GBS is a disorder where your body’s immune system attacks your nerves.
Typically the symptoms will start with paresthesia (a burning or prickling sensation in hands and feet) weakness in legs that gradually spreads up the body, unsteady gait, or inability to walk or climb stairs. Difficult facial movements including speaking, swallowing, chewing, double vision, or an inability to move your eyes. Severe pains, often worse at night. Difficulties with bladder or bowel functions, rapid heart rate, and difficulty breathing. The theme is obvious, loss of muscle control caused by nerve damage.
The exact cause is unknown, however most people report a respiratory or gastro-intestinal infection, which could be bacterial or viral in origin, in the weeks leading up to the symptoms starting.
Research suggests that these are the most common causes of GBS:
Campylobacter bacteria, a common cause of gastro-intestinal upset. This is estimated to account for 33% of cases.
Cytomegalovirus (CMV), a herpes virus. Symptoms include fatigue, fever, swollen lymph nodes. 10-15% of cases.
Epstein Barr Virus (EBV). Fatigue, fever, inflamed throat, swollen lymph nodes, rash. 10% of cases.
Mycoplasma Pneumonia. A chest cold, wheezing, or other common cold-like symptoms. Sometimes with diarrhoea or vomiting. 5% of cases.
Covid or after Covid vaccines. This is an increasingly common cause of GBS. The onset of Guillain-Barre symptoms after covid vaccinations in particular is now being reported widely. Not many months ago you’d have been banned or censored on social media platforms for linking covid vaccine to GBS, however now they’ve been forced to admit it, they’re just in denial about how commonly it is happening.
Unfortunately, as with so many other auto-immune conditions, pharmaceutical medicine doesn’t have many effective tools to help Guillain-Barre Syndrome. At worst, you may struggle to even get a diagnosis. Your G.P may believe that your symptoms are merely ‘all in your head’. At best you’ll be sent for a lumbar puncture and prescribed immunosuppresants. Luckily you have a solution with homeopathy.
Knowing or suspecting the cause of GBS is a tremendous advantage for a homeopath, however even if we don’t know the cause, homeopathy can still be of great benefit. As I never tire of saying, homeopaths have many different tools in our toolkit.
- We can treat the symptoms. This would be called ‘physical/general prescribing’ where the homeopath is matching the symptoms with a remedy that has helped those symptoms in the past.
- We can treat the bacterial or viral cause if we know or suspect what it is. This is prescribing ‘nosodes’, remedies made from the virus, bacteria or diseased tissue.
- We can give remedies, specifically, to help the systems in the body that are affected. An example would be Myelin sheath sarcode. A sarcode is a remedy made from healthy living tissue.
- Alternatively, we may decide to treat a possible mental or emotional cause that preceded the infection that brought on the GBS symptoms. For example, if someone had been under tremendous pressure or stress, or had suffered a terrific shock, this can weaken their system and make them susceptible to picking up an infection.
So, how would I go about treating a case of GBS? Well firstly, I’d tell the patient that this is going to be a process, there won’t be a quick fix and it might be 4 months before we see significant, long-lasting improvements. Then I’d ‘take the case’, asking the patient all about their health history. This is where we might discover the likely cause of their GBS, which would aid me in solving the case. Below are five examples to illustrate how I’d go about treating different types of Guillain-Barre Syndrome case.
Example 1: Female, 34 years old. Onset of GBS began several weeks after a ‘tummy bug’. Symptoms include paresthesia, trembling hands, loss of bowel control and exhaustion.
Treatment: In this case, it’s likely that Campylobacter has been the causative factor. Campylobacter protocol + China.
Example 2: Male, 60 years old. Onset of GBS after his Pfizer Covid Vaccine booster. Two weeks after the jab he complains of body aches, ‘electric shocks’ in feet, difficulty walking, some paralysis of right hand, tongue feels numb causing some difficulty with speech. Symptoms still persist 4 months later.
Treatment: I would give a Pfizer Covid Vaccine detox using my protocol + Causticum.
Example 3: Female, 47 years old. Stressful job, extremely jealous of a co-worker who she felt was receiving preferential treatment. No known illness before onset. Symptoms include Paresthesia, numb fingertips, insomnia due to pain, heart palpitations.
Treatment: In this case a remedy for her mental/emotional symptoms would be the best treatment. The indicated remedy would be Lachesis.
Example 4: Male, 16 years old. Onset after Epstein Barr infection. Symptoms include fatigue, extreme tiredness in legs especially climbing stairs, muscle weakness, swollen glands. History of auto-immune illness in the family. He has been tested in the NHS and they have diagnosed ‘demyelination’ (damage to the myelin sheath that protects nerve fibres). He has been offered immunosuppressive treatments by the medics, but has declined.
Treatment: Carcinosin is a very good remedy for auto-immune conditions, as well as Epstein Barr. I’d probably give an Epstein Barr protocol + Carcinosin alongside this on different days of the week. We might also add remedies specifically to help the Myeline sheath regrow during the course of treatment.
Example 5: Female, 51 years old. Onset after Sanofi-GSK Covid vaccine. Gradual paralysis that started in feet and ascended the body. Patient can no longer walk and is now bed-bound. Complains of difficulties with understanding and poor memory. Fears she is going to die. The hospital has diagnosed her with Multiple Sclerosis and have been giving her a course of steroids. These have been of no benefit, she has now shown increased weight gain from water retention and bruises easily after the steroid course.
Treatment: We’ll need to start with a steroid detox protocol. This is because these medications often stop homeopathic remedies from working. After this, we will move to a Sanofi-GSK vaccine detox protocol + Conium. Conium matches her symptoms beautifully.
What are these ‘Pfizer covid vaccine detox protocols’ mentioned above?
I’m glad that you asked! This is one of homeopathy’s magical treatments. We give a homeopathic remedy MADE from a toxin in order to encourage the body to remove this toxin. This is something that I have great experience with, having treated over 1700 autism cases at the time of writing this article. I give this remedy to stimulate a detox response, then gradually increase the potency over the course of several months. There are certainly other detox protocols out there, but there’s nothing like this that can target a toxin directly. You will typically see detox reactions from these protocols: fever, loose stools, night sweats, increased urination, these types of reactions.
What are these ‘Campylobacter or Epstein Barr protocols’ mentioned above?
Good question! This is another one of homeopathy’s magical treatments. How to help an immune system that is struggling to deal with a particular virus or bacteria? Simply, by giving a remedy MADE from that virus or bacteria. This might sound a little crazy, but don’t worry, we aren’t putting any bugs into their system. These are homeopathic remedies remember, they are so highly diluted that not a single molecule of the original substance remains. I think of them like little packets of information. We are reminding the immune system how to deal with that bug. “Hey, you need to sort out that Epstein Barr Virus”. Again, these remedies are given repeatedly over a course of several months in gradually increasing potencies. Typically we’ll see immune responses whenever we give them, sometimes you’ll even see particular symptoms of that infection returning as the immune system learns how to overcome them. I’ve had great success with this method treating many hundreds of PANDAS cases where the ‘bug’ in question is Streptococcus bacteria.
Typically these protocols would last for 4 months, with a check-up once a month to ensure that things are progressing as I’d expect.
Conclusion:
I hope you can see from these examples above that Guillain-Barre Syndrome can have varying causes, and present with different symptoms. It will therefore need different homeopathic remedies to treat it. In each of the examples above, except perhaps example 3 which should resolve more quickly, we would expect the treatment to take from 4 to 6 months. At the end of this period, I’d expect the symptoms to have resolved and the patients returned to good health.
If you think you or anyone you know might benefit from homeopathic treatment, please feel free to share this article and if you’d like a FREE 15-minute appointment to discuss your case, or ask me any questions you might have please use this link: www.calendly.com/alanfreestone
Alan Freestone, September 2022.
References:
https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/66/3/277
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/guillain-barre-syndrome/symptoms-causes/syc-20362793
Monera, Kingdom Bacteria & Viruses. By Frans Vermeulen. Published 2005.
MetaRepertory, 4th Edition. By Robin Murphy. Published 2018
Phatak’s Materia Medica of Homeopathic Medicines. By Dr S R Phatak. Published 1988