Choose the order: Oximatrine, Olmesartan, Famciclovir, Inosine Pranobex and Cycloferon.

[Art Vandelay]

How long have you been on the MP? And how much longer do you see yourself needing to be on it? What's the benefit from the MP been for you? What's your current health status?

I've been on it 8-9 years with a few breaks. Unfortunately my original doctor had me on too low a dose of Olmesartan for the first 5-6 years with the result that I think it has really slowed my progress. I've only started to make better progress on a higher dose more recently.

The benefit is better brain fog, insomnia, inflammation, gut symptoms and pain. I even have hours here and there where I feel almost normal. However, I still get quite bad PEM if I overdo it and all the other usual CFS symptoms will flare up. The PEM seems closely related to my gut symptoms quite strongly, so I'm wondering that a parasite infection (d.fragilis) or maybe leaky gut is complicating my recovery.

I've spoken to a few local patients who have done very well on the MP. One with CFS considers themselves completely recovered after ten years and another with CFS/Lyme is nearly recovered after 9-10 years. I figure I've got a while to go yet.

Losartan and especially candesartan cross the blood-brain barrier better than olmesartan, so assuming ME/CFS involves a brain infection with enterovirus, you might get better results with ARBs which cross the BBB. Olmesartan only poorly crosses the BBB.

Olmesartan wasn't available in Australia when I started the MP so my doc used candesartan initially. My doctor said most of his patients couldn't tell the difference between it and Olmesartan but I feel that the latter has more of an anti-inflammatory effect.

 

[Art Vandelay]

hey @Art Vandelay - nice to see your around - I bet you still did not get anti EMF clothing.

Haha, not yet I have to find a new MP doctor and integrative doctors are expensive so I need to save up some money!

Good to see you here too!

 

[Hip]

This paper dated back to 2006. Obviously, Marshall knowledge on Olmesartan expanded since then.

You are probably right.

Yeah, well a proper study needs far more financial resources...

In the study itself, it cites ethical reasons for not using a control group. Yet without such a group, no one will take the results seriously.

Olmesartan anti-inflammatory effects are multi sourced, for example it even switches macrophages into M2 type
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20071465

That may not necessarily be good in ME/CFS, as M1 promotes the Th1 response, whereas M2 promotes the Th2 response, and to fight the intracellular viral and bacterial infections found in ME/CFS you need the Th1 response. See this post.

 

[Hip]

I've spoken to a few local patients who have done very well on the MP. One with CFS considers themselves completely recovered after ten years and another with CFS/Lyme is nearly recovered after 9-10 years. I figure I've got a while to go yet.

Would you know anyone who has seen substantial benefits on the Marshall Protocol in shorter timeframes?

 

[Art Vandelay]

Would you know anyone who has seen substantial benefits on the Marshall Protocol in shorter timeframes?

There are a few I've come across , although my recollection is that they were patients whose illnesses were milder to start with perhaps. For example some were still working prior to and while on the MP.

I believe the (late) Dr Blaney in Canada said that those who had a better chance of recovering more quickly were either younger, male and/or had been ill for shorter lengths of time.

I've just had a quick look at some anecdotes from an unofficial MP group:
- one patient reports recovery from Lyme in 6 years
- CFS recovery in 7 years
- recovery from RA in 2 years
- Lyme in 9 years (x2)
- CFS in 6 years
- much improved from CFS in 10 years (x3)

 

[uglevod]

In the study itself, it cites ethical reasons for not using a control group. Yet without such a group, no one will take the results seriously.

Hip, in his last video(https://www.youtube.com/user/DrTrevorMarshall/videos - "Electrosmog Radiation - Effects on the VDR (and beyond)") he made a note on this with a main point that it's simply impossible to have a control group since we are all basically float in microwave radiation.

That may not necessarily be good in ME/CFS, as M1 promotes the Th1 response, whereas M2 promotes the Th2 response, and to fight the intracellular viral and bacterial infections found in ME/CFS you need the Th1 response.

Yep! Olmesartan is also about a delicate balance between pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory response.
That's why additional Olm can potentially bring less inflammation .. well in my case additional doses just give more fatigue, so for me its pro-inflammatory effect dominates over anti-inflammatory one probably due to the further up-regulation of immune system and the rise of TNF-alpha(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10535608), aka "fatigue cytokine".

Some data on my inflammation markers while taking Olm: before therapy by WBC(white blood cells) were about 4.5 - now they are between 5.5 and 7 depending on the level of herx, ferritin was normal - now its between 250..300.
(high ferritin is associated with macrophages activation syndrome: https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-7015-11-185 - so I hope there is a connection)

Also light sensitivity, anxiety and fatigue were really terrible for the first 3..6 months.

 

[Hip]

I've just had a quick look at some anecdotes from an unofficial MP group:
- one patient reports recovery from Lyme in 6 years
- CFS recovery in 7 years
- recovery from RA in 2 years
- Lyme in 9 years (x2)
- CFS in 6 years
- much improved from CFS in 10 years (x3)

The trouble with recoveries that take up to a decade is that on that timescale, you would expect a certain percentage of patients to recover anyway. For example, in this study on mononucleosis-triggered ME/CFS, 55% were back to work after 7 years, due to natural recovery (whether enterovirus ME/CFS has the same recovery rate as EBV ME/CFS is not known).

So unfortunately on that timescale, it's not clear whether it really was the Benicar that led to recovery, or whether the patient might have recovered anyway.

Hip, in his last video(https://www.youtube.com/user/DrTrevorMarshall/videos - "Electrosmog Radiation - Effects on the VDR (and beyond)") he made a note on this with a main point that it's simply impossible to have a control group since we are all basically float in microwave radiation.

It would have been very easy to have a control group: the treated group wore electrically-conductive balaclavas on the head at night, and reported symptomatic improvement; you could very easily have provided similar balaclavas that were not electrically-conductive as the control group.

The electrically-conductive balaclavas will filter out a lot of the electromagnetic radiation; the non-electrically-conductive balaclavas will not filter any electromagnetic radiation.

So in that way you can easily have a treatment group and a placebo group.

 

[uglevod]

you could very easily have provided similar balaclavas that were not electrically-conductive as the control group.

IMO, since most of the patients on the MP are so severely ill it would be unethical to use them as a control group for possible placebo effect from ordinary balaclavas.

 

[Sidny]

Hmm this EMF thing really does make me wonder. My apartment is being blasted by more than a dozen full strength Wifi signals and I’m having major sleeping issues so it can’t be helping. I read somewhere that Russia imposes 100 times stricter limits on mw radiation as compared to the FCCs limit in the U.S. Also Dr. Klinghardt won’t see patients unless they commit to reducing their emf exposures so it might be a significant factor in immunity and illness.

 

[Hip]

IMO, since most of the patients on the MP are so severely ill it would be unethical to use them as a control group for possible placebo effect from ordinary balaclavas.

It's unethical not to provide a control group, as studies without a control group are not taken seriously, which then effects thousands more patients outside of the study.

 

[uglevod]

It's unethical not to provide a control group, as studies without a control group are not taken seriously, which then effects thousands more patients outside of the study.

Well, I still see it as better than nothing, restricted by Marshall's group limits.
You simply "want" too much from a group running by a bunch of volunteers, with no financial gains. In other words - accept the study limitation, or just pass it on - no one is trying to hard sell you anything.

Speaking of what is unethical and what is not ... well, pushing another disease symptoms suppressing supplement(basically any anti-inflammatory starting with a basic one like curcumin and ending up with a powerful TNF-alpha inhibitor) seems far more unethical to me - just a matter of point of view.

 

[Hip]

In other words - accept the study limitation, or just pass it on

It's always important to mention when a study is flawed or has limitations, so that people are made aware that the results cannot be relied upon. The PR forum is renowned for critically analyzing studies and pointing out issues.

Electromagnetic hypersensitivity is a controversial area where lots of patients claim to feel adverse effects from electromagnetic fields, but when these claims are put to the test under scientifically controlled conditions, their claims usually fall apart.

See this article, where it states: "In a provocation study, an electrosensitive person sits in a room with the source of electromagnetic waves hidden from view: they don’t know whether it is switched on or not. There have been 36 such studies published to date. This is very active work. This field has not been neglected. Thirty-three have shown that the subjects were unable to tell if the signal was present or absent, and the other three were flawed."

So in a controversial area, you would want to make sure your studies are robust.

It would have required no extra effort to run a control group. There were 64 patients enrolled in Marhsall's electrosmog study, and the authors made special sleeping caps out of microwave-shielding fabric to give to these 64 patients. Without any extra effort, they could have made half of these sleeping caps from ordinary non-shielding fabric.




I am not following what you are try to say about TNF-alpha inhibitors being unethical.

 

[uglevod]

I am not following what you are try to say about TNF-alpha inhibitors being unethical.

TNF alpha inhibitor has a potential to compromise an immunity to the point of disease progression:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25922085

Virtually no one is talking about a dark side of this kind of medicine.

Electromagnetic hypersensitivity is a controversial area where lots of patients claim to feel adverse effects from electromagnetic fields

Unfortunately, there are only a few studies measuring an actual effect of EMF radiation on immunity, but still there are some:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27901344
After 30 days of exposure time, 1 h/day EMF exposure resulted in significant decrease in immunoglobulin levels (IgA, IgE, IgM, and IgG); total leukocyte, lymphocyte, eosinophil and basophil counts; and a significant increase in neutrophil and monocyte counts.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/15368378.2012.721845
The experiments demonstrated that only EMF tuned to the calcium ion cyclotron resonance frequency was able to affect ROS production in neutrophils.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11558390?dopt=Abstract
The results show that low-intensity extremely-high-frequency electromagnetic radiation with the frequency and energy flux density used does not influence the humoral immune response intensity in healthy mice but influences immunogenesis under multiple repeated exposures.

Pharmacological analysis of anti-inflammatory effects of low-intensity extremely high-frequency electromagnetic radiation:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17175917?dopt=Abstract

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18044738?dopt=Abstract
The results obtained suggest that arachidonic acid metabolites and histamine are involved in realization of anti-inflammatory effects of low-intensity EHF EMR.

Immune responses of a wall lizard to whole-body exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26853383?dopt=Abstract
Our results revealed a noticeable suppression (approximately 45%) of inflammatory responses in EMR-exposed lizards compared to sham-exposed animals. T cell-mediated responses were marginally affected.

...

IMO is it logical to accept the possibility that once the person's immune system got up-regulated with Olmesartan
he or she becomes EMF-sensitive to a greater degree compared with a general population due to the partly proven effects of EMF waves on beings(at least on rats & lizards).

 

[Hip]

Thanks for listing those studies, @uglevod.

Certainly there is a possibility that electromagnetic fields may affect immunity; though until we get high quality studies that examine this, we will not have any strong evidence either way.

I ran a forum poll a while ago to see if proximity to a mobile phone base station might be a factor in precipitating ME/CFS. But according to the results of that poll, there was no significant evidence of any effect.

 

[Art Vandelay]

The trouble with recoveries that take up to a decade is that on that timescale, you would expect a certain percentage of patients to recover anyway. For example, in this study on mononucleosis-triggered ME/CFS, 55% were back to work after 7 years, due to natural recovery (whether enterovirus ME/CFS has the same recovery rate as EBV ME/CFS is not known).

Spot on. I'm always careful to refer to these stories as 'anecdotes' for this reason. Obviously there are also patients who don't do as well on the MP and this should also be considered by people thinking about trying it.

 

[pamojja]

TNF alpha inhibitor has a potential to compromise an immunity to the point of disease progression:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25922085

Extrapolating the side-effects of Adalimumab in 1 case report to a commonly used spice, is worse than extrapolating the side-effects of sky-high doses of the synthetic Accutane to the essential nutrient vitamin A. Totally inappropriate.

 

[uglevod]

Extrapolating the side-effects of Adalimumab in 1 case report to a commonly used spice, is worse than extrapolating the side-effects of sky-high doses of the synthetic Accutane to the essential nutrient vitamin A. Totally inappropriate.

Well, obviously I did not.

> commonly used spice

Dose makes the poison. In other words - yeah, it is commonly used but not megadosed.

> Extrapolating the side-effects of Adalimumab

Its not a Adalimumab side effect - its the TNF-alpha levels drop which made a person more vulnerable to her infection, since TNF-alpha is one of the cytokines providing balance against chronic microbiota.

 

[pamojja]

Its not a Adalimumab side effect - its the TNF-alpha levels drop which made a person more vulnerable to her infection, since TNF-alpha is one of the cytokines providing balance against chronic microbiota.

If you don't have any case study of high-dose curcumin users (which there are many nowadays) where the same happen. It's a complete inappropriate comparison.

 

[uglevod]

If you don't have any case study of high-dose curcumin users (which there are many nowadays) where the same happen. It's a complete inappropriate comparison.

Personally for me curcumin in another NF cappa B inhibitor(google: curcumin nf cappa b).

NF cappa B inhibition compromises the immunity:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17072327
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8011280



Again, as with TNF-alpha inhibition I look at any NF cappa B inhibitor(not just curcumin) as a potential way to compromise my own immunity(I have some chronic infections, one in a very high titre).

 

[pamojja]

Personally for me curcumin in another NF cappa B inhibitor(google: curcumin nf cappa b).

In a test-tube, yes.