Welcome to Phoenix Rising!
Created in 2008, Phoenix Rising is the largest and oldest forum dedicated to furthering the understanding of and finding treatments for complex chronic illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), fibromyalgia (FM), long COVID, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), and allied diseases.
To become a member, simply click the Register button at the top right.
Is tiredness - sleepiness ( not fatigue ). Normal with this treatment and does it last or disappear ?
Is this treatment something others use ongoing and how do you use it ? Is there a pulsing schedule ?
This describes my feeling. Not the rash but a little wired but tired! I took a long nap even yesterday and I never nap. Its not wired like awake wired. A little jittery. Going down to half my dose has helped a lot already.
@SunMoonsStars - what an interesting experience! Several years ago my doctor advised me to try Tagamet to boost my very weak immune system. I tried it but it caused a very dark mood for me, it made me depressed and I couldn't handle it so had to stop. Now I'm wondering whether Zantac would work similarly without causing a dark mood? Definitely worth a try.
I took 150 2x a day for three days
I am now doing 75 2x a day and going to go to 1 x day In not sure if I should stop or keep going since It could help me otherwise and the EBV episode was quite severe and even though symptoms are gone in sure its still there and needs more time to be put into remission.
Maybe its all about finding the right dosage for us each as the immune system down regulation probably is all to a different extent anyway. And also during viral outbreak the virus can trick the immune system to down regulate further to hide from it. So would need more during episodes vs ongoing. Could be.
I have never heard of using H2 blockers for herpes viruses.
As a probably predictable aside, I should mention no one evinced the slightest curiosity about how these results [the rapid termination of LSD effects using niacin] were accomplished, and this "antidote" remains little known thirty years later, much like my discovery in 1979 that cimetidine made acute infectious mononucleosis in teenagers or adults (and varicella, too) resolve in one or two days. I am getting tired of whining about it, but hardly anyone is aware of this treatment, even now [in 2003, 24 years after its discovery]. Although I reported a 90 percent cure rate in over 100 patients (rather high for a placebo response), the results were "anecdotal". Naturally, I was unable to get a grant to perform a double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment. "But Tagamet (and later Zantac) is for ulcers," the reviewers would write. The fact that the chairman of the department of infectious diseases at the local medical school was my coinvestigator on the grant proposal did not grease the wheel at all.
Dr. Goldstein gave me a ketamine infusion in 1997, after all other methods had failed to alleviate my CFS symptoms. I experienced complete remission of my symptoms for a week. Then, they slowly crept back. I tried to duplicate the effect with at home IM treatments, which helped, but never duplicated the dramatic full remission.
I wish I could find someone to try the IV infusion on me again. I use the drug on others all the time, as an anesthesiologist...
Dr. Goldstein is no longer practicing, and is in fact quite ill. I think that it would be a great tragedy for the entire ME/CFS community if his discoveries passed with him.
This essentially what Dr. Goldstein did. It is not possible to eliminate herpes viruses from the body, but in the case of mononucleosis, he found that a few days treatment with these drugs was enough to drive the EBV into remission in the 90% of the cases where this treatment worked. This was in people who had mono but not CFS, so for those cases where an active EBV infection is comorbid with ME/CFS, it's possible that a low dose of Zantac may be required to keep the virus suppressed.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7664171Abstract
Depletion of natural killer (NK) cells in vivo with anti-NK1.1 monoclonal antibody or anti-asialo-GM1 antiserum drastically reduced survival time in Swiss albino mice infected intravenously (i.v.) with herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2). In contrast, depletion of NK cells did not affect the survival time of mice inoculated with HSV-2 by the intraperitoneal route. A single dose of histamine prolonged survival time in animals inoculated with HSV-2 i.v. but not in animals infected intraperitoneally. Treatment with the histamine H2 receptor antagonist ranitidine alone reduced survival time in i.v.-infected animals and blocked the protective effect of histamine. Histamine or ranitidine did not affect survival time in anti-NK1.1- or anti-asialo-GM1-treated animals. Our data suggest a role for histaminergic mechanisms in NK cell-mediated protection against HSV-2.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2521868Abstract
As there is evidence of a possible immunoregulatory role for H2-histamine receptor antagonists, we carried out a prospective randomized trial to evaluate the in vivo and in vitro effect of cimetidine, an H2-blocker, in the treatment of herpes zoster infection. Cimetidine treatment shortened the median interval until the first decrease in pain, the median interval until the complete resolution of pain and promoted faster complete healing of skin lesions than symptomatic treatment. The immunological trends observed in vitro support an important role for histamine in the induction of immunosuppression, as measured by the response to the mitogen phytohemagglutinin. This effect of histamine was antagonized by cimetidine.
Zantac is much less likely to cause mood problems, both due to its lower incidence of side effects in general, and also due to the fact that unlike Tagamet, Zantac does not generally cross the blood brain barrier. However, many of us have leaky blood brain barriers, and that could account for the somnolence and wired feelings reported by @SunMoonsStars.
... The suppression of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) replication by histamine type 2 (H2) receptor antagonists, cimetidine, ranitidine, and famotidine was examined in vitro. The 50% reduction (IC50) in p24 antigen expression caused by the anti-ulcer agent, cimetidine, was observed at 26.8 nM with IC100 at 10 microM. Unlike azidothymidine-a reverse transcriptase inhibitor-cimetidine blocked HIV infection without affecting cell growth, as no cytotoxicity was observed even at the highest 1 mM dose. Ranitidine and famotidine were less potent than cimetidine. H1 antagonists, cyproheptadine and diphenhydramine, had no effect on HIV replication. Although the activity of cimetidine was observed at concentrations attainable by oral administration, the mechanism of anti-HIV action is unknown. This is the first report on antiretroviral action of H2 blockers.
A small minority of people spontaneously present a rash, usually on the arms or trunk, which can be macular (morbilliform) or papular.[6] Almost all people given amoxicillin or ampicillin eventually develop a generalized, itchy maculopapular rash, which however does not imply that the person will have adverse reactions to penicillins again in the future.