Bruce Patterson's Lab tests plus treatments

not tried it - but the guy has a good track record in mainstream research and held in good standing with his peers - his published peer reviewed papers are quite compelling and i think he has government grants to set up test labs and treatment clinics in USA, UK and a couple of countries in Europe

he basically demonstrates a common mechanism at work in chronic lyme, long covid and CFS - that explains why the symptoms are so similar - mainly errant white blood cells expressing antigens from pathogens for much longer than they should - driving vascular inflammation

he is mostly focussed on long covid- but explains that the people who come into his clinics with persistent fatigue dont typically know what they have - and via this testing be is able to tell what the root cause is -
he is finding around 20% have chronic lyme - another 10% have CFS and the remainder are long COVID

there was a project lyme video interviewing him also - which is a bit more focussed on lyme
will attach a link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g3v3qyuvq4

hi Lymie

i think his main innovation is a test that seems to be able to determine what people are suffering from - out of a range of previously hard to distinguish conditions
Long Covid,
ME/CFS,
Chronic Lyme

he has then demonstrated a immune modulating treatment that helps people in the long COVID category ( his initial target - and still his main focus and source of grants etc )

from his comments in the project lyme interview - its clear he thinks that addressing the two immune pathways he identified in Long covid with a statin and a second drug is effective in the majority of long covid patients - he has some decent data to support this claim

he did not seem to have as clear an idea of how to treat chronic lyme patients
he described how this population popped out of his research unexpectedly so are a kind of interesting after thought.
but , while he was doing the rounds on podcasts promoting his clinics / testing etc it then made sense to include an appearance or two in the lyme community - to promote interest - even if he doesn't have all the answers.

while its clear that he believes the same immune disturbing mechanism is at work there as is in long COVID - i don't think he is proposing that only his immune based treatment would be enough to cure Chronic lyme patients -
in the project lyme video he says he thinks antimicrobial treatment is likely to be needed as well but he is clearly not a lyme expert

if there is a lyme group trying only his immune modulating treatments for chronic lyme - i think they are either just doing a speculative trial - or have perhaps misunderstood Patterson's own position on it.
( i haven't watched the Horowitz vs Patterson discussion so perhaps he stated something different there - though i would have thought Horowitz would challenge a treatment without any antibiotics?)

i guess there is always a a chance doing something to the immune system alone could help -

but i personally would be surprised if that alone were enough in the presence of an ongoing infection that is so well adapted to persisting in the host long term and being so disruptive to normal immune function while it does so, letting in other infections etc .

One CIFDS finding is that some people who have been diagnosed with CFIDS have mitochondria that have fragmented to defend the cells against HHV-6 (a particular variant of it). The fragmented mitochondria are less efficient at generating cellular energy. The body remains in a war zone state, a state of being under seige. It never ends the war and enter the rebuilding state. It is ongoing at the cellular level.

This is just one way in which the body will not just be able to respond to some form of immune modulation necessarily, because it is happening at the cellular level, at a very primitive level, and it involves the cellular danger signal.

One other finding is that some people who had mono are carrying a defective form of EBV. Their immune cells are unable to clear it.

I don't know why these findings just die on the vine, and then the people who write the new papers don't seem to have done a thorough review of the pre-existing literature. I don't believe the whole scientific and medical community is nefariously controlled. Influenced and corrupted to some extent, sure, but not under tight conspiratorial control. So I guess most of it goes back to money. I'm sure smart people out there know more than I do but lack sufficient funding. I hope the attention being given to long COVID will change this whole situation. It makes it look really bad to neglect other chronic fatigue diseases, whether Lyme or CFIDS. It becomes a matter of credibility. TPTB may have to do the right thing to save face. I hope so.

I looked in the archives and found somebody who said his uncle who had a bulls eye rash, and later developed ALS-like symptoms of slurred speech and swallowing difficultues, improved a lot from LDI. But after a while, he got much worse, and then LDI was no longer helping him. I didn't see any other stories, but that particular one does sound disastrous.

My son never got much worse, and he kept responding to the borrelia LDI in consistent and predictable ways. When it became temporarily unavailable and he relapsed, that's what originally impelled me to seek another treatment. I had a hard time deciding because of the information explosion type of problem, and I have Stephen Buhner's books, but they are full of exhaustive laundry lists of herbs. They are encylopedic.

The signal-noise problem with information about herbs would have made it hard for me to be the Lyme Dr. Mom. The naturopath told me herbs don't work on Lyme. And he wouldn't have an NP prescribe antibiotics until the gut was healed first. (But the gut didn't improve until borrelia LDI helped with dysmotility problems that were apparently in the nervous system.) The one LLMD available in my previous location would not treat my son because he was diagnosed with autism. Because of these problems I'm very thankful I had the right to try LDI, and I'm very thankful it actually worked.

Years ago it was a blessing to have a simple treatment that healed the nervous system enough for him to make great strides in response to speech and vision therapy and other therapies. Relying on LDI enabled me to focus mainly on the therapies, which were profound needs, and it so happens they were readily available at the time, and we could actually get them covered. I needed to make the most of the resources we had while they were available.

I don't regret the LDI. My only regret is placing too much confidence in the doctor after he succeeded with it. I've learned the hard way that no matter how successful any practitioner is, they can't have too much confidence placed in them. It doesn't matter how outstanding a help they've been. Expecting everything else they do or say to be equally outstanding turns out to be a mistake. (I regret being persuaded that every nail needed an LDA or LDI hammer. We paid the price for it, and I learned from my mistakes--eventually having an ugly communication breakdown, though.)

I still give my son the LDA allergy desensitization treatments for foods and inhalants. I would still give him the borrelia LDI to this day, but he quit responding to it, even at a strong dose of 5c, stronger than he ever had before. His doctor expected it to happen once the herbs reduced the bacterial load below a threshold level.

Sometimes I have suspected that the reason why LDI worked for my son was because I had little choice but to stick with it. But experience with other LDI antigens taught me it's not that simple. Although the borrelia LDI experience had consistency and predictability to it, other LDI antigen experiences were quite a bit more inconsistent and confusing. So I believe the reports of Lyme LDI experiences being inconsistent for many people. Or flaring at higher dose but not helping at a weaker dose, or helping but then not helping anymore.

Bartonella LDI became predictable but started off confusing. But mycoplasma LDI was not consistent, nor was strep. Babesia LDI experience was initially awful but after that phantom-like and elusive. I'm not sure if he ever had a response again after that first one. If I saw a cherry angioma I asked for a dose decrease. It seemed to work.

I've asked the current doctor what could have happened to the co-infections and if LDI flares could have made his immune system attack and kill them. He said it's quite possible. (I don't recommend trying it on purpose. The flares can be massive and horrific, and nobody really knows if the immune system kills the bacteria during the flares or if it's really just a completely unhelpful auto-immune attack.)

No worries. LDI is an experimental treatment. It's hard to tell who will be a good candidate for it. We got lucky in our case.

I wasn't a good responder, myself, to the LDA for allergies. It was hard to tell if it did much, and if it did, it only lasted a few days. I don't know if I should have stuck with it. I didn't know the LDA allergy treatments were helping my son until we couldn't get them temporarily. Then I saw deterioration. It happened on several occasions. It can take up to eight months to actually get much benefit from LDA, I've read. So if I'd stuck it out, maybe I'd have obtained benefit. My son sails through pollen season, but I don't. He used to deteriorate every spring.

A bad reaction usually subsides, but I do know of stories of residual effects that never subsided on their own. I know a story of a kid who had a strep LDI flare that never subsided until he was treated for MCAS. I know one story of somebody whose son never got better from his allergy LDA flare until a trial of helminthic therapy. Another kid never got better from an allergy LDA flare until seeking NAET treatments.

Dr. Shrader used to knock down bad flares with Prednisone when he treated his patients with LDA at his clinic.

the risks from using corticosteroids like prednisone in lyme disease patients are very real

controlled trials were done early on in the disease's history in the USA with patients who had neuroborreliosis - on the basis that corticosteroids are very good at reducing brain inflammation

however the corticosteroids are also very good at suppressing the immune system - and the patients did substantially worse than those who did not receive them, in the long run

there are animal experiments also - that show dramatic increases in the number of spirochetes in tissues of corticosteroid treated animals

Dr Lindner's Daughter was also using them when she had what seemed to be some kind of huge immune resurgence reaction and died suddenly.
its my understanding that they were being used to tray to suppress herx symptoms and allow treatment - but increasing doses were needed and then it all went very suddenly and tragically wrong.

that sounds like a very easy trap to fall into - so i would caution people to be very wary of using them in any chronic infection
eg do a very careful of whether the risks really justify the benefits