Re: LLMD talk

[Guest guest]

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> So, both of those points seemed pretty shocking to me. 3-5 years and a

success rate of 160 out of 8,000 patients. That does not sound any better than

placebo.

agree; I guess that if people would take three glasses of water a day (instead

of ABX treatment), more than those 8 could be discharged yearly. Definitely not

better than placebo; and I'm afraid this applies to most of these very longterm

treatments: there are no controls, but you can bet that at least for some

patients the problem will disappear whatever the treatment is. Even more so as

probably a good chunk of the patients do not have a proven Borrelia infection,

so it could be something else that is being 'treated'.

> Other interesting points he made:

> He does not think the symptoms that Lyme patients feel are due to toxins being

released into the body, but rather from an immune system reaction - that the

immune system is turned up.

This is more or less the IDSA / mainstream view. I just came a across a new

research article that suggests that people who develop chronic lyme have an

insufficient Th1 reaction to the initial Borrelia infection. People with a good

TH1 response clear the infection and have no longer term symptoms (maybe

irrespective of ABX therapy).

These researchers suggest that the subdued initial Th1 response in those

patients causes the later immune response to stay activated even after the

infection is gone, instead of switching off when the bugs are gone. There is no

proof for this, and I could give several other explanations for their findings.

But it is something that could be looked into in more detail.

> He also does not believe that spirochetes inside the brain cause the cognitive

symptoms, brain fog, etc. He thinks that these symptoms are caused by

inflammation of the blood vessels and that in general the bacteria do not cross

the blood/brain barrier (yes he knows that spirochetes have been found in

autopsied brains, but he says in general brain fog is a result of the

inflammation of the nerves).

this is a bit puzzling to me, as we know for sure that the spirochetes often

cross the blood-brain-barrier. Research from Alan Mac even suggests that

the chetes make genetic changes in the brain (and maybe also in other cells?).

What is causing the inflamed blood vessles etc.? I would guess the spirochetes

.... This is the same complicated mixup of multiple cause and effect factors that

you see with many other 'auto-immune' diseases, and where allopathic science

often gets lost.

Some of you have probably read about an Italian surgeon who 'cures' MS by

dilating the blood vessels between the neck and the skull. He found that these

patients have decreased blood flow (maybe because the blood vessel walls are

inflamed or covered in biofilms?), and increasing the flow removes most of the

symptoms.

> He spoke of a recent study that examined the rates of positivity in Lyme tests

in specialized labs such as Igenex and more general labs like Quest, and the

rates were actually the same. He uses stonybrook himself.

that sounds highly unlikely to me; if only because the people who use IgeneX

are probably a different group than those show use the general testing labs with

their stupid Lyme tests, or Western Blots that only apply the strict CDC

criteria for LD.

There are a few recent good studies about blood tests, including one from the

Dutch CDC that is politically 'sensitive'. This study shows that there are HUGE

differences between different serologic lyme tests (and probably between

different labs), making the outcome a lottery (that's my words, but you can't

come to a much different conclusion). Another recent study shows that the exact

band definitions for the Western Blot can have quite a big influence on the

number of positives; and almost every lab has their own criteria ...