What Doctor’s Don’t Tell You: Has Dr Mikovits found the cause of chronic fatigue?

I'm not sure that there's no conflict at this point. Mikovits has had the Science retraction and lab materials criminal complaint, and drawn a lot of negative publicity and Wakefield parallels. I think she's attracted support from an anti-vaccination contingent I would imagine she feels she has a lot to lose face-wise by conceding on xmrv.

Edited - clarity

 

Does anyone know when/if Ron's team is going to look for RNA viruses?

 

WTDDTY is a weird website full of quackery. I read stuff from them before. They love conspiracy theories. Anything 'alternative' is definitely right and anything mainstream is definitely wrong and they don't look much further than that. I wouldn't waste my time reading anything on that website.

 

The problem with these drugs is they have other effects. Like its suspected that much of the benefit from regular antivirals in ME might be due to nonviral effects. We just cannot know without the science. If reverse transcriptase was found, and drugs targeting this diminished the level, then that would be very interesting.

 

Viruses being a factor in the illness isn't the same as retroviruses in particular being important, and neither is the same as retroviruses being causative.

Mikovitz's book that came out recently was a real eye-opener. I closed my browser window at the sentence that went, "God does not want us to take the viruses and DNA of animals and put them into humankind" (paraphrasing, but that was the gist).

Good to be confident enough to know what God wants, I guess.

I was thinking about her and the impact she's had on research. I think the huge splash XMRV research created actually pulled more scientists into the field. So in a very roundabout way, we can thank her. And that is the best I can say of her.

 

This is unfortunate- we need squeeky clean science and mainstream doctors to translate the knowledge into treatment protocols, biomarkers, and drugs that work. Those who advance hypothesis must be ready to face their peer for review and must have their results replicated.

The problem we have had from my point of view, is too many hypothesis and treatment lines that were/ are‘out there’. MTHFR, toxins, retroviruses, ... enough already. Then there are the alternative treatments. Nothing that could pass for real medicine in any country. Antibiotics for years, GCMAF, stem cell transplants (bonus if they do it in Costa Rica), supplement protocol that are supposed to do this and that, diets that are supposed to fix your mitochondria.

Until we have sound science, the above does not pass the smell test in mainstream medicine.

 

I've read of lot of contemporary articles from the Los Angeles Times (and elsewhere) written during the 1934 LA epidemic.

There were two types of prophylactic serum used in the outbreak - pooled serum from healthy adults and serum from convalescent polio patients. In both cases the idea was to deliver polio antibodies to patients and those at risk.

[I believe this is actually known as an "antiserum," and an Ebola antiserum seems to have been successful in treating a couple of Ebola cases in the US resulting from the outbreak in Africa a few years back.]

In 1934, the serum of healthy adults had a fair chance of containing polio antibodies despite the lack of a polio vaccine. The reason being that the majority of people who contract polio are either asymptomatic or only have mild, flu-like symptoms. Most people who had been infected with polio back then didn't know it. So, if you pooled the serum of a lot of healthy people back in those days, you could expect to get at least some polio antibodies.

In the LA outbreak, the antiserums actually seemed to slightly increased the chance contracting polio, while also slightly lowering the chance of developing paralysis. The numbers seem to have been too small to have been statistically significant, though.

About 60% of the patients who developed ME symptoms never got the serum at all, or they developed symptoms prior to or on the same day as they got the serum.

As for the vaccine, three of the doctors involved with the Park-Brodie vaccine decided to test the vaccine on themselves in July 1934 to see if it was safe to give to children. The LA epidemic had already peaked by this point and I haven't seen anything about a "vaccine" actually being given to anyone else during the LA outbreak.

About six months later, according to a newpaper article of the time, the Park-Brodie vaccine was to be tried on 700 children in Bakersfield, California, during a polio outbreak there in February 1935. In addition to the children, doctors and nurses were also to be given the Park-Brodie vaccine in Bakersfield. I'm not aware of a subsequent M.E.-like outbreak reported in Bakersfield in 1935.

The Park-Brodie vaccine seems to have been much safer than the contemporary Kolmer vaccine, which actually induced polio in some people and lead to several deaths. The main problem with the Park-Brodie vaccine was that it just didn't work. It offered no protection against polio at all.