Remission question. ..

On this day that I am trying to remain optimistic. ... I'm feeling pretty crappy today, I'm looking forward to healing and getting my life back, as I am sure we all are....

Do i understand that once remission is reached, and after maintained for an indeterminate amount of time, that if and when symptoms resume, if you treat promptly and of course effectively, that your symptoms will be less severe and shorter lived than the first time around, and from there every possible reoccurance should most likely less severe? Thanks 😘

Thanks, do you think that some kind of preventative ongoing treatment once in remission is a good idea?

Buhner recommends taking Cat's claw and JK indefinitely. I dont think it works all the time, i mean chornic lyme ppl would be so lucky, take cats claw and JK and be safe .... these two herbs are good even for non lyme people to take as daily supplement, they are food grade, and JK has loads of resveratrol which many people take nowadays to help them live 200 years (sic) , and cat's claw is a good general immune booster and antioxidant herb.

However based on Dr. H's statistics from his book, 25-30% of people will relapse even on herbs and will require again a round or two of antibiotics. It's exactly like with TB. Persisters stay there forever. There is no such thing as a fully cured TB individual, they all have some chance of relapse, depending on how quickly they got treatment, the treatment length, dosage, antibiotics used , etc....

So lyme is no different than any other chronic persistent infection on that regard. What is indeed different is the "stealth" nature of it. With TB , when it relapses, you can culture the darn bug. With Lyme, you cannot. But if u put a healthy tick on a guy that relapsed, let it feed, then attach it to a mouse (xenodiagnosis), the mouse will sometimes (not always) get sick with lyme disease ... So the bug is really there, but u cannot culture it.

"In contrast to saline solution-treated mice, mice treated with antibiotic were consistently culture negative, but tissues from some of the mice remained PCR positive, and spirochetes could be visualized in collagen-rich tissues. Furthermore, when some of the antibiotic-treated mice were fed on by Ixodes scapularis ticks (xenodiagnosis), spirochetes were acquired by the ticks, as determined based upon PCR results, and ticks from those cohorts transmitted spirochetes to naïve SCID mice, which became PCR positive but culture negative. Results indicated that following antibiotic treatment, mice remained infected with nondividing but infectious spirochetes, particularly when antibiotic treatment was commenced during the chronic stage of infection."
aac.asm.org/content/52/5/1728.full

My personal experience is "remission" is something that has to be continued to be maintained, daily. It's not an end goal, where when you reach the "goal line" it's over, forever.

Remission is staying on it to stay at the goal line. But here and there, you might get pushed back to the 5 or 10 yard line (hopefully never further back then this) and then you work your way back and try to hold the line.

Remission is an upkeep journey, not really a "destination".

The crazy thing about this disease is some of the treatments do work, some of the herbs really give lyme a hard time. So there are people that do recover.

But because there are so few studies (especially in vivo trials) about chronic lyme, you need to try everything to get better and then if you do, when people ask you "so what herb/drug has healed you?" you have no idea what to reply...

mpost said...
Buhner recommends taking Cat's claw and JK indefinitely. I dont think it works all the time, i mean chornic lyme ppl would be so lucky, take cats claw and JK and be safe .... these two herbs are good even for non lyme people to take as daily supplement, they are food grade, and JK has loads of resveratrol which many people take nowadays to help them live 200 years (sic) , and cat's claw is a good general immune booster and antioxidant herb.

However based on Dr. H's statistics from his book, 25-30% of people will relapse even on herbs and will require again a round or two of antibiotics. It's exactly like with TB. Persisters stay there forever. There is no such thing as a fully cured TB individual, they all have some chance of relapse, depending on how quickly they got treatment, the treatment length, dosage, antibiotics used , etc....

So lyme is no different than any other chronic persistent infection on that regard. What is indeed different is the "stealth" nature of it. With TB , when it relapses, you can culture the darn bug. With Lyme, you cannot. But if u put a healthy tick on a guy that relapsed, let it feed, then attach it to a mouse (xenodiagnosis), the mouse will sometimes (not always) get sick with lyme disease ... So the bug is really there, but u cannot culture it.

"In contrast to saline solution-treated mice, mice treated with antibiotic were consistently culture negative, but tissues from some of the mice remained PCR positive, and spirochetes could be visualized in collagen-rich tissues. Furthermore, when some of the antibiotic-treated mice were fed on by Ixodes scapularis ticks (xenodiagnosis), spirochetes were acquired by the ticks, as determined based upon PCR results, and ticks from those cohorts transmitted spirochetes to naïve SCID mice, which became PCR positive but culture negative. Results indicated that following antibiotic treatment, mice remained infected with nondividing but infectious spirochetes, particularly when antibiotic treatment was commenced during the chronic stage of infection."
aac.asm.org/content/52/5/1728.full

Actually, just wanted to point this out but there are indeed stealth forms of TB ;) Cell-wall deficient forms that will melt right off a heat fixed slide before you even know it's there and are suspected to be behind some idiopathic illnesses. Lymes really not that special at all imo. It's a unique manifestation of a general pattern for parasitic organisms.

I LOVE this visual!!!
" Its like being a knight- you have to keep your body in fighting shape because you never know when the next battle might take place."

Thank you, Bookwyrm!!!! I hope you don't mind my using that phrase as well!

That's not unique to lyme. All organisms are intelligent and respond to danger including bacteria. And plants for that matter. Just because we've put more research into understanding Lymes processes for such doesn't mean others don't do it. Put a drop of blood on some saliva under a microscope and watch them freak out and crowd the plaques looking for entry. Versus a slide with no blood where they just kind of wander aimlessly. Watching those things in dark field is all the evidence you need that they're every bit as alive and intelligent as any other organism. Anyways I have a whole book on stealth pathogens and Lyme takes up a very small percentage of the discussion. Just saying. It's definitely an interesting one but I have yet to come across anything about it that is truly unique. It has it's own way of doing things, but all parasites have to accomplish the same basic tasks as borrelia do and are highly evolved to do it in their own ways.

Post Edited (Psilociraptor) : 3/3/2017 2:07:16 PM (GMT-7)

Thanks for the link, interesting, but you still have not convinced me

Dr. Zhang which is one of the important researches of chronic TB treatments (he is now doing lyme disease antimicrobial research) says the ability to become culture negative after abx treatment is something unique and specific to Lyme bacteria and i dare say one of the reasons we have this huge controversy in treating Lyme, where CDC/IDSA say there is no such thing as chronic lyme, but you have sick people that got the standard abx course and still have the same symptoms as before...

In vivo, once treated with abx, the bacteria becomes culture negative. Meaning u cannot culture it in the lab, but by xenodiagnosis you can still show proof of infection.

He explains this here in detail, gives references to research papers, it's interesting to watch:
/youtu.be/YsitQjnJ6I8?t=1151

So, again, i think this is not a common persistent infection caused by some ordinary bug... I don't say this just to feel special in any way, i'd wish we all just have a bad case of strep, but after reading a lot of research papers about it, this bug seems quite unusual:

- it does not use iron but manganese - unique ability which makes some part of our immune defenses useless
www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/scientists-find-surprising-lyme-disease-bacteria-has-quirky-needs

- it becomes culture negative after abx treatment, yet still viable and infectious, proven by xenodiagnosis (link above)

- it changes shape and becomes dormant under stress. I am not even sure how to define stress. It seems it knows better than me that penicilin means stress, i've no idea how, one wild guess of mine is it detects the toxins produced by other dying sister bacteria and it interprets this as a dangerous situation which triggers the transformation from spirochete into round body.

- it is VERY slow growing, divides every 28 days - this is why abx courses with cell wall abx have to be so long. Strep divides every 10 minutes and E. coli every 20 minutes....

- it suppresses the long lived immunity of the host to the point where for example a flu vaccine is no longer protective and you will get flu even after the shot is administered journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1004976

Girlie said...

there is a silver lining to the long replication time...is that it may not become resistant to the abx we are on.

yes indeed. fewer generations means fewer mutations and less susceptibity for resistance.

But there are other methods to achieve resistance, like for eg using plasmids. Hope it does not work for borrelia
/en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmid-mediated_resistance?wprov=sfla1

probably it still needs to happen during division, so still low chance

Check out this book if you're interested https://www.amazon.com/Cell-Wall-Deficient-Forms-Third/dp/0849387671 It's extremely dense. I'm getting my degree in biochem in may and I still had a lot of trouble reading it but it's indispensable if you're interested in stealth pathogens and parts of it are easily digestible. I think she led one of the Lyme conferences too. She definitely has a huge respect for borrelia but she's got a lot more than that. These are crazy creatures my friend!