What is Biofilm?
I always preface this by saying I'm not a doctor, but through my own reading and experience I'll do my best to summarize for other patients. The Biofilm is essentially a house the disease creates for itself. They will secrete a slimy substance in which they will all congregate and hide in. The slimy substance that is the biofilm will create a barrier in which the medicine you take is unable to get to the spirochetes or co-infections its targeting. More than 75% of infections carry a biofilm component and according to Fry Lab's it's estimated that 80% of Lyme patients have a biofilm component to their illness. It almost seems like a scary science-fiction film that an illness is capable of creating a shield for itself where it can congregate and multiply without worry, but that's essentially what happens.
How Did This Affect Me?
Addressing biofilm was a main factor in me pushing through the wall I hit in my recovery. At one point I had been doing better but my progress had stagnated for almost six months. I was on IV antibiotics and no matter how much I took I would have absolutely no reaction to them. That can be good or bad, but for my case it wasn't a good sign. At least a little bit of herxing is good as it signals the illness is dying. But if you're not feeling better and you're not reacting to medications in any way, its not a good sign. My LLMD at the time had suspicions that the majority of my illness had basically created itself a house that is the biofilm, moved in there, and refused to leave. I could take all the antibiotics in the world but it wouldn't matter as long as they still had their biofilm to protect itself from.
It's weird to talk as if these things are intelligent species. But throughout my own research and experience, this illness is extremely complicated and smart. It knows how to move throughout your body and absolutely confuse your immune system. The fact that it can signal to one another to hide behind a biofilm it creates to continue their own survival is just eery, but it's exactly what they do.
I had been on a supplement for biofilm when I first got sick called Interface Plus but I had no reaction to it. A year later my doctor told me that he had a protocol that would really get at it. He gave me supplements called Xylitol and Lactoferrin. Xylitol is simply a type of sugar that you mix with water and Lactoferrin was given in capsules. I hadn't felt a reaction to any medication for six months when I started the protocol, but the first day I took Xylitol and Lactoferrin I found myself shaking in my bed, feeling as if I had been hit by a truck. I was enduring a severe herxheimer reaction. The biofilm protecting this illness was dying, but it wasn't an easy task eliminating it. The protocol had opened up the illness, and the medications that I had no reaction to, I now became overly-sensitive to. It was a good thing though. I could now treat Lyme and its co-infections effectively, and after the biofilm protocol I saw symptoms disappearing that I had foe years due to the elimination of this illness' shield.
The moral of this post is to research the possibility of biofilm housing your illness if you haven't found an effective solution to break through the wall you've encountered in your recovery. Eliminating the biofilm could be the most important process in regaining your health from Lyme Disease and everything else that comes with it. If you don't address the biofilm you may find yourself forever unable to recover from the disease, its the sad truth in dealing with an enemy and invader within your body that is intelligent as this one. Feel free to comment if you have questions or would like to place your input on this topic.
