Understanding the impact of your medicines

I just pushed out an update to http://microbiomeprescription.com/ that may help you understand what various prescription, over the counter and some supplements may be doing to your microbiome.

Select any of the links highlighted below

The next page will show some choices at the top:

Compare Impact

This is intended to allow you to better choice between alternatives – for example Aspirin versus  Paracetamol (acetaminophen). I am sure people will find more uses for it.

The process is simple, search for each item, and put a check beside it. Select the Compare Impact radio button and then click the submit button below it.
Hint: Pick Complete List, and then do Ctrl-F to search for each drug.

This will take you to a page listing the impact side by side. In this case we see that their impacts are similar, but different on a few items. At the family level there are a few differences

If a family that is important to you is shifted the wrong way, you may wish to consider the better one

Compensate

This is intended when you are prescribed drugs to treat some conditions and wish to reduce the impact on the microbiome by counteracting the drug or drugs impact on the microbiome.

For this example, we pick lovastatin (a statin), Famotidine (Pepcid AC).

We may wish to first see how much impact they have together (do they reinforce or counteract each other)

Bad news — they reinforce each other in decreasing many families

Just pressing back, and changing radio buttons, and submit produces suggestions.

The suggestions are done by creating a virtual microbiome report based on the above shifts and running that through our AI engine.

The suggestion page is the new format with the long lists hidden until you ask to see them.

The Take or Avoid list is defaulted to 100 items (which is one reason that I toggle visibility). Remember – none of these items are guaranteed to work, nor do you need to take all of them. Each item increases your odds

The avoid list values are a lot higher, and thus you may wish by reducing any of these items that you are taking.

As always, these are suggestions that must be reviewed by a knowledgeable medical professional before doing.

Rickettsia (Lyme/Q-fever) Detection by Microbiome?

Today I had a messenger session with someone who noted that Diplorickettsia was in his results. Rickettsia infection treatment plan is the historic basis of Ceclie Jadin’s protocol that she learnt from the Pasteur Institute for Tropical Medicine which has been successful for some ME/CFS patients.

What is Diplorickettsia genus?

” Doubled rickettsia, for the phenotypic resemblance of the isolated strain with rickettsiae shown by Gimenez staining A novel obligate intracellular gamma-proteobacterium associated with ixodid ticks, Diplorickettsia massiliensis” [Src]

”  The disease (Lyme neuroborreliosis) is caused by multiple genospecies of Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato bacteria transmitted by ixodid (hard) ticks, ” [2019]

Checking uploads from Thryve, there were two individuals that had this evidence of a tick bite that may have transferred bacteria that has taken up residency. I have put these people in contact with other (with permission).

Legionella and Coxiella, both of which include notable pathogens. For example, Q fever is caused by Coxiella burnetii and Legionella pneumophila causes Legionnaires’ disease[2][3] and Pontiac fever.[4][5][6]

Wikipedia

Looking at other Thryve uploads, I found one more person with Coxiella. For Legionella, I found 6 additional people — including myself!

For myself, it was present in nose samples (ubiome) in 2017 (highest count, almost 3%) and 2018 (not in relapse) and then appear in my first Thryve gut sample of 2019-11-10. This echos back to several past post of the nasal cavity and mouth being reserves for various bacteria that may help maintain various medical conditions. For ME/CFS, that has been detected: Chronic fatigue syndrome patients have alterations in their oral microbiome composition and function. [Sep 2018].

Rickettsia

As cited above, this was the experience used by Jadin. I found some 20+ individuals, including myself with the same pattern, in nose prior and in my last gut sample from Thryve.

Borrelia (Lyme)

I found this reported in 3 peoples microbiome from XenoGene, a european provider.

This does not mean that you have a pathogenic version. It indicates that you have a cousin to a pathogenic version (whose disease role may not be known).

I have added both of these to Health reports.. as illustrated below

Whether a low number is significant is an unknown

If you discover any similar ‘interest’ bacteria, please let me know and I will update the risk items. Thanks!

For those wishing more information on 16s Microbiome analysis, see this listing of providers.

  • Thryve reports on two
  • Xenogene reports on the Lyme bacteria

The angst of trying to find a physician for ME/CFS

So, how do we find a doctor who believes in cfs and can check into some of this for us. This site is amazing information. – From Facebook Post

Ken Lassesen There are only handful of MDs in every jurisdiction unfortunately. In the province of British Columbia (5 million people) there was just ONE until she left. They are now back up to two!!!!

” The estimated prevalence of ME/CFS in our study ranges from 519 to 1,038/100,000, ” [CDC] so we have perhaps 5,000 patients for these MDs, all being time consuming. A General practise MD usually have 1500-2000 patients (most of them healthy and just seen once a year). For ME/CFS, the patients numbers drop down greatly.

My first 2 physicians were a GP/Surgeon who diagnosis (because of that chronic CFS cough) was antibiotic resistant walking pneumonia and put me on rotating antibiotics (the right thing!)… and a family practice physician (who I saw 2 weeks before onset). With her, I had to literally lead her thru the treatment plan (Jadin’s rotating antibiotics and Hemex coagulation therapy) and the literature once she accepted the diagnosis. I even arranged conference calls with leading researchers at that time for her.

#3 ended up being a ND that worked with a Lyme MD (very long wait list to see the MD), there was a lot of negotiation on the treatment plan, but it worked. In my jurisdiction NDs may prescribe antibiotics — that is not true everywhere.

The KEY is getting a physician that is willing to learn and read well summarize information.

#4 physician was a loss… sorry not standard of care… changed to a new physician, ex-Armed Forces MD (thus seen PTSD a lot), she is very interested in the microbiome model. The remission was not due to her, but instead of “physician heal thyself” became it became Artificial Intelligence heal me!.

With that said, many “CFS physicians” can be locked into a certain view of ME/CFS (which can be 20 years stale). A few people with that speciality still believe it’s a psychological condition.

https://www.mefm.bc.ca/for-health-care-providers

My facebook response

The purpose of this blog containing over 1200 documented posts citing existing medical literature was to try to give an alternative path when there is no specialist physician available.

The path premise is to use the data here (or suggestions from the microbiome prescription site – after getting a 16s analysis). 16s analysis DOES NOT REQUIRE A MD’S REQUISITION!!!! They are direct to retail (and expect some MDs to raise their eyebrows!). The cost is often the same as a few bottles of probiotics.

Use this information and present the changes that you are planning to do to your physician and ask if they have any concerns with doing those. Most MD’s will look at it and shrug. If there have any questions on an item— tell them you will bring in the study next time (I link to all of the studies!).

So, technically you are under a MD’s supervision but have 0% dependency on him generating a treatment plan.

For those of you with brain fog, you may wish to get a significant other or friend to sort thru things.

I suggest these links as a starting point:

Remember that the greatest cause of back-sliding is forgetting how you were when symptoms improve and you stop taking items because they appear to no longer help. The second cause is absent mindedness.

Report on Heritage Super Food!

I was fascinated by your recent posts about eating for your heritage. I have a 23andme done already, so I confirmed I’m roughly 40% British, 40% French/German, and 9% Nordic.

Then I looked at the 4 uBiomes I have on your site. Barley was the main suggestion for all of them. I started eating cooked barley for breakfast and adding in barley/rye only breads, with no wheat. The skinny flat ones that you’ve pictured on your site many times over the years. Shockingly, my brain fog has been improved and my mood is much better. These are two of my worst symptoms and nothing else has touched them for almost a decade.

The problem is that my diarrhea has returned. This was the reason I stopped eating all types of gluten. Going GF and taking lots of digestive enzymes cured me of an awful lifelong struggle with IBS-D. So now I’m worried. I hope it’s just a temporary reaction to a microbiome change. But would love your advice. 

From a reader

The reader did this as a result of my Eating for your heritage microbiome post. I am going to use those uBiomes (with permission from reader) to try to tackle the diarrhea issue using the new Hand picking bacteria to modify

The diarrhea effect may be a herxheimer like effect from the microbiome changing. If this is the case, then roughly it out for a while is suggested (after consulting with a medical professional of course).

The ideal situation would be getting a post-Barley microbiome, to both see the changes and possibly identify what shifted to cause diarrhea to return. For this analysis, I used the latest uBiome sample.

Using the IBS Medical Condition Profile
Using Citizen Science

The final bucket of bacteria we came up with is shown below

Suggestions

I left this bucket on my site so the reader can look at the full list.

  • Under suggestions, I would skip wheat for the moment 😉
  • Under avoid, only a few items are > 0.1, but three items are commonly used in self-treatment.
Good Probiotics
Poor probiotics

Bottom Line

We await the reader’s report on what impact these changes make. If it is negative, I will post it regardless. I seek answers which means a willingness to accept learning experiences.

Hand picking bacteria to modify

Many bacteria have no known effect. The default approach is to focus on high and low bacteria with a goal to move them towards the commonly seen values using all of the bacteria.

There are various filters available (i.e. use only bacteria associated with some medical conditions), but some people wish to really focus on certain bacteria only. A recent enhancement provides that ability

Where you can pick bacteria

There are three spots that you can pick bacteria on http://microbiomeprescription.com/ . You can select some from each spot; the ones selected will be aggregated.

Start by going to My Biome View
Put a check besides the ones of concern and click the top button
These hand picked buttons will now appear
Click on View Hand Picked Taxa to see what you have selected and the values
Looking at Symptoms, Click and then pick one of your symptoms
On Bacteria Explorer Plus, the checkboxes are on the left side. Select and click
We have both selections merged
Using data from published medical studies click above
And for published studies, the same pattern
We have a composite selected in three different ways.

Suggestions

A lot of the bacteria filtering options are removed because they are not needed. You have already picked the bacteria.

  • If you have only a few bacteria (< 20) then Include Parent / Children is recommended

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