I think antibiotics can make things a lot worse.
I really hope that you find something that helps you.
I would definitely give the LDN a go...and thats from someone who tried it and reacted terribly to it.
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Typically speaking I don't tend to take antibiotics unless my skin is really, really bad because I do worry about what they could be doing to my gut. Possible TMI alert but I'm talking huge boils that just will not go away and keep erupting putting me at serious risk of pressure sores because I'm bedbound and among other places they can erupt on, or around, my spine etc. and obviously I'm leaning on that and it's hard to remove the pressure from them. When I had them very close to becoming more serious and right on the edge of pressure sores, the district nurses said that because they were compromising my skin in that way and my body couldn't seem to manage to clear them up by itself, the priority was to clear them up ASAP and stop them from getting to that point in future, and the doctors I've had agreed. As I say, usually when I'm in a crash I can have bouts when my skin kind of explodes like this, and just doesn't heal without being on antibiotics. So me and my doctors and the district nurses etc. thought it's usually a case of 'it's probably not great for my gut, but it's likely the lesser or two evils!' For me.
It's like vaccines. My dad can't have them because of how they affect his ME, but he's in the category of ME where he barely gets any viruses or bugs at all since his ME started, so opposite to me where I catch everything going and struggle to shift it. But due to his job and our circumstances, it's inevitable that I will be exposed to somethings like colds and flu, no matter how careful we are. If i get it , and I usually do, it will make my ME worse, sometimes seriously. So I have the vaccine because although it makes my ME worsen, and for a fair while Afterwards, the worsening isn't as bad as if I got the full blown flu or even a cold, if you see what I mean. Again, lesser of two evils.
It's possible we are making the wrong choices, but like with so many things with this illness it's hard to know which way to 'jump'. I don't mean this negatively, but rather practically, but I often think it's not a case of 'what will let me avoid harm', because everything can but rather 'what will do the least damage overall? AB or long term skin infection and pressure sores? Or vaccine and crash or full blown flu and much, much bigger crash?'. It's hard to know what to do for the best a lot of the time!
But I will definitely look into LDN, thank you for sharing your experience And suggesting it, I really appreciate that, and discuss it with my new GP, it's funny because although moving from one side of the country to another has caused me to crash as expected. I've gained a GP who knows all about ME and the latest research including what's going on in Norway! My old GP was also lovely, but that was a very pleasant surprise so it could be worth a discussion.
Sorry again for a long post, I didn't mean to thread hijack!