Understanding the importance of the microbiome has upended traditional thoughts about the treatment of disease. For example, treatments of autoimmune diseases that adversely affect the microbiome are being rethought. The majority of cells in the human body—cells that don’t have human DNA—are getting a new level of respect. What are metabolites? Despite being so different […]
“Herxing”: Why does it occur?
The Jarisch-Herxheimer reaction (JHR), or “herxing”, was first described by physicians in the late 1800s. Patients who experience this phenomenon report an increase in non-specific symptoms shortly following initiation of antibiotic treatment. These symptoms include chills, fever, headache, and/or intensification of skin rashes. Despite being described more than a century ago, it is still difficult […]
The Basics of Serology
Reading a diagnostic company’s menu can often feel like interpreting another language. The commonly used name of an infection may not be listed, and the scientific name of the pathogen may not be familiar (e.g., Lyme disease vs. Borrelia burgdorferi). To make things more difficult, acronyms for the testing methods can seem like randomly grouped [...]
What are lymph nodes? How do they respond to a Bartonella species infection?
Lymph nodes have been called the “upper management” of the immune system by journalist Matt Richtel. Some of the more impressive aspects of the immune system, such as the ability to recognize pathogens that may have been encountered years earlier, occur in the lymph nodes. Lymph nodes are scattered throughout the body. Some are as […]
Vector-Borne Disease and Skin: Your First Layer of Defense
Skin is the largest human organ. It is also the first place that flea and tick-borne pathogens encounter the human immune system. While some skin symptoms are signature markers for specific pathogens or families of pathogens, others provide hard-to-interpret clues that can be linked to a wide variety of diseases. Lyme borreliosis and bartonellosis are […]
Ticks: A Complex Microbiome
Ticks can be a hospitable environment for a wide range of microorganisms that harm people and their pets. The question is, when are these pathogens a risk to people and animals? Does the microbiome of the tick gut have a different effect on disease risk than the microbiome of its saliva? The invention of PCR […]