What Is Shingles?
A Terrain Perspective on a Misunderstood Condition
A couple of summers ago, a man came to naturopath Amandha Vollmer with a severe case of shingles covering his entire torso. He was in tremendous pain. The angry rash spread across his back and wrapped around his sides—the kind of presentation that typically sends patients to urgent care for antiviral medications and, often, repeat visits when the condition returns months or years later.
In a recent interview, Vollmer explained what she told him—something he had never heard from any doctor: this was not an infection. It was not contagious. And if he wanted it to resolve completely—without scarring, without the chronic nerve pain called post-herpetic neuralgia, without ever experiencing it again—he needed to do the opposite of what conventional medicine recommends. He needed to help his body finish what it had started.
She explained her understanding: what he was experiencing was his body’s attempt to expel toxic material that had accumulated in his nervous system. The nerve tissue was expressing—pushing something out through the skin. Suppressing that process with pharmaceutical antivirals would stop the immediate symptoms, but the underlying toxic material would remain lodged in his nerves, virtually guaranteeing recurrence.
Instead, she gave him a 30% DMSO solution in aloe gel and told him to apply it across his torso two to three times daily. She warned him it might look worse before it got better—the expression would intensify as his body completed the elimination. She recommended nutritional support: B12 and St. John’s wort to support nervous tissue, vitamin C and zinc for tissue repair.
The result: complete resolution. No scarring. No post-herpetic neuralgia. No recurrence. His body had finished what it needed to do, and the condition simply ended.
This outcome is not unusual in Vollmer’s practice. She reports case after case following the same pattern—people who support the expression rather than suppress it experience full resolution without the chronic complications that plague those who follow the conventional treatment path. The question is: why would such a simple approach work when the standard medical treatment so often fails to prevent recurrence and long-term nerve damage?
The answer requires reconsidering what shingles actually is.
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The Dormant Virus Story
According to mainstream medicine, shingles is caused by the varicella-zoster virus—the same virus blamed for chickenpox. The story goes like this: after a childhood case of chickenpox, the virus retreats into nerve tissue where it lies dormant, sometimes for decades. Then, when the immune system weakens due to stress, aging, or other factors, the virus “reactivates” and travels along nerve pathways to the skin, causing the characteristic painful, blistering rash in a band-like pattern called a dermatome.
This explanation has the appealing quality of appearing to account for the pattern of shingles—why it follows nerve distributions, why it tends to appear in older adults, why it occurs in immunocompromised individuals. The Centers for Disease Control states this as established fact, and treatment follows accordingly: antiviral medications like acyclovir aim to suppress viral replication, while pain medications address symptoms.
Several observations fit uneasily with this model. If shingles is caused by reactivation of a dormant chickenpox virus, why does shingles frequently occur in people who have been vaccinated against chickenpox—people who, by the logic of the theory, should never have harbored the virus in the first place? Why does shingles appear as a listed side effect of multiple vaccines, including the shingles vaccine itself? Why does the conventional treatment so often fail to prevent recurrence, with many patients experiencing multiple episodes despite antiviral therapy?
As Dr. Thomas Cowan observes, the dormant-virus-reactivation theory requires accepting a cascade of claims, none of which have been definitively established through rigorous scientific method. The varicella-zoster virus has never been properly isolated according to Koch’s postulates or their modern equivalents. The mechanism by which a virus could remain dormant for fifty years and then suddenly “wake up” has never been demonstrated. The entire story, Cowan argues, represents “inventive reasoning”—making things up to preserve existing dogma when observations don’t fit the expected pattern.
Dr. Sam Bailey, examining the scientific literature on chickenpox and shingles, notes that original papers establishing viral causation are curiously absent. “Throughout the chickenpox literature, the same claim is made that the disease is caused by the highly contagious varicella virus,” she writes. “But nobody cites an original paper where this was established.” The isolation studies that do exist use the same flawed cell-culture methodology that characterizes virology generally—procedures that cannot distinguish between the alleged virus and cellular debris produced by the experimental conditions themselves.
The Contagion Question
One persistent concern among those questioning mainstream medicine is the idea of “shedding”—that vaccinated individuals might transmit something to unvaccinated people, potentially triggering conditions like shingles. Dr. Sam Bailey addresses this directly in a recent discussion: “Contagion in the sense of some sort of microbe or particle passing around between people, whether it’s prions or whatever—it’s just never been shown to be a thing.”
She emphasizes moving away from fear-driven explanations: “I would totally move away from this idea that someone shed on you, or that you’ve caught this from someone who’s been recently vaccinated. I think that is just more fear-driven nonsense and it won’t get you any closer to the answer.”
This matters because the search for an external pathogen—whether from a sick person, a vaccinated person, or environmental exposure to a “virus”—distracts from the more productive question: what went into the body that triggered this response?
Dr. Mark Bailey offers a guiding principle: “The body doesn’t make mistakes. Something’s happened here. There’s a reason why you had shingles. I don’t know what the answer is, but there will be something.” Sometimes identifying that something takes considerable detective work, and the cause may not be immediately obvious.
Rethinking What We See
Understanding what shingles actually is requires stepping back to examine what viruses themselves are—or rather, what they may not be.
When scientists examine diseased tissue under electron microscopes, they observe small particles that have been classified as viruses. The conventional interpretation holds that these particles are invasive pathogens that enter cells, hijack their machinery, replicate themselves, and cause disease. An alternative interpretation emerged suggesting these particles might be exosomes—packages of cellular material that cells produce as part of detoxification and communication processes.
The problem for virology is that these particles are indistinguishable from what are called viruses. They are the same size, contain the same components, and act on the same cellular receptors. A 2020 paper in a leading virology journal acknowledged that a reliable method for separating virus particles from exosomes does not exist because they appear to exist on a continuum.
However, Dr. Thomas Cowan has moved beyond even the exosome explanation. In a recent interview, when asked about exosomes and cellular communication, he offered a blunt assessment:
“Some people think they’re real. I think it’s just debris. I think the exosome thing was something that we went down that path as a ‘Well, it’s got to be something.’ But it’s not. All you see is cell cultures breaking down. Or you do a biopsy of a lung cancer, and you see cancer tissue breaking down, and you see these particles. All you see is debris. You don’t see anything communicating. I don’t buy that anymore. That was to make us feel better. ‘It can’t be just total bullshit.’ But it is.”
This represents an important evolution in terrain thinking. The particles observed in diseased tissue may not be pathogens, may not be sophisticated communication vesicles, may not be anything more than what they appear to be: the broken-down remnants of cells under stress. The significance lies not in what these particles are but in what caused the cellular breakdown that produced them.
Daniel Roytas, in his extensive examination of contagion theory, notes that viruses have never been observed inside living human beings or directly in bodily fluids. Every image of an alleged virus comes from cell cultures—artificial laboratory environments where cells are stressed, starved, and exposed to antibiotics and other toxic substances. Under these conditions, cells produce enormous quantities of debris. Virologists claim this debris represents viral replication. The simpler explanation: cells dying from experimental conditions release their contents, and researchers label this debris as viruses.
William Trebing describes this process plainly: when cells burst due to toxicity, “there is an abundance of cellular membrane material containing the sticky proteins of DNA and RNA now floating in the fluid between the other living cells.” These fragments—pieces of membrane with genetic material caught inside or stuck to them—are what researchers observe when they look for viruses. “They have simply given a name to a phenomena of cellular toxemia, calling it a virus and placing on it as much blame as they can.”
If this view is correct, the particles found in shingles lesions are not invading pathogens but evidence of cellular breakdown—the aftermath of the body dealing with something toxic that entered its system.
Toxicity and the Nervous System
Vollmer’s clinical observation is that shingles typically represents heavy metal or particle toxicity that has lodged in nervous tissue. The nerve is now “expressing”—attempting to push the toxic material out through the skin. This is why shingles is so painful: the inflammation occurs in nerve tissue itself, and the elimination pathway runs from deep within the body to the surface.
This framework explains several features of shingles that the viral theory struggles with. The dermatome pattern—the band-like distribution following nerve pathways—makes perfect sense if the condition represents toxicity in specific nerve roots expressing outward. The pain makes sense if nerve tissue itself is inflamed during a detoxification process. The tendency for shingles to appear in immunocompromised individuals makes sense because a weakened system is less able to handle toxic burden, and the body may resort to dramatic elimination processes when other pathways are overwhelmed.
Heavy metals have a particular affinity for nervous tissue. Mercury and aluminum—both common components of vaccines and environmental exposures—are well-documented neurotoxins that accumulate in the brain and nervous system. Dr. Russell Blaylock describes mercury as an “enzyme poison” that interferes with normal neural development and function. Aluminum, according to research cited by immunologist Yehuda Schoenfeld, “accumulates, and the more you put in the system, the more you have. When you inject aluminum, you inject it directly into the immune system.”
Christopher Exley, professor of bioinorganic chemistry at Keele University, notes that aluminum injected via vaccines behaves differently than aluminum ingested through food: “significant amounts of aluminum adjuvant can be collected from injection sites and transported throughout the body and delivered in potentially acute amounts to target sites which would normally only receive or be subjected to very low but persistent exposure.” The nervous system is one such target site.
The COVID Vaccine Connection
The connection between vaccines and shingles is not speculative—it appears in the medical literature and on vaccine package inserts. Shingles is listed as a potential adverse event following numerous vaccinations. But the COVID-19 vaccination campaign brought this connection into sharp relief.
Reports of shingles following COVID vaccination surged dramatically. Case reports and observational studies documented the pattern: individuals developing shingles days to weeks after receiving mRNA or adenovirus-vector COVID vaccines, often in people with no prior history of the condition or who had not experienced an outbreak in decades. The phenomenon was common enough to generate its own body of medical literature attempting to explain why a vaccine might “reactivate” a “dormant virus.”
From the terrain perspective, the explanation requires no such contortions. The COVID vaccines deliver a substantial toxic payload—lipid nanoparticles, mRNA sequences, spike protein production, and in some formulations, additional adjuvants. This material must be processed by the body. For some individuals, particularly those with existing toxic burden or compromised detoxification capacity, the additional load triggers elimination processes. When toxicity has accumulated in nervous tissue, that elimination may manifest as shingles.
Immunologist Yehuda Schoenfeld and colleagues had already proposed the term “autoimmune/inflammatory syndrome induced by adjuvants” (ASIA) to describe the constellation of symptoms—including neurological effects—that appear after exposure to vaccine adjuvants. The post-COVID-vaccine shingles surge fits this pattern precisely.
This explains Vollmer’s observation that shingles patients frequently have a history of vaccination preceding their outbreaks. The heavy metals and other toxic components of vaccines have an affinity for nervous tissue. Once lodged there, the body may eventually attempt to eliminate them—and the pathway out runs through the dermatome to the skin.
Looking Beyond the Obvious
Dr. Sam Bailey raises an important point about identifying triggers in people who appear to live healthy lifestyles. Even someone eating organic food, exercising regularly, avoiding obvious toxins, and taking supplements may encounter hidden sources of toxic exposure.
Supplements themselves warrant scrutiny. Bailey notes that many supplements contain problematic additives: “One thing that shocked me recently was that there’s this thing called red dye three, which is a food coloring added to lots of different things—colored drinks, different colored candies—but it’s also added to pharmaceuticals and supplements. And you don’t think about it.”
The shells and coatings of supplements often contain colorings, fillers, and other additives that may trigger reactions. Someone taking multiple supplements daily accumulates exposure to these additives over time. Bailey suggests that when faced with an unexplained skin eruption, eliminating all supplements and returning to natural dietary sources may help identify the culprit.
She offers a telling example from her own family: their three-year-old son, raised on completely organic food with no pharmaceutical exposure, developed a skin rash. The cause? M&M’s given as a toilet-training reward. “The coloring in the M&M’s was enough to cause a skin reaction, and as soon as we stopped the M&M’s, the skin just went back to normal again.”
The lesson: triggers can be subtle, easily forgotten, or seemingly insignificant. Eye drops, occasional treats, contaminated water, a new personal care product—any of these might introduce enough toxic material to trigger elimination through the skin. The body’s response is proportional not just to the individual exposure but to the cumulative burden it’s already carrying.
Location as Evidence
Vollmer has observed a striking pattern in her shingles cases: the location of the rash frequently corresponds to sites of prior physical trauma, surgery, or toxic exposure. In her DMSO book, she describes gathering patient histories and finding these correlations with remarkable consistency.
One woman’s shingles appeared exclusively under her breasts—precisely where she had worn an underwire bra for years. Another patient developed shingles on the head at the exact site of a previous closed head injury. These patterns suggest that the body’s elimination process targets areas where toxic material or scar tissue has accumulated, using the nerve pathways in those specific regions.
The conventional viral theory offers no explanation for these location-specific patterns. If a dormant virus were simply reactivating throughout the nervous system, why would it consistently emerge at sites of prior trauma? But if shingles represents the body’s attempt to clear accumulated toxicity from nervous tissue, the pattern makes intuitive sense: the body eliminates through the pathways where the problem exists.
This understanding has practical implications. Vollmer hypothesizes that toxic metals and scar tissue are often involved in shingles presentations, and that detoxifying the nerve is the primary therapeutic goal—not suppressing an imaginary viral infection.
The Problem with Suppression
The terrain perspective on health holds that symptoms generally represent the body’s efforts to heal itself—to eliminate toxins, repair damage, and restore balance. A fever burns off pathogens and accelerates immune function. A rash expels material through the skin. Vomiting and diarrhea clear the digestive tract of harmful substances. These processes are uncomfortable, but they serve the body’s survival.
This view stands in direct contrast to conventional medicine’s approach, which typically seeks to suppress symptoms. Antivirals for shingles aim to stop viral replication—or, from the terrain perspective, to halt the body’s expression of toxic material. Pain medications mask the signals that indicate tissue is stressed. Anti-inflammatories reduce the inflammatory process that is part of healing.
When expression is suppressed, the underlying problem remains. The toxic material that the body was attempting to eliminate stays lodged in the tissue. The body will try again—hence the pattern of recurrence that plagues so many shingles patients despite treatment. And when suppression is repeated multiple times, the long-term consequence can be chronic damage: post-herpetic neuralgia, the persistent nerve pain that conventional medicine acknowledges but cannot adequately explain or treat.
Vollmer describes post-herpetic neuralgia as “simply an unresolved shingles episode.” When DMSO is applied to areas affected by this chronic pain, patients often experience a temporary increase in rash as the body finally completes the elimination it had been attempting years or decades earlier. With continued support for expression, the chronic pain resolves.
The principle appears in traditional naturopathic medicine: suppressing acute symptoms drives illness deeper into the body, eventually manifesting as chronic disease. As one text puts it, “The body is a self-cleansing machine, and running to a medical man, after years of indulgence and wrong thinking to have the healing crises suppressed, is little better than suicide.”
Dr. Mark Bailey summarizes the conventional medical approach: “The temporary suppression or masking of symptoms fails to address the underlying causes and sets the patient up for even worse trouble in the future. It is a grave mistake to treat symptoms as if they are the source of the problems.”
The Shingles Vaccine
When someone develops shingles, doctors often recommend the shingles vaccine to prevent recurrence. Dr. Sam Bailey is direct about this: “Definitely don’t get the shingles vaccine. That is a marketing scam and is not going to do anything for you.”
The logic of recommending a vaccine after shingles exposes a fundamental problem with the conventional theory. If shingles results from reactivation of a virus that has been dormant for decades, how could a vaccine study possibly demonstrate efficacy? As Bailey points out, “There’s no way they could have done a study over that period of time, because they’re saying that people can get this 60 or 70 years later in their life.”
More fundamentally, if shingles represents the body’s attempt to eliminate toxicity, introducing additional toxic material via vaccination moves in exactly the wrong direction. The body is trying to reduce its burden; the vaccine adds to it.
Supporting the Body’s Process
If shingles represents the body’s effort to expel toxicity through nervous tissue and skin, the therapeutic approach shifts from suppression to support. The goal becomes helping the body complete its elimination process efficiently, minimizing tissue damage along the way, and addressing the underlying toxic burden to prevent recurrence.
DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide) plays a central role in Vollmer’s approach. This remarkable compound has been used in Europe alongside conventional treatments for shingles—it is combined with the antiviral idoxuridine to enhance tissue penetration. But DMSO’s properties make it valuable from the terrain perspective for different reasons.
DMSO is a true analgesic, relieving pain without the side effects of pharmaceutical painkillers. It is a potent anti-inflammatory, helping to reduce tissue damage during the expression process. It has bacteriostatic properties, preventing secondary infection of skin lesions. Most importantly for shingles, DMSO penetrates tissues deeply and helps carry substances—including the toxic material the body is trying to expel—through the skin.
Vollmer’s caution is important: DMSO can encourage expression to intensify before it resolves. Patients need to understand that the rash may temporarily worsen as the body completes its work. This is not a sign of treatment failure but of accelerated healing. Continuing application through this phase leads to complete resolution.
Nutritional support addresses the tissue repair that must follow expression. B vitamins, particularly B12, support nervous tissue health and healing. St. John’s wort has traditional use for nerve-related conditions. Vitamin C accelerates tissue repair and supports detoxification pathways. Zinc is essential for skin healing and immune function.
Beyond the acute episode, preventing recurrence requires addressing the sources of toxic exposure that created the problem. This means examining vaccine history, environmental exposures to heavy metals, occupational chemical contact, supplement ingredients, water quality, and other routes by which toxic substances enter the body. The liver’s detoxification capacity may need support if years of toxic accumulation have compromised its function.
Practical Considerations
For those experiencing shingles or seeking to understand the condition differently, several practical points emerge from this framework:
DMSO application: Vollmer recommends starting with a 30% solution of DMSO in colloidal silver or distilled water, or in aloe vera gel. Apply to the affected area two to three times daily. Higher concentrations (up to 50-80%) may be appropriate as tolerance develops. Continue application until healing is complete—do not stop when symptoms begin to improve, as this may leave the process incomplete. Expect that symptoms may temporarily intensify before resolving.
Nutritional support: Vitamin C at 2,000 mg three times daily supports detoxification and tissue repair. A B-complex vitamin with breakfast supports nervous tissue. Zinc supports skin healing. These can be continued beyond the acute phase to support overall nervous system health.
Nervous system support: B12 supplementation and St. John’s wort have traditional use for supporting nerve tissue during expression. Homeopathic remedies may help manage symptoms while allowing the healing process to continue.
Identify triggers: Examine recent exposures carefully. Consider eliminating supplements temporarily to rule out additives as triggers. Check water sources. Review any new foods, personal care products, or medications. The cause may be something easily overlooked or forgotten.
Understanding the process: Recognition that shingles is not contagious and represents detoxification rather than infection can reduce fear and support appropriate decision-making. The condition is painful because nerve tissue is inflamed during elimination—this is uncomfortable but not dangerous. The skin manifestation represents the final stage of toxins leaving the body.
Post-herpetic neuralgia: For those experiencing chronic nerve pain following shingles, DMSO applied to affected areas may help complete the expression that was previously suppressed. This may cause temporary rash recurrence as the body finally finishes its work. Resolution of the underlying condition should follow completion of expression.
Prevention: Addressing sources of heavy metal and neurotoxin exposure reduces the toxic burden that creates conditions for shingles. Supporting detoxification organs, particularly the liver, helps the body process and eliminate toxins through preferred pathways rather than through skin expression. Nutritional sufficiency provides the raw materials for ongoing tissue health and repair.
A Different Understanding
The man with shingles across his torso represented everything the conventional model predicts should go wrong. His condition was severe. He was in tremendous pain. By standard protocols, he should have been given antivirals to suppress the outbreak and pain medication to manage symptoms—and he should have been warned that recurrence was likely.
Instead, he was given an explanation that made sense of his experience: his body was trying to get rid of something harmful, and the way out was through. He was given practical tools to support that process. And his outcome—complete resolution, no scarring, no chronic pain, no recurrence—reflects what happens when the body is allowed to complete what it started.
The terrain model does not offer magic or instant relief. Shingles is genuinely painful, and supporting expression rather than suppressing it means experiencing that pain while the process completes. But the trade-off is resolution rather than chronicity, freedom rather than recurrence.
Questioning the viral theory of shingles means questioning one of the foundational assumptions of modern medicine—that microscopic pathogens cause disease by invading the body from outside. This is a significant intellectual step. But for those who have experienced the failure of conventional treatment, who have suffered repeated episodes despite following medical advice, or who simply find the dormant-virus-reactivation story unconvincing, the terrain perspective offers an alternative framework that aligns with clinical observation and provides practical pathways to resolution.
The body knows what it is doing. When it produces symptoms, those symptoms serve purposes. The task of medicine—and of the person experiencing illness—is not to silence the body’s signals but to understand them, support the processes they represent, and address the underlying conditions that made them necessary.
Shingles, from this view, is not an infection to be fought but an expression to be completed.
Sources
Interview with Amandha Dawn Vollmer on shingles and terrain theory. Lies are Unbecoming.
Interview with Dr. Thomas Cowan on exosomes and cellular debris. Lies are Unbecoming, August 2025.
Bailey, Sam. “Shingles, Shedding & Red Dye 3.” YouTube, February 2025.
Vollmer, Amandha Dawn. Healing with DMSO: The Complete Guide to Safe and Natural Treatments for Managing Pain, Inflammation, and Other Chronic Ailments with Dimethyl Sulfoxide. Ulysses Press, 2020.
Cowan, Thomas S. and Sally Fallon Morell. The Contagion Myth: Why Viruses (Including “Coronavirus”) Are Not the Cause of Disease. Skyhorse Publishing, 2020.
Roytas, Daniel. Can You Catch a Cold?: Untold History and Human Experiments. 2023.
Gober, Mark, et al. An End to Upside Down Medicine: Contagion, Viruses, and Vaccines. Waterside Press, 2023.
Engelbrecht, Torsten, Claus Köhnlein, and Samantha Bailey. Virus Mania: Corona/COVID-19, Measles, Swine Flu, Cervical Cancer, Avian Flu, SARS, BSE, Hepatitis C, AIDS, Polio, Spanish Flu. 3rd Edition, 2021.
Lester, Dawn and David Parker. What Really Makes You Ill?: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Disease Is Wrong. 2019.
Bailey, Mark. The Final Pandemic: An Antidote to Medical Tyranny. 2023.
Trebing, William P. Good-Bye Germ Theory: Ending a Century of Medical Fraud. Xlibris, 2006.
Terrain Therapy. 2022.
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Toxic poisoning event can be dental treatment. I had a root canal removed in 2021, it was a disaster, so much nerve pain, has taken years to resolve. in 2022 had immune event my biologic dentist said was shingles, it was all over my face, neck and spread to my arms - that was all. It lasted for nearly a year. Unfortunately he didn't want to hear that I may have had a reaction to the many many anaesthetic injections I had every few weeks over 2-3 years.
A family friend received the shingles vaccine…two weeks later they acquired shingles…their advice…”don’t get the shingles vaccine, it doesn’t work.”