Starving to Heal in Siberia: My Radical Recovery from Late-Stage Lyme Disease and How It Could Help Others

by Michelle B. Slater

Too slow, memory faulty, fallible, unable to produce, but broken-slate Miche with the other’s brain

How terrible, in sickness, would it be to loose your faculities es as my brain is the one thing I llve best about me,"the perpetual student", as I so defined myself....i dont think i could bear to loose my brain, my head, like this

wabi sabi, more beautiful because of my cracks and fissures.

As I thought of knotted wood, for all the bruises and knots, all the more beauty, in a hard worn life

Climate change increases the number and geographic range of disease-carrying insects and ticks.

Oddly, it went up even more,especially in my area, Ohio, so much so many articles were written, even wrote an article. Now that I think about it....even though I dont think the tick Ii had was attached to me long, just being homeless all those years, maybe I should be tested. Maybe this book is a sign, the win and all

personal. “I want you to share with me how—and if—climate change has affected you thus far. I’ll go first. I fell prey to an aggressive case of Lyme disease that was diagnosed in 2012. The CDC—the Centers for Disease Control—calls Lyme the first disease directly caused by global warming.

Lyme disease....first disease cuased by global warming...why?

Tinnitus and sinusitis were omnipresent,

Have this too....why? Does it have to do with the immune, treatmemt with soany antibiotics?

My heart started having wild improv sessions in my chest, waking me up in the night with its fast beats and syncopated rhythms. The doctors had told me that tachycardia, or increased heart

Have this too

rate with abnormal beats, was yet another symptom of chronic Lyme disease. Would I have a heart attack as a result

1 I had no language, and I had no home in my own mind.

With immune diseases, do you get the mind deficiencies, too? Or, is this just with lyme, is it because of long term antibiotic treatment, was on them for six months, was convinced I was dying at that time

the joint pain in my hands and feet woke me up—and I often cried at the paucity of solutions. Research is what I had done best in my

What did you take for pain? Were you once on painkillers, was that discontinued by your choice or doctors...as the pain worsens, what will you do now and in the future, for it?

Cure Zone, which referred in a reverent way to a Dr. Filonov.

Dr. Filonov purportedly cured patients

through extreme fasting methods that “incinerated diseased cells in the body”

and “drained the swamp of inf...

“According to Siberian doctor Sergey Filonov, dry fasting activates each cell to become an incinerator and burn bacteria and viruses in the body; when depr...

Those who walk on well-trodden paths always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.

one teaspoon of aluminum-free baking soda in a cup of hot water every morning for two weeks, and I was to take two tablets of “coal” on an empty stomach twice a day.

it possibly be activated charcoal?” Since the Russian word implied absorbing

detoxes the body.. interesting to find out the process

plant-based organic diet consisting

homemade vegetable broth, green vegetables, and whole grains such as millet and buckwheat porridge. I juiced vegetables and added a few pumpkin and hemp seeds to my salads. I cared

he counseled me against dry fasting, but he said he remained open-minded.

stopped wearing deodorant with aluminum—a heavy metal—so I was getting a bit stinky.

The increased use of pesticides, coupled with warmer temperatures, created perfect conditions for the disease that had invaded my body. Pesticide use has led to an alarming decline of pollinators like bees. This has coincided with the significant rise of arthropods like ticks, which spread the most prevalent vector-borne disease: Lyme. Did I agree with Carson

After two short preparatory water fasts, I embarked on a three-day dry fast, while D was away on business. What fueled me when food and water didn’t was what I had read on Dr. Filonov’s site: “Dry fasting has colossal power to heal the body, and to enhance one’s natural system of immunity.”

The process that dry fasting ignites in the body is called autophagy.

at the time that I was missing key detox enzymes in my genetic profile, that I didn’t methylate like others did.

autophagy—or self-eating—was going to cure me. I had been focused on what to put in my body, not what I could take out. I

What you take out of your body can sometimes be as important as what you put in and we learn in ....Starving to Heal in Siberia, how one can sure themselves of something that Western medicine, pharmecuticals, has been unable to combat. All those struggling with autoimmune disturbances many want to take time to reed this tell all book because, even though the author herself, struggles with lyme disease there are still other important lessons, especially in dealing with ...///cant think of word, flare ups, the puffiness////, that this book may apply to. ********Start review off here, with above#**

How is it possible that he counsels me for free in the twenty-first century after I have spent thousands of dollars on out-of-pocket Lyme treatments? Dmitri’s mother had sent a small wire transfer from her Russian account to Dr. Filonov’s, and we would be bringing the remainder of the payment in cash. Fifty dollars a day was a pittance in comparison with the cost of alternative treatments we had already covered outside of health insurance’s range. This tiny figure would become increasingly astonishing to me.

Cheap treatment, after all the money spent, with daily access to the doctor ....could it be, that he believes in his treatment, and that it works, he has no fear in communicating with you? His patient?......how did it feel to have access to a doctor, in this way, to be able to speak to him 24/7, what did this tell you about him, his treatment? Did it make you feel confident, in him, his method?

“The human body cannot survive for more than three days without water. Your organs will shut down. You could have permanent damage.”

People think that the human body cannot survive this?

“The human body is comprised of at least 60 percent water. Every cell needs water to function properly. I do not support you,” she said.

who had been sued multiple times as director of a water-fasting treatment center abroad. He argued that dry fasting was dangerous and would lead to death if attempted.

Dr. Filonov has been conducting medical fasts for over thirty years. He has written books on the subject, and patients flock to him in Siberia. This is not a New Age treatment, as Helen calls it. We must trust him.” When one is

Hippocrates, wrote that our food should be our medicine but that to eat when we are sick is to feed our illness.

When we eat, during an illness, that is what we feed. ...wonder why it is that chicken soup works so well for a cold?

Plato said that he fasted for greater physical and mental efficiency.”

“I don’t doubt that these ancients fasted, but how do we know they dry fasted?” he countered.

Difference between fasting and dry fasting, no water.....

Dad patted my head, not strong enough to move his arms, which had been afflicted with a mixture of post-polio syndrome and neuropathy.

Janet made my favorite soup that we called my “sick soup,” with simple vegetables and water.

“we must invent language to describe pain,”

we cannot know another’s pain.1 D had heard

never endowed him with the empathetic ability to fully understand

You are lucky to have family to support you, to support you in your illness,believe you, stand beside you, especially when medical doctors dont have any cure, insist their is no more, you are lucky to have been believed by doctors but you have that class that others may lack

continuing. “You still have not given me an answer to the question as to how many patients have died while undergoing this, er, treatment.” At the word “treatment,” he seemed to choke.

Why is it you never told your father if the doctor lost anyone...did he? I know that it didnt matter that, as when one considers assisted suicide, there being no cure to youur disease, your ills, that it didnt matter if the doctor had lost patients. Had he lost patients and you didnt want to worry your father? That is the only answer I can deduce in you saying, to your father,that the doctor had lost no one. Or, maybe you did not even want to pose this doctor with that question....as it is offensive.

A stereotypical picture prevails: a vast land where distance separates people and where isolation has affected people’s mental state,

If people are always seperated, grow up that way, knowing that, why would it affect their mental health any different than a normal life...if that is what is normal? Becauee of the isolation they may have a different personality but to say that, the way this was said, isolation, because of the area, is normal. Why would it create an abnormality if this is normalcy for ppl?

in most part by wolf packs, a destination for deportations.

Oddly, the only things not isolated seem to be the wolves, animals

sounded like shouting, but my volume button had been broken for a long time—all sounds were freakishly amplified in my Lyme-ridden brain.

Why do you believe sound was amplified, foe you, as with my ear problems sound is more muted,dull,takes longer to travel and understand...what about lyme amplified things? I, more boggled, really?

My mother died when she was forty-two. I am forty-two. I have long feared dying at this symbolic age. I do not want to die. I want to live the full life that I have imagined

Sad to want to live a rich and full life when this disease seems to take that away....are you now hopeful for more?

bed. 1 Bed Avenue is so far away, and I might never see it again, I thought plaintively.

Do you ever miss 1 Bed Ave? Would you ever want to go back?

babushkas, or Russian grandmothers, were serving coleslaw,

instance, RGO hearkened back to times of the collective in the Soviet Union, when everyone had to help out and do their part to survive.

“RGO,” or Soviet, wouldn’t prioritize

emotional needs—like the...

spend every last minute with my husband before I had to begin the process of starving by myself in Siberia—over a more practical need.

What was it like to live with people who lived this RGO lifestyle, who didnt prioritize personal wants and demands for the needs of others, the group,what is necessary? Was it hard to accept and live in this way, as an American?