How long to stick with treatments that aren't working

Hi All,
Last November/December I tried to get through the 9-week Horowitz double dapsone protocol but had to stop about a week and a half after reaching double dapsone strength (6+ weeks in) when I became too ill from a virus on top of the treatment. Despite aborting treatment I made huge gains in brain function, myalgias, and joint pain. After recovering for a few months I started treatment with Mepron plus Azithromycin because of a positive Babesia FISH test prior to the dapsone treatment and my remaining symptoms of hand and foot pain, night sweats, exercise intolerance, and head pressure/pain. After about a month of no real improvement (and increasing tinnitus maybe from Azithromycin) I was switched to Malarone and Tafenoquine. Altogether I have been treating babesia for 3 months but have not experienced any significant improvements (night sweats have decreased, but hand and foot pain are increasing and everything else about the same). My doctor is now suggesting trying the Horowitz quadruple dapsone 6-day pulse (plus all the antibiotics for a week prior and during). I am tempted by the short duration despite my difficulties last time around, and also by the gains I had made before, which had allowed me to return to work 1/2 time. Does anyone have any thoughts on whether I should stick out the Tafenoquine treatment for a while longer despite almost no real improvement. Thanks for your thoughts!

i have had periods where there were no measurable progress for 2-3 months - and then without doing anything different - had significant improvements in the next month

i think its common for the process to be non-linear - up some weeks down other weeks - faster progress some weeks and slower progress other

but i think 3 months without any change is about the limit for me

i am a slow responder to all treatments though

partly to try to cope with that - i have a very sensitive and accurate way to track any improvements via numeric methods tracking objective measures - not subjective ones -

so i think it fair to say the granularity and consistency with which you can detect changes is also a part of the same consideration

if a person is tracking only gross measures of health - or only subjective ones - its quite possible for significant real world improvements to be going on over the period of a coupe of months that are not obvious to them

whereas someone with a very carefully constructed objective measures system could easily pick up say a 2% improvement in a month using moving averages etc.

i am in the latter camp and self treating and found i had to have something systematic and objective in nature after demonstrating to myself how poor my subjective measures were at guiding my treatment.

hope its of some help

I can tell something is working when my Monthly Die-Off becomes more exasperated. It is rare for me to get any immediate response. I stick to the belief that I need to get worse, before I get better. Strange, but true irony for those who are stuck in the Chronic category.