Posted by bleauberry on October 3, 2015, at 6:41:51
In reply to Re: Vitamin D Maintenance dosage, posted by Lamdage22 on October 2, 2015, at 15:09:34
> why cant the infections be proven??
Because accurate tests do not exist.
For example, let's pretend you get a tick bite. You go to the doctor to get tested for Lyme. The test comes back negative which means you didn't get Lyme from the tick. But in fact, the test if often wrong, and you could be very sick despite the test.
That test...which is really common....and the primary test all MDs use...is only about 50% accurate...
So this story happens to millions of people and I am unfortunately one of them. The doctor says no infection, go home and get some rest, it's probably just stress. (if you hear that statement, the translation is....we don't know what's wrong with you). Then for the next 20 years there is incredible suffering, both physically and mentally, but no one knows why. The test was negative, remember? So nobody considers Lyme. They already ruled it out. They test for a few other things, and they are negative too. Lots and lots of testing....nothing wrong.
But then the patient starts an antibiotic for some other unrelated reason, and bingo, guess what? They get better! Or, maybe a doctor or nurse suspects the test was wrong and wants to try antibiotics just to see what happens. That is actually the only true way to test and diagnose a suspected infection....treat it as if it was confirmed and see what happens....the same drugs used to do that are given to teenagers for acne for months and months, so the safety is not a concern.
Complicated. I have a book which literally takes an entire chapter describing how some infection bugs evade testing.
Another common one is Candida, a gut yeast. There is no accurate test for that. Why? No idea. There is a simple home test that can be done with just a glass of water and some spit. But medically, they really don't have the tools we need. Simple as that.
Here's why. The tests we have depend upon antibodies. The test don't actually find the bad guys, they find the antibodies fighting the bad guys. But in some infections, such as Lyme, the bad guys shut down parts of the human immune system with enzymes, or other things happen that prevent antibodies from happening. So when the blood test is taken, and they find no antibodies, you are considered safe, when in fact you could have a raging infection.
The science of infection detection is not great. Some bugs can be detected easily and accurately. Some cannot. It takes a book to explain the details and intricacies as to why that is. Even then, we really don't know. That's why in medicine they call it "practice".
The two mentioned here....Lyme and Candida....both have as primary symptoms everything we see in what psychiatry calls depression. MDs who spend most of their days treating Lyme patients will tell you that most of them came from other MDs who had been unsuccessful, most of them have longstanding psychiatric issues not being well managed, and most of them got nearly 100% better on antibiotics but not on psychiatric meds.
Psych meds are useful as stepping stones or symptom managers, but will never be a cure. Unfortunately, our medical system does not aim for cures. They simply aim to bandage your symptoms.
poster:bleauberry
thread:1082724
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20150929/msgs/1083158.html