Lysine is AWESOME in shortening outbreaks. What I do is take it about twice a week and when I get an outbreak of cancre or gnital I literally down a Lysine pill every 3 hours or so. I DRATICALLY increases the healing time. Cancre sores in the mouth go from 2 weeks to 5 days in healing time and a genital outbreak goes from 3 weeks to about 1 1/2 weeks. But that's just me, everyone is different.