I'm seeing comments jumping to conclusions about taking manganese supplements or trying to starve yourself of manganese. These are dangerously wrong interpretations of the article.
Any interventions would have to be targeted directly at the B. burgdorferi to disrupt their internal regulation of manganese. It's a long shot used to make this research discovery sound more impressive, not an actual cure.
Your own body uses manganese for critical processes like your metabolism, critical brain functionality, and generating important antioxidants in your mitochondria (MnSOD, the same one mentioned inside of Lyme in the article).
Your body also regulates manganese absorption and excretion. Manganese deficiency is extremely rare outside of genetic conditions or other medical problems which interfere with this regulation. You can't really starve yourself of manganese by adjusting your diet or even by periods of fasting.
So if you're reading this and thinking you could defeat Lyme by starving yourself of manganese or overdosing on manganese, don't. That's not what this article is saying.
I agree that we should not simply self-treat by supplements or starving ourselves.
But you are dead wrong that interventions would need to be directly targeted at B. burgdorferi.
The standard and effective treatment for TB back in the 1950s was a combination therapy with Streptomycin, Isoniazid (INH), and PAS. The purpose of PAS was to create a low manganese environment in the body, which put stress on Mycobacterium tuberculosis - the bacteria that causes TB. This stress did not kill the bacteria by itself, but it did make it more vulnerable to the rest of the treatment. Because of this treatment, we have a lot of data showing how well people do with low manganese for a period of 1-2 years. (That was the time that this treatment required.) It wasn't pleasant (in particular it came with nausea), but it was definitely survivable.
If low manganese really does stress B. burgdorferi, then a similar combination is worth trying today. Better yet, this combination would not require the development of a new drug that needs FDA approval. It can be tried using only drugs that have been long approved, and which are already part of standard medical practice. (Granted, PAS is no longer used for TB. But it is the standard treatment for an excess of manganese.)
> The purpose of PAS was to create a low manganese environment in the body,
Do you have a source for this?
I searched, but this recent paper on the mechanism of action for para-Aminosalicylic Acid (PAS) doesn't even mention manganese. It says it targets Dihydrofolate Reductase pathways: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5395024/
Searching for manganese and TB leads me to papers showing that manganese is an essential cofactor for Isoniazid's anti-TB action: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31319159/ but nothing about inducing low manganese states would be helpful or intentional.
So I don't think I'm dead wrong at all. Unless you have some sources, I don't think inducing manganese deficiency is actually the mechanism of action for PAS.
> we have a lot of data showing how well people do with low manganese for a period of 1-2 years. (That was the time that this treatment required.) It wasn't pleasant (in particular it came with nausea), but it was definitely survivable.
Again, do you have any source for this? Preferably a source that indicates what manganese levels were reduced to during treatment?
The side effects are likely due to the 3 drugs in combination which have their own side effects, not low manganese (if it occurred).
EDIT: This commenter was making the same claim down thread and admitted they couldn't find a source for their claim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45932379 It seems like they're making assumptions and presenting it as scientific fact.
I don’t recall the chemical, but there was one mentioned on Everything is Tuberculosis. Someone discovered that aspirin makes TB metabolize more oxygen. Someone found a chemical with the opposite effect, suppressing instead of exciting the same pathway. Based on you’re description I don’t believe it was PAS though.
I have heard that forensic analysis can see a distinct sufficient enough difference in bone manganese levels to identify the diet of a deceased person. Vegetarian diets end up with excess Mn stored in the bones. Like calcium, it’s needed and water soluble so you’ve gotta store it for a rainy day.
Lyme desperately needs more attention and revised CDC guideline as it's becoming an epidemic in the northeast United States.
As and outdoor-hobbies type person I've had it 3 out of 4 previous years and have begun sourcing antibiotics from agricultural suppliers, or directly from India. Contrast this to my childhood in the same region, when tick-borne diseases were never even a blip on the radar. Supposedly this is because of climate change and much warmer winters allow deer ticks to spread rapidly.
From my own anecdotes and research, none of the traditional guidance is accurate:
-Never had a bullseye rash
-Never had a tick attached more than 24 hours
-When a tick was attached around 24 hours, infection rate was close to 50% and symptoms appeared within 10 days. Contrast to ~3% infection rate per cdc average.
...I suppose the sad irony here is that lyme is not getting attention because well... current generations never touch grass and the outbreak never appears as bad as it actually is.
At a party, I heard one person mention that a doctor had told him that he had BOTH north american lyme disease AND european lyme disease.
Lucky him.
He was at the doctor's office because of severe symptoms that he suspected were due to lyme disease since he had received several tick bites years ago.
Very covid-like symptoms, to the point where I initially did a quick home covid test (or multiple tests if I remember) that was negative. Very distinct soreness around the crease of the hip/leg joint, probably a lymph gland.
Second year:
exact same symptoms but less intense, still started antibiotics immediately
third:
again same but less intense, I ignored it until general full-body joint pain occurred then immediately went on antibiotics, after a few months of that it started to clear up.
Lyme disease and bacteria are always temporary. The long term disease/syndrome many people attribute to it is something else similar to long COVID and still debated.
This is the one area where the CDC actually does have accurate advice, Lyme is excellent at hiding itself from your immune system and tends to burrow into joint tissue where antibiotics have difficulty reaching.
DON'T assume the disease is temporary, as the bacteria is well-known to cause lasting nerve damage even after it dies off completely. I have more than one friend who wasn't as lucky as me and still suffers with symptoms to this day.
Having done the research myself, it seems to be biofilms that the bacteria create leading to a "dormant" yet still metabolically active state that releases inflammatory byproducts throughout the body.
The recommended course of action seems to be disulfiram to bust those biofilms + antibiotics to finally kill it all off.
> current generations never touch grass and the outbreak never appears as bad as it actually is.
I must say, I played in tall grass a lot as a child, catching insects and whatnot. Now I won't go anywhere near them without pretty serious protection, and I spend a great deal of time outdoors
These comments directly contradict the other. Either you've never had a tick for 24 hours which means the second comment isn't true, or your first comment is not true.
"Around 24 hours" means approximately 1 day. "More than 24 hours" means more than approximately 1 day. Please do not comment further unless you actually have something useful to add.
Yeah nah. I agree with the comment you replied to.
The error bars on around 24 hours and more than 24 hours over lap at least a bit.
If I had a tick for 23 hours and the guidelines say ‘more than 24’ I’d be treating it the same as ‘more than 24’ for practical purposes.
There is at least some natural variation in the host and the pathogen for there to be at least some people for who the guidelines aren’t strict enough.
Public health policy is a balance of factors, one of which is trying to not overwhelm services with trivial / non maladies.
whenever I need a crash-course on a vitamin or mineral I check the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University for quality info written by and reviewed by Phds
And it's also a potent neurotoxin from a crude dr google lookup. Which is meaningless because they wouldnt bother exploring both sides of the deal if there wasn't a safe dose for humans which is bad for the bacteria, but it bears thinking about.
Nobody, in the article or otherwise, is suggesting that you can take manganese to fight Lyme. I don’t know where you got that, but I hope nobody thinks to try it.
The idea would be to look at all of the components that regulate manganese in B. burgdorferi and then look for drugs that might disrupt how they operate.
Any solution would act indirectly by disrupting manganese balance in a targeted manner directed at B. burgdorferi, not by flooding the whole body with manganese. The cells regulate their internal manganese anyway, so supplementing manganese wouldn’t force it to go into those cells anyway.
This is a PR release for some research that tries to stretch it into a promising treatment, but it's really more of an interesting discovery than a path to a new treatment.
That's where you would be wrong. By the time you posted your comment there are already people hawking manganese bracelets on FaceBook as a cure for Lyme disease.
Sounds like starving Lyme of manganese is likely the better option that trying to overdose manganese. I don't know how effective a low-manganese diet or lifestyle would be though but it is very interesting.
> I don't know how effective a low-manganese diet or lifestyle would be though but it is very interesting.
You cannot achieve what the paper is discussing through diet or supplements.
The paper is hypothesizing that if a drug could target the components of B. burgdorferi that regulate manganese then that would kill it.
You cannot deprive the cells of manganese or overwhelm them through supplementation or restrictive diet. You would damage your own body long before reaching levels that killed the Lyme infection.
I really hope the alternative medicine people don't start abusing this headline to push diets and supplements.
Deliberately inducing manganese deficiency (which I doubt you could pull off while still eating food) isn't "self care". It's a misunderstanding of what this article is saying.
Your body needs manganese and MnSOD (one of the target enzymes mentioned in the article) just as much as Lyme disease does.
You could theoretically kill the Lyme by killing the host body, like that classic XKCD about destroying anything in a petri dish if you don't care about collateral damage. The key to making a successful treatment is finding a way to kill the infection without killing the host.
Calling anything you're suggesting "self care" is dangerous and wrong.
WP says that manganese deficiency causes skeletal deformity and inhibition of wound healing. So I'm guessing that you could survive weeks in a severe-manganese-deficiency situation before you noticed any ill effects.
> So I'm guessing that you could survive weeks in a severe-manganese-deficiency situation before you noticed any ill effects.
Your guess would be wrong. Your body needs manganese for similar reasons that Lyme disease needs it. You also produce MnSOD.
If you starved your body of manganese sufficiently (which I doubt you could do without eating a completely synthetic diet for months) then you'd be killing yourself in parallel with the Lyme disease.
The idea is not trivially wrong. It's the same idea as chemotherapy. Sure, it is a poison for you. But it hits the cancer harder than you, and so can also be an effective treatment.
That said, it is very unlikely that simply reducing manganese is preferable to existing antibiotics. But that doesn't rule out the potential effectiveness of a combination therapy.
Here is how we'd do that combination therapy. We'd mix a standard antibiotic with oral para-Aminosalicylic acid (PAS). Orally delivered PAS is the the standard treatment for treating excess manganese in humans. (Sorry, but you're dead wrong about needing a completely synthetic diet for months.) While PAS does harm a few kinds of stomach bacteria, it is far better than a broad spectrum antibiotic. And if the target disease is under stress already, then you need less antibiotic to finish them off.
Sure, a medicine that targets manganese in Lyme disease bacteria would be even better than this combination. But that medicine does not exist. And the combination in question is something that can be experimented with today, using drugs that have already been approved by the FDA.
Furthermore this is a combination that we already have a lot of experience with. Back in the 1950s, a variation on this, working on the same principles, was the standard treatment for tuberculosis. It was abandoned not because it was ineffective, but because we developed treatments with fewer side effects.
> Here is how we'd do that combination therapy. We'd mix a standard antibiotic with oral para-Aminosalicylic acid (PAS).
I responded to your comment above with this same claim. I cannot find any sources that say reducing manganese was the mechanism of PAS in TB.
A recent research paper on PAS in TB doesn't even mention manganese once. It identifies Dihydrofolate Reductase related actions as the mechanism against TB: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5395024/
> orally delivered PAS is the the standard treatment for treating excess manganese in humans.
EDTA has been the standard treatment. PAS has been explored and trialed. It can be used, but I don't know if I'd call it the "standard" treatment.
> (Sorry, but you're dead wrong about needing a completely synthetic diet for months.)
I was talking about a low-manganese diet, which the comment above me suggested. I don't know why you're so set on calling me "dead wrong" so much when you can't provide sources and aren't even reading what I'm writing.
> While PAS does harm a few kinds of stomach bacteria, it is far better than a broad spectrum antibiotic. And if the target disease is under stress already, then you need less antibiotic to finish them off.
You're really going to have to provide sources for PAS reducing manganese as a mechanism for fighting TB.
As I pointed out in my other comment, manganese is an essential cofactor for one of the other anti-TB drugs in the triple combination that was used in the past.
You could probably add enough phosphate to all your food to prevent you from absorbing any manganese, then inject iron, calcium, and magnesium? Just guessing here.
How long would it take you to die on a zero-manganese diet? If it's longer than it takes Borrelia, you still win!
I regularly find myself on a zero manganese diet for hours at a time, and I've yet to experience immediate death, screaming in agony.
Furthermore we have lots of data on how well humans can tolerate extended low manganese regimens. The standard treatment course for TB in the 1950s resulted in humans having low manganese for 1-2 years. This was unpleasant, but not lethal.
Any google search on PAS and manganese will show that it eliminates manganese from the body by chelating it, and is therefore used for treating manganese toxicity.
I don't have a specific reference for manganese levels in people undergoing the old TB treatment. But I'm sure that it should exist somewhere.
If you believe really hard and really try you can transmutate lead into manganese. Of course, eating all that lead will probably kill you first. At least your Lyme won't be a problem any more.
And all those years alchemists were wasting their time trying to change lead into gold when they could have been going for manganese to eliminate Lyme disease! Greed has no bounds
I'm seeing comments jumping to conclusions about taking manganese supplements or trying to starve yourself of manganese. These are dangerously wrong interpretations of the article.
Any interventions would have to be targeted directly at the B. burgdorferi to disrupt their internal regulation of manganese. It's a long shot used to make this research discovery sound more impressive, not an actual cure.
Your own body uses manganese for critical processes like your metabolism, critical brain functionality, and generating important antioxidants in your mitochondria (MnSOD, the same one mentioned inside of Lyme in the article).
Your body also regulates manganese absorption and excretion. Manganese deficiency is extremely rare outside of genetic conditions or other medical problems which interfere with this regulation. You can't really starve yourself of manganese by adjusting your diet or even by periods of fasting.
So if you're reading this and thinking you could defeat Lyme by starving yourself of manganese or overdosing on manganese, don't. That's not what this article is saying.
I agree that we should not simply self-treat by supplements or starving ourselves.
But you are dead wrong that interventions would need to be directly targeted at B. burgdorferi.
The standard and effective treatment for TB back in the 1950s was a combination therapy with Streptomycin, Isoniazid (INH), and PAS. The purpose of PAS was to create a low manganese environment in the body, which put stress on Mycobacterium tuberculosis - the bacteria that causes TB. This stress did not kill the bacteria by itself, but it did make it more vulnerable to the rest of the treatment. Because of this treatment, we have a lot of data showing how well people do with low manganese for a period of 1-2 years. (That was the time that this treatment required.) It wasn't pleasant (in particular it came with nausea), but it was definitely survivable.
If low manganese really does stress B. burgdorferi, then a similar combination is worth trying today. Better yet, this combination would not require the development of a new drug that needs FDA approval. It can be tried using only drugs that have been long approved, and which are already part of standard medical practice. (Granted, PAS is no longer used for TB. But it is the standard treatment for an excess of manganese.)
> The purpose of PAS was to create a low manganese environment in the body,
Do you have a source for this?
I searched, but this recent paper on the mechanism of action for para-Aminosalicylic Acid (PAS) doesn't even mention manganese. It says it targets Dihydrofolate Reductase pathways: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5395024/
Searching for manganese and TB leads me to papers showing that manganese is an essential cofactor for Isoniazid's anti-TB action: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31319159/ but nothing about inducing low manganese states would be helpful or intentional.
So I don't think I'm dead wrong at all. Unless you have some sources, I don't think inducing manganese deficiency is actually the mechanism of action for PAS.
> we have a lot of data showing how well people do with low manganese for a period of 1-2 years. (That was the time that this treatment required.) It wasn't pleasant (in particular it came with nausea), but it was definitely survivable.
Again, do you have any source for this? Preferably a source that indicates what manganese levels were reduced to during treatment?
The side effects are likely due to the 3 drugs in combination which have their own side effects, not low manganese (if it occurred).
EDIT: This commenter was making the same claim down thread and admitted they couldn't find a source for their claim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45932379 It seems like they're making assumptions and presenting it as scientific fact.
"cofactor is a non-protein chemical compound or metallic ion that is required for an enzyme to function as a catalyst."
I don’t recall the chemical, but there was one mentioned on Everything is Tuberculosis. Someone discovered that aspirin makes TB metabolize more oxygen. Someone found a chemical with the opposite effect, suppressing instead of exciting the same pathway. Based on you’re description I don’t believe it was PAS though.
I have heard that forensic analysis can see a distinct sufficient enough difference in bone manganese levels to identify the diet of a deceased person. Vegetarian diets end up with excess Mn stored in the bones. Like calcium, it’s needed and water soluble so you’ve gotta store it for a rainy day.
this sort of case presentation re manganese brain toxicity pops up from time to time too:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4515672/
Some of the comments here are the kind of stuff that makes you lose faith in humanity.
> Any interventions would have to be targeted directly at the B. burgdorferi
Alcohol suspension tincture of the following antibacterial herbs together, which target Lyme's various coinfections:
a. Cryptolepsis sanguinolenta
b. Polygonum cuspidatum (aka: Japanese knotweed)
c. Artemisia annua (aka: Sweet wormwood)
d. Uncaria tomentosa (aka: Cat’s claw)
Begin with one drop two times per day, increasing to tolerance/under advisement of your ND/MD, or wellness consultant.
Make sure to draw blood with leeches twice a week for the best effect, but only after burying a lock of your hair at midnight in the garden.
Lyme desperately needs more attention and revised CDC guideline as it's becoming an epidemic in the northeast United States.
As and outdoor-hobbies type person I've had it 3 out of 4 previous years and have begun sourcing antibiotics from agricultural suppliers, or directly from India. Contrast this to my childhood in the same region, when tick-borne diseases were never even a blip on the radar. Supposedly this is because of climate change and much warmer winters allow deer ticks to spread rapidly.
From my own anecdotes and research, none of the traditional guidance is accurate:
-Never had a bullseye rash
-Never had a tick attached more than 24 hours
-When a tick was attached around 24 hours, infection rate was close to 50% and symptoms appeared within 10 days. Contrast to ~3% infection rate per cdc average.
...I suppose the sad irony here is that lyme is not getting attention because well... current generations never touch grass and the outbreak never appears as bad as it actually is.
treat your clothing with permethrin
Can't easily buy it in Europe. Some dog sprays have it, and stuff against wood bugs.
At least in Germany you can get Nobite sprays in drug stores. This (German) security sheet[1] lists 2% Permethrin as an ingredient.
[1] https://nobite.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Nobite_Kleidun...
Is Lyme disease much of a problem in Europe though?
Yes, a big one actually. In Austria, it’s really really bad. I’ve had it twice (rash and all) 20y ago already.
At a party, I heard one person mention that a doctor had told him that he had BOTH north american lyme disease AND european lyme disease.
Lucky him.
He was at the doctor's office because of severe symptoms that he suspected were due to lyme disease since he had received several tick bites years ago.
what were your symptoms?
First year:
Very covid-like symptoms, to the point where I initially did a quick home covid test (or multiple tests if I remember) that was negative. Very distinct soreness around the crease of the hip/leg joint, probably a lymph gland.
Second year: exact same symptoms but less intense, still started antibiotics immediately
third: again same but less intense, I ignored it until general full-body joint pain occurred then immediately went on antibiotics, after a few months of that it started to clear up.
Glad that your lyme was temporary
Lyme disease and bacteria are always temporary. The long term disease/syndrome many people attribute to it is something else similar to long COVID and still debated.
This is the one area where the CDC actually does have accurate advice, Lyme is excellent at hiding itself from your immune system and tends to burrow into joint tissue where antibiotics have difficulty reaching. DON'T assume the disease is temporary, as the bacteria is well-known to cause lasting nerve damage even after it dies off completely. I have more than one friend who wasn't as lucky as me and still suffers with symptoms to this day.
Having done the research myself, it seems to be biofilms that the bacteria create leading to a "dormant" yet still metabolically active state that releases inflammatory byproducts throughout the body.
The recommended course of action seems to be disulfiram to bust those biofilms + antibiotics to finally kill it all off.
Lyme Disease has existed for a very long time, it is always treatable by antibiotics and can be tested by tests. Antibiotics work.
> current generations never touch grass and the outbreak never appears as bad as it actually is.
I must say, I played in tall grass a lot as a child, catching insects and whatnot. Now I won't go anywhere near them without pretty serious protection, and I spend a great deal of time outdoors
> -Never had a tick attached more than 24 hours
> -When a tick was attached around 24 hours,
These comments directly contradict the other. Either you've never had a tick for 24 hours which means the second comment isn't true, or your first comment is not true.
"Around 24 hours" means approximately 1 day. "More than 24 hours" means more than approximately 1 day. Please do not comment further unless you actually have something useful to add.
Yeah nah. I agree with the comment you replied to.
The error bars on around 24 hours and more than 24 hours over lap at least a bit.
If I had a tick for 23 hours and the guidelines say ‘more than 24’ I’d be treating it the same as ‘more than 24’ for practical purposes.
There is at least some natural variation in the host and the pathogen for there to be at least some people for who the guidelines aren’t strict enough.
Public health policy is a balance of factors, one of which is trying to not overwhelm services with trivial / non maladies.
whenever I need a crash-course on a vitamin or mineral I check the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University for quality info written by and reviewed by Phds
https://lpi.oregonstate.edu/mic/minerals/manganese
Didn't Pauling fall prey to pseudoscience regarding Vitamin C? It's embarrassing to name an institute after him.
yes he basically created the "vitamin C cult" of the time which is like the "vitamin D cult" of today
HOWEVER
Linus Pauling was also a legit brilliant chemist that won two nobel prizes and authored over 1000 papers
He created "quantum chemistry" and "molecular biology"
And was also a big peace activist
So he is forgiven for the Vitamin C stuff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling
Lyme disease is basically a political weapon in today's America.
Huh? Explain
And it's also a potent neurotoxin from a crude dr google lookup. Which is meaningless because they wouldnt bother exploring both sides of the deal if there wasn't a safe dose for humans which is bad for the bacteria, but it bears thinking about.
Nobody, in the article or otherwise, is suggesting that you can take manganese to fight Lyme. I don’t know where you got that, but I hope nobody thinks to try it.
The idea would be to look at all of the components that regulate manganese in B. burgdorferi and then look for drugs that might disrupt how they operate.
Any solution would act indirectly by disrupting manganese balance in a targeted manner directed at B. burgdorferi, not by flooding the whole body with manganese. The cells regulate their internal manganese anyway, so supplementing manganese wouldn’t force it to go into those cells anyway.
This is a PR release for some research that tries to stretch it into a promising treatment, but it's really more of an interesting discovery than a path to a new treatment.
> or otherwise
That's where you would be wrong. By the time you posted your comment there are already people hawking manganese bracelets on FaceBook as a cure for Lyme disease.
Sounds like starving Lyme of manganese is likely the better option that trying to overdose manganese. I don't know how effective a low-manganese diet or lifestyle would be though but it is very interesting.
> I don't know how effective a low-manganese diet or lifestyle would be though but it is very interesting.
You cannot achieve what the paper is discussing through diet or supplements.
The paper is hypothesizing that if a drug could target the components of B. burgdorferi that regulate manganese then that would kill it.
You cannot deprive the cells of manganese or overwhelm them through supplementation or restrictive diet. You would damage your own body long before reaching levels that killed the Lyme infection.
I really hope the alternative medicine people don't start abusing this headline to push diets and supplements.
I really hope the anti-medicine people don't start grasping for a middleman to get in between people and self care.
> self care.
Deliberately inducing manganese deficiency (which I doubt you could pull off while still eating food) isn't "self care". It's a misunderstanding of what this article is saying.
Your body needs manganese and MnSOD (one of the target enzymes mentioned in the article) just as much as Lyme disease does.
You could theoretically kill the Lyme by killing the host body, like that classic XKCD about destroying anything in a petri dish if you don't care about collateral damage. The key to making a successful treatment is finding a way to kill the infection without killing the host.
Calling anything you're suggesting "self care" is dangerous and wrong.
Trying to starve yourself of manganese would cause harm long before it affected Borrelia.
WP says that manganese deficiency causes skeletal deformity and inhibition of wound healing. So I'm guessing that you could survive weeks in a severe-manganese-deficiency situation before you noticed any ill effects.
> So I'm guessing that you could survive weeks in a severe-manganese-deficiency situation before you noticed any ill effects.
Your guess would be wrong. Your body needs manganese for similar reasons that Lyme disease needs it. You also produce MnSOD.
If you starved your body of manganese sufficiently (which I doubt you could do without eating a completely synthetic diet for months) then you'd be killing yourself in parallel with the Lyme disease.
The idea is not trivially wrong. It's the same idea as chemotherapy. Sure, it is a poison for you. But it hits the cancer harder than you, and so can also be an effective treatment.
That said, it is very unlikely that simply reducing manganese is preferable to existing antibiotics. But that doesn't rule out the potential effectiveness of a combination therapy.
Here is how we'd do that combination therapy. We'd mix a standard antibiotic with oral para-Aminosalicylic acid (PAS). Orally delivered PAS is the the standard treatment for treating excess manganese in humans. (Sorry, but you're dead wrong about needing a completely synthetic diet for months.) While PAS does harm a few kinds of stomach bacteria, it is far better than a broad spectrum antibiotic. And if the target disease is under stress already, then you need less antibiotic to finish them off.
Sure, a medicine that targets manganese in Lyme disease bacteria would be even better than this combination. But that medicine does not exist. And the combination in question is something that can be experimented with today, using drugs that have already been approved by the FDA.
Furthermore this is a combination that we already have a lot of experience with. Back in the 1950s, a variation on this, working on the same principles, was the standard treatment for tuberculosis. It was abandoned not because it was ineffective, but because we developed treatments with fewer side effects.
> Here is how we'd do that combination therapy. We'd mix a standard antibiotic with oral para-Aminosalicylic acid (PAS).
I responded to your comment above with this same claim. I cannot find any sources that say reducing manganese was the mechanism of PAS in TB.
A recent research paper on PAS in TB doesn't even mention manganese once. It identifies Dihydrofolate Reductase related actions as the mechanism against TB: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5395024/
> orally delivered PAS is the the standard treatment for treating excess manganese in humans.
EDTA has been the standard treatment. PAS has been explored and trialed. It can be used, but I don't know if I'd call it the "standard" treatment.
> (Sorry, but you're dead wrong about needing a completely synthetic diet for months.)
I was talking about a low-manganese diet, which the comment above me suggested. I don't know why you're so set on calling me "dead wrong" so much when you can't provide sources and aren't even reading what I'm writing.
> While PAS does harm a few kinds of stomach bacteria, it is far better than a broad spectrum antibiotic. And if the target disease is under stress already, then you need less antibiotic to finish them off.
You're really going to have to provide sources for PAS reducing manganese as a mechanism for fighting TB.
As I pointed out in my other comment, manganese is an essential cofactor for one of the other anti-TB drugs in the triple combination that was used in the past.
This is fascinating, thanks!
You could probably add enough phosphate to all your food to prevent you from absorbing any manganese, then inject iron, calcium, and magnesium? Just guessing here.
How long would it take you to die on a zero-manganese diet? If it's longer than it takes Borrelia, you still win!
As noted in my sibling comment, the standard of care for eliminating manganese is para-Aminosalicylic acid (PAS).
Plenty of other treatments can remove manganese. But they all are biologically active in other unwanted ways.
You would die. Immediately, and screaming in agony.
That's stupidly wrong.
I regularly find myself on a zero manganese diet for hours at a time, and I've yet to experience immediate death, screaming in agony.
Furthermore we have lots of data on how well humans can tolerate extended low manganese regimens. The standard treatment course for TB in the 1950s resulted in humans having low manganese for 1-2 years. This was unpleasant, but not lethal.
Source? I can't find anything about the standard treatment course for TB in the 1950s resulting in low manganese.
I wrote more above, but I cannot find anything to support this claim about PAS being used because it reduces manganese either.
The mechanism of action of PAS against TB is in the Dihydrofolate Reductase pathway: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5395024/
I can only guess that this commenter saw that PAS can also be used for manganese chelation and jumped to conclusions?
See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4407437/ to verify that PAS was used.
Any google search on PAS and manganese will show that it eliminates manganese from the body by chelating it, and is therefore used for treating manganese toxicity.
I don't have a specific reference for manganese levels in people undergoing the old TB treatment. But I'm sure that it should exist somewhere.
> I don't have a specific reference for manganese levels in people undergoing the old TB treatment. But I'm sure that it should exist somewhere.
You've spread this claim throughout the comment section and called others "dead wrong", yet even you can't find a reference to support it?
The mechanism of PAS in TB is not manganese reduction: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5395024/
It appears that the body cannot produce manganese on its own it is an essential trace mineral that must be obtained from the diet.
I wonder if a prolonged water fast would do the job.
Yes, obviously it can't produce manganese on its own. What, do you think the humans have nuclear reactors in their squeedlyspooches?
If you believe really hard and really try you can transmutate lead into manganese. Of course, eating all that lead will probably kill you first. At least your Lyme won't be a problem any more.
And all those years alchemists were wasting their time trying to change lead into gold when they could have been going for manganese to eliminate Lyme disease! Greed has no bounds
Sounds like the old timey syphilis cure of massive amounts of liquid mercury!
Take antibiotics. They generally just work.
Assuming you've tested for, identified, targeted, and then retested for, all of your coinfections.
Unfortunately, this doesn't seem ubiquitous.