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2nd Peterson Appointment--XMRV

mojoey

Senior Member
Messages
1,213
Reposted from my blog:

*Apologies on delay in live blood analysis videos. Having trouble uploading, but hopefully will remove tech dunce hat by end of day.

What a crazy 2-day stretch. Was on the amtrak for about half the time, taking in the aesthetically insane views of the bay area, Sacramento wildlife reserves, and Sierra mountains, while all the time wondering if there would ever be a day when these views would no longer be internalized as utterly lackluster. I remember there used to be a day when all these solo excursions made me feel deeply at the core--whether it be longing for someone to take it all in with me or a quality of the human spirit being laid out before my eyes--but these days I'm so focused on recovering that it's challenging for anything that's unrepresentative of progress to elicit an emotional ripple. Funny thing is: I don't mind it one bit. It takes a machine to be resourceful enough to find a way out of this illness, and I can honestly say I'm proud of myself for becoming one.

Peterson was practically glowing when he came into the room. "So we have some big news." Understatement of the year? He hashed over the details of the study, which I won't go over here. Instead, I'll report some of the (maybe) lesser-known aspects of it.

Peterson was very selective with his sample. He picked the patients that he thought were most likely to have the illness, and >90% of them were positive. The other sample sizes from around the country averaged out to something lke 60% positivity, so it's definitely possible 1) that XMRV isn't as ubiquitous as it seems, 2) detection methods aren't refined enough, 3) some of the patients in other sample sizes don't have CFIDS but rather have chronic fatigue.

He said I'm a very good candidate for XMRV because 1) it infects NK cells, 2) I have rnase-L abnormalities, 3) it's reactive with other viruses which I documented stealth infections of, and 4) it has a cortisol receptor, which is why my symptoms wax and wane so much due to stress.

We had a good laugh about Reeves and how I barely escaped falling into Reeves' group of "hypogonad males who complain about everything" with my normal hormonal levels.

Surprisingly, my only elevated cytokine is IL-8, which however is produced in the gut and correlates highly with my elevated coxsackie A and B titers. However, the IL-8 is also the cytokine that's most strongly associated with XMRV. Peterson's interpretation was that many of the drugs I took such as Zithromax, Mepron, Valtrex were either immunomodulatory or lowered my viruses without me knowing it. I nodded politely, but I only took all those drugs within a 3-month period back in summer '08. The next year of bug-killing was all photons and later, ozone.

I wanna take this opportunity to give a shout-out to the Bionic 880. I've never been more convinced that it is the most effective targeted antiviral, antibacterial, antifungal treatment I've ever tried. I don't think I give the machine and community of users that have helped guide my Bionic treatment the credit they deserve for getting me to this point of relative health compared to a year ago.

Back to XMRV: he's not sure if it's sexually transmitted, vector-transmitted, or maybe a human endogenous (HER) virus. I was really impressed that he was equally open to each option. He did say he doesn't believe it is highly contagious if sexually transmitted (most of us patients have had sexual partners, and the norm is that our partners do not develop CFIDS), and that the chances of vector transmission are slight (given that millions have it--although lyme patients would clearly disagree with this logic). I for one am really glad to hear he's open to the HER virus theory. These viruses are embedded in our embedded genome, yet the reason why some family members express them and some don't may have to do with the triggers which I'll talk about shortly. Peterson even waxed a bit about how some retrovirologists think that HER viruses may be advantageous to human genomes.

Another reason he thinks this virus is causative of CFS is because he took blood samples from 1984, inserted the virus into non-infected cell lines, and produced high viral loads. I think this is the fact that really impressed virologists involved in the study. However, he said we're relatively lucky to have a gammaretrovirus vs the lentivirus (HIV is a kind).

Ok so what does this mean for treatment? He thinks this study shows why Ampligen and other immune-modulating therapies caused relapse after patients got off the drugs: they didn't eradicate the virus. Ampligen has been proven to have some anti-infectious activity, but not nearly enough. He said if he were me, he would consider going on AZT, a reverse transcriptase inhibitor. He said some docs around the country are already trying this on CFIDS patients. His reads into patient personalities actually have a lot to do with his individual treatment recommendations. He knows I like to be aggressive with treatment (in fact most males in his practice do). As an allegory, he said that during the AZT trials for HIV patients, the patients that didn't wait for later-stage clinical trials to try the drug had better results. Hint hint.

As a bit of an aside, I'm really glad to have found a physician that fully understands the gender role discrepancies of the illness. He said he has found males in his practice to employ the same treatment tendencies as myself because he thinks it's much less socially acceptable to have this illness as a male than as a female. I rarely hear this discrepancy being mentioned in patient communities (probably because it's taboo for one patient to say to another my suffering is greater than yours), but I really agree with Peterson. He said 9 out of his first 12 Ampligen patients were male, and he believes the same guinea-pig aggression will be seen with AZT.

But this next part is very interesting for those that aren't convinced this virus is the end-all, be-all. I think I'm still hanging onto that bandwagon by a thread, especially after what Peterson told me next. I went back to what we talked about last time: the relation between immune dysfunction and autonomic nervous system dysfunction. Whereas last time, he seemed convinced that ANS dysfunction was secondary to immune dysfunction, this time around he didn't seem as steadfast. Because of the cortisol receptor business, he realizes that the ANS definitely has a part to play in triggering the retroviral activation as well as re-triggering it. Since I'm doing a therapy right now that focuses on restoring ANS and immune dysfunction at the same time, the following exchange was definitely the take-home of the appointment:

Me: "Since cortisol sets off XMRV, can the autonomic nervous system be the initial culprit? And let's say I take AZT and eradicate what virus is in my blood stream (btw we can never fully eradicate retroviruses based on medicine available now and maybe ever,) can't autonomic dysfunction reactivate it?"

Peterson: "Absolutely. In fact, the double-hit (#1 ANS dysfunction #2 viral trigger) theory is one of the leading ones among retrovirologists right now."

Holy bejeezus I got the ah-ha I was looking for... from a straight-edge allopathic physician.

Then for confirmation of what I thought he just implied:

Me: "Do you treat cases that aren't triggered by infections? Say physical or emotional trauma?

Peterson: "Of course, now that we know about the cortisol receptor."


This last question is one that several patients had wanted me to ask, and I think they'll be nothing short of ecstatic with that answer. The last time I saw Peterson, immune dysfunction seemed to be the holy grail. I can say with certainty that both the above lines and everything else between the lines during our visit now shows that to be merely prologue to Peterson's expanded view of the disease.

As for why this was my "ah-ha," I needed to know if there was a point to taking a toxic drug like AZT if the initial above-the-neck hit wasn't resolved. Now I know my intuition is right. Maybe the drug will have a place for me in the future. Maybe doing isopathic injections won't be enough to lower the viral loads, but that is a worry for later. Right now, even the signs from a purely drug-prescribing CFS physician are pointing me toward Sanum injections and possibly stem cells to regenerate the central nervous system.
 

KC22

Senior Member
Messages
161
Location
Ohio
Very, very interesting. Nice reporting.:)

So if the ANS dysfunction may be #1cause and then the viral trigger, what does he say about treating #1???
 

SaraM

Senior Member
Messages
526
cortisol

Joey, thank you for the report.

Did Dr.Peterson mention how he treats those people whose CFS were not triggered by infection? Did he test you for all those pathogens like EBV, CMV,...too? What does he really mean when he uses the phrase "stealth pathogens"? Does he mean a negative IgM and a high IgG titer?Or IgM necessarily needs to be high,too?

Sara
 
D

dank

Guest
Your retelling of your visit with Peterson reflects your biases and is frankly a bit distorted.

I've been a patient of Peterson's for years and disagree with your last statements.

Autonomic nervous system dysfunction does not cause a virus or retrovirus to reactivate. It's the other way around.

You seem to have misunderstood what he said.
 

mojoey

Senior Member
Messages
1,213
dank

Next time you see him, ask him word for word "can ANS dysfunction reactivate the retrovirus?" Let me know what he says. I'm not really concerned with how long you've been a patient...a good doctor's opinions change based on current research. And also, common scientific sense about the cortisol receptor means autonomic stress can turn "on" the retrovirus.

In fact, when I told him that many patients were surmising that it is ANS dysfunction that retriggers what may be an endogenous virus, he said that these patients may very well be right. Of course I am guilty of being biased but confirmation bias (seeking statements that reflect your bias) is very different from twisting words.
 

mojoey

Senior Member
Messages
1,213
Kc22

I didn't mean to say that it's necessarily 1-2 as in ANS comes first. The double-hit theory may simply mean that those 2 factors are both necessary in order to manifest in CFIDS.

He doesn't say anything about treating the ANS.
 

mojoey

Senior Member
Messages
1,213
sara

Only coxsackie and EBV showed up with elevated titers, and they were both IGG not IGM.

He says opportunistic infections, I use the term "stealth." He says CFIDS patient have 70-80 of them on average in any given day.

I think when we talk about non-infectious triggers, that isn't mutually exclusive from having the XMRV virus. The infectious trigger is a documented infection at the time of onset. XMRV has never been documented in us but very well could have been complicit at the time of onset. I think at this point, he would still screen cases without an infectious trigger for XMRV first. That is my opinion based on everything else he told me, not something he said.
 

cfs since 1998

Senior Member
Messages
604
Thanks for posting, this was very informative. Have you been tested for XMRV or is Dr. Peterson just assuming that you have it? Let us know if you try AZT and what the dosage is.
 

heapsreal

iherb 10% discount code OPA989,
Messages
10,089
Location
australia (brisbane)
cortisol

An australian researching is looking into cfs testing, unsure if XMRV but am led to believe so. Also read in her bio other testing she has done, one that caught my eye was testosterone on natural killer cell function, could get into it to read details, but i remember reading about aids patients taking anabolic steroids to counteract muscle wasting from the disease and found it increased cd4 lymphocyte counts which is a marker of hiv positive or ngative. After reading XMRV has cortisol receptors, drugs like testosterone and anabolic steroids have opposite effects to cortisol and can block or lower the effect of cortisol, mmmm maybe another avenue of treatment, especially for men as less side effect of these drugs then for women.

Something to think about.
bit more googling for me on this.
 

Marylib

Senior Member
Messages
1,155
Thanks M0joey and all,

So I am correct in these two brain-fogged reading of these posts:

Dr. P did not offer any ideas about treating the ANS?

Is Sanum a homeoptathic regimen, using lots of different preparations?

thanks
Marylib
 

mojoey

Senior Member
Messages
1,213
Hi Mary

No he didn't.

If you're interested in Sanum, check out Mike Dessin's recovery story and the posts by patients 1,2,3 in the Community group "New Day." Sanum is not homeopathic. It is an isopathic, which uses live microorganisms as an antiviral, antibacterials, immune modulator etc. Really poorly understood, even by the alternative medical community, but very powerful when used in the right hands.
 

Wayne

Senior Member
Messages
4,300
Location
Ashland, Oregon
Right now, even the signs from a purely drug-prescribing CFS physician are pointing me toward Sanum injections and possibly stem cells to regenerate the central nervous system.

Hi Joey,

Remarkable post! Thanks much. I was wondering if you're familiar with Richard Schultz? May not have the last name spelled correctly. He's into all kinds of natural remedies and mentioned once that he feels one of the best ways to regenerate the nervous system is with St. John's Wort (lots). I could try to find more information on this if you would be interested.

I feel you're really on the cutting edge of things (as i see it) and I've always felt our general approach and philosophy is very similar. I, however, don't have the cognitive skills (used to) to go as in depth as you are able to. So I appreciate that dimension you bring to your reporting. Personally, I find your reporting to be quite objective; it feels you will go in the direction that makes the most sense and offers the greatest likelihood of success. Don't really see you attached to any biases. Thanks again for your reporting.

Best Regards, Wayne
 

mojoey

Senior Member
Messages
1,213
Hi Wayne

Thank you for the kind comments. I agree...we have shared very similar philosophies since the Prohealth days.

Herbdoc.com? I haven't heard of Dr. Schultz but have heard of St. John's wort being used for depression.. not for NS regeneration. Interesting.

It would really be great if we could find some co-factors to regenerate stem cells innately. A friend of mine sent me a study showing that AIDS interferes with stem cells in the brain. This may very well be happening in CFIDS as well.
 

InvertedTree

Senior Member
Messages
166
Thanks for taking the time to provide us with this detailed information. It's fascinating to watch as you visit Dr. Peterson and Dr. Bigelson et al.

I'm becoming increasingly more interested in stem cell stuff also.

Have you ever thought of becoming some sort of MD or other type practitioner? I continue to be impressed with your knowledge and how you make difficult to understand things make sense.

Thanks Joey.