How to Treat Your Body

I sprayed just about every product known to man on my skin and I think I did my body more worse than good. The only things that seemed to be effective were natural products, nothing synthetic or filled with pesticides or deet had any affect on these mites whatsoever.

You may just have some products in your household RIGHT NOW that will work effectively, the first being apple cider vinegar. I used this product in a spray bottle 50/50 apple cider vinegar (ACV) and H2O, and it worked quite well in deterring mites for about a week. I highly recommend dousing your whole body, even your hair in it. Eventually these things built up a tolerance to products I used so I tried to rotate them, rotating products was a much more effective way to fight them. Mineral oil is also a great product to use, I doused my entire body in mineral oil including my ears and managed to get at least two good nights of sleep with that method. For my head, which was completely covered in bugs, I doused in coconut oil. I slathered massive gobs of coconut oil on my head and left it on for days, adding more after I showered to keep my head continuously covered in the stuff. Many people in the mite groups I was in seemed concerned that mites like to thrive in oils, but for me coconut oil was incredibly effective in getting them out of my scalp. I think I kept my head completely covered in coconut oil for 7 days before they gave up living on my scalp, I even felt them running down my face when I first applied the product to my hair. I know, gross.

It’s unfortunate that bird mites can hold their breath for countless hours, because I did try to drown them in the bath. I will say that sitting in a bath of baking soda and salt for a good 40 minutes, stepping out for 20 to see if mites will surface on your skin and then immediately jumping back in the bath is a very effective process. For good measure I added lots of essential oils as well, mites especially hate clove, thyme, and sweet orange.

It should be noted that an overproduction of bird mites on your body can inspire an overproduction of demodex mites as well, which can also wreak havoc on you. Have you ever had your eyelid twitch randomly? Doctors will tell you that’s from stress. It’s not. It’s an overproduction of demodex mites living on your face. The kryptonite for demodex is tea tree oil, dipping a Q-tip in diluted tea tree oil (50/50 with water) and applying it to your eyelid is extremely effective in eradicating demodex mites from your face. I actually watched in horror as I applied a tea tree soaked Q-tip to my eyelid and my entire eyelid just SHIFTED to the right to try to get away from the oil. Just be careful not to get this stuff in your eyes, it burns horribly. Luckily the burning subsides, it’s just miserable waiting for that moment of relief.

I showered three to five times a day depending on my level of infestation. The shower seemed to be the only place I got any respite, these things would calm their incessant crawling for at least the amount of time I was underneath the shower head, only to resume activity when I dried off. I cried a lot in the shower. I prayed incessantly. My most effective routine seemed to be showering as usual and then pouring an entire steeped yarrow tea bag’s worth of tea on my body, waiting 5 minutes and then following that up with pouring warm salt water all over my skin and letting it air dry as much as possible so I didn’t wipe off too much of the salt. I used regular table salt. It seemed to be the most effective in deterring mites. Then I’d run and jump into my plastic nightmare of a bed in a recently fogged room and try to sleep with the lights on, as mites are nocturnal and attack harder when the lights are off. It actually took me another 6 months to be able to sleep in a completely dark room after my bird mite infestation subsided, I was so traumatized.

My ears were affected the worst of all, I thought I was going to go completely deaf from the sheer number of mites funneling in and out of my ears all day. I did find it very effective to get mites out of my ears by simply putting an ice pack at the base of my ear underneath the lobe (freezing straight Dawn dish liquid in a small Ziploc bag makes for an awesome malleable ice pack) and waiting for mites to crawl up out of it. Once they made it to the top I’d spray them with a spray bottle of 99% alcohol and then immediately plug my ears with silicone ear plugs. They are very effective in keeping mites out of your ears, as they are like putty and can be smashed around your ear opening to keep mites out. Another effective tool is a cotton ball smothered with Vaseline: douse a half of a cotton ball quite heavily with Vaseline and then additionally drop some more on top of your ear hole once it’s plugged to deter them even further. It took me quite a significant amount of trial and error to figure out these tricks, many things I tried like noise cancelling headphones just made matters much worse as the heat drew more mites to my ears, they would just wriggle their little bodies past the leather ear pads to dive into my ear canals. I found garlic mullein oil ear drops and debrox ear drops to be only moderately effective by comparison. In bed at night I found that if I kept a little cooler next to my bed with ice packs in it, I could keep my ears conveniently covered with ice packs in pillow cases and deter mites from entering my ears while I slept. The cooler was to make life easy if an ice pack melted in the night and needed to be swapped out for a frozen one. If the ice packs are too cold, putting them in a pillow case helps. The more synthetic the fabric is on your pillowcase, the less they will infest it.

My number one mite fighting blaster? EATING RAW GARLIC. That’s right, my friends, smash it up, put it in all your food and see how much you can tolerate, I managed to keep so many bugs off my body this way. I’d chop it up and throw it in hummus, toss some in my eggs in the morning, drop some crushed cloves in salad dressing, anything I could do to deter these bugs from tunneling their way under my skin. They despise raw garlic. Garlic is an incredibly powerful tool in the fight against both mites AND Lyme, which I will explain more in depth in further posts.

The next mite fighting silver bullet I’m going to insist you take if you are struggling with mites is wormwood. I noticed that people in my mite group were having mixed results when taking this supplement, but it was because they weren’t taking a significant enough dose for it to be effective. The secret was to take larger doses of it (2 pills, three times a day) for a long period of time in order for it to be incredibly effective. The supplement I take is by a company called Standard Process, and the product is Artemisinin Complex. Its ingredients are artemisia annua (267 mg) and smilax officianalis, or sarsparilla (200 mg). The problem with this supplement is that it isn’t simple to acquire. You can’t order it directly from the company, only a practitioner who carries it. It isn’t easy to find. I had a heck of a time acquiring it, but it saved my life. It took about 4-5 weeks to build up in my system and make me unattractive to mites, I still take it to this day a year and a half later. The main health concern you need to stay on top of while taking this supplement is your liver health, I added a milk thistle supplement daily for liver support and get my liver enzymes checked regularly. Everything has been good so far.

If you can’t find this product I want to recommend taking the two supplements separately, I will add links to them in this post. Please let me know how you are faring taking them if you do decide to try these brands instead, and again patience is key to their effectiveness. It took 4-5 weeks before I noticed that these mites were attacking me less and less. Thank God for wormwood. It is incredibly powerful stuff but again, you have to take more than just two pills a day in order for it to be effective in the fight against mites.

I want to note that I am NOT a doctor, it is important that you see a naturopath or functional medicine doctor while you are working through this process. If you are reading this message and mites are attacking you, that there is a reason you are dealing with this. One of those reasons is the fact that you have something malfunctioning with your immune system and need help. While wormwood is an incredible parasite fighting herb, it is not the answer to all your problems, you still have a long journey ahead of you to discover what may be going on with your body. I have found that naturopaths and functional medicine doctors are WAY more likely to listen to and accept the fact that you’re dealing with non-typical medical issues, and you’ll be way less likely to end up in a psych ward in a straitjacket with bugs crawling all over you. You may be dealing with auto-immune issues that a plain ol’ bloodwork test result won’t show, naturopaths are way more likely to look at other underlying issues you may be dealing with that could be very helpful to your cause.

I saw/spoke with/reached out to a number of doctors that either completely rejected me or diagnosed me as delusional. I just kept thinking, “IF ONLY A DOCTOR WOULD BELIEVE ME THINGS WOULD BE BETTER” but I eventually realized that the thought itself was a delusion. Just getting a doctor to believe you doesn’t mean they can help you with this affliction. Chances are, they’ll just give you a tube of permethrin cream (I found permethrin to be ineffective, a slow poison with repeated use and mites build up a tolerance to it very quickly) or a very insufficient dose of ivermectin, which isn’t effective enough to kill mites. My suggestion is to find some groups to join on facebook or other social media sources, there are a large number of people out there who are banding together to find answers, instill hope, and share information. Joining these groups was one of the most helpful things I could have done on my quest to get my life back, I do not recommend going through this alone. I met my best friend in one of these groups, she and I weathered the storm together. There were things that happened to me that only she could understand or relate to, and vice-versa. It is not emotionally safe for you to deal with this trauma alone.

FIND A FRIEND.