Author: Admin (207.175.253.---)
Date: 04-14-02 04:07
The 64,000 dollar question, Mike! ("is it still alive in my body or is it the remains of dead bacteria that my body is fighting")
For the last four decades (since the discovery of Prednisone in the 50's) we have fought the body's misbehaving immune system, primarily with prednisone, recently with newer drugs that were developed to inhibit the multiplication of cancer cells. This approach can hardly be called a spectacular success (see, for instance, "Prednisone Improves Symptoms but not Lung Function in Sarcoidosis" or "Bone sarcoidosis" or "Comparative evaluation of the effectiveness of traditional and combined therapies of patients with sarcoidosis".)
Nevertheless, we have very little information available to help us figure out where to go from here. I started the thread on treatments for Lyme Disease because I felt that the experience which has been gained from understanding how to deal with Lyme may be applicable to the 'similar' bacteria which have now been found in sarc granuloma.
My guess, and it is purely a guess at this point, is that the DNA from killed bacteria would be encased by the body's macrophages over time. Is that time scale months, years, or decades? Probably months and years. But if we look at how hard it is to totally suppress flare-ups of the known recalcitrant bacterial diseases, I would suspect that there probably are flare-ups of Rickettsia/TB/Whatever activity in sarc patients as well. I think the primary difference is that the sarc patient's bodies reject the DNA, and the granuloma which are consequently formed do additional damage to the body above and beyond what the live bacteria itself causes. Again - this is purely a guess on my part at this time.
Additionally, we have not definitely proven that the sarc granuloma were caused by the bacterial DNA found in the biopsy slides. It is still possible that this DNA just happened to be scattered throughout tissue, and that the body was actually encasing something else. But we have nothing to lose by accepting the cause hypothesis at this point, IMO. It may lead us to a better understanding of the sarc disease process, and it may lead to development of alternative therapies, ones that Doctors can rely upon to treat this disease effectively.
Even assuming that another cause of sarc granuloma may have been found, we will still have to work on dealing with the non-granulatomous damage that has been done to our bodies by the live bacteria. Still, I would suspect many of these symptoms would be similar to those caused in the general population by Lyme and other bacterial diseases (meningitis? encephalitis?) and if so, a plethora of treatments ought to become available fairly quickly.
I would suggest you print out the article on the Rickettsia discovery and discuss a course of anti-biotic and anti-microbial therapy (plaquenil) with your doctor. The drugs he would use do have side effects, but these pale in companison to the risks of drugs already being used to treat sarc.
..Trevor..
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