If you suffer from cold sores, then lysine cold sores treatment may be the solution for you. Cold sores often respond quite well to the amino acid lysine, and it can be an excellent way to treat your blemishes.
What Are Cold Sores?
While we call them “cold sores,” or “fever blisters,” these painful and ugly blemishes have nothing to do with having a cold or a fever. If they did, it is unlikely that they would respond as well as they do to lysine. Cold sores, in fact, are caused by the herpes simplex virus. Mouth sores are almost always caused by Type 1 of the herpes virus, not Type 2, which is more well-known for causing genital herpes.
Cold sores cannot be treated with antibiotics because they’re a virus. Some prescription medications, among them acyclovir, may help hasten the end of a cold sore, but there is no cure for the herpes virus at this time, nor is there a vaccine to prevent cold sores.
When you have a cold sore, this is an active period of the disease, and the blister on your skin is contagious. The rest of the time, the virus is in remission and stays dormant. However, you still have the herpes virus and will have for the rest of your life.
What is Lysine?
You may have heard of lysine cold sores treatment but not be sure what it is or how it can help if this is an incurable virus that doesn’t respond to antibiotics.
Lysine is an essential amino acid. What does this mean? First, an amino acid is a core component, or “building block” of protein. Because lysine is an essential amino acid, the body can’t create it from scratch and we must get our lysine from the food we eat or from supplements.
How Does Lysine Affect Cold Sores?
The key to the lysine cold sores puzzle is that lysine prevents the growth of the herpes simplex virus while it is active (while you have a cold sore) and keeps the virus in its dormant state so that you do not develop more cold sores.
This may sound too good to be true, but it has been confirmed by scientific studies, including one well-known study by the Indiana School of Medicine.
How Lysine Cold Sores Treatment Works
To treat cold sores, you should take lysine supplements, as the amount of lysine you get from your diet is not sufficient to treat or prevent the outbreak of cold sores.
The maintenance dose of lysine, which you should take every day when you do not have fever blisters, is 500 mg once each day. If, in spite of your regular lysine cold sores prevention regime, you develop a cold blister, you should increase your dosage to 1000 mg 3 times a day until the cold sore heals.
The best advice for lysine cold sores treatment is to begin taking the healing dose of 1000 mg 3 times per day as soon as you feel the initial signs of an oncoming cold sore—for most people, a tingling sensation on the lip which won’t go away. If you follow the maintenance regimen and treat your cold sores aggressively with lysine when they occur, you should soon notice a reduction in both the severity and the frequency of your fever blisters, or cold sores. You should continue taking lysine on a preventive basis and treating active outbreaks with lysine cold sores treatment; remember that there is no cure for the herpes virus and that you will always face the potential of cold sores.