Hibernation Consternation

My muse left on extended vacation when the Lipkin XMRV study and subsequent press conference succeeded in discrediting retroviruses as a possible explanation for ME/CFS, with lots of important questions still left unanswered. The discussion reverted to whether or not it is a real disease and which set of diagnostic criteria are best, so there hasn’t been much to inspire me. It got pretty depressing. The IOM report was a joke: “The term ‘myalgic encephalomyelitis’ is not appropriate because there is a lack of evidence for encephalomyelitis (brain inflammation) in patients with this disease…”. Fail. I don’t know what to make of the Lipkin cytokine paper, because I take with a grain of salt results from a debunker on call for the government. XMRV wasn’t the first time: Lack of association between measles virus vaccine and autism with enteropathy: a case-control study. Nothing worth blogging about there. Certainly nothing hopeful. But recently, the Naviaux study was published and a couple of proposals posted by NIH have been making the rounds on Facebook, so I’ve had an uptick in email, some asking what I think about the paper and some telling me about successes with antiretrovirals in Europe, as well as encouragement to blog again. So, feeling very rusty, I’m going to give it a go.

My reaction to the Naviaux et al paper, Metabolic features of chronic fatigue syndrome, was dismay that the damage is so extensive and widespread. So many broken pathways. Finding a specific drug target seems very unlikely. There won’t be an answer anytime soon. They, and everyone else, including Lipkin and Hanson, are studying downstream effects, without attempting to identify the root cause. It’s a good thing that people are thinking and looking, but hibernation and dauer are not disease states and being compared to larval worms isn’t exactly the image change we need ;-). Even if they’re right and a handful of common abnormalities in this very heterogeneous group is accepted as validating real disease, my guess is that the findings will be similar in other diseases, e.g. GWI, fibromyalgia, ASD, maybe even chronic depression. GWI patients have PEM and often meet criteria for ME/CFS. As I said five years ago, I think all of these diseases of modern civilization are related and there is a family factor that confers risk to partners and offspring. There are even a few patients who believe themselves to be contagious by casual contact.

So what lies in wait to be activated by heterogeneous triggers and once activated causes immune dysfunction, neurological disease and opportunistic infections? The most likely explanation lives in the realm between retrovirology and genomics, the difference between the fields being as small as a single mutation. We have been injecting retroviruses and pieces of retroviruses into people for over a century. What are the chances that nothing bad happened from that? XMRV apparently doesn’t infect people, but injected into monkeys, it sets up a low level infection. Retroviruses recombine and rescue each other. Environmental toxins activate retroelements (HERVs and retrotransposons) which can recombine with each other or new incoming retroviral sequences and fully replicative retroviruses from vaccinations, biologics and lab workers. XMRV was created in a lab. The Paprotka paper said the odds of the recombination event that produced XMRV happening twice are infinitesimal. On the other hand, the odds of similar events having happened many times is very high I would think, since there have been so many chances. In the last few years it has been found that many cell lines produce viruses like XMRV which are capable of infecting human cells in tissue culture. Lipkin said in a press conference that 85% of Montoya’s samples contained retroviral sequences and in the XMRV study, 6% of patients and controls were positive for an antibody to SFFV, a very nasty murine retrovirus, but everybody is choosing to ignore those clues because that well is poisoned. Nobody wants to be the next Judy Mikovits. Lo and Alter both dropped it like a hot potato, returning to other research, never mind the question of how all these labs, Mikovits, Ruscetti, Silverman and Lo/Alter managed to consistently contaminate the patient samples at a higher rate than the controls.

Take a look at this paper: Are human endogenous retroviruses triggers of autoimmune diseases? Unveiling associations of three diseases and viral loci by Bjørn et al. “We speculate the possibility that recombinants or mixed viral particles are formed and that the resulting viruses stimulate the innate immune system, thereby initiating the autoimmune response.” They looked at multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes mellitus, and rheumatoid arthritis. It is one of several recent papers heading in this direction.

I hypothesized way back when that ME/CFS is related to MS. There are case reports of MS improving when patients take antiretrovirals, Multiple sclerosis patient walks after taking HIV drugs, and new cases of MS are rare or nonexistent in patients taking AIDS drugs, HIV and lower risk of multiple sclerosis: beginning to unravel a mystery using a record-linked database study.

Our very own Gerwyn Morris published an excellent paper on the subject of ME and MS being related diseases. Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and encephalomyelitis disseminata/multiple sclerosis show remarkable levels of similarity in phenomenology and neuroimmune characteristics. I’d like to take this opportunity to acknowledge Gerwyn’s extraordinary achievement. If you search “Morris Gerwyn” on PubMed, his name appears as an author on 23 papers since 2013, usually as first author.

Lots of evidence has been published about the MS retrovirus, MSRV. Viral particles have clearly been detected, but it is less clear if these particles are ever infectious. There are several new papers reporting findings similar to this one, Two endogenous retroviral loci appear to contribute to Multiple Sclerosis.

Which brings us back to where this blog began. Are retroviruses at the bottom of ME/CFS? Might antiretrovirals be effective for ME/CFS and other diseases? Despite the thorough trashing of retroviruses in our disease and the intense ongoing fear mongering about how dangerous antiretroviral drugs are, apparently people are still trying it in Europe. The experience five years ago, when maybe a hundred people tried various regimens in a completely uncontrolled fashion, was some subjective improvement in about half, and no complete recoveries, except for one notable exception. The exception was a teenager who had only been sick for eight months. His mother wrote in the comments on this blog. He recovered fully, took the drugs for 6 months, stopped and as far as I know, didn’t relapse. I still find it upsetting that the prescribing physician was too cowardly to come forward and write a case report. How many teenagers could have been treated acutely since then? There were no injuries that I ever heard of. I was in touch with many of the doctors who were prescribing and there was lots of sharing, doctors and patients together, the only time I’ve ever seen that happen. One doctor I knew prescribed for 50 patients and concluded that it was better than placebo, but not worth the risk of prescribing it.

However encouraging the Naviaux paper may be with respect to advancing the case that ME/CFS is, in fact, a real and dreadful disease, it is discouraging with respect to finding treatment. A viable drug target seems unlikely. We are left with global strategies, hoping for synergy between therapies that don’t stand alone, same as now. But just as I was feeling dour about dauer…

The NIH compilation of responses to their request for proposals was published here. Read bottom of page 3 to top of page 4. I’m not going to mention any names for Google, because I don’t want to increase the risk of regulatory repercussions against a doctor brave enough to report successes with antiretrovirals. Also please read pages 9-12.

Then I heard from a patient in Europe who is having success with antiretrovirals after 20+ years of illness. In his own words:

I have been ill with ME since my mid-teens in 1994. Onset was in two stages. Firstly a gradual onset, whereby I was feeling increasingly more tested after the combined measleas/rubella vaccine, followed a few weeks later by the polio booster. And then secondly once that prodrome had got its hold, the downward cascade was always inevitable, and just waiting for me around the corner. 1994-2014 were harsh and brutal years. I hovered around 55% on the Bell scale and it was torture enough.

From September 2014 to July 2015 I took tenofovir 245mg. Improvement was an upward curve, albeit with some turbulence. Sometimes taking half- week, or full-week, or month-long breaks when I felt my body needed a rest from it so as to hold its own for a while. From August 2015 to September 2016 I added raltegravir to tenofovir and initially at full dose daily which sent me to sleep almost in the first few days. During this period I toggled around until I found the right balance for me. I got it right in the end around about June/July 2016 and the past two/three months have been great. My current regimen is tenofovir 245mg Tuesday through Friday, and on Tuesday and Thursday I also take raltegravir 400mg x 2. My original baseline was about 55% on the Bell scale for the twenty or so years when I was sick. I am now 95-100% and can go to the gym once weekly thanks to the antiretrovirals where I can build up quite a healthy sweat and recuperate normally. My VO2 max continues to increase substantially and my CD3-4-8 counts are x2.5 to 3 fold what they were before I started the antiretrovirals. Life is very good. I also take celebrex and multivitamin/antioxidant supplements and I am monitored closely.

This year I feel more confident about the winter than I did in 2014 on just tenofovir and than in 2015 when I was grappling with adding raltegravir. They were bad winters even though the arv’s did help me through better I guess. Winter 2016 can throw at me what it wants however. Now that I have hit the perfect treatment regimen with the antiretrovirals I am sure it will be a better winter. It was worth sticking it out and learning. I thank Dr Judy Mikovits and my physician over in Germany, along with the continued support of a rare and dedicated French doctor over there in Paris. Finally I thank two doctors over there in the UK for listening. I salute them all as men and women of true honour.

Several people wrote to ask what happened with antiretrovirals for my daughter and me. Ali and I plateaued without recovering fully. After the initial improvement, there was really no way to know what was happening. We both had a very mild flare of symptoms for the first six weeks and then a noticeable increase in energy and resilience. We started with AZT and Isentress, then switched the AZT to Viread a year later. Ali stayed on the two drugs for three years, not wanting to rock the boat, as she was doing relatively well. I stopped the Isentress after about a year and half and took Viread alone after that. We both improved during the three years we took antiretrovirals, but we were doing lots of other things documented on this blog. Since there was always the possibility that we might do better without them, eventually we decided we should find out. As it turned out, we didn’t decline when we stopped. I had some trouble coming off Viread, because my always labile blood pressure went crazy when I stopped, twice. Go figure. In the end, I weaned without any sort of noticeable decline. When we started, we were all so hopeful. Judy believed we’d be able to monitor viral load in a year, but it wasn’t to be. Our combined copays were breaking the bank and after three years, with no way to monitor and able to stop, it just didn’t make sense to continue. I would consider antiretroviral drugs again if either of us crashed completely.

My experience treating six very informed patients was similar to what other doctors have reported, 50% improved subjectively. Two had adverse reactions to Viread, including one who had responded initially; both resolved quickly when the drugs were stopped. Two patients continued long term, one on two drugs and one who opted for Viread monotherapy. I didn’t see anything dramatic enough to make me very encouraged though. I had successes with other things that were similar in scale with less risk to the patient and the doctor. However, it’s possible that tinkering with lower doses and less than every day regimens would make the drugs we have more useful for ME/CFS, even if they were designed for a virus we don’t have. Although we do not want to encourage resistance to the drugs, it’s possible that a small dose of a reverse transcriptase inhibitor would work for us. I heard from a doctor in Europe who reported complete recovery in 2011 after nine months on micro dose AZT (20-30mg/day). I don’t know how it turned out long term, but will write to him and ask.

Dr. Michael Snyderman is still doing remarkably well, still able to work in his hematology oncology practice at 75, controlling his cancer like a chronic disease, specifically like AIDS. He has been taking HAART for over 6 years, having twice passed his median survival, meaning there was less than a 25% chance that he’d still be alive by now. I will share his data here in the near future. He is still hoping to collaborate with Roswell Park Cancer Center in his hometown of Buffalo, NY to help patients who have cancer and who have a poor prognosis. The same viruses that infect cancers infect the immune system.  If cancer patients benefit as he expects they will, initiatives can be made with the neuroinflammatory disorders including ME/CFS. There is now a reliable virus detection methodology, ViroCap invented by the Wylies at Washington University and the Wylies are interested in collaborating with this research.

These are leads, the only leads we have. If drugs developed for a completely different retrovirus have some activity against a disease, think what could happen with some attention to the process that is actually occurring. The technology, next generation sequencing, already exists to begin to answer our questions, but the various software platforms that analyze the data are still in their infancy. The metabolomics studies are happening because there is a new toy. There are going to be lots of new toys in the near future. It already didn’t happen by random doctors prescribing off label. Since it wasn’t a slam dunk, it needs to be formally and properly studied.

It is possible that the metabolites that Naviaux et al have identified as a potential diagnostic panel might be useful for monitoring success with antiretrovirals. Dr. Naviaux has answered questions here, stating that he thinks the use of antibiotics and antivirals aren’t indicated and I mostly agree with him, planning to share my thoughts on treatment in a future blog.

I continued to go slowly uphill after I last blogged about ME/CFS almost two years ago, but nothing like a full recovery. I was able to work a little and I was able to ride on the back of a tandem, close to a thousand miles in two years according to Strava, half of it on dirt. Still lots of symptoms, but a life, where once there wasn’t one, plus a way to get endorphins. My recovery was slow after exercise; I felt drained the next day, but nothing like full blown PEM. I was still maintaining the fantasy that someday I would recover fully. But a year ago, while hiking, I twisted my ankle and broke my distal fibula. It was a minor fracture that should have healed without problems in 6 weeks. Instead I got RSD/CRPS (reflex sympathetic dystrophy/complex regional pain syndrome), a very challenging and painful condition. It takes most of my energy just to cope and I’ve been out of commission since it started, able to attend only to my own treatment (HBOT).

After 5 years of managing patients, I had to retire completely. I only worked with a very small number of patients, scattered all over the country, who saw me in person once a year in Hawaii or Arizona, but I got to know them very well, because most of the contact was electronic, day to day, moment to moment even, and that works well for ME/CFS patients. It was enough to learn quite a bit about the spectrum of disease, what works and what doesn’t, especially given that almost everyone I saw had been around the block and came with voluminous records, having failed treatment with the best. I’d like to share my impressions while still fresh, so intend to keep blogging, if I don’t get too beat up over this one ;-).

Today’s song from Les Misérables

Cactus Fruit

Last October, after three months on the Wahls paleo diet, I recovered my ability to benefit from exercise. I had been unable to exercise without payback for nine years, since starting treatment for tick borne diseases, a decade into my illness. That most intangible switch between can’t and can suddenly flipped back and aerobic exercise became possible again. No drugs involved. Just a clean, nutrient dense, low carbohydrate diet. Lots of healthy fat.

In February, the “flu” went through our house. I was down with it for about 6 weeks. Then I pushed through and went to Tucson to see patients in April. My upper respiratory tract symptoms came back on my second day home and a week later my husband got sick also. Then, in quick succession, I had a UTI, sinusitis and a salivary gland infection requiring back to back courses of antibiotics.

My mood crashed also. It’s really tough to be very active for a while and then find yourself back in the pit. When I was emerging from years of hell, I felt amazingly wonderful, even though I still had lots of symptoms. Conversely, after a period of very few symptoms, I had a lot of trouble coping with symptoms that would have been no big deal when I was sicker.

I don’t usually catch stuff. I’d been experimenting with higher doses of Vitamin D after reading some studies about using higher doses in MS patients for anti-inflammatory effect. In hindsight, the dose I was taking was probably too immunosuppressive for me, though it is cited as safe in several recent papers. When I went back to a lower dose, the infections stopped. I didn’t try this experiment on anyone but myself. If you do try higher doses of Vitamin D, follow levels and be careful. Upward target level creep is happening in the literature, as people try to use Vitamin D as a drug, not just a preventative. For me, 5000 iu daily seems OK and my 25(OH)D level on that dose is about 50 ng/mL. More was not better, but I am not saying that it couldn’t be for someone else. The word isn’t in yet as to how to supplement Vitamin D optimally in the setting of neuroimmune illnesses. Natural sunlight is no doubt the best way. The most powerful ways to heal are provided by Mother Nature, not a pharmaceutical or neutraceutical company.

Despite my fear that the gig was up for good this time, gut torn up again by antibiotics, I started the climb back to wellerness. I was really weak when I got back on the bike, but I improved faster than the first time and by early August had surpassed my previous level. Anthony and I spent our 26th anniversary camping on the Conejos River in southern Colorado, and went fishing in our canoe on Platoro Reservoir, same as our 25th. Last year, I needed a special seat on the floor of the canoe with a backrest. This year, I could help paddle. Last year, I couldn’t ride a bike. This year, we rode uphill on a fire road for an hour, from 9000 to almost 11,000 feet, before a long, exciting descent. Then later, the same day, we went fishing. If you have been reading my blog for a while, you will recall, I used to need a wheelchair to get through an airport. Now I could jog to the gate if I were late. Exercise is my go to “treatment” when I am feeling poorly, which I still do, not infrequently. I am not cured, by a long shot, but I’m not at the mercy of the illness. I can fight back.

I still attribute my recovered exercise ability to the Wahls paleo diet. I’m no longer completely adherent though. My intake of vegetables is much increased from prior, but I’m no longer force feeding. I eat some rice and quinoa and a few legumes. I eat bananas, apples and pears, though Wahls excludes them. I’ve learned that any dairy is problematic, except butter, but I can get away with a bite of gluten, at least as far as I can tell. Properly produced eggs are my friend, though I haven’t tested for egg allergy or tried eliminating them. My focus has become not only what I eat, but what I avoid, especially toxins and GMOs. We are paying attention to what cookware we use and what we store food in. Bone broth is a staple in our household. My daughter makes it with fresh turmeric root and seaweed. I love my green drinks. We are having an adventure with fermenting. We are learning what edibles grow naturally around us. I am going hunting for prickly pears with my daughter and grandchildren in a little while, planning to make prickly pear, crabapple butter. It will probably be terrible:-), but the walk and the project will do us good.

We are no longer eating as much meat as we were when we first went on the diet. We are a large family and bought a whole cow from a local ranch. It was definitely different to buy it alive and sign off on its slaughter. For about six months, we ate a large amount of very high quality, grass fed, grass finished beef. After that, two healthy members of the family had serious GI complications, specifics of which I won’t share to protect their privacy. Anecdotal of course, but we decided to back off on the red meat. We are eating more fish, even though finding clean fish is so problematic, and having more vegetarian meals.

I stopped writing, not because I was too sick, but because I was too negative. Existential crisis. Jaded and cynical. Disgusted with how broken and corrupt the system is and how hopeless it seems that our current suicidal trajectory can be changed in time. We are about to be a failed experiment, on a global scale. Why write about it? Time to eat, drink and be merry. We have the technology to figure out what we need to do, and not do for neuroimmune illnesses, but no cavalry is coming over the hill. The game is rigged. All greed and special interests. What gets studied, and then published, is tightly controlled. Obvious studies that challenge a prevailing paradigm will not get done (vaccinated vs unvaccinated children or the family study we tried to do once on this blog). Scientists who dare to depart from the mainstream paradigm are discredited (Mikovits and Ruscetti). Yet real live fraud within a government agency that most likely harmed children is covered up by the media (see my last blog). The billions of dollars paid out by the drug companies for their frequent gigantic frauds make the news, but their stock prices remain strong. Those billions are just the price of doing business. And they are indemnified in the case of vaccines, so that’s a real gravy train. The medical profession is completely asleep at the wheel when it comes to the causes of or solutions to complex chronic diseases. Safe treatments that can’t be patented, like home oxygen, will never be studied. So their treatments now do more harm than good. Conventional doctors push dangerous drugs. Alternative doctors push expensive tests and supplements. Depressed yet? I certainly am, if I think about it too much. So I won’t. I’ll go on a hike with family at the end of a magnificent monsoon season in the high desert, pick prickly pears and be grateful I can walk. Time to find some heavy gloves.

Stay tuned for an update from Dr. Michael Snyderman.

By Way of Sorrow –  Cry, Cry, Cry

The Fox Guarding The Henhouse

It’s been quite a while since I’ve had the urge to blog. Throughout the years when I was writing regularly, even when very angry, I always had a positive feeling that awareness was growing and answers would be found. However, I’ve lost that feeling in a growing realization of just how corrupt the people we need to save us actually are. I haven’t wanted to write from a place of negativity, because God knows there’s already enough bad news, but the recent CDC whistleblower scandal, dismissed by the mainstream media, has given me twitchy fingers again.

As far as I can tell from the various sources on the internet, Brian Hooker, PhD, an engineer, autism dad and board member of an organization called Focus Autism, after years of trying to exercise his Freedom of Information Act rights, managed to obtain the original data set for a study published by the CDC in 2004: Age at first measles-mumps-rubella vaccination in children with autism and school-matched control subjects: a population-based study in metropolitan Atlanta by DeStefano et al, 5 authors including one William Thompson. Apparently, late last year, Thompson contacted Hooker and in a series of conversations confessed privately to fraudulent manipulation of data to cover-up a 240% increase in autism in African American males who were given the MMR vaccine on time compared to those vaccinated later. However, the decision was made to use only children with a valid birth certificate, thus eliminating enough black children to dilute the increase to below statistical significance. Some email by Thompson expressing his concerns at the time have also come to light. All of this is very well covered on the Age Of Autism website.

Brian Hooker recently published a paper reanalyzing the original data and showing the association: Measles-mumps-rubella vaccination timing and autism among young african american boys: a reanalysis of CDC data. In a YouTube, Dr. Thompson was outed, initially with his voice disguised electronically, then a couple of days later, without the distortion, including this quote, “Oh my God, I did not believe that we did what we did, but we did. It’s all there… This is the lowest point in my career, that I went along with that paper. I have great shame now when I meet families of kids with autism, because I have been part of the problem.” 

Despite a chillingly complete black out by the mainstream media, Dr. Thompson issued a statement published on his lawyers’ website, which included this admission of guilt. “I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information  in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed.” Then the predictable backpedaling. He believes vaccines have saved millions of lives, blah, blah, blah. What can he say to ameliorate his admission that he is personally responsible for publishing disinformation, a lie, when the truth could have spared how many black boys from relentless suffering? Thousands? Tens of thousands?

According to the CDC website, Coleen Boyle, the senior author of the paper in question went to work at the CDC in 1984 and now “serves as Director of the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities (NCBDDD)”. She was appointed to this position in 2004, the same year the DeStefano paper was published. It was on her watch, working as a visiting researcher in Boyle’s department, that Danish researcher Poul Thorsen, was financed by the CDC, in part to study the relationship between autism and vaccine exposure. 22 publications come up when PubMed is queried with his name and “autism”, two in high impact journals (Pediatrics and NEJM) purporting to prove that thimerosal and the MMR vaccine don’t cause autism. In 2011, he was indicted on 22 counts of wire fraud and money laundering for diverting over a million dollars of CDC money to his personal accounts. His papers have not been retracted. In fact, he is still publishing. Here is his listing on the Office of Inspector General’s Most Wanted Fugitives list (scroll down the page). The combined efforts of these fraudsters constitutes much of the literature on vaccine safety.

If they had been honest, how might the world be different today? Might vaccinations have been questioned in an even broader context than black boys with autism? What about the combined effect of all vaccines on innate immunity, in not just black children, but all children? What about children with ME? What about children with autoimmune diseases? 5 authors took responsibility for that paper. How many papers did they publish collectively which state unequivocally that vaccines are safe (even though the various package inserts state pretty clearly they are not)? More than half of our children have a chronic disease. Is this one of the reasons why? I say one of the reasons, because there are so many confounders, so many ways our children have been poisoned in our toxic world, in addition to vaccines. Since some unvaccinated children are autistic, does that mean that vaccines don’t cause autism? Of course not, but that is what our vaccine experts would have you believe. 

Data falsified, drug companies indemnified from consequences, media outlets proving beyond a shadow of doubt that their talking heads are shills for industry, eye witnesses of the damage done discredited as nutcases or worse. It can only be called a conspiracy.

I have no expectation that this will play out in a just manner. First there was a media black out, then Dr. Hooker’s paper was removed from the web, with a statement that it might be incorrect or endanger the public; it is back up today with a disclaimer that it is a troubled paper. CNN finally reported, concluding vaccines are absolutely safe, except in the rarest of cases, and people who decide not to vaccinate are the problem. The only other mainstream media report seems to be Time Magazine, a few days ago. It is behind a pay wall, but here is the headline and subtitle, “Whistleblower Claims CDC Covered Up Data Showing Vaccine-Autism Link: The claim, however, may just be more unsubstantiated fuel from the anti-vaccination movement.” That sounds unbiased, doesn’t it?

So there you have it, folks. Even when the evil doing is exposed, actually admitted, there is no interest. Dr. Hooker and Dr. Thompson will both be discredited in different ways. Dr. Hooker will be called a liar and not competent to evaluate the data because his degree isn’t in statistics. Dr. Thompson will be deemed unstable and his guilt delusional. Whatever it takes. The vaccine program is a sacred cow. It is thought of as the one unequivocally good thing modern medicine has accomplished. Anyone who questions that meme is an antivax crazy person. All the parents that witnessed their children regress into autism from their vaccines are too ignorant to understand what really happened.

The doctors administering the shots have been rendered comatose with explicit instructions not to worry about all the harm they are doing, since, like the drug companies, they are indemnified by the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. Kangaroo Court, created by necessity, because vaccines are dangerous, but designed to perpetuate the myth that they are not. If we made doctors responsible for the bad outcomes, things would change in a hurry. If every doctor had to consider the merits of each shot, what is actually in the shot and ask themselves, what is the risk to the particular child sitting in front of me right now if I do or don’t give it, what would happen then? I can feel pediatricians shuddering from here. At this moment, how many pediatricians are even aware of exactly what is in each of those shots or how they are manufactured? Do they know that some of them contain adventitious replication competent retroviruses and pieces of retroviruses, when we know only too well that retroviruses have a propensity to recombine and rescue one another? Let’s not forget the Recombinant origin of the retrovirus XMRV and its riveting sequel, Recombinant origin, contamination, and de-discovery of XMRV.

The fact that good things happened because of the vaccine program for small pox and polio in the mid 20th century does not justify what has come since. And just because good things happened, doesn’t mean bad things didn’t happen too. Millions of people were infected with SV40 for example; that mishap is acknowledged, but any possible adverse consequences denied. The retroviruses that inevitably were present in the first yellow fever and oral polio vaccines aren’t even acknowledged. Even now, when we have the technology to know what we are doing, we are still doing it. For example, we know that live attenuated virus vaccines grown in chick embryo fibroblasts contain avian leukosis virus and other retroviral nucleic acid sequences, but our CDC scientists have determined it is safe to inject these viruses and pieces of viruses into babies, in order to prevent diseases which, in fact, most individuals would be better off getting naturally. Here is a paper where they found bad stuff, but conclude it is safe anyway. Viral Nucleic Acids in Live-Attenuated Vaccines: Detection of Minority Variants and an Adventitious Virus.

Mutations and minority variants, relative to vaccine strains, not known to affect attenuation were detected in OPV, mumps virus, and varicella-zoster virus. The anticipated detection of endogenous retroviral sequences from the producer avian and primate cells was confirmed. Avian leukosis virus (ALV), previously shown to be noninfectious for humans, was present as RNA in viral particles, while simian retrovirus (SRV) was present as genetically defective DNA. Rotarix, an orally administered rotavirus vaccine, contained porcine circovirus-1 (PCV1), a highly prevalent nonpathogenic pig virus, which has not been shown to be infectious in humans. Hybridization of vaccine nucleic acids to a panmicrobial microarray confirmed the presence of endogenous retroviral and PCV1 nucleic acids. 

The “extensive proof” that avian leukosis virus (ALV) does not pose a threat to human health consists of three small studies, published from 1999 to 2003, all by the CDC and all by the same senior author, W. Heneine. Interestingly, his name also appears on the Lipkin XMRV study. His 1999 paper said,Our data indicate that the sources of RT activity in all RT-positive measles and mumps vaccines may not be similar and depend on the particular endogenous retroviral loci present in the chicken cell substrate used.”, but PCR of PBMC’s on 33 children after measles and mumps vaccines were negative, so they concluded this should “provide reassurance for current immunization policies.” In 2001, 206 recipients of the MMR were negative by PCR for 2 known avian retroviruses and had negative serology to an antibody developed specifically for the study. In 2003, studying adventitious retroviruses contaminating 3 brands of the yellow fever vaccine, they found there were 3 kinds of RT, more than expected from the 2 retroviruses they knew to be there; nevertheless, they concluded, “None of the samples were seropositive by an ALV-E-based Western blot assay or had detectable EAV or ALV-E RNA sequences by RT-PCR. YF vaccines produced by the three manufacturers all have particles containing EAV genomes and various levels of defective or nondefective ALV-E sequences. The absence of evidence of infection with ALV-E or EAV in 43 YF vaccine recipients suggests low risks for transmission of these viruses, further supporting the safety of these vaccines.” 282 cases from the millions of doses given where they couldn’t find evidence of anything shortly after inoculation, with technology that is now 15 years old? Are we comforted yet?

This work isn’t science. It is religion. There is no room for the precautionary principle here. Vaccines are good. Necessary. Period. No need to discriminate which babies might be at greater risk for complications, because we need our herd immunity. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Only it isn’t just a few anymore. That logic might make sense if the health of the species had actually improved during the period in question, but it is quite the opposite. More than half of everyone in the U.S. has a chronic disease, including our children. Our infant mortality rate is 34th in the world, despite, or perhaps because, of the fact that we give more vaccine doses before the age of 1 than the 33 countries ahead of us. Take a look at this paper: Infant mortality rates regressed against number of vaccine doses routinely given: Is there a biochemical or synergistic toxicity?

I am in no way saying that vaccines are to blame for everything, just that the vaccine program is one of a long list of high risk things we have done blindly, uncritically, while the health of our species has dramatically deteriorated. But what can we expect when the fox is guarding the henhouse?

Recovery In Neverland

Even though the last blog was the least controversial I’ve ever written, it managed to ruffle a few feathers. On the one hand, it couldn’t possibly be as simple as a diet cure and, on the other, it is too hard to implement, especially if you are sick and short of money. And what about retroviruses?

I am not cured. It is a relapsing, remitting illness and I am experiencing a remission. I am not asymptomatic, but much, much better. My husband and I have ridden our tandem 180 miles so far this month. Our rides are quickly getting longer, faster and more challenging. My husband said I have never worked harder. I don’t know if that’s because I want it more, or because I finally fixed my rubidium deficiency;-). No doubt a real doctor would say I finally decided to get off my ass;-). But anyone with real knowledge of the disease knows what a profound change has to occur for an ME patient to return to exercise after nine years.

Ali also has noticed improvement with respect to her physical abilities. She went to an hour long yoga class a few days ago with no PEM and expects to continue. She is living away from me, something neither of us thought possible just a few short years ago.

It isn’t just the diet. The diet happened to us in the context of a slow recovery over a number of years during which several treatments were contributory, all documented on this blog. Antiretrovirals, oxygen, Deplin, at one time Actos, at another modified Meyer’s cocktail IVs, metformin and Prometrium for Ali, prior dietary modifications and ever more awareness of the importance of biotoxin avoidance. I believe all of these things have helped to tip the balance towards recovery. When you are treating an incurable disease, it is necessary to look for therapeutic synergy.

As to the diet being hard, some of the biggest things aren’t too hard. A daily smoothie, big plates of organic greens, bone broth from clean grass fed animals. Buy organic. Try your local CSA (community sponsored agriculture) who sometimes deliver. Try eliminating gluten and dairy for three months. Consider nutrient density before eating something. Don’t try to change everything at once. Pick one thing and do that, then add to it. It is more expensive to eat this way. If it is too expensive, I am thinking the food is more important than supplements, on which most patients spend a lot of money. I am increasingly suspicious of things that come in pill form, including supplements.

One of the really interesting things that has happened to me on the Wahls diet is I am not tolerating B vitamins at all, finding them overactivating and sleep disrupting, after taking Deplin for years. I presume this is because I am getting what I need from my food. Can we infer from this that my methylation status has improved? Take a look at the numbers midway through this article by Dr. Wahls: Maximizing Nutrient Density for the Modern Day Hunter-Gatherer.

In addition to a relatively small number of known required nutrients, whole food contains thousands of compounds which work together in ways we do not begin to understand. Supplements supply an excess of a single nutrient. In the case of L-methylfolate, the idea is to overcome an enzyme deficiency by supplying the activated form of the nutrient folic acid to prime the pump of essential metabolic pathways. The deficiency occurs more often in the presence of certain genetic mutations, or SNPs, but remember, the problem is most often not caused by the genetic make-up of the individual, who was healthy once, but by epigenetic changes that have occurred. Also remember that methylation silences retroviruses.

I still think retroviruses are at the bottom of it, endogenous and/or exogenous. I will prevail upon Dr. Snyderman, who has lots to say on this subject, to give us an update in the near future. There is a growing body of literature to support the association of activated HERVs with various diseases. There are even a few intrepid researchers still pursuing novel retroviruses in chronic disease, working at the edge of our current understanding. Andrew Mason‘s betaretrovirus associated with primary billiary cirrhosis, clinical trials with antiretrovirals ongoing, Sidney Grossberg‘s JHK gammaretrovirus which he has identified in CFS patients, and Hervé Perron‘s MSRV, particles from HERV-W transcripts, with an immunopathogenic envelope protein, severity of illness correlates to viral load, replication competence still unknown. “Most HERVs are unable to replicate but MSRV expression associated with reverse-transcriptase activity in MS would explain reported DNA copy number increase in MS patients.” from The DNA copy number of human endogenous retrovirus-W (MSRV-type) is increased in multiple sclerosis patients and is influenced by gender and disease severity.

The possibility that animal retroviruses are the root cause of the enormous increase in chronic neuroinflammatory illnesses, autoimmunity and cancer in our modern world has not been ruled out, just because the particular sequence called XMRV has been put to bed. In fact, in figuring out where XMRV came from, created in a lab using techniques in use every day all over the world, a can of worms has been opened. How many times have similar organisms been created? How many cell lines commonly in use produce infectious virus that can spread airborne through a clean lab, as XMRV does.

Given that retroviruses recombine and rescue each other, that under certain conditions HERVs activate to produce viral product, that the environment is full of the very toxins used to amplify retroviruses in the lab and that high risk biotechnologies have offered up so many chances for new retroviruses to infect humans, it seems more likely than unlikely that it has happened, and more than once. After all, we have been injecting adventitious retroviruses into people for 80 plus years in combination with other live viruses. We think nothing of fusing human and mouse genetic material to produce monoclonal antibodies that are given to immunocompromised people. Passaging human tumor tissue through immunodeficient mice, gene vector technology, genetically modifying animals to produce human proteins for IV administration (Atryn) are all very high risk things to do. Lots and lots of chances. Hubris allowed it. Money drives it. How could the legacy of all that science be that half of everybody has a chronic illness, including children? Who wants to know that?

Injected into monkeys, XMRV causes a low level latent infection, which isn’t communicated by transfusion. However, Dr. Mikovits found other sequences in patients besides XMRV. Here is a slide from her recent lecture at Dr. Enlander’s conference showing just that.

The Exotic Biology of XMRVsfinal slide 10

Of course, she doesn’t have her notes, so all of the unpublished work she did is lost to us. Meanwhile, the WPI continues to suck up a big chunk of the government dollars spent on our disease, while their co-founder awaits jail for his felony convictions.

$450,000 of taxpayer money was spent on the specimens collected for the Lipkin study, which was negative, as expected. The good news was that Dr. Lipkin was going to use those specimens to answer some questions. I guess he couldn’t get funding. Instead those specimens have gone to Dr. Peterson, who is raising money to look for evidence of arthropod borne disease, even though the collection criteria for the specimens specifically excluded Lyme Disease. How’s that for looking under the streetlight?

Meanwhile, as a patient community, we are back to case definitions, an obfuscation if there ever was one. A case definition is an exercise in futility, because the disease isn’t one thing. ME/CFS is a garbage pail diagnosis, somewhere to put all those patients who feel awful, have non-specific immune dysfunction and secondary mitochondrial failure, with nothing else to define their illnesses. Many roads lead to Rome. The question of causation is simply too complex for our current scientific methods. The ability to analyze huge amounts of genetic material cost effectively is coming, but it isn’t here yet. It may turn out that the specific retroviral sequences involved are found in particular families or groups of people with certain environmental exposures, e.g. certain chemicals or vaccines.

With the burying of XMRV has come a resurgence of Lyme Disease as The Cause. The CDC recently admitted that they were low on the number of annual cases by a factor of ten, right on time for the release of Baxter’s new vaccine and Lyme test. The CDC’s admission is unfortunately a boon to ILADS, a renegade medical society based on an incestuous relationship with a private lab, to which they refer and then use the unvalidated results to perpetuate their mythology: Patients congratulated for “herx” reactions to antibiotics, rather than recognizing it for the damaging cytokine storm that it is. Then there’s the one about how enough antibiotics in the right combination for the right duration can eradicate it, despite all evidence to the contrary. And the one about how chronic Lyme Disease is a distinct entity from ME/CFS, despite the fact that the two groups are clinically indistinguishable without test results from this one particular cash only lab whose results no other lab can duplicate. And then, if they happen to get a negative test, which is a rare event, the most imaginative of all, seronegative Lyme can be diagnosed clinically, even in people with no risk factors. It’s a scam and a dangerous one. I saw this yesterday: Is Lyme Disease Contagious? Clues Hint That It May Be A Sexually Transmitted Disease, quoting no other than Dr. Raphael Stricker, the most published of the so called LLMDs. Here is what the Office of Research Integrity at the NIH has to say about him (link):

Raphael B. Stricker, M.D., University of California at San Francisco. An investigation conducted by the University found that Dr. Stricker falsified data for a manuscript and a PHS-supported publication reporting research on AIDS. In the manuscript, Dr. Stricker selectively suppressed data that did not support his hypothesis, and reported consistently positive data whereas only one of four experiments had produced positive results. In the publication, Dr. Stricker reported that an antibody was found in 29 of 30 homosexuals, but not found in non-homosexuals. However, Dr. Stricker”s control data, which he suppressed, showed the antibody in 33 of 65 non- homosexuals. The falsified data was used as the basis for a grant application to the National Institutes of Health. The ORI concurred in the University”s finding. Dr. Stricker executed a Voluntary Exclusion and Settlement Agreement in which he has agreed not to apply for Federal grant or contract funds and will not serve on PHS advisory committees, boards or peer review groups for a three year period beginning April 1, 1993. The publication “Target platelet antigen in homosexual men with immune thrombocytopenia” in the New England Journal of Medicine, 313: 1315-1380, 1985 has been retracted (New England Journal of Medicine, 325: 1487,1991).

ME/CFS, Chronic Lyme Disease, mold illness, MCS, fibromyalgia, GWI, all have pretty much the same symptoms. Lots of tunnel vision going on in each group. A retroviral hypothesis is the most parsimonious explanation for all of these diseases, which didn’t exist or were very rare when I went to medical school 35 years ago. Dysautonomia, now common, wasn’t seen then except rarely in advanced diabetes. A retroviral hypothesis fits for ASD also. This very brief distillation is all referenced elsewhere on this blog. However, even when one turns to the literature for answers, you have to figure that a very large proportion of it is wrong due to mistakes, contamination and fraud (lots of that going around). Why Scientific Studies Are So Often Wrong: The Streetlight Effect. So whatever cohort you fall into, which may depend more upon which doctor you go to than anything else, you get to choose between neglect by conventional doctors and expensive overtreatment by the “experts”. My advice is avoid doctors and eat your vegetables.

Tonight’s song: We Shall Overcome by Pete Seeger

Healing In A Toxic World

My health has been slowly improving for four and a half years. Even so, I have been unable to exercise without payback, but that changed three months ago. I attribute this breakthrough to “minding my mitochondria” per Dr. Terry Wahls. Six months ago I watched her TED Talk. I had written a blog entitled MS Light? a few months earlier, suggesting that MS and ME are two branches of the same tree and I thought, if it worked for her, maybe it will work for me.

We jumped into the diet as a family in July. In a nutshell, 3 cups each of greens, sulfur containing foods and colored fruits & veggies each day, bone broth, grass fed grass finished meat,  organ meat and seaweed. No grains or simple sugars. Olive oil, coconut oil, butter, animal fat. Every bite needs to be nutritionally dense. In addition, we cleaned up our act, went all organic, non-GMO, almost all locally sourced food, no cans containing BPA, no teflon or plastic in the kitchen. In addition, we emphasized a variety of mushrooms, ginger, turmeric, garlic, cilantro and fermented foods. We all noticed some improvement after a month, sick and healthy people alike.

Then I got distracted, sucked up in a negative energy vortex involving my family of origin, the kind of stuff that makes me nuts, and then sick. I didn’t particularly notice what I was eating for a while, but ate what my daughter, Julie, put in front of me. Historically, I can adhere to a regimen for about a month, before losing track, but Julie kept me on the diet.

One day, after about three months of eating this way, I was feeling particularly stressed, sick and discouraged. My husband said, “Let’s go for a ride on the tandem.” I quipped, “OK, maybe I’ll die.” I’ve ridden a few times before in the last few years, and the aftermath wasn’t pretty. But this time, it was only good- the ride itself, afterwards and the next day. I was shocked. After nine years, I didn’t really expect it to ever change. We went again the day after and have kept on going, trying to ride at least three times a week. We started with 4.5 miles in 25 minutes and have worked up to 17 miles in an hour and a quarter. Also, I can now hike a couple of miles again, even though walking was really tough before. When I stand, I don’t feel like somebody turned up the gravity anymore. My arms no longer feel heavy. No more wheel chairs through airports for this girl.

I am putting on muscle quickly. I have much less resistance to exercising than when I was younger and healthy. Maybe it’s because I couldn’t do it for so long or maybe it’s because exercise requires a willingness to suffer and my illness has taught me how to accept physical suffering. I am so motivated, we have continued to ride in freezing weather. We even tried off road for the first time a couple of days ago when it was 30 degrees out. 7 miles of dirt with mud and ice here and there, plus a fierce wind. Pretty hardcore for a 60 year old sick woman;).

We have been learning about food and improving our family’s diet since our kids were little, but even so, I must have been nutritionally deficient and/or being harmed from ongoing toxin exposure in my food to have experienced such a fundamental improvement in physical function. Here’s an interesting one. I have been taking Deplin 7.5 mg for years but in the last month, I’ve stopped tolerating more than a tiny dose, which is good, because the pharmaceutical preparation contains coating and additives that a quality OTC supplement doesn’t. So methylation status is much more complex than MTHFR genetics. It is possible to get enough folate from food, even for someone who needed to take it before in high dose pill form.

As I am using food as medicine, I am ever more suspicious of anything that looks like a pill or was made in a plant. I am taking Vitamin D3, methyl B-12 and OTC 5-MTHF in the form of Metafolin, B-complex, fish oil, UBQH, magnesium and chlorella. I am still taking antihypertensives and bioidentical HRT. I stopped Viread and Isentress a couple of months ago, once I knew my improvement was solid. A year ago, I had a hypertensive crisis when I stopped Viread monotherapy and restarted. This time my BP only went up a little for a short time and returned to better than prior baseline. I wanted to get off, because it is not going to be studied and there is no way to monitor what the drugs are doing. I was pretty sure they were helping in the first year, and we had clear laboratory evidence of improvement from the WPI, but after that, it was less clear. Both Ali and I did very well during the years we took them, but when we started, I thought we’d have viral load measures in a year and it didn’t happen.

Ali likes the diet, but hasn’t experienced the clear cut benefit that I have. She has continued her slow uphill climb, excelling in college at U Mass Lowell online, going out and being much more physically active, MCS improved, but still experiencing post exertional malaise if she pushes it. As she says, she has gotten very good at managing her spoons. She is living with her boyfriend in Albuquerque, something I wouldn’t have thought possible a couple of years ago. She has made huge progress, but it has not been clearly related to the diet. She wants to continue nevertheless. She stopped Actos about 6 months ago, continuing on metformin and luteal phase Prometrium with good control of PCOS symptoms. She came off arv’s in the last month and has been having a bit of a hard time since, but not so bad as to force her to restart at this point. With no support from the medical or scientific communities, it is time for us to stop if possible.

All of this is triggering my survivor’s guilt or whatever it is. Maybe that’s why it’s been so hard to write lately. Or maybe it’s just that my anger has been diluted by endorphins and anger has been the driving force behind many of the blogs I have written. I feel guilty reporting that this is what is working for me, because I couldn’t do it without lots of support. My daughter keeps me on the diet and exercise is dependent upon my husband’s skill and encouragement. My advice is find a friend to support you and, if you can exercise, pick an activity you have done before. I have muscle memory for the tandem; we rode for many years before I got too sick to do it.

Besides patients with neuroimmune disorders there is growing anecdotal evidence that a paleo diet is beneficial for patients with autoimmune disorders, in particular rheumatoid arthritis. Many ME patients have evidence of autoimmunity. Phoenix Helix is a good blog with lots of useful information, in particular how to do a strict elimination diet, cutting out the most allergenic foods that might be contributing to the problem, dairy, eggs, nuts, nightshades, legumes, and then adding them back in one at a time. Ali is planning to do this when she has a clear space to see if a particular food is keeping her from realizing gains.

So, since I was already on a good diet, what’s my guess for what is making the difference? The big changes for me were force feeding leaves, bone broth, seaweed, no grains, sugar or vegetable oils besides olive and a little sesame, almond and avocado oil. All organic. Toxin avoidance. Organ meats are a bit of a stumbling block for me, but I am eating some liver.

I am a small woman and can only eat 6 or 7 cups of vegetables and fruit per day. It falls off quickly if I don’t focus on getting in my cups. Once I eat what I’m supposed to there is no room for anything else. I have not been scientific about it at all. 3 cups is a heaping dinner plate, raw, where you can’t see the bottom. I just work on getting down as much as I can. I have a daily smoothie with leaves, berries and probiotics which helps me get down more greens.

A couple of my patients crashed themselves at the beginning trying to do the diet. Others have said up front, I can’t do it. I could never have done it without Julie. I think I could do it now, but I’m six months in and my daughter is now an inspired paleo cook, so if I stay home, I’m covered:). But I keep thinking about how to make it possible for sick patients. In a perfect world, share a cook. Otherwise, baby steps! Massive dietary change is hard on the body. Eat more leaves. Eat from the rainbow. Make bone broth once you have sourced clean animal marrow or knuckle bones. Put in some lemon or apple cider vinegar to help extract the minerals. It is kind of gross if you cook it on the stove top for a long time, but Julie makes it in a pressure cooker, which as far as I can tell, preserves the nutrients well. It is quick and wonderful. Healing. She makes it with garlic, ginger, fresh turmeric root and seaweed, then uses it to cook everything. I enjoy it plain or with spinach or kale.

There is so much to learn about food. Eating for health is a lifestyle, not a diet. Take a look at Eating On The Wild Side. It will inform your decisions about what to buy in the supermarket, farmer’s market and seed catalog, as well as how to store and prepare your food to maximize it’s nutritional value. It isn’t really possible to eat an ancestral diet since the foods that paleo people ate are no longer readily available. I really looking forward to gardening and foraging in the spring. My daughters and I started a Facebook community page called Healing In A Toxic World. Please join us. We are sharing what we are learning including how to source your food and lots of recipes.

 

Van Morrison – Days Like This

Bats In The Belfry

I missed Dr. Lipkin’s dog and pony show a few days ago, but thank you to ME/CFS Forums for posting a transcript. Here again, it appears he has dismissed the only finding that actually adds to the discussion. It is just like last time when he dismissed the only positive finding in the XMRV study, that 6% of the people tested were positive for an antibody to a nasty mouse retrovirus, significance unknown. This time:

We found retroviruses in 85 percent of the samples. Again, it is very difficult at this point to know whether or not this is clinically significant, and given the previous experience with retroviruses in Chronic Fatigue I am going to be very clear in telling you, although I am reporting this at present in Prof. Montoya’s samples, neither he nor we have concluded that there is a relationship to disease. I’ll repeat that one more time. We found retroviral sequences, but their relationship, at this time, to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is unclear and, in fact, if I were to place bets and speculate, I would say that they are not going to pan out.

In addition to this astonishingly unscientific statement, in the same week, he announced other recent findings. From the BBC News: “They found nearly 60 different types of viruses, most of which had never been seen before”, in one species of bat. He extrapolated this to suggest that there are 320,000 new viruses in mammals still to be discovered. However, he could find nothing at all in hundreds of sick humans. Presumably using the same techniques. Or is that the problem? Doesn’t it seem unlikely that there would be nothing to find in sick humans with low NK function and a propensity for opportunistic infections of all kinds? We are mammals after all. Here is the paper: A Strategy To Estimate Unknown Viral Diversity in Mammals. He wants to spend billions of dollars in an attempt to avert a pandemic, when he has several existing pandemics staring him in the face. I guess existing diseases aren’t as much fun as teaching Gwyneth Paltrow how to have a seizure. Then again, maybe we all really do need to be vaccinated for the next bat virus we might encounter.

But, he did give the nod that we are sick, not just crazy, so I guess that’s a good thing coming from such a high profile scientist. We have elevated levels of proinflammatory cytokines and chemokines. Completely nonspecific, all downstream effects, but abnormal numbers nevertheless, something measurable. In my experience however, the commercially available tests (Labcorp and ARUP via Quest) don’t show the abnormalities he describes (and which have been previously described by others), so we need more sensitive assays commercially. I’m not sure why the difficulty, but the clinical reality is that the doctors who are actually treating the patients have almost nothing to follow, except for a very few nonspecific inflammatory markers in some patients, e.g. hsCRP, C4a and TGF beta-1.

So that leaves us exactly nowhere, as usual. We are not going to be saved anytime soon by the medical model. Look how much the scientific method has accomplished for us in the last few years:-). As a doctor, I have a small bag of tricks to fight a terrible, incurable disease. However, it is an inherently unstable disease, relapsing and remitting all on its own. Look for a way to get a foot in the door. It is possible to tip the balance in favor of better health with global strategies that support the body, mind and spirit. Find synergy. Ali and I continue to be committed to the Wahls paleo diet. Less suffering for sure, after only a couple of months. Just like oxygen, methylation supplements, hormone balancing, we feel better from this intervention. Not expecting a cure, but we are both experiencing a bit more uphill movement, even though our diets were already pretty good. Please take a hard look at this diet, most likely beneficial for all neurodegenerative and inflammatory diseases.

Ali has all but moved out, her symptoms so manageable that she is mostly living with her boyfriend in Albuquerque, despite nearly new construction that once triggered her MCS so badly, she almost couldn’t be there. There was a time when I didn’t think she would ever be able to live away from me. Bittersweet…

She Blinded Me With Science (Live) by Thomas Dolby

Opting Out

My thoughts keep coming back to this paragraph on the CFS Patient Advocate blog:

Mady Horning gave a fine talk, echoing the one she gave in Florida in January. That talk can be accessed here. She spoke of the terrain and genetic defects leading to ME/CFS – what variables contribute to getting ME/CFS. In a follow-up question she was asked what we all want to know. What information can she give about the ongoing CFI Lipkin study? She said that 80% of the blood work is done, but that much additional work needs to be done on saliva, feces and urine. She said that they had identified several promising pathogen “candidates” including a “novel pathogen” – but the work was still early and no conclusions can be drawn. I have heard the term “novel pathogen” somewhere before.

A novel pathogen from Dr. Lipkin’s lab… Hard not to speculate on what it could be. An attenuated poliovirus perhaps? That would put us back into the doomsday scenario, life imitating science fiction again. My illness is consistent with a post-polio syndrome. I received the very first round of the oral polio vaccine from my pediatrician father. I have a vivid memory of lining up with the kids in his practice to get my sugar cube. I remember impressive pain from IBS for some time after that. My father told me it was normal, but I wonder if he wondered. He knew the state of the technology. My father’s office was attached to our house. He had rats in the toolshed on which he did research.  I also remember getting called into his office to get a gamma globulin shot followed by a kiss from a patient with measles, so I would get a “modified” case. He was on the frontier. Rockefeller Institute was nearby.  Lots of women exactly my age (59) are sick. Too high a percentage of the patient group. It was a wave. Something went out horizontally. There were other waves, the first outbreak of Epidemic Neuromyasthenia at LA County Hospital happened two years after the Yellow Fever vaccine was released, a live attenuated vaccine passaged through mouse brains, mouse brains that express viruses like XMRV. Maybe it’s a persistent enterovirus, as Dr. Chia has long thought. Maybe it lies dormant, and with an appropriate trigger, say organophosphate exposure, mold, infection, trauma, vaccination, what have you, it fires up and activates HERV’s, probably different sequences in different people and families. Doesn’t fit as well as the retroviral hypothesis, but it could be right.

Yes, I find myself hoping against hope that “the world’s most celebrated virus hunter” will find our pathogen(s). We need new treatment strategies. We are becoming visible as a patient group and there is more acceptance that there is a biological basis for our illness. ME patients are demanding the big guns. We are going to get what other patient groups get, to be guinea pigs. This is what can happen: PML Case Seen in Patient on Gilenya. This was an MS patient. PML or progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy is a complication of drugs like Rituxan, trials currently being sought by ME advocate groups. That’s what modern medicine has to offer you, if you have a real disease.

Not to mention how monoclonal antibodies are produced… Hybridoma technology involves producing cells that are a fusion of another mammal’s B cells and human cancer cells and the resultant product is introduced into humans. Revolting when you think about it. Probably just the sort of thing that got us into this mess. Splicing and dicing viruses and growing them in the cells of various animals. That’s where XMRV came from. How many more? Here’s another scary one: from Modelling the long-term persistence of neutralizing antibody in adults after one dose of live attenuated Japanese encephalitis chimeric virus vaccine, which says, “One such new vaccine is a Japanese encephalitis chimeric virus vaccine (JE-CV; Imojev™; sanofi-pasteur), a live, attenuated product grown in Vero cells.” Vero cells are monkey kidney cells. So viruses spliced together in the lab and grown in monkey cells, which can express viral particles, are injected live into people. “Attenuated”, meaning reduced virulence, which doesn’t tell us anything about whether a virus persists or not. They look for persistence of antibodies, but not for persistence of the live virus they intentionally infect people with. Look how much they knew about the dangers of using monkey cells in 1960: Notes on viruses likely to be encountered in vaccine production using monkey kidney tissue. The government acknowledges that 30 million people were accidentally innoculated with a monkey virus, SV40. Not so surprising given the crude techniques they used at the time. It Only Took 50 Years: CDC Admits Polio Vaccine Tainted with Cancer Causing Virus.

It is out of control. Biotechnology run amok. We don’t have the wisdom, individually or collectively. It is all built on a faulty premise, that Big Pharma is going to save us. It isn’t going to happen. These are the folks that brought us Viox, Avandia and Fen-Phen. Fraud is rampant in the pharmaceutial industry. Huge multibillion dollar settlements happen all the time. Our world is becoming populated with sick people. In the US, 55% of children have a medical condition, 20% of the population have a rheumatologic disorder, 2% of children fall on the autistic spectrum. 1% of the US population has ME/CFS. MS, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases. The disease burden is enormous and completely out of balance with nature. It is no doubt multifactorial, but the parenteral use of engineered biologicals must be high on the list of stupid things we have done. All of this interspecies tinkering and regular introductions of foreign DNA and RNA into people who are chronically inflamed from their environments anyway, has offered innumerable opportunities for the creation of new infectious viruses. It is ridiculous to think that the creation of XMRV was a unique event.

The older I get, the clearer I am that pharmaceuticals are a very poor answer to chronic illness. All drugs are poisons, which doesn’t mean that you might not choose to take one, but they are almost never truly health enhancing. In particular, drugs which are akin to shooting a bazooka at the immune system are a bad idea. I know, I know, I am taking antiretrovirals. However, I have every reason to believe they are not going to kill me. I do not know if they are helping or not, but I tried to stop them and got worse. I had a prolonged hypertensive crisis when I came off Viread, requiring the addition of more drugs, now getting back to my baseline after on again for 6 months. Thus, I think I am better back on Viread and Isentress, but how can I know for sure? The disease waxes and wanes all on its own and life happens, making it very difficult to evaluate the effect of any one intervention. Antiretrovirals are not the only thing Ali and I do for our illness. We use oxygen and methylation supplements. We are always working on our diet and supplements. We get ever cleaner about food and the products we buy. Life does not imitate science in any way. Real life is always multifactorial.

At any rate, almost 3 1/2 years in, despite huge stress in the last 2 years, Ali and I are still beating the odds. We are not well by any stretch, but it’s a good life. Still improving glacially, not all the time, but overall, better function. Able to do more with less payback. Minimal suffering compared to our years as chronic Lyme patients. I have never said that anyone should take antiretrovirals, but it is still unfathomable to me that it has not been studied at all. Enough people experienced initial improvement, though it was rarely dramatic, and often didn’t last beyond a year, but it is a clue. These drugs are supposed to have specific activity and weren’t designed for what we have and yet, they can have a positive effect. There has still been no experience at all with protease inhibitors, except as reported to us by Dr. Snyderman. I don’t understand what it is about this particular class of drugs that freaks everybody out so much. Patients get  much more dangerous drugs for much flimsier reasons every day. Why? What’s the big deal about a trial of drugs which inhibit retroviral proteins, especially since they might have an impact on activated HERVs or other retroelements. I don’t understand why the drug companies aren’t more interested. There are more of us than AIDS patients. Throw in ASD and MS, we are talking about a lot of people.

My first day of medical school, in 1975, a wise professor told us, “Half of everything you learn here will turn out to be wrong.” Well, it was much more than half. Just recently there have been papers reporting Zithromax can cause sudden death. Statins and beta blockers are bad for old people. All those CYA  head CT’s we did on little kids that we knew would be normal gave some of them brain cancer. Mammograms are bad for you. When it came to nutrition, they didn’t teach us much of anything, but what we did learn was wrong. Turns out diabetics don’t need to limit fruit, only refined carbohydrates. Vegetable oils are mostly bad for you. Salt, coffee, bacon and eggs are good for you, if properly sourced. “They” were wrong about almost everything. What is bad for you is to eat processed foods that contain genetically engineered plants that tolerate RoundUp, but have almost no nutritional value.

What is bad for you is to take drugs for symptomatic relief of chronic symptoms. Sleep and pain meds are a trap. They commit patients to a kind of purgatory. They cause poor quality sleep, depression and cognitive decline. Deadeners. They lead to physical dependence and tolerance is an ongoing struggle. I am not judging anyone. I did it. I call them my lost years. Everything improved when I discontinued antibiotics and medication for symptom relief. I wish the drugs really helped, but they don’t, and they make it worse over time. Don’t kill the messenger. I prescribe them if I have to, but my patients know going in that my agenda is to wean them if at all possible. When patients give up unnecessary drugs, they come out improved on the other end, pretty much without fail, because the body works better without the toxic assault. I know up close and personal what it is like to sit there on pain meds, not tolerating the pain, wondering how it is possible to survive without dulling it, but the brain has been sensitized to the pain and in fact, can’t adjust to the reality of the pain while the drug is there.

Sleep is such a fragile thing. There is no way to reach deep restorative sleep through artificial means. Insomnia is perhaps the hardest symptom to address, inflammatory in nature. Insomnia goes hand in hand with better or worse, in a chicken or egg fashion. Melatonin and herbal concoctions can help. Neurofeedback may help, though sleep disruption is a stubborn symptom. Sleep hygiene is crucial. Sleep returns with wellerness. It is important not to go more than one night with no sleep, but sometimes some sleeplessness may have to be endured to get the body used to not being knocked out with drugs. There is a payoff at the end of that tunnel. Please note, it is dangerous to stop benzodiazepines without weaning.

Our family is trying hard not to comply with Big Ag’s agenda. We are a big family. Four generations under one roof, and I am blessed to be living with young adults who share the work. Ali and I are following the Wahls Paleo Diet, the rest of the family also, plus some rice, potatoes and gluten free bread. We both really like it, though Ali just discontinued Actos, after a slow wean. It was kind of tough every time she went down, so she hasn’t realized a tangible benefit from the diet yet the way that I have. She was already on the best diet of all of us. She plans and prepares many of our meals, for up to 9 people, a clear sign of how far she has come. I’ve been much less symptomatic since I started the diet. I was away for 5 days of wilderness camping with my husband for our 25th anniversary, didn’t have my daily smoothie or as many veggies as at home, cheated with a little gluten free bread, and my gut noticed. Now home again for 4 days, I again realize how important this diet is for me. What surprises me is, our diet was already really good. The differences are a huge increase in fruits and vegetables, no grains (we had already eliminated gluten), grass fed/grass finished animals, more fish, seaweed, marrow bone soup, nut milks, no cheese (we were already non-dairy except cheese), all organic, completely non-GMO (we were mostly there already). We are also emphasizing fermented foods, including brewing our own kombucha. Today’s smoothie was spinach, kale, purslane, frozen berries, hemp seeds, coconut milk, glutamine and water in the Blendtec. I used to be anorexic until noon. If I drink a veggie berry smoothie in the morning, my appetite is improved for the whole day and I can eat lots of green things.

Please read the comment by Celia Harrison in the last blog. There are other testimonials on the internet by ME patients who are finding this diet beneficial. It is likely useful for all neurodegenerative diseases. I heard from people who took exception with my use of the nickname MS Light in previous blogs, feeling that it trivializes our illness. That was certainly not my intent, rather I think the comparison of ME to MS is a useful one conceptually, but sister illnesses is a better way to put it.

It is more than a diet for us. It is a complete lifestyle. We are buying our food from local sources. No convenience foods. We are gardening and planning to expand next year. CSAs (community supported agriculture) are a wonderful way to go. Organic produce, in season. Instead of shopping for what you want, eat what you get. Big Ag considers the food we are eating specialty crops, because they don’t generate big profits. They don’t get made into GM corn syrup, which is what they make their money on. They have been feeding us their insane ideas, e.g. food containing BT toxin. Our illness is part of a bigger problem. The bees are dying. They are canaries in the coalmine, just like we are. The ways in which food is being mass produced in the modern world is making our planet sick also. What a strange world that growing your own vegetables and supporting local farmers is revolutionary.

Opt Out

 

Today’s song: As Time Goes By

Status Post XMRV

I have been in the doldrums, but since blogging is my hedge against powerlessness…

This is how deep in it I have been; my inner blogger didn’t even twitch for this: Partial molecular cloning of the JHK retrovirus using gammaretrovirus consensus PCR primers. Grossberg SE, …, Sun HY

 “Unlike earlier reports, in which MLV-like sequences were identified in human source material, which may have been due to murine contamination, budding retrovirions were demonstrated repeatedly by electron microscopy in uncultivated lymphocytes of the index patient that were morphologically identical in their development to the virions in the JHK-3 cells, and immunological evidence was obtained that the index patient produced IgG antibodies that bound to the budding viral particles in patient PBMCs and in the JHK-3 cells. “

It’s tough to keep writing about it when the medical and scientific communities aren’t interested. This group has been publishing about their retrovirus since 1995. Andrew Mason and Hervé Perron have been publishing about their respective retroviruses for over a decade and nobody is interested:

I haven’t heard or seen anything that makes me feel hopeful of meaningful treatment since the demise of XMRV. The only perhaps promising development was Dr. Hornig saying publicly that they have isolated a novel pathogen. Cruel to have said so without more information, but let’s hope it is true and they publish soon. Otherwise, it is pretty much the same ole, same ole.

Chronic Lyme Disease seems to be experiencing a horrifying resurgence as the explanation for what ails us. A wise doctor, one of the few, once told me that antibiotics are the surest path to worse. Wish I had listened to him. ILADS hasn’t updated their guidelines since 2006, even though lots and lots of people have been made worse by their protocols. They are stumped because in all these years they still can’t show that what they do is a good idea.

Borrelia burgdorferi is obviously one of the things that can happen to the microbiome if one is bitten by deer ticks. The problem is that it can’t be eradicated  with antibiotics once it is established and the antibiotics are harmful. Weigh these papers:

This is as positive as it gets in the literature:

Nevermind that we can’t really tell who has it or whether it is what is making them sick. They could tell that a man from 5000 years ago, found frozen in the Aps had Bb, but he died of trauma. However, they can’t really tell if we have it. The Iceman’s Genome Reveals Evidence Of Lyme Disease, Lactose Intolerance And Distant Relatives.

But what about the people who do get better from antibiotics? My daughter got several remissions in the early years. Did it even have anything to do with Lyme? Broad spectrum antibiotics kill in a broad spectrum way.

So who should get antibiotics? That is the million dollar question. I keep listening and it seems to me the people who are better off for having taken antibiotics know it pretty quickly when they go on. When it works, it works. This idea that a prolonged “herx” is a good thing is lunacy. As bad as blood letting with leeches. It is a cytokine storm, not a good thing and if it lasts a long time, it is damaging.

Two suicides in the Facebook ME/Lyme community yesterday. Both beautiful young women. This should not be happening! And the response is, we understand why they did it. How can that be? When is it going to change? Not soon. Nobody is going to save us. We have to help ourselves. The disease is treatable. Not curable, but treatable. Read the last blog. K is not an anomaly. She has come a huge distance by finding synergy in gentle therapies, none of which would have done it alone. But those therapies aren’t even on the table for discussion.

Ali and I have been on the Wahls diet for 2 weeks. Terry Wahls is a physician with secondary progressive MS who got herself out of a reclining wheelchair with diet. She was already on a paleo diet which had slowed her progression, but modified it to get reversal. Since my working hypothesis is that we have MS Light, I decided to give it a try. I already know it is helping me. My chronic nausea is almost gone and my gut function is much improved. Ali is less sure, but likes it and plans to continue. Only two weeks. We were already on a good gluten free, mostly dairy free, whole food diet. Changing diet is a process, but we have taken it to the next level. Force feeding vegetables:). 9 cups daily, or as much as we can stuff in. Lots of leaf and berry smoothies. We have eliminated grains and added sea vegetables. Working on organ meats and bone soup.

There is no one right diet for everybody. Nor do I expect it to be curative. Like everything I do, it is about quality of life. In particular, getting our food from local CSA’s and learning about the source of what we are eating is feeling really good. Learning about food is fascinating. Focusing on making each bite nutrient dense is working for me. Yes, it is a lot of prep work and yes, it is more expensive. I couldn’t have started without Ali, but now I could do it alone. I posted something about the diet on Facebook and the comments that it is impossible are heartbreaking. Why do these patients have no help?

Dr. Wahls has a book on Amazon Minding My Mitochondria in print and kindle editions. Here are her recent papers:

She is doing the work. The Wahls Foundation is working to further her research and is on Facebook. She found something that helps and she is putting it out there. Here are the videos that inspired me: 

Guest Blog: K Update

I am in no way suggesting by posting this that what has worked for K works for everyone. However, the treatments we have used are very low risk and non-invasive. In my opinion, supervised trials of these safe, gentle therapies should be widely available to ME/CFS patients. Val’s account of K’s remarkable progress contains many clues about how to improve. The credit is all K’s. She did the work. I am so proud of her for taking control of her health and finding her own path to wellerness. She is a most remarkable young woman. Now, for some good news from Val. (Here is the link to her original guest blog in March 2012: Seeing Jamie.)

 

K skiing

K skiing

 

It’s been just over a year since I first posted here about my daughter’s (K) experiences with Dr. Jamie’s treatment, so I wanted to do an update to share the really fabulous news about K’s progress.  In preparation, I’ve been re-reading old posts and correspondence, and it’s sure been a lesson in how effective our minds can be at suppressing bad memories — at least the memories that don’t generate PTSD — although some of those 3 a.m. trips to the ER had the potential.

K has continued to improve beyond our wildest dreams over this past year.  These are the symptoms that have improved:

Pain

Her pain has decreased so much that she’s basically off any prescription pain meds. She’ll take a very small piece (e.g., 1/8th) of a 5 mg Percocet tablet for pain in the evenings, but often goes without it now.  This is compared to what she was taking when she first saw Dr. Jamie, when she was using a 25 mcg fentanyl pain patch supplemented with 15 mg oxycodone tablets 4 times/day.  K will still have pain that puts her on the couch with her heating pad some evenings.  But it’s nothing compared to how excruciating and unremitting it previously was.  She also went off Lyrica a few months ago, and this time the withdrawal was barely noticeable.

Sleep

A big shock is that her sleep/wake cycle has straightened out!  She still takes tizanidine at night for sleep, but she can go without it and often substitutes Benadryl instead, believe it or not.  She actually has a REGULAR bedtime now, after all of these years.  She is still a bit of a night owl – bedtime is midnight or 1 a.m. and she usually sleeps until 10 a.m. – but she’s not just endlessly cycling around the clock, and is reliably awake during the daytime.  What a difference being reliably awake during the daytime has made in her quality of life!  As I described in my post a year ago, she’s had terrible sleep since she was born, so I never thought we’d see this.

OI/POTS

One of K’s scariest symptoms was fainting without warning.  That stopped happening over a year ago.  When Dr. Jamie did the 5-minute standing mini-tilt test with K last October, K’s vital signs did what they were supposed to do and the test didn’t bother at all.  The first time Dr. Jamie did this test, we had to stand right next to K to make sure we could catch her if fell, and it was very painful for her. Now she can stand up long enough to take a really looonggg shower (annoys the heck out of my husband) without all the blood pooling in her feet and ankles and no dizziness.  She can even stand up in the kitchen long enough to help with dinner!

Cognition

She is able to be on the internet again finally!  Her cognitive limitations that made it impossible for her to do much more than watch tv and read romance novels a few hours a day are gone.  Having an iPad also helps.  Now she’s once again voraciously reading the news and the kinds of complex political and economic analyses she used to love, posting on facebook and in forums, handling twitter, and even doing some writing.

Gut

This, too, has straightened out.  No more terrible cramping and it all works normally for the first time in her life.  Interestingly, she’s just discovered that she does much better by avoiding gluten.  She was tested for celiac when she was having extreme gut problems in her early 20’s, but was negative.  And she’d tried a low-carb diet in the past, which seemed to make no difference at all previously.  But now, also at Dr. Jamie’s recommendation, she’s finding that avoiding gluten and just about all processed foods is helping a lot.

Exertion

The most amazing thing of all is that she’s now capable of vigorous physical exercise with no PENE!!!  The background on this is that we’ve relocated to Hawaii – just in time for Dr. Jamie to move her practice to Arizona…  But we fell in love with it here and moved this past year.  Hubby and I got to Hawaii on September 1st.  K wasn’t able to get here until early October because of complications from bringing her dog into Hawaii, but then had a full month of treatment with Dr. Jamie and basically finished detoxing off the prescription pain meds.  She spent December and January in Seattle and handled it really well, despite it being cold, dark and damp, which formerly made Christmases there a really bad time for her – not to mention how difficult it was for her to handle the flights.

But here is the big news:  She was well enough by late January to go SKIING!!!  It’s something she has always loved, but she had to stop when she was about 16.  We hadn’t even kept her equipment.  So, she used one afternoon’s worth of energy to go get the rentals she needed.  Then the next day, she was able to ski two runs in the afternoon, with no PENE.  AND, she did it again the next day!!!  (Apologies for all of the exclamation marks, but I really can’t help it.)

When she got back to Hawaii at the beginning of February, she started swimming.  Vigorously.  For increasing lengths of time and over increasing distances.  In the ocean, with waves and sharks (seriously) and currents.  Doing the crawl – you know, that swim stroke that has you lifting your arms over your head and uses the muscles in your neck, shoulders and back, where her worst pain has always been located???  And she says it feels wonderful – no PENE from this either!  In fact, she craves the exercise now and goes at least every other day and often daily.

Oh, and Fatigue

I’ve never known what this is supposed to be about.  She felt like shit all the time.  She was in so much pain and misery she could never sleep well and any kind of exertion made everything worse.  Or, she could never sleep well and so was in constant incredible pain and misery, and any kind of exertion made it all much worse, as well as making her feel fatigued.  She desperately tried to sleep as much as she possibly could to escape the conscious experience of how unremittingly miserable she was, but it didn’t alleviate the misery, no matter how much she kind-of slept, and being constantly “fatigued” was a by-product of the entire mess.  She was completely incapacitated and felt horrible all the time, awake, asleep or in between.  She could barely move on most days.  Is that “chronic fatigue?”  “Feeling dead tired all the time” is the least of the categories of misery this disease imposes.

But, anyway, she still gets pooped out and has to lie down a good part of every day.  She still has nightmares that interrupt her sleep from pain and misery some nights. She isn’t close to having the energy we see that her friends are able to expend in a day.  She doesn’t faint, can get out of bed, dress herself, exercise, drive, stand, shower, shop a little, cook a little, talk on the phone or in-person for longer periods, chat online or text more and for longer periods, read and comprehend intellectually challenging stuff, and doesn’t pay for it.  When she overdoes, the payback is limited to the next day and she’s not flayed by it for the next week or weeks or for months.  She can travel on airplanes without being destroyed for weeks afterwards.  She’s not in bed 24/7 with her eyeshade on and earplugs in, and doesn’t have to crawl to the bathroom.  Is she less “chronically fatigued?” Yes, she feels less “fatigued,” but focusing on fatigue as the major symptom of this disease is ludicrous.

Summary

Taken together, this all adds up to much more of a real life than she’s had in 10 years.  She’s not even close to being able to work or sustain a social life yet.   But it seems like in a few more months…?

Next Challenges

The next big step is resuming her education.  Not only has it always been near and dear to her heart, but it’s also looking like she may be able to do paid work eventually and even possibly in a profession.  It’s been 7 years since she finished the last online college course that she was able to complete.  She tried for three more semesters, each of which ended abysmally.  As any young person who has this disease has experienced, dealing with our educational systems’ rigidity and lack of comprehension has left lasting scars, not only to her self-esteem but also in response to the plain old distrust, insults and abuse that are visited on our very ill young people by so much ignorance.  Speaking of PTSD, we’ve labeled all of that as Post-Traumatic-Student-Disorder.  We’re not only dealing with the residue of bad educational experiences, but there is the additional discomfort now associated with being an older student. As we move through the processes required to get her enrolled in online classes again, I’m realizing that she’s not the only one with this version of PTSD!

Attributions

In looking back at my blog post from 14 months ago, I see that I said, “I’m pretty sure that if we only stopped here with oxygen, hyperbaric and Deplin, all these gains would fade over the next 2 years.”  Well, we’re only just a couple months past a year out from that self-protective prediction – we didn’t want to let ourselves have too much hope.  After all, there are stories around of PwME who go into remission for years at a time, attributing it to some combination of treatments or other, only to have it fade away over time or end with another crash.  So, it’s possible this past 20 months of improvements may be another example of the relapsing/remitting nature of this disease. There may not actually be a link between the improvements and the high-flow oxygen, Deplin, the mild HBOT Dr. Jamie provided over a month in March 2012, and then again between October and December this year, dietary tweaks and getting her off all of the prescription meds.

But K has inadvertently done her own within-subject research on whether it’s these treatments that are actually responsible for the improvements.  For example, there have been occasions over the past year when we were unable to arrange for her O2 in the midst of our moving and travels.  She reports that within 2-3 days of being off the O2, her energy starts decreasing, then her pain level starts increasing, then the brain fog starts returning.  She hasn’t had to go without it longer than 2 weeks, but she REALLY noticed the difference.  The effects of going without Deplin are milder.  Its absence also increases her fatigue and brain fog, but doesn’t have as much of an effect on her pain as the absence of O2 does.  For a former treatment-resister of the youthful “if it’s not a magic bullet that makes me feel better immediately, I’m not going to do it” type, she’s become very dedicated to making sure, herself, that she has her O2 and Deplin now.

And now there is this happy little study from Turkey that came out the other day:  “The efficacy of hyperbaric oxygen therapy in the management of chronic fatigue syndrome”.  In a very preliminary way, it supports what K and some of Dr. Jamie’s other patients are experiencing.  That is, if you pulse the patients with high dose oxygen, their symptoms abate.  And, based only on K’s really positive, immediate happy experiences with HBOT vs. the slower, but continuing improvements from daily high-flow O2, I’m betting there’s a dose-response relationship that wouldn’t be hard to demonstrate at all, if there were researchers who had the funding to look into it.  Of course, there is absolutely no money to be made by Big Pharma on this, so we can be sure that the NIH, CDC, the CAA, etc. won’t ever fund research on such a simple, inexpensive, accessible thing as high-flow oxygen from a tank or concentrator, which insurance and Medicaid/care in the US cover and can be delivered to the bedsides of even the sickest patients.  But, I sure do hope these lovely guys in Turkey continue looking into it.

Once again, I apologize for the excessively long post, but I have two more things to report/say.

A Step Back

K went back on Lexapro last fall.  In the Oct-Dec timeframe when K was upset about moving to Hawaii and was going through the rapid withdrawal, her mood tanked.  Going back on it helped, even at the much lower dose she is now taking.  I think she’s ready to go off it again, but I’m just an observer these days.  With all of these improvements, she’s really able to be in charge of managing her own treatment. Yay!!!  Dr. Jamie wasn’t in favor of K going back on Lexapro last fall, but K was sure she needed it then, and Jamie was so good about supporting K’s decision. They’ll figure it out.  As a Mom who spent years in pure panic mode, it so is nice to have K able to evaluate these things for herself.  It’s even nicer that K has a Dr. who puts her ego aside, understands how complicated and interesting it is for K to be emerging from the horrible prison of this illness, and knows how to support K as she begins catching up in life.

Rate of Improvement, New Benefits from Old Ideas, and New Sensitivities

The strangest thing about all of this is that K’s rate of improvement has massively accelerated since she got past the opiate and other prescription med withdrawals in January (except Lexapro, as above).  Whereas the first year or so on Dr. Jamie’s treatments gave her slow, but steady improvements, over this past 3-4 months, the pace has accelerated.  Was all that garbage interfering with and slowing down the rate of her improvements?  Probably.

Or, what if there are thresholds in this disease where old hat treatments/changes actually can make a difference, if we could somehow stop the cascade of failures?  I don’t discount the beneficial effects of K getting off the dozen or more prescription meds her previous physicians had thrown at her (and I permitted in desperation – Mom guilt).  But, beyond that, over the past 20 months, it’s as if every system that failed sequentially as her disease progressed has been coming back online.

As she was getting sicker and sicker, it was like this disease attacked one system at a time.  As I wrote in my post last year, she had sleep and gut problems from birth, and those have been the most recent improvements.  The OI/POTS and migraines came next at puberty.  Then, the excruciating pain and fatigue/PENE soon after, but distinctly later by a year.  Then the complete hormonal failures.  Then a wild and crazy exacerbation of her gut problems that had her in the hospital numerous times for a year.  And finally, the complete cognitive shutdown.  Over the past 20 months, it’s as if the systems that control those symptoms at first stuttered into occasional action, then have eventually kicked in to functioning somewhat close to normally again.  I’m reminded of Paul St. Amand’s claims about how “reversal” works on his guaifenesin protocol.  It has been interesting how the symptom sets have improved in the reverse order from how they initially shut down.

It is also so strange how things that made no difference at all or made her WORSE while she was getting sicker and sicker are now making a positive difference.  I mean, really, how weird is it that she’s now dedicated to vigorous exercise to control her pain and it actually makes her feel better overall with no PENE?  How can that be?  And how strange is it that she’s suddenly discovered she is gluten intolerant?  Another small change is that arnica actually works for her now to give a little pain relief now and then, when it was one of the first treatments we tried and did nothing at all to help her back then. What’s with that?

Wishes, not Conclusions

I wish we knew why Dr. Jamie’s treatments have been so good for K.  I wish we knew what has been making these treatments work so well for her, but not some others.  I especially wish we knew whether K’s upward trajectory will continue and the improvements will last.

I’ll continue to post updates as this evolves.  A little more wellerness as every month goes by has been unbelievably wonderful.

Hate this disease, but I sure do love Dr. Jamie.  Thanks so much, dearest friend.

 

K after swimming

K after swimming

 

The Doomsday Scenario

An important new paper has been published: Xenotropic MLV envelope proteins induce tumor cells to secrete factors that promote the formation of immature blood vessels. Muegai et al. The et al includes Pathak who published the paper with Coffin which identified XMRV as a virus created in the lab. From the title you might think it is about cancer and blood vessels; however, look at the last sentence of the conclusion:

… the results suggest that xenograft approaches commonly used in the study of human cancer promote the evolution of novel retroviruses with pathogenic properties.

Here is the crux of the matter:

The evidence that XMRV was generated as a consequence of studies aimed at elucidating the pathology of human disease is disturbing in that it highlights long feared dangers of use of xenograft tissues in clinical settings, including porcine valves [14,15]. Of even greater concern, the results support the idea that attempts to develop better therapeutic interventions might inadvertently promote the development of pathogenic viruses. However, the following observations refute this possibility: First, although xenotropic and polytropic MLVs have been described as far back as 1970 [16,17], as of yet there has been no validated evidence of human infection by this class of viruses. Second, despite intensive investigation of XMRV by many laboratories [1,18,19] there is no evidence that XMRV is capable of inducing transformation of cells [1,20], although there is recent evidence showing that XMRV infection of LNCaP cells resulted in modest increases in proliferation, and invasion of cells into Matrigel in vitro (Pandhare-Dash et al. [4,21]).

Are you reassured? Their first point is a basic logical fallacy. Absence of proof is not proof of absence. Nobody ever found it, so it isn’t there. Their second point says XMRV, the manmade gamma retrovirus about which we know the most, isn’t dangerous, maybe. What a relief. Yet even they are now admitting, XMRV is not the only one out there. They found a new one for this paper. So now there are at least two, and no longer such a remote possibility.

The studies described herein address these questions, and show that at least one other XMRV-like virus exists, and that the virus evolved the ability to infect human cells and to express gene products that impact tumor pathogenesis.

But no need to panic. The folks that brought you this mess, will figure it out one of these decades. Recombinant Origin of the Retrovirus XMRV, now a year old, where they argued that the chances were “vanishingly small” that XMRV wasn’t created in a lab in the mid 90’s, while studiously ignoring the fact that other similar events were in fact quite likely. So they are finally admitting that the chances aren’t so small, since there have been so many chances. Now there are two. Or is it three? This paper, identified a cell line in use at the NCI that produces another infectious XMLV: The Human Lung Adenocarcinoma Cell Line EKVX Produces an Infectious Xenotropic Murine Leukemia Virus.

Inductive logic is forbidden. No connecting the dots allowed. And who can blame them, when it has been recently demonstrated that dot connecting gets you burned at the stake in the scientific community. Have to start with what we know and carefully build step by step, hoping that the pyramid ends with something coherent. God forbid, we should decide that we have learned something new, something so big that a top down approach should be employed. It is so big in fact, it could explain why 133 million of our people and 55% of our children have chronic illnesses in the US, and why 20% of adults in the developed world have an autoimmune disease. ME/CFS is little. It is time for a revolution. It is an emergency. I wrote that same sentence in 2010 and nothing has changed.

How many young people have been felled by ME/CFS since then? I know about one teenager that was treated in 2010 with antiretroviral drugs and recovered. His mother posted on this blog anonymously at one point, but was presumably prevented from going public. Sick for 8 months, better in 6 weeks. Treated for 6 months and remained in remission off treatment, as far as I know. How did that case report not  make it into the literature? It is unconscionable. I am sick of hearing about how an N of 1 is irrelevant. An N of 1 is called a case report. If important enough, it leads to a pilot study and then a clinical trial.

This burden of chronic disease in children is our replacement for the 20% that used to die before the age of 5 of infectious diseases. So instead of dead children we have live disabled ones. What is going to happen to all these disabled children? Whether the cause turns out to be an activated HERV, or an exogenous simple animal retrovirus (alpha, beta or gamma), the use of antiretroviral drugs is a logical thing to try. It is unfortunate that the only drugs available to us were developed for a retrovirus that is phylogenetically dissimilar from the simple viruses in question here, but even so, AZT, Viread, and Isentress have had a positive effect on a number of patients with ME/CFS, incomplete and, after a while, not clearly worth it, but there is a noticeable positive response in a percentage of patients, which appears annecdotally to be greater than placebo. That should be a beacon in the fog, not a reason to make the drugs taboo. Dr. Snyderman’s cancer is stable on full HAART. Shame on both the scientific and medical communities for ignoring him.

What would happen if you gave antiretrovirals to children at the time of an autistic regression? I know your government wants you to believe that the astonishing increase in ASD, now acknowledged by CDC at about 2%, is because we got better at diagnosing it. While that is undoubtedly partially true, since it is now a common disease, it is insulting to our intelligence to reassure people on that basis. It is only 2%, so no worries; your individual chances of having an autisitic child are still low. But what are your chances if you have CFS or a first degree relative with CFS, or autism, GWI, Lyme Disease, PANDAS, RRMS? These diseases are running rampant. Certain families bear an incredible burden of illness, including early aggressive reproductive and hematologic cancers. It is frightening, even if you look at only one disease at a time, but as part of a preapocalyptic whole involving the health of the species? Terrifying. Virus, injury, genetics. Many perfect storms.

Whatever happened to vaccines being inappropriate for people with immunological abnormailities? Given that patients with various immunological problems now encompass a very significant proportion of the population, the entire vaccine program needs to be seriously reevaluated. Continuing to give ever increasing immunological challenges to a patient population with seriously declining immunological health, for diseases that are extremely unlikely to cause long term morbidity or mortality, is no longer clinically justifiable in my opinion. It is medically incorrect and unethical at this point to take the current vaccination schedules for civilians and the military at face value, especially in light of the implications from this paper, and the recent acknowledgement that GWI is not in fact limited to the veterans of Desert Storm, but still occurring.

The upcoming FDA meeting will no doubt give mention to many more dangerous treatment options than AIDS drugs. AIDS patients got the best. Lots of very clean drugs to work with that cost billions to develop. There are probably many drugs on the shelf that didn’t work well enough for HIV, but might have activity against the viruses we are dealing with. My guess is antiretrovirals will not even be on the table for discussion.

IT IS STILL HAPPENING. Every single day. New people getting sick that should be treatable. The scientific community should not be allowed to take their own sweet time about this. It is not acceptable in the midst of this pandemic for them to withhold anything clinically relevant, whilst expressly trying to prohibit the off-label use of legal, safe drugs that might help patients who are in dire straights, patients suffering beyond belief, for whom there is no meaningful treatment. But the culture is to “burn at the stake” any scientist that steps out of bounds, as we have already witnessed. Doctors too, for that matter.

Look at the tunnel vision in this paper. It is all about cancer and xenografts. No mention that gamma retroviruses cause neuroimmune diseases in vivo, as well as cancer. No mention that there are aspects of modern biotechnology that could be causing the same or worse problems than the ones described in this paper, notably hybridoma technology. And nothing about vaccines, the sacred cow, which contain foreign DNA and are parenterally introduced, given in ever increasing numbers and combinations to an ever more vulnerable population. Live attenuated vaccines are grown in cultures known to express animal retroviruses, e.g. chick embryo, mouse brain culture, monkey kidney cells. Here is a list of vaccine excipients and culture mediums used for production from Wikipedia. And that’s now. Can you imagine what the technology was like in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s? Viruses successively passaged through mouse brains, passaged meaning brain sucked up with a big needle and injected into the next mouse, then eventually the resultant sludge was injected into or fed to people. Now we can tell what we are doing and we are still doing it. Chemical Induction of Endogenous Retrovirus Particles from the Vero Cell Line of African Green Monkeys.

The paper under discussion mentions the “plasticity” of these viruses. They recombine and rescue each other. But scientists aren’t allowed to connect the dots, even when obvious, as it should have been a couple of decades ago, since it was known by the 70’s that these viruses were there. Here, written by a couple of the scientists who have recently contributed to the distortion of the true significance of XMRV, telling us in 1995 what they feared, but did nothing about. I have posted it before and try not to repeat myself, but in light of this paper, it deserves to reappear.

CoffinStoye95

The assumption that these viruses could not harm humans was made on very shakey ground; everybody was having too much fun tinkering to be stopped by a few qualms. There were a few absence of proof experiments. What hubris! Now, this is the only explanation for ALL of the observed phenomena, encompassing the environmental and genetic aspects, the variations on a theme so clear to see in the various patient cohorts. The Lipkin paper came up with positive serology in 6% of the study population, patients and controls, to a very nasty defective murine retrovirus that produces Env. That particular mystery should be a high priority by now. Why is the 6% not being studied intensively? They found positive serology in human beings to pathogenic retroviral Env in Lombardi et al, they found it in Lo et al and they found it in the Lipkin study. The 6% may be, probably is, only one of many. But no need to panic.

On the personal side, as I reported last time, I went back on Viread. I again noticed an uptick in function and ability to withstand stress 6 or 7 weeks after starting it. My blood pressure is now well controlled on additional antihypertensive medicines, in fact better controlled than at any other time in my illness. I started Isentress a couple of days ago and plan to add Kaletra very soon. Ali remains remarkably stable on Viread and Isentress for 3 years now. Her life is very full. She is productive and happy. Her most limiting symptom remains MCS.

I just returned home after a trip to Tucson seeing patients. The first 5 patients I saw were 3 women almost exactly my age and 2 men, both 48 years old and sick for almost four decades. That strikes me as a bit much for coincidence. I have noticed for years, and especially since I’ve been writing this blog, that my December 1953 birth date seems to be at the peak of a bell curve for middle aged ME/CFS women, suggesting something went out horizontally. Was it when we were born? We received the oral polio vaccine, on a sugar cube, but we wouldn’t have all been the same age when we got it, since it wasn’t released until 1961. And we know that there were outbreaks before the polio vaccine. Papers have documented certain years with peak waves of onset. All of this fits with the idea that it has happened multiple times and each time, it looks a little different, e.g. average age of onset, gender susceptibility, most prominent symptoms, thus the misconception that it is a heterogeneous problem.

Just as there were many retroviral invasions in the distant past, in this paper we have emerging evidence that it has happened again, on a grand scale, over a very short period of time. There are most likely already some viruses that are endogenized in families, since it has gone unchecked for so long. The very high incidence of PCOS in young ME/CFS women may be consistent with a retrovirus invading the germline. When I first wrote about this possibility, I thought it was irreparable, a true doomsday scenario, but it is not. Evolution will deal with it, even while our fertility is dropping at an alarming rate. Deletions will occur, possibly in not very many generations. We will learn how to stay methylated to keep our viruses quiescent. We will eventually learn to manipulate epigentic factors in our favor. But like carbon emissions, we need to stop it now. A retrovirus or pieces of a retrovirus now and again, repeated exposures to endocrine disruptors, synthetic hormones and steroids, add a little Bt toxin, a “cover your ass” CT scan and a couple of radioactive tracers for worthless imaging, courtesy of your doctor, and voila! A recipe for the disaster that is occurring, while nobody panics.

Today’s song: You Haven’t Done Nothing by Stevie Wonder