Dr. Diane Mueller explains low dose naltrexone (LDN) as a treatment for Lyme disease and mold illness. Start at 1 to 1.5 mg at night and titrate up to 4.5 mg. The drug works as an opioid receptor antagonist that produces anti-inflammatory effects, though sleep disturbance is the most common side effect.
4.5 milligrams
About 1 to 1.5 milligrams taken at night
An opioid antagonist (blocks opioids at the receptor level)
Sleep disturbances
Hey everybody. In this video we're going to talk about LDN and Lyme and mold and chronic illness. I'm Dr. Diane Mueller and LDN is essentially low dose naltrexone. It's a low, low, low dose of a pharmaceutical called naltrexone. Naltrexone is an opioid antagonist, meaning that it blocks opioids there. It blocks them at the level of the receptor, meaning that opioids, if someone were to take opioids, they would be blocked. So this is used pharmaceutically to get people, wean people off of opioids and opioid addiction. But we do have natural opioid like substances in our body all of the time, right? This is part of why we have these processes where we can process and handle opioids is because we do have our natural opioid system in our body. So when we take these opioid antagonists, ldn, very, very low dose, what tends to happen is as it wears off, we get a flood of anti inflammatory properties that are happening. And so sometimes when people have these chronic disease processes, it's a two part type of mechanism, right? We want to get to the root cause of the disease, which could be a wide variety of things, but we also want to manage symptoms as much as possible while we're getting to the root. Now oftentimes when people are very sick, we find that they are reacting to a lot of things that would manage symptoms. And for some people, LDN is a lifesaver. So most of the time if you're going to take LDN, you're going to take it up to 4.5 milligrams and at that dose there's pretty low side effects. If there are going to be side effects, most of the time it's going to be sleep disturbances. Of course, always talk to your provider about these things, that sort of thing. But from the standpoint of why you would use this, you would use this to help give symptomatic relief to things like pain, inflammation and to your symptoms while you're getting to the root. Most people I find in the chronic infection world do best to start at a very, very low dose of this, which is about 1 to 1.5 milligrams taken at night and then work up, if they tolerate it all the way up to that max low dose naltrexone dose of 4.5 milligrams. So it's just something to try. I see it work well for some people. Other people don't respond well to it. Pay attention to sleep, pay attention how to how you feel. Work with your provider. Start slow, but it's definitely a worthwhile consideration for people when you're trying to really get to that root, but also lower symptoms at the same time. So I hope this has been helpful. There's information about how to work with me and my clinical practice in the show notes below and I will see you in another video.
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