If you are seeing a doctor for low blood platelets or ITP blood disorder and are looking for additional ways to supplement your doctor's treatment methods than this is the article for you. In a few brief paragraphs I am going to explain what various methods your doctor will be using to treat you're condition and also turn you on to an option that he or she is not trained for and you may be unaware of.

If you are already familiar with standard medical treatments and the benefits along with the side effects than I suggest you jump down to the last four paragraphs of this article to get to the meat and potatoes of the overlooked option you might not know about.

How Your Doctor is Trained to Treat You

Since ITP blood disorder is an autoimmune condition your doctor will use both short term and long term treatments to suppress your immune system. This is because your confused immune system is giving orders to create antibodies to destroy platelets.

Platelet destruction is natural but should only occur at the end of their usefulness. This way there are already replacements ready. However with this condition younger, healthy platelets are being destroyed. Because of this you are loosing platelets faster than they are being produced.

Your doctor will accomplish immune suppression using drugs like Prednisone. Fairly fast results are achieved in a couple of weeks then a regime of continually taking the drug in smaller and smaller doses until weaned is implemented so as not to over-activate the immune system but gradually stop the drug therapy.

Another long term treatment is to use synthetic hormones which also suppress the immune system. For this method to work you need to be on the drug therapy for over a year. Many have achieved remission with this treatment.

The major downside with any drug therapy is the unwanted side effects. At times they can even be worse than the low platelet counts if they are still in the safe zone, above 50,000. Of course below 50k especially below 20k things become real serious and the health risks out weigh the side effects.

Other measures (some drastic) taken by doctors are surgeries such as spleen removal, blood filtration, transfusions and infusing immunoglobulins. These and others are only temporary measures and will need to continually be repeated (except spleen removal) if you can't balance platelet counts with other means.

Alternative Treatments to Increase Platelets

Your immune system is like a teeter totter. There is actually two components that do opposite things and need to be kept in balance. Usually this is accomplished without us even knowing but when things get out of balance then platelet destruction occurs.

Scientifically the two ends of the immune system teeter totter are known as Th1 and Th2. The Th1 system is responsible for causing inflammation and creating antibodies (in this case bad ones). The Th2 system is responsible for keeping the Th1 system in check. If it is not working properly or suppressed then Th1 goes ballistic.

Natural alternative treatments such as herbs, supplements and antioxidants are used to modulate the immune system, targeting each side with what will balance in stead of suppress, as in standard treatments.

Of course this is only a small part of your natural options that can contribute to over all immune balance and health. For more detailed information I suggest you read Conquer Low Platelets written by Dr. Louis Cruz.