Medical doctors often treat herpes with antiviral drugs and steroids. While antiviral prescription drugs should be reserved for acute infections, they are available and prescribed by medical doctors to just about anyone who wants to try them. Antiviral prescription drugs are believed to lower the ability of the virus to multiply in your body, thereby reducing your symptoms, but there can be terrible side effects.
Depending on the location and severity of an outbreak, an antiviral medication may be the only way to stop the progression of the herpes virus.
However, any anti-infective chemical can increase the emergence of resistant organisms, which means prescription drugs can exacerbate HSV outbreaks by causing the virus to reappear sporadically throughout the body, a condition known as Disseminated Herpes, a viral complication. Topical steroids can increase the activity of the herpes virus. They DO NOT cure HSV and DO NOT work for everyone to halt an outbreak. Furthermore, most medicines only work if taken at the first outbreak you've ever had.
Taking a low-dose prescription antiviral, such as Acyclovir, may help prevent infections. Here's why. When herpes activates, Acyclovir acts against the virus by entering the viral DNA during replication, thereby preventing lesion formation. This is good news. At least, that's the idea. However, the drug cannot enter the viral DNA once the virus becomes dormant (i.e., goes into hiding). Herpes is still there, slumbering away in your nerves.
The bad news? Antiviral drugs can cause herpes to mutate into superbugs resistant to them. It's said that these new superbugs are less virulent than the original herpes virus. However, less virulent doesn't mean fewer outbreaks—and here's the danger. Your new "brand" of herpes will resist all previously taken antiviral drugs. Why? Because herpes encodes the next generation to do so.
Most of the time, you can put HSV in remission naturally, which isn't to say that medical intervention can't be helpful in emergencies to get you "over the hump" while you're learning to rebalance your nervous system.
If you need to take antiviral medications, don't feel bad about it. Consider it part of your comprehensive approach to managing herpes. Just know that if you are taking medications, optimizing your immunity will be that much more essential in offsetting the adverse side effects of your medication.
Also, see Prescription Antiviral Medications for a list of prescription medications and possible side effects.
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