Dear Stephen,
I am having a problem with high liver enzymes. I am on the Core Protocol. My doctor has told me to quit the herbs and we will re-check. I have heard a warning about cat’s claw being a problem with liver. I have been ill with lyme for at least 24yrs and just diagnosed 2 years ago. I started with cat’s claw, then bee-venom shots, salt and vitamin C and then found your wonderful book and added andrographis and resveratrol. No longer doing shots. I am feeling extremely ill. I understand babesia can affect the liver but I tested negative. Any thoughts or ideas would be appreciated. Others have suggested castor oil packs. Thanks and blessings to you.
I am having a problem with high liver enzymes. I am on the Core Protocol. My doctor has told me to quit the herbs and we will re-check. I have heard a warning about cat’s claw being a problem with liver. I have been ill with lyme for at least 24yrs and just diagnosed 2 years ago. I started with cat’s claw, then bee-venom shots, salt and vitamin C and then found your wonderful book and added andrographis and resveratrol. No longer doing shots. I am feeling extremely ill. I understand babesia can affect the liver but I tested negative. Any thoughts or ideas would be appreciated. Others have suggested castor oil packs. Thanks and blessings to you.
Stephen’s response:
Castor oil packs do help many people, mostly for pain in the liver, however. You might check my book Herbs for Hepatitis C and The Liver (see bookstore). I talk a lot in there about herbs for high liver enzymes.
Castor oil packs do help many people, mostly for pain in the liver, however. You might check my book Herbs for Hepatitis C and The Liver (see bookstore). I talk a lot in there about herbs for high liver enzymes.
In any event, the basic thing to take is standardized milk thistle capsules. I emphasize standardized. Take 1,200 mg a day to begin with. This should lower enzyme levels in a few weeks.
I have not heard about any of these herbs having negative liver impacts, in fact several of them are used in the treatment of liver disease. I am surprised to hear about elevated liver enzymes in the absence of babesia infection with lyme only, but again, lyme continually surprises me. In any event, milk thistle is the best place to begin.
Stephen
Dear Stephen,
I just read about high liver enzyme and I decided to write a few words. I have been taking herbs your protocol from 5 months (andrographis, polygonum cuspidatum, cat’s claw at the beginning and then I added Smilax, Stefania and two weeks ago Eleuthero and syberian ginseng and of course vit b, fatty acids 3,….) After a one month of taking that herbs from main protokol my liver enzymes were high, twice a standard, but the doctor said that it can happen, and I didn’t stop taking and increase herbs because I read that this herbs should protect my liver. And next month my liver enzymes were in standard – half of it. And next monts the same. So I thought that maybe it was a disintegration of the spirochete. Thank you for your book:)
Dear Stephen,
One month after staring core protocol I experienced loss of taste and it took about one month. The loss was really strange, somethimes I felt in my mouth salty all the time, or sweety or bitter and it changed taste of what I ate. When I get my taste back it was a really happy day. I didn’s stop taking herbs, because I thought that is the process of healing.
I have very severe, treatment resistant OCD, thought to be due to Lyme didiese (I tested positive for Lyme disease). Since the beginning of March, I’ve been trying to treat it with some of the herbs recommended in Stephen Buhner’s book of Lyme disease. I’ve been adding one new herb every week and waiting to see what happens, rather than starting everything at once, as I have a histoy of having bad reactions to things.
In general, things have been going downhill since I started the herbs. I don’t know whether this is a herx reaction or just that it’s a bad idea.
But there was one thing where I seemed to be better while I was taking it, and that’s milk thistle seed. (Half a teaspoon of the raw seeds morning and evening – I couldn’t find standardised tablets that were suitable for vegetarians). My family noticed I was better, too, it’s not just me. The catch was that I also had constant headaches, ending up in what was definitely one of my old familiar migraines complete with nausea. After about a week I stopped it, and the headaches went away immedatiely, but the OCD also got wrose agon. I tried taking another dose of it a few times over the following couple of weeks, but got a headache each time either that evening or the next morning. So I left it alone.
In desperation, on April 10th I started taking the milk thistle again – but I didn’t get a headache and the OCD didn’t budge. I’m still taking it but nothing’s happening.
What should I do? Can anyone think what’s going on?
I suppose it’s possible that it wasd a delayed reaction to another thing, not the milk thistle at all. But then, I’m still taking all the other things I was taking at that point, so why the change?
An intriguing thing is that the milk thistle seeds aren’t meant to do anything for the Lyme disease directly; the point of them is to help with herx reactions caused by other things, by helping to get rid of the gunk released by killing off bacteria. So if it really was the milk thistle that helped, that seems to suggest that some of the other things WERE doins something. (The other things I was taking at the time were Echinacea angustifolia, selenium and green tea extract. I’m aware that these aren’t usually considered first priority herbs, by the way. there are resons for that – my OCD won’t let me take a lot of the “main” ones, so I’m just taking whatever relevant herbs IO can. And I haven’t dared take any directly antibacterial ones yet because I’m in such a bad way I didn’t dare take the risk of a herx.)
Dear A.B. I know that this is an older post, so hopefully you have made some progress in your struggles. But I thought I would send a message. It sounded like you were relatively new to to Lyme war. It sounds to me that your Lyme is at a stage that is causing great havoc to your system. Your system is overloaded with Lyme toxins and any little shift in killing Lyme, improving your immune system, or detoxing is causing you problems. You need to have a massive detox protocol in place before you start killing things. But you are very sensitive, so you will have to wade in slowly. Epsom salt baths, work your way up to every day. Milkthistle, start at a micro dose and very slowly work up. Same with all the other liver detox herbs- burdock root, red root, burber, pinella, parsley, activated charcoal, citrus pectin, etc. Once you get your toxin load down you can start adding killiing herbs, but make no mistake, you will feel worse while treating and your symptoms (including your OCD and headaches) will worsen. So you have to balance how intense you are going after the Lyme with how much your body is able to handle. Hope this helps, and I wish you the very best.