I did not find taking two weeks off helpful for bart. It grows back too fast. I did take a few days off with minocycline because it inhibited my immune response, so I needed to let my immune system recover and clear out the dead bacteria, but two weeks with no abx seems too long to me.
For borrelia, the idea is to let the persisters wake up by stopping the abx for a week or two. I found that unnecessary because I could use certain drugs that do not result in persister formation. I had a lot of success with valproate and valacyclovir. For whatever reason, borrelia does not seem to sense the danger with these drugs, and does not go into its dormant state. I would herx almost every time.
Beta-lactams and ribosome inhibitors do seem to result in borrelia persisters. This was an issue since I was treating bartonella with minocycline. So I just let borrelia go into its dormant state while I killed off bart. Once I was done with bartonella then I attacked borrelia with different drugs. I still take minocycline or atovaquone/azithromycin occasionally just to make sure the bartonella isn't coming back, but these meds aren't that great for treating borrelia.
I found rifampin and clarithromycin not effective for bartonella. Rifampin was just useless as bartonella quickly became resistant to it and it had bad side effects. Taking mepron with clarithro could overcome bartonella's resistance to it, but clarithromycin alone was rather useless.
The key thing with bartonella is to take something that will disturb its dormant form and cause it to come out, then you can kill it with antibiotics. I did this with valproate. Valproate did cause some amount of borrelia die off even when the bacteria were in the dormant persister state, but the amount of borrelia die off from this was less than the bartonella that I was killing with mino.
Blebbing does happen with borrelia, and I particularly noticed this with loratadine. I would take a claritin pill and within a few hours I was sweating. The bacteria were clearly releasing something. Obviously the bacteria can not do this indefinitely, they will have to replace that lost material. So I would take a claritin, wait for the reaction, then hit borrelia with abx as it tried to recover. A day or two later I would get a huge die off. This seems to be an effective way to goad the bacteria into taking the poison.
The only problem I had with claritin is that, as with minocycline, it suppresses the immune response, so I needed to take a day or two off to let my immune system recover and clear out the dead bacteria. Usually this only took a few days, so I didn't need to stop taking it for weeks. The only thing I would stop for weeks was valproate, but that is a special case because it can actually remain for weeks after you stop taking it. None of the other meds last that long.
Post Edited (Quin) : 10/22/2022 4:54:29 PM (GMT-7)