I'm seeing comments jumping to conclusions about taking manganese supplements or trying to starve yourself of manganese. These are dangerously wrong interpretations of the article.
Any interventions would have to be targeted directly at the B. burgdorferi to disrupt their internal regulation of manganese. It's a long shot used to make this research discovery sound more impressive, not an actual cure.
Your own body uses manganese for critical processes like your metabolism, critical brain functionality, and generating important antioxidants in your mitochondria (MnSOD, the same one mentioned inside of Lyme in the article).
Your body also regulates manganese absorption and excretion. Manganese deficiency is extremely rare outside of genetic conditions or other medical problems which interfere with this regulation. You can't really starve yourself of manganese by adjusting your diet or even by periods of fasting.
So if you're reading this and thinking you could defeat Lyme by starving yourself of manganese or overdosing on manganese, don't. That's not what this article is saying.
I agree that we should not simply self-treat by supplements or starving ourselves.
But you are dead wrong that interventions would need to be directly targeted at B. burgdorferi.
The standard and effective treatment for TB back in the 1950s was a combination therapy with Streptomycin, Isoniazid (INH), and PAS. The purpose of PAS was to create a low manganese environment in the body, which put stress on Mycobacterium tuberculosis - the bacteria that causes TB. This stress did not kill the bacteria by itself, but it did make it more vulnerable to the rest of the treatment. Because of this treatment, we have a lot of data showing how well people do with low manganese for a period of 1-2 years. (That was the time that this treatment required.) It wasn't pleasant (in particular it came with nausea), but it was definitely survivable.
If low manganese really does stress B. burgdorferi, then a similar combination is worth trying today. Better yet, this combination would not require the development of a new drug that needs FDA approval. It can be tried using only drugs that have been long approved, and which are already part of standard medical practice. (Granted, PAS is no longer used for TB. But it is the standard treatment for an excess of manganese.)
> The purpose of PAS was to create a low manganese environment in the body,
Do you have a source for this?
I searched, but this recent paper on the mechanism of action for para-Aminosalicylic Acid (PAS) doesn't even mention manganese. It says it targets Dihydrofolate Reductase pathways: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5395024/
Searching for manganese and TB leads me to papers showing that manganese is an essential cofactor for Isoniazid's anti-TB action: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31319159/ but nothing about inducing low manganese states would be helpful or intentional.
So I don't think I'm dead wrong at all. Unless you have some sources, I don't think inducing manganese deficiency is actually the mechanism of action for PAS.
> we have a lot of data showing how well people do with low manganese for a period of 1-2 years. (That was the time that this treatment required.) It wasn't pleasant (in particular it came with nausea), but it was definitely survivable.
Again, do you have any source for this? Preferably a source that indicates what manganese levels were reduced to during treatment?
The side effects are likely due to the 3 drugs in combination which have their own side effects, not low manganese (if it occurred).
EDIT: This commenter was making the same claim down thread and admitted they couldn't find a source for their claim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45932379 It seems like they're making assumptions and presenting it as scientific fact.
I don’t recall the chemical, but there was one mentioned on Everything is Tuberculosis. Someone discovered that aspirin makes TB metabolize more oxygen. Someone found a chemical with the opposite effect, suppressing instead of exciting the same pathway. Based on you’re description I don’t believe it was PAS though.
I have heard that forensic analysis can see a distinct sufficient enough difference in bone manganese levels to identify the diet of a deceased person. Vegetarian diets end up with excess Mn stored in the bones. Like calcium, it’s needed and water soluble so you’ve gotta store it for a rainy day.
It's important to demarcate flavors of medicine at play here:
- MD "allopathic medicine" this is what we all consider normal medicine. They have hardcore requirements for clinical evidence.
- ND "naturopathic medicine" is a fully government licensed form of medicine (in certain places such as pacific northwest). They generally have less hardcore requirements for evidence, but do use evidence nonetheless, sometimes pre-clinical. All this recent interest in "senolytics"... a lot of what exists such as quercetin or fisetin, those are herbals, the ND's domain. And these have preclinical evidence against cancer. SOME are pretty cool and scientific people, of course, some are crazy hippie dippies what with the mushrooms and the healing crystals
- leeches "humoral medicine". This is an ancient and non-empirical form of medicine based on primarily the works of Roman physician Galen but bears similarities to medicines in other nations like China - "hot" and "cold" disease states vs hot & cold food, four humors, one of which is blood. If the disease is "too much humoral blood" the treatment is then the leech to lower that blood. This is very much distinct from the ND (at least I hope)
Make it through 12 allopathic specialists before receiving even one of the three diagnoses you need to get your life back (finally stumbled across an MD who was also an ND…),
you may be left unimpressed with allopathy as well.
doesn’t change the fact I have my life back due to addressing infection with antibacterials
As far as we know it's rather: you got your life back and happened to take some herbs at the same time. Basic correlation. Could be causal but no controls nor proof whatsoever. Hardly controversial indeed.
Yes, it’s through the placebo effect alone I am no longer bedridden.
That could indeed be one of the possibilities. But, again: no controls nor proof. Also, again, to be cystal clear because looking at your tone it seems I hit a nerve there: I never in any way said it's impossible those herbs in fact helped.
There is a big difference between believing something cured you, and publicly promoting something as a cure.
I see this all the time in various social media communities: For example, people with an autoimmune diseases that got better after eliminating dairy or starting to take willow bark supplements or whatever. The moment they see a benefit, they jump on Reddit or YouTube or whatever to promote it as a cure and tell everyone to do the same thing as them.
Promoting an extremely specific medical treatment without evidence larger than N=1 is both unethical and scientifically sloppy. At least you could bother to temper the advice with some caveats.
But apparently everyone on social media can be a medical authority these days, and giving out medical advice without a license is okay.
You're heavily implying it is a cure, yes. Even if it's not a cure, you're still irresponsibly peddling an unproven medical treatment that has no established effect other than yourself, so my point stands. You have no particular reason to believe it works on anyone else because you haven't tried it on anyone else. This type of pseudoscience doesn't belong on HN.
For those wondering... this is just antibiotics. It worked because the biofilm created by Lyme disease doesn't have any resistance to this combination for the period of time the parent was using it. (The biofilm is the tricky part of treating Lyme disease.)
Lyme disease seems difficult to understand, as it has features that challenge some basic assumptions how diseases work in general.
One such assumption is that borreliosis is always the same. But researchers have been able to capture on video the morphosis of borreliosis spirochets to biofilm, and also spirochets hiding inside red blood cells. Antibiotics apparently only work on some of these forms, thus if you are using antibiotics to cure yourself, you need long-term antibiotics to permanently kill borreliosis.
There is actually a whole subculture of hobbyists investigating their own blood samples, prepared in certain way, to capture on video how the borreliosis emerges when the red blood cells die.
Lyme is actually not a single disease but a syndrome of borreliosis together with some co-infections. These co-infections appear to work synergistically together. If you reduce the amount of one of them, others increase in numbers, weakening you so that the original co-infection can make a comeback.
Also, sometimes curing borreliosis or co-infections can make you feel worse. This is called the Herxheimer reaction. One of the reasons for this seems to be that sometimes the symptoms are actually not due to the co-infections themselves, but toxins that are released in your body when the co-infections die within the body. Thus, the more effective the cure, the more toxins, and you feel worse.
If I remember correctly, there are around 40 subspecies of borreliosis. The tests can recognize only few of these.
I also remember reading about research where random people (without symptoms) were tested for certain types of borreliosis. If I remember correctly, around 15% tested positive. This means that actually many of us may carry these diseases, but at a level that does not cause symptoms. But if our body is weakened, these diseases may become active.
Before you start supplementing with manganese, know that excessive manganese exposure (usually occupationally) is a recognized contributing risk factor for the development of a Parkinson's-like movement disorder:
whenever I need a crash-course on a vitamin or mineral I check the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University for quality info written by and reviewed by Phds
Lyme desperately needs more attention and revised CDC guideline as it's becoming an epidemic in the northeast United States.
As and outdoor-hobbies type person I've had it 3 out of 4 previous years and have begun sourcing antibiotics from agricultural suppliers, or directly from India. Contrast this to my childhood in the same region, when tick-borne diseases were never even a blip on the radar. Supposedly this is because of climate change and much warmer winters allow deer ticks to spread rapidly.
From my own anecdotes and research, none of the traditional guidance is accurate:
-Never had a bullseye rash
-Never had a tick attached more than 24 hours
-When a tick was attached around 24 hours, infection rate was close to 50% and symptoms appeared within 10 days. Contrast to ~3% infection rate per cdc average.
...I suppose the sad irony here is that lyme is not getting attention because well... current generations never touch grass and the outbreak never appears as bad as it actually is.
The quantity of ticks in the eastern US is insane. I would be in favor of a serious look at eradicating them.
It isn’t too bad in the Mountain West comparatively in my experience, though you have some bad areas in California. I am an outdoorsy person. While I live in the western US my experiences in the woods of the eastern US still stick in my mind. In some areas it was literally crawling with ticks.
I currently live in Seattle. The western side of the Cascade Mountains are essentially devoid of ticks and no one knows why, it is a bit of a scientific mystery. Years of tromping through the bush and I’ve never seen one here, which is great. It does make me wonder if there is something in the ecosystem here that could be adapted to mitigate tick populations elsewhere.
Come down to Ojai valley. They'll be crawling all over you in no time. I grew up in the east. Most of the ticks we had at least couldn't even carry Lyme or Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. California is wild.
> current generations never touch grass and the outbreak never appears as bad as it actually is.
I must say, I played in tall grass a lot as a child, catching insects and whatnot. Now I won't go anywhere near them without pretty serious protection, and I spend a great deal of time outdoors
At a party, I heard one person mention that a doctor had told him that he had BOTH north american lyme disease AND european lyme disease.
Lucky him.
He was at the doctor's office because of severe symptoms that he suspected were due to lyme disease since he had received several tick bites years ago.
Very covid-like symptoms, to the point where I initially did a quick home covid test (or multiple tests if I remember) that was negative. Very distinct soreness around the crease of the hip/leg joint, probably a lymph gland.
Second year:
exact same symptoms but less intense, still started antibiotics immediately
third:
again same but less intense, I ignored it until general full-body joint pain occurred then immediately went on antibiotics, after a few months of that it started to clear up.
Lyme disease and bacteria are always temporary. The long term disease/syndrome many people attribute to it is something else similar to long COVID and still debated.
This is the one area where the CDC actually does have accurate advice, Lyme is excellent at hiding itself from your immune system and tends to burrow into joint tissue where antibiotics have difficulty reaching.
DON'T assume the disease is temporary, as the bacteria is well-known to cause lasting nerve damage even after it dies off completely. I have more than one friend who wasn't as lucky as me and still suffers with symptoms to this day.
Having done the research myself, it seems to be biofilms that the bacteria create leading to a "dormant" yet still metabolically active state that releases inflammatory byproducts throughout the body.
The recommended course of action seems to be disulfiram to bust those biofilms + antibiotics to finally kill it all off.
In my understanding (from some years back when I was researching this myself), Lyme takes multiple forms, and in some phase in their life cycle are able to hide inside red blood cells. Antibiotics work only for some of the forms.
Some researchers think that the difficulty in healing Lyme disease is related to the fact that Lyme changes form and antibiotics only target some of the forms. In some countries, doctors are forbidden to make long-term prescription for antibiotics based on the idea that chronic Lyme does not exist.
> ...I suppose the sad irony here is that lyme is not getting attention because well... current generations never touch grass and the outbreak never appears as bad as it actually is.
The Morgellons outbreak is also much worse than it appears, or so I've heard.
These comments directly contradict the other. Either you've never had a tick for 24 hours which means the second comment isn't true, or your first comment is not true.
"Around 24 hours" means approximately 1 day. "More than 24 hours" means more than approximately 1 day. Please do not comment further unless you actually have something useful to add.
Yeah nah. I agree with the comment you replied to.
The error bars on around 24 hours and more than 24 hours over lap at least a bit.
If I had a tick for 23 hours and the guidelines say ‘more than 24’ I’d be treating it the same as ‘more than 24’ for practical purposes.
There is at least some natural variation in the host and the pathogen for there to be at least some people for who the guidelines aren’t strict enough.
Public health policy is a balance of factors, one of which is trying to not overwhelm services with trivial / non maladies.
The actual error bar of "typical time-to-infection", as per CDC guideline is 36 hours minimum. 24 is my generous amount of error factor in the most optimistic (or worst, if you're a human and not a tick) direction.
So in other words, this was my experience, and it was at least 50% worse in timescale than the cdc predicted
And it's also a potent neurotoxin from a crude dr google lookup. Which is meaningless because they wouldnt bother exploring both sides of the deal if there wasn't a safe dose for humans which is bad for the bacteria, but it bears thinking about.
Nobody, in the article or otherwise, is suggesting that you can take manganese to fight Lyme. I don’t know where you got that, but I hope nobody thinks to try it.
The idea would be to look at all of the components that regulate manganese in B. burgdorferi and then look for drugs that might disrupt how they operate.
Any solution would act indirectly by disrupting manganese balance in a targeted manner directed at B. burgdorferi, not by flooding the whole body with manganese. The cells regulate their internal manganese anyway, so supplementing manganese wouldn’t force it to go into those cells anyway.
This is a PR release for some research that tries to stretch it into a promising treatment, but it's really more of an interesting discovery than a path to a new treatment.
That's where you would be wrong. By the time you posted your comment there are already people hawking manganese bracelets on FaceBook as a cure for Lyme disease.
Sounds like starving Lyme of manganese is likely the better option that trying to overdose manganese. I don't know how effective a low-manganese diet or lifestyle would be though but it is very interesting.
> I don't know how effective a low-manganese diet or lifestyle would be though but it is very interesting.
You cannot achieve what the paper is discussing through diet or supplements.
The paper is hypothesizing that if a drug could target the components of B. burgdorferi that regulate manganese then that would kill it.
You cannot deprive the cells of manganese or overwhelm them through supplementation or restrictive diet. You would damage your own body long before reaching levels that killed the Lyme infection.
I really hope the alternative medicine people don't start abusing this headline to push diets and supplements.
Deliberately inducing manganese deficiency (which I doubt you could pull off while still eating food) isn't "self care". It's a misunderstanding of what this article is saying.
Your body needs manganese and MnSOD (one of the target enzymes mentioned in the article) just as much as Lyme disease does.
You could theoretically kill the Lyme by killing the host body, like that classic XKCD about destroying anything in a petri dish if you don't care about collateral damage. The key to making a successful treatment is finding a way to kill the infection without killing the host.
Calling anything you're suggesting "self care" is dangerous and wrong.
WP says that manganese deficiency causes skeletal deformity and inhibition of wound healing. So I'm guessing that you could survive weeks in a severe-manganese-deficiency situation before you noticed any ill effects.
> So I'm guessing that you could survive weeks in a severe-manganese-deficiency situation before you noticed any ill effects.
Your guess would be wrong. Your body needs manganese for similar reasons that Lyme disease needs it. You also produce MnSOD.
If you starved your body of manganese sufficiently (which I doubt you could do without eating a completely synthetic diet for months) then you'd be killing yourself in parallel with the Lyme disease.
The idea is not trivially wrong. It's the same idea as chemotherapy. Sure, it is a poison for you. But it hits the cancer harder than you, and so can also be an effective treatment.
That said, it is very unlikely that simply reducing manganese is preferable to existing antibiotics. But that doesn't rule out the potential effectiveness of a combination therapy.
Here is how we'd do that combination therapy. We'd mix a standard antibiotic with oral para-Aminosalicylic acid (PAS). Orally delivered PAS is the the standard treatment for treating excess manganese in humans. (Sorry, but you're dead wrong about needing a completely synthetic diet for months.) While PAS does harm a few kinds of stomach bacteria, it is far better than a broad spectrum antibiotic. And if the target disease is under stress already, then you need less antibiotic to finish them off.
Sure, a medicine that targets manganese in Lyme disease bacteria would be even better than this combination. But that medicine does not exist. And the combination in question is something that can be experimented with today, using drugs that have already been approved by the FDA.
Furthermore this is a combination that we already have a lot of experience with. Back in the 1950s, a variation on this, working on the same principles, was the standard treatment for tuberculosis. It was abandoned not because it was ineffective, but because we developed treatments with fewer side effects.
> Here is how we'd do that combination therapy. We'd mix a standard antibiotic with oral para-Aminosalicylic acid (PAS).
I responded to your comment above with this same claim. I cannot find any sources that say reducing manganese was the mechanism of PAS in TB.
A recent research paper on PAS in TB doesn't even mention manganese once. It identifies Dihydrofolate Reductase related actions as the mechanism against TB: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5395024/
> orally delivered PAS is the the standard treatment for treating excess manganese in humans.
EDTA has been the standard treatment. PAS has been explored and trialed. It can be used, but I don't know if I'd call it the "standard" treatment.
> (Sorry, but you're dead wrong about needing a completely synthetic diet for months.)
I was talking about a low-manganese diet, which the comment above me suggested. I don't know why you're so set on calling me "dead wrong" so much when you can't provide sources and aren't even reading what I'm writing.
> While PAS does harm a few kinds of stomach bacteria, it is far better than a broad spectrum antibiotic. And if the target disease is under stress already, then you need less antibiotic to finish them off.
You're really going to have to provide sources for PAS reducing manganese as a mechanism for fighting TB.
As I pointed out in my other comment, manganese is an essential cofactor for one of the other anti-TB drugs in the triple combination that was used in the past.
You could probably add enough phosphate to all your food to prevent you from absorbing any manganese, then inject iron, calcium, and magnesium? Just guessing here.
How long would it take you to die on a zero-manganese diet? If it's longer than it takes Borrelia, you still win!
I regularly find myself on a zero manganese diet for hours at a time, and I've yet to experience immediate death, screaming in agony.
Furthermore we have lots of data on how well humans can tolerate extended low manganese regimens. The standard treatment course for TB in the 1950s resulted in humans having low manganese for 1-2 years. This was unpleasant, but not lethal.
Any google search on PAS and manganese will show that it eliminates manganese from the body by chelating it, and is therefore used for treating manganese toxicity.
I don't have a specific reference for manganese levels in people undergoing the old TB treatment. But I'm sure that it should exist somewhere.
If you believe really hard and really try you can transmutate lead into manganese. Of course, eating all that lead will probably kill you first. At least your Lyme won't be a problem any more.
And all those years alchemists were wasting their time trying to change lead into gold when they could have been going for manganese to eliminate Lyme disease! Greed has no bounds
> In its metallic state it appears to be inert when swallowed, unless it meets with much acidity in the alimentary canal, or is in a state of minute division ; its compounds are, however, all of them more or less poisonous.
> Mercury has been employed in one or other of its forms in almost all diseases ; but each of its numerous preparations is supposed to have some peculiarity of action of its own, combined with that common to all the compounds of this metal. The mercurials form, indeed, one of the most important classes of the materia medica.
He goes on to explain that mercuric acetate is the basis of Keyser's antivenereal pills (according to Robiquet), that mercuric chloride (which is probably what you meant by "mercuric chlorine") is "employed as an alterative, diaphoretic, and resolvent, in the chronic forms of secondary syphilis, rheumatism, scrofula, cancer, old dropsies, numerous skin diseases, &c." He also devotes a lot of space to emphasizing how important it is to be careful of it, describing the symptoms of poisoning with it, and explaining how to analyze "animal tissue" to detect mercury salts in it. He also discusses the use of mercuric nitrate in syphilis.
But never in all the pages he devotes to the uses of mercury and its compounds does he suggest that anyone ever used metallic mercury for syphilis.
I've also never seen a suggestion that mercuric chloride was ineffective against syphilis. Wikipedia says, "Once used as a first line treatment for syphilis, it has been replaced by the more effective and less toxic procaine penicillin since at least 1948."
Less academic of course. And mercuric chlorine was an autocorrect mistake from chloride.
If mercuric chloride was actually effective (without killing the patient) seems like total luck, and generally the first actual effective treatment was considered Salvarsan [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsphenamine] - which was arsenic based yes?
Until antibiotics came around.
But people tried all sorts of things, including liquid mercury, as your source notes.
The WebMD page is about calomel, mercuric chloride, and perchloride of mercury, not metallic mercury; the body text is clear about this, but the title is wrong. It describes all kinds of poisoning symptoms that don't occur with metallic mercury. So too for the mercury section of the Science Museum web page, except for a brief mention of attempts to treat with mercury vapors. And neither of them seems very credible.
My source did not note that people tried liquid mercury.
“Mercury has been employed in one or other of its forms in almost all diseases”
Are you really saying that in that time, no one tried the most obvious form?
You’re right though that I was wrong it was the primary one - I’m truly horrified at the various things people tried. But I guess untreated syphilis is one of the worst possible ways to die, and I’d try pretty much anything too.
The problem with antibiotics at least in some countries is that official guidelines take the position that chronic Lyme does not exist, and thus doctors are forbidden to write long-term prescription to antibiotics for Lyme. Short-term may not work, as research suggests that antibiotics works only on some phases of the life-cycle of borreliosis and only for some co-infections.
Chronic Lyme where the bacteria persists does not exist. There is no evidence the primary bacterial infection persists as far as I have been able to discover. So, that is a faulty starting point in terms of your framing. Now, what is chronic lyme, does the bacteria injure the nervous system, does it leave "debris" behind that maybe antibiotics somehow help the immune system attack and clear? That is way less clear and not validated medical science.
I'm seeing comments jumping to conclusions about taking manganese supplements or trying to starve yourself of manganese. These are dangerously wrong interpretations of the article.
Any interventions would have to be targeted directly at the B. burgdorferi to disrupt their internal regulation of manganese. It's a long shot used to make this research discovery sound more impressive, not an actual cure.
Your own body uses manganese for critical processes like your metabolism, critical brain functionality, and generating important antioxidants in your mitochondria (MnSOD, the same one mentioned inside of Lyme in the article).
Your body also regulates manganese absorption and excretion. Manganese deficiency is extremely rare outside of genetic conditions or other medical problems which interfere with this regulation. You can't really starve yourself of manganese by adjusting your diet or even by periods of fasting.
So if you're reading this and thinking you could defeat Lyme by starving yourself of manganese or overdosing on manganese, don't. That's not what this article is saying.
I agree that we should not simply self-treat by supplements or starving ourselves.
But you are dead wrong that interventions would need to be directly targeted at B. burgdorferi.
The standard and effective treatment for TB back in the 1950s was a combination therapy with Streptomycin, Isoniazid (INH), and PAS. The purpose of PAS was to create a low manganese environment in the body, which put stress on Mycobacterium tuberculosis - the bacteria that causes TB. This stress did not kill the bacteria by itself, but it did make it more vulnerable to the rest of the treatment. Because of this treatment, we have a lot of data showing how well people do with low manganese for a period of 1-2 years. (That was the time that this treatment required.) It wasn't pleasant (in particular it came with nausea), but it was definitely survivable.
If low manganese really does stress B. burgdorferi, then a similar combination is worth trying today. Better yet, this combination would not require the development of a new drug that needs FDA approval. It can be tried using only drugs that have been long approved, and which are already part of standard medical practice. (Granted, PAS is no longer used for TB. But it is the standard treatment for an excess of manganese.)
> The purpose of PAS was to create a low manganese environment in the body,
Do you have a source for this?
I searched, but this recent paper on the mechanism of action for para-Aminosalicylic Acid (PAS) doesn't even mention manganese. It says it targets Dihydrofolate Reductase pathways: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5395024/
Searching for manganese and TB leads me to papers showing that manganese is an essential cofactor for Isoniazid's anti-TB action: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31319159/ but nothing about inducing low manganese states would be helpful or intentional.
So I don't think I'm dead wrong at all. Unless you have some sources, I don't think inducing manganese deficiency is actually the mechanism of action for PAS.
> we have a lot of data showing how well people do with low manganese for a period of 1-2 years. (That was the time that this treatment required.) It wasn't pleasant (in particular it came with nausea), but it was definitely survivable.
Again, do you have any source for this? Preferably a source that indicates what manganese levels were reduced to during treatment?
The side effects are likely due to the 3 drugs in combination which have their own side effects, not low manganese (if it occurred).
EDIT: This commenter was making the same claim down thread and admitted they couldn't find a source for their claim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45932379 It seems like they're making assumptions and presenting it as scientific fact.
"cofactor is a non-protein chemical compound or metallic ion that is required for an enzyme to function as a catalyst."
I don’t recall the chemical, but there was one mentioned on Everything is Tuberculosis. Someone discovered that aspirin makes TB metabolize more oxygen. Someone found a chemical with the opposite effect, suppressing instead of exciting the same pathway. Based on you’re description I don’t believe it was PAS though.
I have heard that forensic analysis can see a distinct sufficient enough difference in bone manganese levels to identify the diet of a deceased person. Vegetarian diets end up with excess Mn stored in the bones. Like calcium, it’s needed and water soluble so you’ve gotta store it for a rainy day.
this sort of case presentation re manganese brain toxicity pops up from time to time too:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4515672/
Some of the comments here are the kind of stuff that makes you lose faith in humanity.
> Any interventions would have to be targeted directly at the B. burgdorferi
Alcohol suspension tincture of the following antibacterial herbs together, which target Lyme's various coinfections:
a. Cryptolepsis sanguinolenta
b. Polygonum cuspidatum (aka: Japanese knotweed)
c. Artemisia annua (aka: Sweet wormwood)
d. Uncaria tomentosa (aka: Cat’s claw)
Begin with one drop two times per day, increasing to tolerance/under advisement of your ND/MD, or wellness consultant.
Make sure to draw blood with leeches twice a week for the best effect, but only after burying a lock of your hair at midnight in the garden.
as for lyme disease - doxycycline works well
anon's herbals have SOME clinical evidence generally : https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2956313/
It's important to demarcate flavors of medicine at play here:
- MD "allopathic medicine" this is what we all consider normal medicine. They have hardcore requirements for clinical evidence.
- ND "naturopathic medicine" is a fully government licensed form of medicine (in certain places such as pacific northwest). They generally have less hardcore requirements for evidence, but do use evidence nonetheless, sometimes pre-clinical. All this recent interest in "senolytics"... a lot of what exists such as quercetin or fisetin, those are herbals, the ND's domain. And these have preclinical evidence against cancer. SOME are pretty cool and scientific people, of course, some are crazy hippie dippies what with the mushrooms and the healing crystals
- leeches "humoral medicine". This is an ancient and non-empirical form of medicine based on primarily the works of Roman physician Galen but bears similarities to medicines in other nations like China - "hot" and "cold" disease states vs hot & cold food, four humors, one of which is blood. If the disease is "too much humoral blood" the treatment is then the leech to lower that blood. This is very much distinct from the ND (at least I hope)
Make it through 12 allopathic specialists before receiving even one of the three diagnoses you need to get your life back (finally stumbled across an MD who was also an ND…),
you may be left unimpressed with allopathy as well.
[flagged]
Are you a Lyme patient?
I was.
Bury me, don’t care, doesn’t change the fact I have my life back due to addressing infection with antibacterials - hardly controversial.
Biohacking only includes electronics, for this crowd?
doesn’t change the fact I have my life back due to addressing infection with antibacterials
As far as we know it's rather: you got your life back and happened to take some herbs at the same time. Basic correlation. Could be causal but no controls nor proof whatsoever. Hardly controversial indeed.
Yes, it’s through the placebo effect alone I am no longer bedridden.
You’ve cracked the case, detective!
As far as you know: nothing.
Same as before.
Yes, it’s through the placebo effect alone I am no longer bedridden.
That could indeed be one of the possibilities. But, again: no controls nor proof. Also, again, to be cystal clear because looking at your tone it seems I hit a nerve there: I never in any way said it's impossible those herbs in fact helped.
There is a big difference between believing something cured you, and publicly promoting something as a cure.
I see this all the time in various social media communities: For example, people with an autoimmune diseases that got better after eliminating dairy or starting to take willow bark supplements or whatever. The moment they see a benefit, they jump on Reddit or YouTube or whatever to promote it as a cure and tell everyone to do the same thing as them.
Promoting an extremely specific medical treatment without evidence larger than N=1 is both unethical and scientifically sloppy. At least you could bother to temper the advice with some caveats.
But apparently everyone on social media can be a medical authority these days, and giving out medical advice without a license is okay.
Are you talking about me?
Notice how I said nothing about a "cure" – that was actually only found in the contents of your trigger-happy response.
You're correct about the phenomenon you're referring to existing.
You're not correct about everyone you think you're observing it in. Obviously.
You're heavily implying it is a cure, yes. Even if it's not a cure, you're still irresponsibly peddling an unproven medical treatment that has no established effect other than yourself, so my point stands. You have no particular reason to believe it works on anyone else because you haven't tried it on anyone else. This type of pseudoscience doesn't belong on HN.
Antibacterial herbs,
with gobs of research, and even a study or two, supporting their efficacy for the targeted microbes,
are pseudoscience?
I’m heavily implying nothing.
My recommendation to address Lyme and coinfections like Bab and Bart in this way
(in addition to antibiotics, if you choose)
is from research and then personal experience.
Respectfully: do better, if you want to try and tell people what belongs where.
For those wondering... this is just antibiotics. It worked because the biofilm created by Lyme disease doesn't have any resistance to this combination for the period of time the parent was using it. (The biofilm is the tricky part of treating Lyme disease.)
Antibiotics - without the same risks of gut microbiome issues.
One of them!
Lyme disease seems difficult to understand, as it has features that challenge some basic assumptions how diseases work in general.
One such assumption is that borreliosis is always the same. But researchers have been able to capture on video the morphosis of borreliosis spirochets to biofilm, and also spirochets hiding inside red blood cells. Antibiotics apparently only work on some of these forms, thus if you are using antibiotics to cure yourself, you need long-term antibiotics to permanently kill borreliosis.
There is actually a whole subculture of hobbyists investigating their own blood samples, prepared in certain way, to capture on video how the borreliosis emerges when the red blood cells die.
Lyme is actually not a single disease but a syndrome of borreliosis together with some co-infections. These co-infections appear to work synergistically together. If you reduce the amount of one of them, others increase in numbers, weakening you so that the original co-infection can make a comeback.
Also, sometimes curing borreliosis or co-infections can make you feel worse. This is called the Herxheimer reaction. One of the reasons for this seems to be that sometimes the symptoms are actually not due to the co-infections themselves, but toxins that are released in your body when the co-infections die within the body. Thus, the more effective the cure, the more toxins, and you feel worse.
If I remember correctly, there are around 40 subspecies of borreliosis. The tests can recognize only few of these.
I also remember reading about research where random people (without symptoms) were tested for certain types of borreliosis. If I remember correctly, around 15% tested positive. This means that actually many of us may carry these diseases, but at a level that does not cause symptoms. But if our body is weakened, these diseases may become active.
Before you start supplementing with manganese, know that excessive manganese exposure (usually occupationally) is a recognized contributing risk factor for the development of a Parkinson's-like movement disorder:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5272970/
https://www.e-jmd.org/journal/view.php?number=335
Incidentally, if your body is either starved of or overloaded with manganese, it also suffers... :-)
whenever I need a crash-course on a vitamin or mineral I check the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University for quality info written by and reviewed by Phds
https://lpi.oregonstate.edu/mic/minerals/manganese
Didn't Pauling fall prey to pseudoscience regarding Vitamin C? It's embarrassing to name an institute after him.
yes he basically created the "vitamin C cult" of the time which is like the "vitamin D cult" of today
HOWEVER
Linus Pauling was also a legit brilliant chemist that won two nobel prizes and authored over 1000 papers
He created "quantum chemistry" and "molecular biology"
And was also a big peace activist
So he is forgiven for the Vitamin C stuff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling
Lyme desperately needs more attention and revised CDC guideline as it's becoming an epidemic in the northeast United States.
As and outdoor-hobbies type person I've had it 3 out of 4 previous years and have begun sourcing antibiotics from agricultural suppliers, or directly from India. Contrast this to my childhood in the same region, when tick-borne diseases were never even a blip on the radar. Supposedly this is because of climate change and much warmer winters allow deer ticks to spread rapidly.
From my own anecdotes and research, none of the traditional guidance is accurate:
-Never had a bullseye rash
-Never had a tick attached more than 24 hours
-When a tick was attached around 24 hours, infection rate was close to 50% and symptoms appeared within 10 days. Contrast to ~3% infection rate per cdc average.
...I suppose the sad irony here is that lyme is not getting attention because well... current generations never touch grass and the outbreak never appears as bad as it actually is.
The quantity of ticks in the eastern US is insane. I would be in favor of a serious look at eradicating them.
It isn’t too bad in the Mountain West comparatively in my experience, though you have some bad areas in California. I am an outdoorsy person. While I live in the western US my experiences in the woods of the eastern US still stick in my mind. In some areas it was literally crawling with ticks.
I currently live in Seattle. The western side of the Cascade Mountains are essentially devoid of ticks and no one knows why, it is a bit of a scientific mystery. Years of tromping through the bush and I’ve never seen one here, which is great. It does make me wonder if there is something in the ecosystem here that could be adapted to mitigate tick populations elsewhere.
Come down to Ojai valley. They'll be crawling all over you in no time. I grew up in the east. Most of the ticks we had at least couldn't even carry Lyme or Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. California is wild.
Did you get tested or did you diagnose yourself?
> current generations never touch grass and the outbreak never appears as bad as it actually is.
I must say, I played in tall grass a lot as a child, catching insects and whatnot. Now I won't go anywhere near them without pretty serious protection, and I spend a great deal of time outdoors
When I was young, tall grass was fine. But kids these days know to beware of Pokemons in the tall grass.
treat your clothing with permethrin
Can't easily buy it in Europe. Some dog sprays have it, and stuff against wood bugs.
At least in Germany you can get Nobite sprays in drug stores. This (German) security sheet[1] lists 2% Permethrin as an ingredient.
[1] https://nobite.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Nobite_Kleidun...
Is Lyme disease much of a problem in Europe though?
Yes, a big one actually. In Austria, it’s really really bad. I’ve had it twice (rash and all) 20y ago already.
At a party, I heard one person mention that a doctor had told him that he had BOTH north american lyme disease AND european lyme disease.
Lucky him.
He was at the doctor's office because of severe symptoms that he suspected were due to lyme disease since he had received several tick bites years ago.
what were your symptoms?
First year:
Very covid-like symptoms, to the point where I initially did a quick home covid test (or multiple tests if I remember) that was negative. Very distinct soreness around the crease of the hip/leg joint, probably a lymph gland.
Second year: exact same symptoms but less intense, still started antibiotics immediately
third: again same but less intense, I ignored it until general full-body joint pain occurred then immediately went on antibiotics, after a few months of that it started to clear up.
Glad that your lyme was temporary
Lyme disease and bacteria are always temporary. The long term disease/syndrome many people attribute to it is something else similar to long COVID and still debated.
This is the one area where the CDC actually does have accurate advice, Lyme is excellent at hiding itself from your immune system and tends to burrow into joint tissue where antibiotics have difficulty reaching. DON'T assume the disease is temporary, as the bacteria is well-known to cause lasting nerve damage even after it dies off completely. I have more than one friend who wasn't as lucky as me and still suffers with symptoms to this day.
Having done the research myself, it seems to be biofilms that the bacteria create leading to a "dormant" yet still metabolically active state that releases inflammatory byproducts throughout the body.
The recommended course of action seems to be disulfiram to bust those biofilms + antibiotics to finally kill it all off.
In my understanding (from some years back when I was researching this myself), Lyme takes multiple forms, and in some phase in their life cycle are able to hide inside red blood cells. Antibiotics work only for some of the forms.
Lyme Disease has existed for a very long time, it is always treatable by antibiotics and can be tested by tests. Antibiotics work.
Some researchers think that the difficulty in healing Lyme disease is related to the fact that Lyme changes form and antibiotics only target some of the forms. In some countries, doctors are forbidden to make long-term prescription for antibiotics based on the idea that chronic Lyme does not exist.
> ...I suppose the sad irony here is that lyme is not getting attention because well... current generations never touch grass and the outbreak never appears as bad as it actually is.
The Morgellons outbreak is also much worse than it appears, or so I've heard.
> -Never had a tick attached more than 24 hours
> -When a tick was attached around 24 hours,
These comments directly contradict the other. Either you've never had a tick for 24 hours which means the second comment isn't true, or your first comment is not true.
"Around 24 hours" means approximately 1 day. "More than 24 hours" means more than approximately 1 day. Please do not comment further unless you actually have something useful to add.
Yeah nah. I agree with the comment you replied to.
The error bars on around 24 hours and more than 24 hours over lap at least a bit.
If I had a tick for 23 hours and the guidelines say ‘more than 24’ I’d be treating it the same as ‘more than 24’ for practical purposes.
There is at least some natural variation in the host and the pathogen for there to be at least some people for who the guidelines aren’t strict enough.
Public health policy is a balance of factors, one of which is trying to not overwhelm services with trivial / non maladies.
The actual error bar of "typical time-to-infection", as per CDC guideline is 36 hours minimum. 24 is my generous amount of error factor in the most optimistic (or worst, if you're a human and not a tick) direction.
So in other words, this was my experience, and it was at least 50% worse in timescale than the cdc predicted
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Lyme disease is basically a political weapon in today's America.
Huh? Explain
And it's also a potent neurotoxin from a crude dr google lookup. Which is meaningless because they wouldnt bother exploring both sides of the deal if there wasn't a safe dose for humans which is bad for the bacteria, but it bears thinking about.
Nobody, in the article or otherwise, is suggesting that you can take manganese to fight Lyme. I don’t know where you got that, but I hope nobody thinks to try it.
The idea would be to look at all of the components that regulate manganese in B. burgdorferi and then look for drugs that might disrupt how they operate.
Any solution would act indirectly by disrupting manganese balance in a targeted manner directed at B. burgdorferi, not by flooding the whole body with manganese. The cells regulate their internal manganese anyway, so supplementing manganese wouldn’t force it to go into those cells anyway.
This is a PR release for some research that tries to stretch it into a promising treatment, but it's really more of an interesting discovery than a path to a new treatment.
> or otherwise
That's where you would be wrong. By the time you posted your comment there are already people hawking manganese bracelets on FaceBook as a cure for Lyme disease.
Sounds like starving Lyme of manganese is likely the better option that trying to overdose manganese. I don't know how effective a low-manganese diet or lifestyle would be though but it is very interesting.
> I don't know how effective a low-manganese diet or lifestyle would be though but it is very interesting.
You cannot achieve what the paper is discussing through diet or supplements.
The paper is hypothesizing that if a drug could target the components of B. burgdorferi that regulate manganese then that would kill it.
You cannot deprive the cells of manganese or overwhelm them through supplementation or restrictive diet. You would damage your own body long before reaching levels that killed the Lyme infection.
I really hope the alternative medicine people don't start abusing this headline to push diets and supplements.
I really hope the anti-medicine people don't start grasping for a middleman to get in between people and self care.
> self care.
Deliberately inducing manganese deficiency (which I doubt you could pull off while still eating food) isn't "self care". It's a misunderstanding of what this article is saying.
Your body needs manganese and MnSOD (one of the target enzymes mentioned in the article) just as much as Lyme disease does.
You could theoretically kill the Lyme by killing the host body, like that classic XKCD about destroying anything in a petri dish if you don't care about collateral damage. The key to making a successful treatment is finding a way to kill the infection without killing the host.
Calling anything you're suggesting "self care" is dangerous and wrong.
Trying to starve yourself of manganese would cause harm long before it affected Borrelia.
WP says that manganese deficiency causes skeletal deformity and inhibition of wound healing. So I'm guessing that you could survive weeks in a severe-manganese-deficiency situation before you noticed any ill effects.
> So I'm guessing that you could survive weeks in a severe-manganese-deficiency situation before you noticed any ill effects.
Your guess would be wrong. Your body needs manganese for similar reasons that Lyme disease needs it. You also produce MnSOD.
If you starved your body of manganese sufficiently (which I doubt you could do without eating a completely synthetic diet for months) then you'd be killing yourself in parallel with the Lyme disease.
The idea is not trivially wrong. It's the same idea as chemotherapy. Sure, it is a poison for you. But it hits the cancer harder than you, and so can also be an effective treatment.
That said, it is very unlikely that simply reducing manganese is preferable to existing antibiotics. But that doesn't rule out the potential effectiveness of a combination therapy.
Here is how we'd do that combination therapy. We'd mix a standard antibiotic with oral para-Aminosalicylic acid (PAS). Orally delivered PAS is the the standard treatment for treating excess manganese in humans. (Sorry, but you're dead wrong about needing a completely synthetic diet for months.) While PAS does harm a few kinds of stomach bacteria, it is far better than a broad spectrum antibiotic. And if the target disease is under stress already, then you need less antibiotic to finish them off.
Sure, a medicine that targets manganese in Lyme disease bacteria would be even better than this combination. But that medicine does not exist. And the combination in question is something that can be experimented with today, using drugs that have already been approved by the FDA.
Furthermore this is a combination that we already have a lot of experience with. Back in the 1950s, a variation on this, working on the same principles, was the standard treatment for tuberculosis. It was abandoned not because it was ineffective, but because we developed treatments with fewer side effects.
> Here is how we'd do that combination therapy. We'd mix a standard antibiotic with oral para-Aminosalicylic acid (PAS).
I responded to your comment above with this same claim. I cannot find any sources that say reducing manganese was the mechanism of PAS in TB.
A recent research paper on PAS in TB doesn't even mention manganese once. It identifies Dihydrofolate Reductase related actions as the mechanism against TB: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5395024/
> orally delivered PAS is the the standard treatment for treating excess manganese in humans.
EDTA has been the standard treatment. PAS has been explored and trialed. It can be used, but I don't know if I'd call it the "standard" treatment.
> (Sorry, but you're dead wrong about needing a completely synthetic diet for months.)
I was talking about a low-manganese diet, which the comment above me suggested. I don't know why you're so set on calling me "dead wrong" so much when you can't provide sources and aren't even reading what I'm writing.
> While PAS does harm a few kinds of stomach bacteria, it is far better than a broad spectrum antibiotic. And if the target disease is under stress already, then you need less antibiotic to finish them off.
You're really going to have to provide sources for PAS reducing manganese as a mechanism for fighting TB.
As I pointed out in my other comment, manganese is an essential cofactor for one of the other anti-TB drugs in the triple combination that was used in the past.
This is fascinating, thanks!
You could probably add enough phosphate to all your food to prevent you from absorbing any manganese, then inject iron, calcium, and magnesium? Just guessing here.
How long would it take you to die on a zero-manganese diet? If it's longer than it takes Borrelia, you still win!
As noted in my sibling comment, the standard of care for eliminating manganese is para-Aminosalicylic acid (PAS).
Plenty of other treatments can remove manganese. But they all are biologically active in other unwanted ways.
You would die. Immediately, and screaming in agony.
That's stupidly wrong.
I regularly find myself on a zero manganese diet for hours at a time, and I've yet to experience immediate death, screaming in agony.
Furthermore we have lots of data on how well humans can tolerate extended low manganese regimens. The standard treatment course for TB in the 1950s resulted in humans having low manganese for 1-2 years. This was unpleasant, but not lethal.
Source? I can't find anything about the standard treatment course for TB in the 1950s resulting in low manganese.
See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4407437/ to verify that PAS was used.
Any google search on PAS and manganese will show that it eliminates manganese from the body by chelating it, and is therefore used for treating manganese toxicity.
I don't have a specific reference for manganese levels in people undergoing the old TB treatment. But I'm sure that it should exist somewhere.
> I don't have a specific reference for manganese levels in people undergoing the old TB treatment. But I'm sure that it should exist somewhere.
You've spread this claim throughout the comment section and called others "dead wrong", yet even you can't find a reference to support it?
The mechanism of PAS in TB is not manganese reduction: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5395024/
I wrote more above, but I cannot find anything to support this claim about PAS being used because it reduces manganese either.
The mechanism of action of PAS against TB is in the Dihydrofolate Reductase pathway: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5395024/
I can only guess that this commenter saw that PAS can also be used for manganese chelation and jumped to conclusions?
It appears that the body cannot produce manganese on its own it is an essential trace mineral that must be obtained from the diet.
I wonder if a prolonged water fast would do the job.
Yes, obviously it can't produce manganese on its own. What, do you think the humans have nuclear reactors in their squeedlyspooches?
If you believe really hard and really try you can transmutate lead into manganese. Of course, eating all that lead will probably kill you first. At least your Lyme won't be a problem any more.
And all those years alchemists were wasting their time trying to change lead into gold when they could have been going for manganese to eliminate Lyme disease! Greed has no bounds
Sounds like the old timey syphilis cure of massive amounts of liquid mercury!
No, mercury salts. Liquid mercury won't cure you of anything but constipation.
Mercuric chloride and liquid elemental mercury were both commonly prescribed treatments for syphilis. Neither did much.
The 01880 edition of Cooley (https://archive.org/details/cooleyscyclopaed02cool) says of mercury:
> In its metallic state it appears to be inert when swallowed, unless it meets with much acidity in the alimentary canal, or is in a state of minute division ; its compounds are, however, all of them more or less poisonous.
> Mercury has been employed in one or other of its forms in almost all diseases ; but each of its numerous preparations is supposed to have some peculiarity of action of its own, combined with that common to all the compounds of this metal. The mercurials form, indeed, one of the most important classes of the materia medica.
He goes on to explain that mercuric acetate is the basis of Keyser's antivenereal pills (according to Robiquet), that mercuric chloride (which is probably what you meant by "mercuric chlorine") is "employed as an alterative, diaphoretic, and resolvent, in the chronic forms of secondary syphilis, rheumatism, scrofula, cancer, old dropsies, numerous skin diseases, &c." He also devotes a lot of space to emphasizing how important it is to be careful of it, describing the symptoms of poisoning with it, and explaining how to analyze "animal tissue" to detect mercury salts in it. He also discusses the use of mercuric nitrate in syphilis.
But never in all the pages he devotes to the uses of mercury and its compounds does he suggest that anyone ever used metallic mercury for syphilis.
I've also never seen a suggestion that mercuric chloride was ineffective against syphilis. Wikipedia says, "Once used as a first line treatment for syphilis, it has been replaced by the more effective and less toxic procaine penicillin since at least 1948."
[https://www.webmd.com/sexual-conditions/features/mercury-dou...]
[https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/history...]
Less academic of course. And mercuric chlorine was an autocorrect mistake from chloride.
If mercuric chloride was actually effective (without killing the patient) seems like total luck, and generally the first actual effective treatment was considered Salvarsan [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsphenamine] - which was arsenic based yes?
Until antibiotics came around.
But people tried all sorts of things, including liquid mercury, as your source notes.
The WebMD page is about calomel, mercuric chloride, and perchloride of mercury, not metallic mercury; the body text is clear about this, but the title is wrong. It describes all kinds of poisoning symptoms that don't occur with metallic mercury. So too for the mercury section of the Science Museum web page, except for a brief mention of attempts to treat with mercury vapors. And neither of them seems very credible.
My source did not note that people tried liquid mercury.
“Mercury has been employed in one or other of its forms in almost all diseases”
Are you really saying that in that time, no one tried the most obvious form?
You’re right though that I was wrong it was the primary one - I’m truly horrified at the various things people tried. But I guess untreated syphilis is one of the worst possible ways to die, and I’d try pretty much anything too.
Take antibiotics. They generally just work.
The problem with antibiotics at least in some countries is that official guidelines take the position that chronic Lyme does not exist, and thus doctors are forbidden to write long-term prescription to antibiotics for Lyme. Short-term may not work, as research suggests that antibiotics works only on some phases of the life-cycle of borreliosis and only for some co-infections.
Chronic Lyme where the bacteria persists does not exist. There is no evidence the primary bacterial infection persists as far as I have been able to discover. So, that is a faulty starting point in terms of your framing. Now, what is chronic lyme, does the bacteria injure the nervous system, does it leave "debris" behind that maybe antibiotics somehow help the immune system attack and clear? That is way less clear and not validated medical science.
Assuming you've tested for, identified, targeted, and then retested for, all of your coinfections.
Unfortunately, this doesn't seem ubiquitous.