Most people who have read my threads know that I think viral stuff is the main driver in my cfsme. Especially varicella/shingles and cmv. But I think with myself and possibly others, there's ongoing bacterial infections maybe lyme, maybe coinfections of lyme or the coinfections in lyme like mycoplasma can come seperate from lyme but I believe they can add extra strain to the immune system.
The end of last year, the last 6 months and until April this year, I was having reoccurring shingles every 3 weeks or so, even though I was on antivirals, but I believe the antivirals did reduce the severity.
My last shingles episode was April so it's been a long 'remission' of the shingles for me. I think what has initially helped was doing a course of cycloferon. This increases your natural interferon and this increases your nk function. I think this probably helped any viral or bacterial stuff I had going on. I did this for a couple of months.
I then started on an antibacterial/lyme type of a protocol with a couple of different antibiotics as well as herbals that are used in lyme and its coinfections. I alternated between different antibiotics and herbals. I'm now just using 1 antibiotic and several herbals.
I think this antibacterial treatment has taken the strain off my immune system and with the antivirals, has kept the shingles away. My migraines have reduced, probably because of reduced shingles flares which are on my head, so the migraines are probably a sort of post herpetic neuralgia.
The herbs I have been using are typical herbs used in lyme and I just rotate several in and out every couple of weeks since June as well as a few antibiotics eg doxycycline, roxithromycin, bactrim, flagyl. The herbs Serrapeptase for helping break down bacterial biofilms, cryptolepis, grapeseedextract, artemesia, Japanese knotweed. Again I don't take them all at once but rotate them in and out generally 1 antibiotic and 2 herbals currently.
I'm not superman but we are in the process of selling our house and moving 16hrs north of where we are now. It's cheaper place to live so we should be debt free, one of our main reasons. So cleaning up our yard, which is like a rain forest and I had 3 weeks leave off work and went hell for leather loading my trailer for of general rubbish and garden rubbish and taking it to the dump etc. I lost count how many times I went to the dump. At the end of the day I was tired and sore but not cfs exhausted and didn't crash. A couple of times I had to have a day to chill but I think that's probably normal. Last year this would have been impossible.
The other thing that's helped me improve aswell is losing 30kg simply by stopping lyrica and changing over to toprimate for migraine prevention. Lyrica is a good drug for nerve pain but long term you really have to weigh up the side effects of the wt gain and for me it didn't matter how strict I ate, the wt climbed up slowly. I still use it very intermittently if I feel a migraine type headache coming on and will club myself with it, but it's not very often.
That's my current uptake on things and it seems to be controlling the reoccurring shingles and avoiding big cfsme crashes.
Cheers
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