Quick update to my previous post: you can now view a video archive of the IDSA hearings online here: http://webcast.you-niversity.com/idsaArchives/
How do we evaluate treatments?
January 19, 2009 at 7:05 pm (thoughts, treatments)
Tags: thoughts
I’ve been thinking a lot about the post I made earlier today on the Marshall Protocol and I decided to remove any material discussing my feelings about it, for now. I do plan to post on that (and on other things like energy healing), but I think that I need to step back first and ask the question — what are the metrics by which we can evaluate different approaches to healing in general, and approaches to healing lyme disease in particular. I need to do a much better job of elucidating the underlying facts and intuitions that lead me to judge whether a particular healing system is right for me. Also, if I am to decide what approach to take next, it would help a lot if I could compare and contrast two different approaches along dimensions that they share in common. So I’m going to start this series of posts by talking about some of the things that I think are important to evaluating something. I’m brainstorming here, and I hope some of you will add comments with your own thoughts about what helped you decide on a treatment. So here goes:
Alternatives?
January 19, 2009 at 1:29 pm (treatments)
Tags: alternative, marshall protocol, treatment, treatments
I’ve been forced to accept the fact in the last two weeks that, despite the great recovery that I had in October, I’m still not better. In fact, at this point, it appears that I have simply gotten back to where I was when I first started antibiotic therapy. In other words, while on antibiotics, I got very, very sick … and then I recovered from that. Who knows whether or not I would have gotten just as sick if I’d never started the antibiotics, but I certainly find it difficult to believe that my current treatment course is getting me where I want to go. At my last LLMD visit, my doctor called me an “antibiotic veteran” — and this is after just one year of antibiotics (but four different types + mepron).
Based on this realization, I have started once again to think about alternatives to antibiotics, such as those described in The Top 10 Treatments for Lyme Disease, Healing Lyme, and Lyme Info’s page on alternatives to antibiotics. I don’t know where this will lead me yet, but I do know that I will consider both techniques that are complementary to and substitutes for traditional antibiotics. This will be the first in a series of posts where I explore different alternative techniques. Disclaimer: I am no doctor, and I cannot speak to the ability for these techniques to cure anyone. What I will document is what sources of information I found about different techniques, and what evidence I used to make my own personal decision to try or not to try something. I encourage you to research these techniques and make your own decisions about them.
Note: this post used to go on to discuss the Marshall Protocol, but instead I decided to step back and think about how to evaluate different treatment approaches. I will discuss the Marshall Protocol in a future post once I’ve had time to collect my thoughts on it in a way that addresses the full set of issues that I think should go in to such a serious decision.
