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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.
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Yes it is. The corkscrew shape of the borrelia spirochete is no flight of fancy: it can burrow into other living cells. It can penetrate through cell walls, even infect lymphocytes. It's a nasty bug.Is Lyme an intracellular infection?
Fascinating, Helen. Thanks for the link. Apparently other researchers are also looking at the similarities, and it's clear that most of us in this community have a serious problem with immune modulation that affects our NK cells. I have done several tests for my NK cell count and function (with scary results) that attest to this issue.Tom Kindlon drew my attention to Dr. Abhijit Chaudhuri in this thread, where I quoted a study with him as a co-writer. The study might be of interest for the ongoing discussion in this thread.
Prof. Edwards, what would be the point in consciously giving the study less power? And what would be the problem (other than financial) with using all the replicable tests together, as I suggested? Another reason to increase the number of tests would be to decrease the effect that a preponderance of either a certain type of Lyme, or a preponderance of patients with either Late or Early-stage Lyme in the patient cohort would have.
Sorry, Jonathan Edwards, but I need to disagree with you. You are oversimplifying. It is just not that easy. To suggest otherwise seems to me to be ignoring (or unaware) of the profound polemics and disputes at play in diagnostics.
is Dr De Meirleir any where near right to say that 95% of people diagnosed as ME have Lyme.
Prof. Edwards, since we are on this subject, and since you know much more about autoimmunity and general medicine than the rest of us combined, I imagine, could you explain how an autoimmune process could theoretically start with what seems to be, but isn't, an infectious onset? Are there are autoimmune diseases with similar onsets that don't have an infectious onset? As a layman, I find this hard to understand.