In 1999, I can down with sudden onset CFS. Once the diagnosis was made the challenge of treatment arose. My family practice MD did not know how to treat beyond trying to give symptom relief. The MD challenged me to find a way to treat… I still had periods of reasonable intelligence on some days. I also had done a Masters in statistical analysis of medical treatments…

After researching everything that was published, I ended up saying that no-one knows what causes this condition — tons of theories. I ended up with two protocols that had a high rate of remission being reported:

• David Berg’s  use of Heparin to address hyper-coagulation of CFS patients (this has been confirmed to apply to Lyme patients also in 2009).
• Use of long term antibiotics.

Both had a remission rate of 70+%. So if I did both at the same time, then my odds could be 91% for remission. I liked those odds. There were many antibiotics protocols being proposed so the question became one of which one to pick. I opted for the protocol with the shortest time to remission and the highest incidence of remission: Cecil Jadin’s protocol.

Her protocol was very appealing because it was a grandfathered protocol. It had been used long before CFS or Lyme became medical conditions. This means that the risk of unexpected side-effects was much less than a newly created protocol.

It worked!  By 2001, I was in full remission and stayed there for eleven years. I went out of remission as a result of flu (that sent me to hospital) while under stress.

Re-Evaluating Jadin’s Protocol in light of Microflora

Jadin’s protocol does work for a considerable percentage of patients. The typical medical reaction when doing something that cures or improves a condition is to try to explain why it worked. The protocol may work, the rationalization of why it worked may be very wrong. For the use of antibiotics, the logical first-pass explanation is that it is impacting an infection in the body or the blood. There is a problem here…

The problem is that short term antibiotics should be sufficient. There are a few infections like TB that require long term antibiotics — but with those infections, the infection can continue to be detected. This was not always the case with CFS. Conclusion: long term antibiotics are not warranted.

If we do a second-pass on why Jadin’s protocol worked better than other protocols, we may conclude that it worked better because it’s rotation through different families of antibiotics resulted in different gut-flora species being reduced progressively until a healthy balance is re-established. Any single antibiotic will not do this. It also explains why the length of CFS and the length of treatment required have no relationship.

To recover means destroying the dysfunctional microflora which have settled into a steady state within 6 months of onset. Experience now makes sense. Yes, there may be pathogens that were reactivated which the antibiotics also addressed — but these pathogens may not be a main contributor to the CFS state.

Example of Antibiotics against one Microflora Species

My favorite probiotic is Mutaflor (E. Coli Nissle 1917) because CFS patients often have only 25% of the normal level of E.Coli. Worst still, E.Coli is usually reduced by lactobacillus species found in many common probiotics. The mutaflor people have identified which antibiotics it is sensitive to (and which it is not).

Antibiotics do not kill ALL of your gut flora. They reduce some species (but within each species there are species that may be resistant).

Summary

If you are a patient or a MD and wish to alter microflora via probiotics then consider Cecile Jadin’s protocol. It is typically 7-10 days on antibiotics followed by 2-3 weeks off. The weeks off should include aggressive use of non-lactobacillus probiotics and pre-biotics.