Experience with antibiotics

[nryanh94]

Looking for some opinions on antibiotics, my Dr. believes I have high titers for Pneumoniae and wants to put me on an extended course of AZITHROMYCIN 250 MG daily, and METRONIDAZOLE 250 MG 3 times a week.

I’m a little concerned to try this as I’ve seen people on here State they have had really bad outcomes taking antibiotics.

Opinions?

 

[Sancar]

@nryanh94 ~ It would be beneficial for you to look in “alternative diagnoses” section- Myself I’ve been bitten by a tick 3 times that I know of. I have photos to back it up plus the tick. That being said- you may hav other symptoms that your Dr feels antibiotics would help. Did you inquire as to the Drs reason? Antibiotics have helped me personally to get through some very difficult “flares”- Low grade fever is another symptom of other co-existing illnesses- I truly hope the best for you!

 

[Markus83]

Can you post your blood test results?

 

[Goldfishbowl]

I would avoid antibiotics at all costs. Unless you have a really good reason for taking them.
There are lots of alternative medicines out there. Olive leaf extract for one!. This is just my humble opinion as I've taken loads of antibiotics and they have wiped out all the good bugs in my gut. If you do have to take them then do take loads of pre and probiotics.

 

[ljimbo423]

Looking for some opinions on antibiotics, my Dr. believes I have high titers for Pneumoniae and wants to put me on an extended course of AZITHROMYCIN 250 MG daily, and METRONIDAZOLE 250 MG 3 times a week.

I’m a little concerned to try this as I’ve seen people on here State they have had really bad outcomes taking antibiotics.

Opinions?

I would have them do a PCR test to make sure I actually have an active infection. As Goldfishbowl said, long term antibiotics wipe out healthy gut bacteria. Which might be very, very, very difficult to re-balance.

I have been treating my gut for 2 years and have made good progress but I still haven't been able to re-balnce it completely yet.

After 12 years of researching I am convinced my CFS started primarily because of dozens of courses of antibiotics I took prior to getting CFS. They wiped out my healthy gut microbiome and caused my CFS.

I think ME/CFS researcher Chris Armstrong is right in his theory that CFS is caused by a "slow sepsis", increased intestinal permeability or a "leaky gut".

 

[Hip]

my Dr. believes I have high titers for Pneumoniae

Do you mean high titers to Chlamydia pneumoniae? Or to Mycoplasma pneumoniae?

Dr Chia found antibiotic treatment with azithromycin 250 mg daily for one or two months is effective for Chlamydia pneumoniae. However relapse is common, requiring repeated treatment. See this paper.

I would have them do a PCR test to make sure I actually have an active infection.

Would you have a reference for ME/CFS doctors using PCR to diagnose Chlamydia pneumoniae (assuming that's what @nryanh94 has)?

Because all the ME/CFS doctors tests I have seen have used antibody tests for Cpn, not PCR tests.

 

[Hip]

I would avoid antibiotics at all costs. Unless you have a really good reason for taking them.
There are lots of alternative medicines out there. Olive leaf extract for one!.

Any treatment which has antibacterial effects, whether an antibiotic or a supplement, is going to kill beneficial bacteria as well. The only advantage of supplements is that they are generally much weaker as antibacterials, so will kill less of the good bacteria, as well as less of the bad bacteria.

You sometimes read on alternative medicine websites that antibacterial herbs do not kill good bacteria, but I've seen no evidence for that. Of course, evidence is often not the strong point of such websites.

 

[Goldfishbowl]

I agree to differ on this one through experience.
There are homeopathic Nosodes available from Germany. Which work on treating like with like.
If you have scientific proof of your infection then that makes it easier to find the Nosode.

Also Dr Morton Walker has proved Olive leaf extract to be as effective as Acyclovir for all the Herpes viruses.
Also if you have flare ups once the initial infection is sorted then you will need antibiotics again and again. So it might be worth looking for an alternative.

 

[ljimbo423]

Would you have a reference for ME/CFS doctors using PCR to diagnose Chlamydia pneumoniae (assuming that's what @nryanh94 has)?

Because all the ME/CFS doctors tests I have seen have used antibody tests for Cpn, not PCR tests.

I don't have any references for ME/CFS specialists doing PCR testing.

This is a link to the Center for Disease Control, I hope @nryanh94 will take a look at. It shows the "Advantages, Disadvantages, and Availability of Select C. pneumoniae Diagnostic Methods". https://www.cdc.gov/pneumonia/atypical/cpneumoniae/hcp/diagnostic.html


I would want to be as certain as possible I had an infection before I took any antibiotics. I have gone from severe and mostly bedridden to mostly mild with very short periods of moderate symptoms (a few hours here or there), from treating dysbiosis, leaky gut and supporting my mitochondria.

So for myself the cause of my CFS is now very clear. It's dysbiosis and a leaky gut. I've also been disabled with CFS for 30 years, since 1989. So even after 30 years, I am recovering my health!

Having made this much progress from fixing my gut and that progress continues. I would need be as certain as possible, I had any infection that would require antibiotics, before I would take them. Even then, I would look to alternatives to antibiotics first. Like high dose powerful herbal antibiotic extracts, etc.

As I said in my earlier post. Re-balancing significant dysbiosis caused by antibiotics, etc. can take a long, long time. I feel like it's something to take very, very seriously.

 

[Hip]

Also Dr Morton Walker has proved Olive leaf extract to be as effective as Acyclovir for all the Herpes viruses.

I doubt very much that Dr Morton Walker has conducted studies on subjects infected with various different herpesviruses, and has shown that olive leaf extract (or its active principle oleuropein) is effective, as demonstrated by a reduction in the subjects' viral load or antibody titers. It's only by doing studies like this that you can obtain evidence for an antiviral effect.

If Dr Morton Walker just wrote a book containing his claims or opinion that OLE works for herpesviruses, that is not the same as providing actual evidence. Alternative websites or books often make claims that they cannot backup with actual evidence.

I've seen no studies that show OLE is effective for any herpesvirus in vivo.

We would all like there to be some supplements that have potent antiviral effects, but sadly this is usually not the case.

 

[Goldfishbowl]

Good luck on whichever route you decide to take.

 

[Dakota15]

For those that said you had to 're-balance' your gut after antibiotics, can I ask how / what helped to establish the re-balancing after antibiotics?

 

[ljimbo423]

For those that said you had to 're-balance' your gut after antibiotics, can I ask how / what helped to establish the re-balancing after antibiotics?

I've been on a low carb diet, taking probiotics and antibiotic herbs daily for 2 years. Antibiotic herbs like olive leaf extract, oil of oregano, ceylon cinnamon and others. I'm taking fairly high doses of antibiotic herbs and still the changes to my gut are coming very slowly but they are happening.

I also added in prebiotics after about 6 months into the low carb diet. My digestion is finally normalizing after about 2 years but I won't go into detail and my health has improved a lot and continues too.

The fact that I'm taking the equivalent to 12-14 grams of a day of antibiotic herbs, as both whole herbs and extracts and changes to my gut are still happening very slowly. Tells me how very difficult it is to re-establish a healthy gut after significant dysbiosis has set in.

 

[Hip]

In the above study I linked to, Dr Chia uses antibody testing, not PCR.

I've seen various forum members post up the list of blood tests given to them by ME/CFS doctors, including Dr John Chia, Prof Jose Montoya, Dr Kenny De Meirleir and Gordon Medical, and in none of these lists was a Chlamydia pneumoniae PCR blood test ordered. They all used antibody testing.

And nryanh94's own doctor, whoever he is, also used antibody testing.

 

[ljimbo423]

EDIT- The larger point I was making, is that I would do everything I could, to be as certain as possible I had a Chlamydia pneumoniae(CP) infection. Before I took any antibiotics. Weather that would be a PCR test or whatever was necessary for me to be convinced I had a CP infection before I would treat with antibiotics.

 

[Goldfishbowl]

Professor George Lewith and many others like him started there lifes as Gp's and then went into complementary practice because they could see the need for both..
I will let HIP Google him ( Prof George Lewith)and then he can see his list of credentials and the many papers he has written. Sadly he has passed away and as with Dr Peter Fischer(the Queen of Englands homeopath) the world of Complementary Medicine will suffer..
I rest my case...

 

[Hip]

Dr Morton Walker has proved Olive leaf extract to be as effective as Acyclovir for all the Herpes viruses

Now we would all like there to be a cheap and safe supplement that has potent antiviral effects against herpesviruses, but in spite of the claims made for olive leaf extract, I have seen no evidence for antiviral effects for herpesviruses.

In fact, I spent several months going through a whole range of supplements, including OLE, and calculating their antiviral effect in humans, using a pharmacokinetic analysis, which allows you to convert in vitro results into in vivo efficacy.

Many supplements and drugs have antiviral effects in vitro (in a cell line in a test tube), but the question is whether those antiviral effects appear in vivo (in the body), when you actually take the supplement or drug orally.

In the case of olive leaf extract, there is one in vitro study that shows OLE has antiviral effect for herpes simplex virus 1 when tested in a cell line in a test tube. The question is, will those antiviral effects hold up in vivo?

Well, the answer is no, from my pharmacokinetic calculation. OLE has no useful antiviral effects for HSV1 when you take it orally.

When I calculated the in vivo antiviral Potency Factor for various supplements and drugs, Valtrex (the prodrug for acyclovir) had a Potency Factor of 4,235 for Epstein-Barr virus, and a Potency Factor of 811 for HSV1.

But the antiviral Potency Factor of olive leaf extract for HSV1 was calculated as 0. Yes zero.

So this shows in the case of HSV1 at least that olive leaf extract is useless as an antiviral, whereas acyclovir / Valtrex are effective.

I cannot rule out the possibility that olive leaf extract may have some immunomodulatory effects which fight viral infection, as my calculation only takes into account direct antiviral effects. But as direct antiviral effects go, OLE appears to be no good for herpes simplex virus 1.



By the way, most of the supplements I performed pharmacokinetic calculations on turned out to be poor antivirals in vivo. Whereas most of the commercial antiviral drugs would have calculated Potency Factors typically in the 1000s, the antiviral Potency Factor for most supplements turned out to be pretty low, usually somewhere between zero and 100.

So sadly, as much as we would like there to be potent antivirals supplements, my pharmacokinetic calculations found that most supplements were very weak antivirals.

However, there were some exceptions:

Andrographolide (from the herb Andrographis paniculata) 40 mg three times daily has Potency Factor of 971 for Epstein-Barr virus.

Genistein (flavonoid supplement) in high doses of 2000 mg daily has a Potency Factor of 763 for cytomegalovirus.

Black soybean (Glycine max) 120 grams of beans twice daily has a Potency Factor of 500 for coxsackievirus B1 (though this is based on an approximate pharmacokinetic calculation, so take this result with a pinch of salt).

So the above were the only cases where I found supplements had fairly strong antiviral effects.

 

[Hip]

By a quick bit of Googling, I found the following info on Chlamydia pneumoniae PCR and antibody testing in ME/CFS patients, which indicates the complexities:

In this research Dr.'s Cheney, Peterson & Bell sent blood samples from their own Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients to Dr. Stratton's Vanderbilt Chlamydia pneumoniae lab for testing. According to Dr. Stratton, they tested 100's if not 1000's of such blood samples. These were tested using both ELISA-based serologic methods and PCR testing using the tests developed by Stratton, et al. at the Vanderbilt Chlamydia Research Laboratory. Dr. Stratton's lab found that the majority (almost 100%) of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients were PCR positive for Chlamydia pneumoniae in blood samples.

That the selected patient group of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients had almost 100% positive PCR tests for Chlamydia pneumoniae (actual proteins, which means actual presence of the bacterial particles not only an antigen response which could be remnant from prior infection) is an extraordinary finding. Further, the majority also had either elevated IgM or IgG antibodies to Chlamydia pneumoniae major outer membrane protein cross-confirming the PCR based findings.

Of course this in-of-itself does not mean Cpn is the cause of CFS. The presence of Chlamydia pneumoniae could be due to some third factor that is part of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (such as immuno-suppression, etc). But such high of a correlation with one specific organism outweighs every other or biological finding to date in CFS research. No other single variable in the CFS literature even comes close to being found in near 100% of CFS patients. Now, there are some unknowns here, especially the criterian used to select those patient samples sent to Vanderbilt. This remains unknown as of this writing.

The first research problem:

They also discovered that many of the randomly selected "healthy controls" were also Cpn PCR positive. This would tend to call into question the tests themselves, i.e. suggesting that the tests are generating false positives. So, they tested a random sample of blood donors to have a larger pool of healthy controls from which to get a baseline comparison for the study's original control group. They found that, of "healthy blood donors" about 20% were Chlamydia pneumoniae positive! This percentage was higher than expected at the time, as it was not yet understood how ubiquitous Cpn is.

However, it turns out that this matches the figures of Cpn found in recent research with healthy, young blood donors.[9] That these earlier Vanderbilt studies found the percentage of Chlamydia pneumoniae occurring in healthy donors replicating the currentaccepted findings (which range from 18-25%) lends credence to the accuracy and sensitivity of the tests used to study this original Chronic Fatigue Syndrome sample. In other words, post hoc data suggests that their finding of an incidence of Cpn in healthy "controls" was an accurate one, not an artifact from an inaccurate test.

Note that "serologic methods" means antibody testing.

So from the above, it appears that if you PCR tested ME/CFS patients, nearly all of them would be positive Chlamydia pneumoniae. So PCR does not seem to discriminate between ME/CFS patients that might actually have an active Chlamydia pneumoniae infection possibly causing or contributing to ME/CFS symptoms, and ME/CFS patients who have Chlamydia pneumoniae in their body, but in a relatively dormant state which is not causing issues.


Even if you are using IgG antibodies as a means of testing, there are further complexities: Dr Chia notes that most ME/CFS patients with active Chlamydia pneumoniae infection will have high IgG antibody levels (but IgM is negative); however some with this infection will have low IgG levels. Thus low IgG level do not necessarily rule out active Chlamydia pneumoniae infection. Ref: here.

 

[Rufous McKinney]

my pharmacokinetic calculations found that most supplements were very weak antivirals.

@Hip : did you look at black elderberry (antiviral properties)?

 

[Hip]

@Hip : did you look at black elderberry (antiviral properties)?

I did not look at elderberry extracts like Sambucol, as its antiviral effects are mainly against influenzavirus, and I restricted my calculations to supplements or drugs having antiviral effects against viruses linked to ME/CFS (namely CVB, echovirus, EBV, HHV-6, CMV, VZV, HSV and parvovirus B19).

Each pharmacokinetic calculation for each supplement or drug would take me around half a day or a full day of work (and in some complex cases, several days), because I had to hunt down and read through various studies to get the data. So it was a laborious task. So to make things easier for me I just stuck to the ME/CFS viruses.

I am going to put all the calculation results online, but I've not quite finished the work.


Elderberry does also have some reported effect against herpes simplex, but I could not get hold of the actual in vitro study for this, so could not get the necessary data need for my calculations (I need to get hold of the EC50 or IC50 value from the in vitro study to do my calcs).

Elderberry does have significant immunomodulatory effects, and these may also fight viruses. My calculations cannot assess and quantify immunomodulatory effects against viruses, only the direct antiviral effects. This study say that elderberry extract increases TNF-alpha by 44.9 times.


The nearest thing to elderberry for ME/CFS viruses is strawberry, which I calculated has a Potency Factor of 114 for coxsackievirus B1, if you eat a high dose of 500 grams of strawberries twice daily.

Though its usually CVB3, CVB4 and CVB5 that you find in ME/CFS, and I am not sure if strawberries have antiviral effects for those. In any case, the Potency Factor of strawberries is pretty low. Good antivirals have Potency Factors in the thousands.