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Live Blood under the microscope: interesting

WoolPippi

Senior Member
Messages
556
Location
Netherlands
Yesterday I visited a practitioner who does Live Blood Analysis. They take a small drop of blood with a really gentle finger prick and put it under a dark field microscope which is attached to a screen.

The analysis-part is controversial so lets not talk about that but seeing my red blood cells move about was fascinating!

This picture is from the internet -please ignore the texts on it- and it's pretty similar to what I got to see from my own blood:
after-blood-pic1.jpg

Those are nice round red blood cells. They were slowly moving about, tumbling. Some of mine were misformed or jagged.

The grainy cell is a white blood cell. Mine looked like this one and that's a good one. It has more than one structure within.

The bit of "fluff" on the cell at the left above the white one was called "debris" in my case. Stuff that should have been evacuated from the body. (??)

There are 3 or 4 little star like dots in this picture, close to cells. Mine had many more, floating amongst the cells and they were actively vibrating and moving. She said they were nutrients like minerals (??) They looked magical!

With me there was also a structure the size of 5 nutrient-dots and she said it was a parasite, a bacterium. A common one, not a spirally one because those would have indicated Lyme, something-else-I-forget or Syphilis. (??)

As I said, I'm not prepared to defend the interpretation/analysis-part of this practise. But seeing the shape of the cells and the ratio between red and white cells gives information. Lots of white blood cells indicate an inflammation somewhere in the body.

I think my drop of blood had about 300 red blood cells and 20 white blood cells. I had about 200 vibrating nutrient-dots. 25 bits of debris-fluff. 20 bacteria.
Some of my red blood cells had a pointy bit. This happens when the specimen gets older (we're talking minutes here) but also when there's need of B12. This would coincide with my situation but now we're in analysis-territory.

It was really cool to see.
 

WoolPippi

Senior Member
Messages
556
Location
Netherlands
Very, very cool, @WoolPippi! I think you just posted something else for me to throw my hard-earned at. ;) Thanks for sharing!
It cost me 105 euros and the appointment took one hour, what with the introduction, the interpreting and also something called Free Radical Test or Dry Blood Analysis or Oxidative Stress test. But that test is too alternative to the likes of this forum.

The fingerprick was really gentle. I was worried and stressed about it but it was no issue.
I chose to be pricked at the side of the finger which is less sensitive than the top. A trick I learned from Blood Sugar measuring.

This particular practitioner knew her stuff, from supplement interaction to methylation cycle to cell membranes and I was very much surprised. We were talking like a couple of FR-forummers in no time. So I'm giving her some credit and will explore the supplements she advised. They made sense to me.

There's no need for a follow up appointment.
 
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whodathunkit

Senior Member
Messages
1,160
@WoolPippi, thanks for the info. The price seems reasonable and the procedure non-troublesome. Since I started shooting myself up with mB12 every day for the last two years, and also checking my blood sugar daily, needles just don't bother me any more. So it sounds like it's all good.

If you don't mind sharing what she said about methylation and cell membranes, I'd be interested in that, too. Bet some others would as well. Speaking for myself, alternative health strategies are the only ones that have ever done me a dang bit of good.

Please only share if you have the energy, though. :) And you can PM if you want. Or not. Again, it's all good.

Thanks again! :thumbsup:
 

Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,824
Here is a picture of my blood cells that I took in 2008 with a microscope that I bought cheaply for £60 on eBay (some years ago I naively thought that a microscope might be a useful diagnostic tool in ME/CFS):

Hip Blood Cells.jpg

I don't have any expertise in interpretation of such microscopy images. In microscopy, you often use stains to highlight the cells of interest (such as bacterial cells), but no stains were used in this image.

I think those spiky-looking blood cells may be echinocytes, which are red blood cells whose membrane has become covered in spiky, thorny projections. Here is a Google Image search on echinocytes.

Echinocytes can be created as an artifact of drying out of the blood smear; but they are also associated with uremia, pyruvate kinase deficiency, hypomagnesemia, hypophosphatemia, and hemolytic anemia in long-distance runners, according to Wikipedia.
 

maryb

iherb code TAK122
Messages
3,602
Location
UK
Recently someone on a Lyme forum on FB bought himself a microscope from e-bay, he had a Prof from Oxford look at the slide of his blood and he identified a spirochete, you can clearly see it in the sample, scary.... can the NHS UK deny this.. probably.
 

Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,824
Recently someone on a Lyme forum on FB bought himself a microscope from e-bay, he had a Prof from Oxford look at the slide of his blood and he identified a spirochete, you can clearly see it in the sample, scary.... can the NHS UK deny this.. probably.

It must be a relatively rare occurrence to find Borrelia spirochetes in the blood in this way (except perhaps in acute infections), otherwise patients and testing labs would not have to go through complex and expensive testing routines to detect Borrelia.
 

bertiedog

Senior Member
Messages
1,738
Location
South East England, UK
It must be a relatively rare occurrence to find Borrelia spirochetes in the blood in this way (except perhaps in acute infections), otherwise patients and testing labs would not have to go through complex and expensive testing routines to detect Borrelia.
I spoke to a German doctor who specialises in Lyme testing (MELISA) and she told me that borrelia do not stay in the blood but very quickly go into tissues so it was very unlikely that one would see spirochetes with live blood microscopy. She said that it has to be something else.

I believe Dr W admitted this when he was in front of the GMC in 2011.

Pam
 

WoolPippi

Senior Member
Messages
556
Location
Netherlands
I'll be by to post more about what was said. As soon as I have the time/energy to give a proper response :)

we didn't talk methylation specific. She's a supplement expert first.
 
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vortex

Senior Member
Messages
162
I spoke to a German doctor who specialises in Lyme testing (MELISA) and she told me that borrelia do not stay in the blood but very quickly go into tissues so it was very unlikely that one would see spirochetes with live blood microscopy. She said that it has to be something else.

It turns out that the reason you dont see them is that they burrow into the red blood cells. If you keep the microscope slide and examine hours or days later, the lyme spirochetes come crawling out of the red blood cells and you can see them then.

Prof. Morten Laane held the presentation: "Easy Detection of Bacteria and Parasites in Infected Human Blood by Microscopy. Some Simple, Low-cost Methods" at the NorVect conference 2014.
 

HowToEscape?

Senior Member
Messages
626
I had this done at one point. It was interesting to look at but when I later checked up on what the live blood analysis expert told me, I found it to be 100% BS. He also sold an 'alkalized' water machine, that's several thousand dollars.
His previous career was nightclub operator.
 
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Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,824
It turns out that the reason you dont see them is that they burrow into the red blood cells. If you keep the microscope slide and examine hours or days later, the lyme spirochetes come crawling out of the red blood cells and you can see them then.

Prof. Morten Laane held the presentation: "Easy Detection of Bacteria and Parasites in Infected Human Blood by Microscopy. Some Simple, Low-cost Methods" at the NorVect conference 2014.

That's very interesting.

An article about Prof Morten Laane's microscopy technique can be found here, and a video here.

His 2013 paper is here:
A simple method for the detection of live Borrelia spirochaetes in human blood using classical microscopy techniques

In this paper he says the technique is simply to add a tiny amount of sodium citrate solution to the patient's drop of blood on the microscopy slide, "which for unknown reasons seems to further stimulate replication of Borrelia". Under these conditions, he says that Borrelia might appear both inside and outside the red blood cells.


However, since this paper was published back in 2013, I don't think this method can be reliable for diagnosing Borrelia infection, otherwise it would have been taken up and widely utilized by now.



EDIT 2019: Laane's method was proven incorrect in a 2016 study.
 
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Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,824
What I would like to know is how easy it is to see Borrelia spirochetes using Prof Laane's microscopy technique, when blood is taken from patients who are certain they have Lyme disease (eg, patients whose infections started with a bullseye rash, who then developed the symptoms of chronic Lyme, and who test positive on the standard CDC two-tier test).

I would imagine that in such chronic Lyme patients, you are not going to see these spirochetes under the microscope every time; you'd probably have to take blood samples every day, and check them under the microscope, and then perhaps once every now and then, you will find a sample in which you can see the spirochetes.