Provoking Lyme Response

hi Duncan
i'm not sure the abx challenge works - at least not reliably

i have never seen any data to suggest it does beyond n=1 anecdotes

the closest i have seen is that there is a kind of general tendency for people who are sero-negative to become sero positive after some months of treatment with antibiotics - usually many months and several different types of antibiotics in the case reports i recall reading - not in everyone and not after a few days or a week of abx.

one explanation for that could be killing a lot of bacteria in the hosts and restoring better immune function - allowing the host to make antibodies they were not able to before - perhaps at the same time exposing a lot of bacterial proteins to the immune system.

i think short course are much less likley to do the same thing - as meaningful progress with the host immune function usually takes many months of treatmnet in people who have been sick a long time

so i wouldn't say it cannot happen from a short course - by by the above reasoning its seems less likely

do you mind if i ask a question - why do you want another positive test for lyme?

the reason i ask is that all of the data we have says the value of future tests ( be they positive or negative) has little or no diagnostic value - once a person has had a positive result - let alone several as in your case.

if negative - as the tests have high false negative rates generally - not much can be read into a negative result
if positive - it could be due to ongoing infection of just persistent antibodies - as its known that people can continue to make lyme antibodies for many years or even a lifetime after infection - even if symptoms have resolved.

i hope its of some help

i am also a little suspect of the MTTT

my C6 has also been negative both times i was tested -

better perhaps perhaps stick to western / immunoblots then

given that acc to the CDC - which presumably your ID will follow - they are only supposed to test for IgG if patient was infected in the last month -
and given that the body normally takes a month to make IgG after initial challenge
so if the body was going to sero convert from negative IgG to positive IgG we might logically expect that to take over 1 month from start of abx

perhaps the logic would suggest taking 1 month of a couple of abx - then waiting a month for the body to make IgG antibodies ( if it were going to)

also logically - biofilm busters that work for lyme - eg xylitol, lactoferrin etc might be worth adding on the basis that one could reason that the more bacteria exposed - the greater the chance of sero conversion -

its all a bit speculative though - guesswork really - so the other option would just be to roll the dice and do a test now - depends on how soon you need the result - and how much you dislike taking abx

ref labs - i would use Igenex - or whatever lab you feel you have tested positive to most in the past

good luck whichever way you decide Duncan !

duncan - What do you mean abx destroys you now and it's not a herx? You mean your gut and stuff? Or allergies?

For me, the response depended upon what type of abx I was taking at the time. Some had a limited response, in intensity, while all had a limited overall affect. This made sense to me, because most people in my shoes would fall under the "chronic" label and most research in this field agrees that a compromised underlying immune system is a major factor in this. Long term use of abx compromises the mechanisms of the gut that assist in strengthening the immune system - "robbing from Peter to pay Paul" quite literally......