actually feels a pricking/painful sensation just as the tick starts to attach, and repeatedly has found and pulled ticks off himself using this Early Warning System that his body seems to have developed.
I am positive that members of our family have been exposed to LYME - it's impossible that we haven't, what with seven of us pulling deer ticks off ourselves daily. We continue to feel that ticks checks daily without fail is the best line of defense, since possibly the ticks haven't yet had time to disgorge themselves into us completely if we pull them off soon...but I also think a LOT about how susceptible a given person is to infection, and how well their body fights it. Optimizing our health seems super important, as always, but how to do this??
One of our children has been more susceptible to symptoms from (all sorts of) passing infections than anyone else in the family, starting with a terrible bout with some unknown respiratory bug about five years ago. Now I can't help wondering if this same child is struggling with lyme-type or lyme-related infections, even though we've never seen a bullseye.
I literally cannot find information online that helps me figure out what to do if that's the case, or whether to trust any given practitioner, each of whom uses all sorts of things under the sun, plus antibiotics, plus energy work, plus Chinese medicine, plus a zillion other very expensive possible treatments that of course would be worth it if they work, but how on earth to evaluate? Lyme tests seem notoriously unreliable, cannot (as far as I can tell) distinguish an active infection, and don't necessarily catch other tick-borne diseases that may be just as bad. If this child's symptoms are Lyme-ish, they are definitely chronic (starting years ago, although worsening lately), and in that case antibiotics scare me even more than if it were an easy-to-see bullseye with a recent tick bite. Symptoms seem to be "triggered" by colds that the rest of us get, but this child then continues into weeks of: constant headache, super fatigue, pain “all over”, lowered appetite, stomach pain, anxiety, and not getting better from the original cold. Is it chicken, or egg? Or is there some other cause?? I had hope for thiamine megadoses, EFA supplementatation/eating nuts, eating eggs, following the child's intuition... and nothing has brought lasting relief, although B1 helps a bit. (This child will eat meat when reminded that Protein is Important, loves fruit, will eat some bread and rice, and will eat some nuts and salad. Not interested in eggs, beans (at ALL), nor soup.)
Tomorrow it will be four years since beginning our low vitamin A adventures...
I am cross-posting with another thread I started about ticks...
Would appreciate any thoughts or ideas concerning infections...
@sarabeth-matilsky The overwhelm is real... 😓
My notion is chronic viral infections wouldn’t happen if the immune system were working properly? (🐔 Is that focusing on the hen? 🙂) Why is the immune system dysregulated, though? Is the question...
I’m sorry your kid is struggling so much. 🙁
Do you include flaxseeds and chia in your diet at all? Could you take a guess at the ratio of plant-based omega 6 to 3 your kid is getting currently?
ETA: the word in bold above lol
I don't include flax or chia currently...but maybe I should?? I don't know what proportion of omega 6 to 3 we/the child in question has been consuming. We only just started eating nuts and seeds last month, after years of not...and I am not sure if we were getting much of either one at all, before...
Great minds think alike, because your thought about Terrain, @puddleduck, is echoed by the author of the book I started reading yesterday. In "Toxic," Neil Nathen focuses on unraveling and "rebooting" the body after exposure to what he deems the most common causes of severe chronic diseases: mold, infections like Lyme and Borellia, synthetic and environmental toxins (I think...can't remember the exact description at this moment), Mast Cell Activation disorder, porphyria, pesticide exposure/buildup, and one other thing. He certainly doesn't get the vitamin A/liver/diet piece, but how many practitioners do?? And he does do a good job of discussing "integrative" treatments, and the super important fact that just because someone gets bitten by a tick or contracts Lyme, for example, does NOT mean they develop long term and complicated sicknesses therefrom. And so the reverse is true: treating a patient for these things must take into account their inherently weakened state (i.e. not just Battling the Enemy with Ferocious Drugs), as evidenced by the fact that they are so sick from something that is not making others as sick. AND in many cases of chronic disease, the constant inflammatory etc. response is keeping the person very ill long after the infectious agent or toxin is gone.
How to break the sickness cycle? Nathen notes that finding the right order to peel the onion layers of sickness treatment is important. He notes that in some cases, treating mold illness results in the same patients' symptoms of Lyme or Borellia subsiding on their own, since the hallmark of these diseases is not eradicating them from the body (impossible), but allowing the immune systems to quell them and keep them at bay - in balance with everything else.
Anyway - certain binders and treatment for mold are a whole lot less invasive and scary than antibiotics, so I'm going to start with that and see where we get. Will just cross post this on the other thread. 🙂 xoxo
Sounds like that Neil Nathan book is super insightful, @sarabeth-matilsky! I appreciate his gentle approach to supporting sick individuals, as being made into a battleground does sound kind of dangerous. 🙂 Binders always seemed less scary to me than the Ferocious Drugs, too...
I hope that path goes well for you guys. 💛🌞 It's good to have somewhere new to start, something new to try. Keep us updated as you are able! 😎
"I don't include flax or chia currently...but maybe I should?? I don't know what proportion of omega 6 to 3 we/the child in question has been consuming. We only just started eating nuts and seeds last month, after years of not...and I am not sure if we were getting much of either one at all, before..."
I'm tempted to infodump into your log on this subject, since I'm focused on it right now...But so as not to make this response too unwieldly, I'll save all the references for my own log update. 🙃
Flax and chia are the only seeds with a decent amount of omega 3, without much omega 6 along with it. Walnuts and hemp hearts have some omega 3, too, but they contain a greater amount of omega 6 (both are close to 4:1 in favor of omega 6). All other nuts and seeds have way more omega 6 than 3.
The hypothesis I'm trying my best to understand suggests: an imbalance between omega 6 and omega 3--especially when omega 3 in the diet is woefully deficient--may contribute to immune system dysregulation. In an omega-6 overload situation, the omega 3 seems to help the body to lower inflammation. Some researchers suggests a 4:1 ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 is optimal, others suggest 1:1, but if an individual with chronic illness is dealing with excess inflammation it is possibly therapeutic to temporarily limit omega 6 as much as possible while restoring omega 3 from chia, freshly ground flaxseed, or cold-pressed-flaxseed oil (but research on this approach is inadequate). I haven't formed any strong conclusions yet from my own experience as I'm just starting to test that last idea, but I do feel the ratio seems to be worth considering.
Fascinating....I can see how we'd be deficient in omega 6s, and ALSO omega 3s...I just got so suspicious about all of them that we kinds stopped eating all of them! Maybe just including nuts isn't enough, and might cause its own set of problems. I look forward to hearing more.
Cross post: I spent about two weeks working the possibly-Lyme-afflicted child up to a dose of one (purified medical-grade bentonite) clay pill in the morning, one in the afternoon (between meals).
There was minimal change, but no negative reactions, so then I started a quarter capsule of charcoal. The first day of charcoal, this child played outside without my husband or me for three hours (the first time the child would leave the house alone in weeks). The second day, six hours of outdoor play. I bumped up to two capsules/day but was informed that "I can't fall asleep at ALL”, so I brought it back down to half-cap 2x day for the past week. This child is SO much better: still anxious, but functional (ie I can leave the room without a panic attack ensuing), the headache and stomach ache and nausea and muscle or join pain (which were more or less constant for over a month this time) have subsided, appetite is up, the child is smiling and happy quite often, and…because my kids always get this weird immune reaction: there is a shadow of a lip rash around the mouth. ???
(Incidentally, my older child had a lip rash all winter that finally went away when I sent a bottle of 500mg thiamine and magnesium threonate, and instructed to take one pill of each every morning. Maybe I’ll give the possibly-Lyme child some more B1 too…it didn't help on its own in this child's case before, but maybe in addition to the binders...)
People keep asking "when the Lyme started," if it is Lyme, and I keep thinking that for many people, these things don't just "start" all of a sudden. Six years ago, this child had a horrible respiratory virus with RSV style symptoms. Since then, this child is just So Susceptible, catching everything and it lasts longer, and has never bounced back to super robust. I think the systems were and have been overwhelmed, and perhaps a tick last fall stayed in too long, or a virus like Lyme or Borellia that others’ immune systems were able to beat, this child's wasn't…and/or maybe there was sensitivity to mold this spring (the washer in our old house was getting nasty, plus stuff would grow in our drains and HVAC…and then we all kept getting sick, and we got to our new house and had another moldy washer at first (gone now!!), and got another round of flu… But now a brand new washer, and no HVAC or ductwork, and a super well built house. My fingers are crossed.
But if the theory is correct, and these binders can get some toxins OUT via poop and not recirculating indefinitely, thus allowing immunity and detox to function increasingly better…that would just be awesome.
Oh it’s wonderful to hear about your child’s positive response to the charcoal! 😁 Hopefully he or she will now be able to build greater resiliency.
It’s such a big deal to live in a home with good air quality, especially when you know what the opposite is like...