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I’m propped up against pillows in my guesthouse bedroom in San Jose, Costa Rica. For two days, I haven’t been able to get out of bed except to attempt a plateful of rice or some cinnamon tea. I hover near my best friend john and try to stay away from the chatty guests of this friendly place. Had I known MMS would leave me in such agony I might have waited to start the protocol. After all, it’s not convenient to be herxing in a guesthouse in a foreign country. But then again, I’ve never, in the two and a half years since I’ve been treating Lyme disease, been hit with a die-off reaction like this before.
And those in the Lyme disease world who know me, know that I don’t get strong die-off reactions.
It’s not that the other protocol I’ve done haven’t worked, but none have provoked such dramatic die-off reactions as MMS. I’ve never had nausea from a herx reaction. I mean, never. Until yesterday.
It’s left me encouraged and dismayed. Dismayed because I realize that I’m not as healthy as I thought. Just last week I was gallivanting through the streets of San Jose with my friend Jason, high on my energy horse and pleased that I had the stamina to be out and about for hours without suffering tremendous fatigue.
But it’s also encouraging, because it means that bugs are dying and that I don’t have to devise some intelligent dosing regimen to perpetuate a herx reaction. And my current experience is lending credibility to a theory I’ve been chewing on for awhile—namely, that if I back down on my MMS dose for a few days and then ramp up to the dose I was taking previously, I get sick, especially around the full moon. Current contention is that folks with Lyme disease should ramp up to two 15-drop doses of MMS per day. I’m wondering if that’s really necessary. My experience is teaching me that whatever dose I ramp up to, if I stay at that dose for a good week or two, cut it in half for another week, then immediately return to the previous dose, then I am sure to get a herx reaction.
While I’m of the sort to fire away at my infections with both guns, I have to admit that with MMS, it’s also nice to back down on the stuff to evaluate my progress. In the meager month and a half that I’ve been taking it, I’ve felt mostly worse, and so lowering my dose from time to time allows me to feel better, thereby enabling me to remember that I am yet healing. It’s just too easy to forget when you feel awful.
How sick am I really? I have to wonder. My gut feeling is that most everyone who takes MMS, Lyme or no Lyme, will experience a herx reaction because we all have infections, whether we realize it or not. Also, the intensity of a herx may not necessarily be indicative of the severity of illness. It may, in fact, demonstrate the opposite, since a strong immune system can mount a stronger response to infection.
As mentioned in a previous post, an adequate dosing schedule for MMS for Lyme disease has not yet been established. The knowledge we have about how to take it is based upon speculation of what has worked for other illnesses. The founder of MMS knows that two 15-dose drops daily will cure malaria. But we are its lab rats for Lyme disease.
Thus, if your current dose of MMS is starting to bore you; that is, if you are no longer herxing nor improving on it, then I encourage you to experiment with cutting back on your dose for a few days, or a week, and then ramp up quickly to the dose you were at before. I’m not a doctor; I don’t pretend to be an expert on MMS dosing; I’m simply offering up a suggestion based on my own experience. Start off by lowering the dose only slightly, however, so you can discern how dramatic of a reaction you will get when you increase the dose again.