Posted by bleauberry on July 2, 2011, at 19:44:48
In reply to Anti inflammatories and Antibiotics Boost SSRI's, posted by Phillipa on July 1, 2011, at 21:06:36
I totally agree with the antibiotic approach in depression, primarily because me and thousands of other lymies have personally experienced the improvement. I shouldn't say just Lyme however. Many possible stealth chronic infections.
Inflammation can come from other things besides infection, but it is my belief infection is the primary cause. We don't have reliable tests to pinpoint a suspect, so trial and error is routine. Some of the best markers are immune system markers, such as CD57.
Maybe depression itself causes inflammation. I don't know. Either way it doesn't matter. if they go hand in hand as common as the authors have witnessed, then therapy for one should help the other. That is unless inflammation came first, in which an antidepressant won't do squat.
The problem in choosing an antibiotic is there are so many different mutations of bugs. Lyme on the west coast responds well to Teasel Root, but not so well on the east coast. Why is that? The same mysterious phenomenon happen with antibiotics. For one person, Minocycline. Another Doxycycline. Another Flagyl. Maybe Rifampin. Usually a mix of 2 or 3 or sometimes a rotation of 2 or 3, so as to get the regular guys, the cyst guys, and the intracellular guys....a different antibiotic for each. Doxycycline does have some unique anti inflammation potency differentiating it from the others. Doses that are too low for infection have anti inflammatory mechanisms.
My own personal experience is that Doxycycline did help me better than any of a couple dozen psychiatric meds. But then, so did Diflucan. Diflucan is probably the most potent rapid antidepressant I've ever had, lifting me from the dumps in about 4 hours after the first dose. How could that be? I don't know. It takes a few days for the bugs to die off enough to feel any Herxing or improvement, so what happened in just 4 hours? My only guess is an immediate anti inflammatory response and somehow someway doing genetic instructing that somehow ties into mood chemicals indirectly.
Which brings up another complication. The symptoms of bacterial infection can look identical to lyme or other infections or depression. Brain fog and fatigue are the big clues to look for in any infection.
Ghosts. And yet another complication. As explained to me on a chart by my doctor, some bacteria change the genetic coding of your own DNA. So even after you have eradicated all the pathogenic organisms, the symptoms remain....the genes were changed in a negative way. In that situation, now we are dealing not only with anti inflammation, but trying to figure out how to bridge the genetic roadblock.....5htp, dlpa, tyrosine,ssirs, snris, stimulants, antipsychotics. They have far more actions than are popularly talked about, including turning certain genes up, down, on, or off. So through trial and error we get lucky and find the one that tweeks our genes the right way.
Anyway, I am a believer in antibiotics for depression except I don't approach it in such a general blanket one size fits all manner as the authors did. It just aint that simple. That's why Doxycycline for 6 months didn't help SLS. For whatever reason, it didn't hit the right bugs and/or it didn't massage the genes the right way to make any difference. A different substance might.
poster:bleauberry
thread:989944
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20110630/msgs/990012.html