Dr. Rob Whitfield explains why detoxifying treatments like sauna can initially worsen Lyme disease and breast implant inflammation through a Herxheimer reaction, where the body releases inflammatory molecules. He warns this can resemble a cytokine storm and recommends avoiding inflammation triggers while focusing on calming the immune response instead.
even sauna. I've had people where they go in for 1 minute of sauna, like, way prior to any perspiration happening, and they still hurt from that. So I think there's this, like, there is— there's this impulse to, like, be like, oh, we have to get it out. But any of these things that mobilize, any of these things that kill any— like, they can actually make us worse before we actually see any improvements. And when we are in that Herxheimer, right, when we're in that situation where we're having that die-off or that detox reaction that's making us feel worse, what's actually happening in part— there's a lot of things happening. But one of the things that often is happening is we're releasing more of those inflammatory molecules. And what I tell people is like, the more inflamed we make you, the more we have to go back and fix that and help your body to calm and get you out of that vicious cycle of inflammation, which we can really get in that vicious cycle where it's like We get more inflamed and the tissues work more poorly and we get more inflamed. And, you know, we see situations in medicine we call things like cytokine storms where we have this huge bolus of inflammation all at once. And for some people it can be that level of severe and it can be this whole secondary process to calm that down. So it works a lot better to just like avoid getting there, you know, to begin with.
