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Recommendations for Tick Bites?
It sounds like you are muddling a bunch of different concepts. While I acknowledge that it is certainly possible to gain some control over your experience of reality (e.g. mindfulness practices that, when mastered, enable one to reduce or override the conscious sensation of pain or illness), we are all demonstrably part of a shared objective reality over which we have no personal say in matters of what we call physics.
The brain is such that you can convince yourself that a tick did not bite you, even when we can objectively demonstrate that it did bite you. You could affect some chemical processes in the body that benefit your body's ability to fight infection by convincing yourself that you are at no risk of harm, but you can in no way guarantee prevention of an infection from a tick bite (which did happen even if you are convinced it did not) simply by actively deluding yourself about objective reality.
One's outlook on life certainly affects the health of the body, but it does not prevent the body from participating in objective reality and succumbing to the laws of that reality. With enough self-control of the mind, you could keep yourself in a state of bliss until you die, but die you would nonetheless, and you will die a lot faster if you delude yourself into thinking that you are beyond the laws of objective reality! There's a reason humans fear things...it's an evolutionary adaptation that enables us to survive by avoiding danger!
Tick bite update: we decided to take a wait-and-see approach with this, because the tick was very flat when we took it out, and if they have been on for less than 48 hours, it's less likely that there has been time to transmit the LYME/etc. even if the tick has it. The bite swelled up and got very red and very itchy for a few days, but no bulls eye and no spreading. Crossing our fingers, it seems like it's healing up with no other symptoms... Can't vouch for our family's collective state of mind, because I'm not sensing anything close to enlightenment here, but we're muddling along, doing the best we can under the circumstances! 🙂
Wow, so...just exactly a year later, I'm thinking a lot again 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. Lyme tests seem notoriously awful, 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 might cross post this in our family thread...
Would love any thoughts or ideas.
Hi @sarabeth-matilsky! I was just looking back at this thread a little ways to get some context and it really got deep hehehe.
I didn't look too far back, but bit it appears that carnivore was trying to say that if he refuses to acknowledge that Lyme is a thing then he can't suffer from it? Hmm! Interesting perspective. I do sort of agree that sometimes with medicine... ignorance is bliss. I know a family in which all the kids are positive on Lyme tests but no symptoms. Would they be better not to know? Ignorance is sometimes bliss.
I think from wapf days I remember someone mentioning rubbing something germ-killing on tick bites, and I've done that. Like a little iodine or some oregano oil. I'm not sure there was really any difference between that and doing nothing. 🙂
I wonder about ivermectin or colloidal silver for chronic things? Especially for things that might be more like a parasite? There are some parasites that can tag along on ticks. And how about good-old spices and herbs? It seems to me that in hot, tropical climates full of parasites... things like curries are always found. How about quinine?
My brother was always the one who got very sick out of us. My mother asked a person with ESP about him! She said he had something wrong with his blood. At age 19 he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. I hope it is nothing like that, and even if it is perhaps going low VA will help it in the long run.
You know, when I was a young girl I didn't see a tick until about 1975. And I was an outdoor girl.
As summer gets hotter and drier the ticks will calm down a bit. My friend whose whole family has Lyme allows guinea hens to free-range because they eat ticks.
Haha! Yes, "deep" is one nice way to put it 😉
And yeah - something is definitely going on with ticks. When I was little we got them exactly never. Now, we pull them off daily, huge ones, tiny ones, minuscule ones....among all of the many out of balance things in this modern world.
Speaking of balance, I started reading Neil Nathen's book "toxic" yesterday, and he focuses on unraveling and "rebooting" the body after exposure and what he deems the most common causes of severe chronic diseases: mold toxicity, 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 cross post on the other thread. 🙂 xoxo
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.