Naltrexone or LDN or Low Dose Naltrexone

The MD who is helping us is Dr. John Hart of Fredericksburg, VA. He suggested trying low dose naltrexone. I'm not an MD or a chemist so my understanding is very rudimentary. Naltrexone is an opioid antagonist which competes with opioids for the receptors they would use. It's been used to help recovering alcoholics and drug addicts, and to improve immune function in people with various immune system and auto-immune disorders. It seems to suppress endorphin production when sleeping, stimulating the body to produce higher rates of endorphins in response to the deficit.


Here's a partial list of diseases it seems to help:
Lyme
Crohn's
Some cancers
Fibromyalgia
Multiple Sclerosis (MS)
Rheumatoid Arthritis

I went looking for information and found a couple of sites that seem to have useful information. One is low dose naltrexone. I found lots of great videos on youtube of people detailing their experiences with the drug.

The first night I took it, I woke up in about 1 1/2 hrs. to see a huge gray and hairy spider skittering up my wall and across the ceiling. It was an hallucination. It's been 4 days now and I haven't had an recurrence of sleep disturbance or bad dreams with hallucinations. I didn't sleep the rest of that night though.

I have had a lot of fatigue, but I think that's because I am doing more physically. I've been losing physical coordination and strength consistently for the last year or two. I couldn't do things like sort papers because my fingers couldn't separate them - too numb. I've actually been sorting papers and cleaning up my year's worth of teaching papers. So there's an improvement but it's hard to quantify right now. I am sleeping a lot. I get a couple hours of things done and have to rest. I've been sleeping 10 or more hours a day. This is not great for working, but I have a lighter schedule right now in order to accommodate new therapies.

I am also taking Bactrim right now, a sulfa-based antibiotic. What I noticed as soon as I started the Bactrim was a huge jump in energy levels, and optimism. So, it must be slowing down the progress of the bacteria in my system.

I have borrelia Burgdorferi. The test that was accurate, at last, was done by Central Florida Research. Your MD can request a test kit for you.

Fatiguing out again so I'll stop here.