141–150 of 186 posts
Thanks docs!
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>Even the other treatment outlined in this blog post (disulfuram) has an open study that is still looking for volunteers. That tells you a little bit about the level of need (modest, but not zero) and the disinterest of the patient community in advancing science (you can draw your own conclusions here). This shows a lack of empathy. Patients are either too sick to travel or lack the money. And how would they hear abo…
> This shows a lack of empathy. Well, now you are attacking my humanity. It's very difficult to have constructive dialog about these issues when individuals attack the speaker, and not what's being said. We are talking about public health policy, which necessarily glosses over individual patients who are suffering and aggregates them into cold, sterile statistics in order to make decisions that are best for society.…
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They're working on the new one: https://www.newsweek.com/lyme-disease-vaccine-valneva-fda-ap...
Currently in Phase 2 Clinical Development since Dec 2018, with interim data expected mid-2020 [1]. [1] https://valneva.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/2018_12_17_VL...
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Lyme disease talk just makes me think of Nicholas Zakas and then I get bummed out. I know there's a guy, or maybe he represents a group of researchers, who thinks that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is caused by inflammation in the brain, either due to some undetectable infection, or just a misfiring that is a lingering effect of some other insult (sounds to me like a histamine response aka allergy). If your body thought y…
Smart talking aside it's possible and relatively easy to identify microbes without growing them. When an immuno-suppresive is effective at reducing symptoms you know it's an autoimmune disorder. You can even find specific anti-bodies in some cases. >You could really ask the same question about Crohn's or IBS. No you couldn't. They are clearly auto-immune disorders. Out of curiosity, do you have any formal training on…
My daughter has an auto-immune disorder and it took two years and a brain biopsy for the best pediatricians in Canada to determine it was auto-immune related. Of course you may dismiss that by saying there are no good doctors in Canada because they're not from (wherever you're from), but your casual dismissal of the complexity of these disorders is simply wrong.
And your last sentence is clearly not just "out of curiosity".
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Lyme disease talk just makes me think of Nicholas Zakas and then I get bummed out. I know there's a guy, or maybe he represents a group of researchers, who thinks that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is caused by inflammation in the brain, either due to some undetectable infection, or just a misfiring that is a lingering effect of some other insult (sounds to me like a histamine response aka allergy). If your body thought y…
Smart talking aside it's possible and relatively easy to identify microbes without growing them. When an immuno-suppresive is effective at reducing symptoms you know it's an autoimmune disorder. You can even find specific anti-bodies in some cases. >You could really ask the same question about Crohn's or IBS. No you couldn't. They are clearly auto-immune disorders. Out of curiosity, do you have any formal training on…
This isn’t an argument that supports your reasoning. It’s just an appeal to authority.
> When an immuno-suppressive is effective at reducing symptoms you know it’s an autoimmune disorder.
Is surgery an autoimmune disorder? A lot of doctors will give a patient steroids to reduce inflammation after surgery.
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Smart talking aside it's possible and relatively easy to identify microbes without growing them. When an immuno-suppresive is effective at reducing symptoms you know it's an autoimmune disorder. You can even find specific anti-bodies in some cases. >You could really ask the same question about Crohn's or IBS. No you couldn't. They are clearly auto-immune disorders. Out of curiosity, do you have any formal training on…
There is a growing consensus in immunology/rheumatology that infections may be a major cause of autoimmunity. One mechanism is molecular mimicry - antigens from foreign invaders that are similar to your body’s own proteins trigger your immune system to attack both self and invader. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199912303412707
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In my (brief) experience with PTLDS sufferers, there have been a couple of disturbing realizations/experiences: 1) it seems that "chronic lyme specialists" are physicians who realized that each patient they diagnose with "chronic lyme" is potentially a cash cow. In that they can be persuaded to pay out of pocket for regimens of IV infusions of antibiotics costing up to tens of thousands of dollars (and which make no…
I don’t doubt everything you’re saying, and that unscrupulous physicians are genuinely taking advantage of their patients. However, as someone with a family member who was recently diagnosed with a (largely untreatable) autoimmune disease, I want to explain why patients become so desperate that they’re willing to try anything. The basic problem here is that anyone who goes online and reads about their condition (eg P…
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>Surgical masks are not effective at preventing infection. They are effective at spreading infection. This is a common misconception, for which CDC is also partially the one to be blamed. Laboratory tests find that improvised cloth masks block 60 – 80% of virus particles Most experts in the early 2000s agreed that these masks were probably better than nothing. https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/5/4/e006577.full.…
> Laboratory tests find that improvised cloth masks block 60 – 80% of virus particles How many virus particles do you need to become infected? Is 20% of the load in a typical aerosol droplet from an asymptomatic infected person above or below that critical number?
>higher viral loads associated with severe clinical outcomes
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Zheijang study does not show any detectable effectiveness https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04261517
Thanks for the link. In case you are interested, here is a larger study from in Wuhan that showed lower time to recovery on hydroxychloroquine: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.22.20040758v...
Though... it seems it has plenty of issues as well, see the comments on pubpeer: https://pubpeer.com/publications/71E74AD5896DCF99981A47917DE...
In the trials registry [1] this was registered as a three arm trial with 100 patients each, so 300 overall. Yet the paper mentions ony two groups with 31 patients each. That alone looks very dubious...
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Lyme disease talk just makes me think of Nicholas Zakas and then I get bummed out. I know there's a guy, or maybe he represents a group of researchers, who thinks that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is caused by inflammation in the brain, either due to some undetectable infection, or just a misfiring that is a lingering effect of some other insult (sounds to me like a histamine response aka allergy). If your body thought y…
Smart talking aside it's possible and relatively easy to identify microbes without growing them. When an immuno-suppresive is effective at reducing symptoms you know it's an autoimmune disorder. You can even find specific anti-bodies in some cases. >You could really ask the same question about Crohn's or IBS. No you couldn't. They are clearly auto-immune disorders. Out of curiosity, do you have any formal training on…