@Hip I have read suggestions that "provoking" a virus while treating can help clear it from the system (in its acute form?). Would this theory in any way transfer to enteroviruses in their non-cytolytic state?
I think what you mean by "provoking" a virus is waking the virus from its latent (dormant) state within cells. This is indeed a way that theoretically you might clear a virus.
For example, the reason that a cold sore around the mouth never disappears is because the herpes simplex virus, as it reawakens to create the cold sore, is slowly cleared by the immune system; but a small percentage of this virus goes off to hide within cells, and stays in those cells in a latent state.
Because the virus is quiet during latency, immune system does not notice those cells, so the virus lives on to fight another day. But if you could reawaken all herpes simplex viruses from their latent state in cells, then the immune system would spot those infected cells, and you could clear all the virus from your body, and your cold sore would never come back.
So far though, I don't think anyone has been able to coax herpes simplex out of latency, because it they had, we would have a permanent cure for herpes cold sores.
And this approach will only work for viruses that are capable of entering a latent state, such the herpesvirus family.
Enterovirus is not capable of latency, although it does enter into a latency-like state called a non-cytolytic infection, when again it hides inside cells. Non-cytolytic is not fully dormant, but smolders away as a low-level infection in the cell, which tends not to be noticed by the immune system, and/or is not able to be cleared by the immune system.
If you could coax non-cytolytic enterovirus into returning back to a normal full infection, then you may well be able to clear the enterovirus infection from the body. In ME/CFS, it is the non-cytolytic form of enterovirus that is assumed to cause all the trouble.
We actually know the cellular conditions that cause enterovirus to change from a full infection to a low-level non-cytolytic infection. In short, non-cytolytic enterovirus can only arise in non-dividing cells; these cells lack an important factor called hnRNP C in their cytoplasm (full technical details
here). It is the lack of hnRNP C in the cell that allows non-cytolytic enterovirus to form. If we could change those cellular conditions, then we might be able to eliminate enterovirus.
