Green & Lyme

I specifically asked Chris Green to come in to talk about somet We talk about biofilms being part of the culprit, but we don't necessarily want to get rid of them because they play a role in a healthy h And then the other thing that she said that struck me as interesting, that there are certain herbs that will shut down the eflux p So I thought it would be interesting to have her expand on those two points today. So thank you. And it's a little expansion, but I these bacteria are very stealthy. We thought we'd beat the bacteria. It's a little arrogant that we thought so, but when antibiotics were really coming out and we didn'the virus, yeah, AIDS appeared, et cetera. But t And it's really called Stealth Pathogens. And so interactions between microbes and h The microbes are both. Despite advances that have been made over the past decades in understanding microbial pathogens, more people worldwide still die every year from infectious disease than from any other cause. I'm an ecologist. I majored in ecology. So I really t And we evolve, but the bugs evolve a lot faster. And in the ideal world, we're all symbiotes, right? Everyt So one of the they live in what's called a sessile. They're settled. They aren't floating around the blood or floating around the fluids. They're living in community. Almost all organisms, no matter what level you are, actually live in communities. And what's very interesting is almost biofilms form in a very set way. You have fungi in them that are provided. They're And then the gram positives move in and then the gram negatives move in. And they have neighborhoods. They have a neighborhood that's aerobic and a neighborhood that's anaerobic. pH can vary hugely wit So it's very interesting that these organisms are living happily in us and community. That is probably what keeps us healthy. We have the h And it's almost It's kind of One little ant is really just part of t If you read Wilson, et cetera. So I said t Sorry. Forgive me if you've heard it before. When I saw the EM micrographs of biofilms, I thought t It'so scary. They're And they're communications. They're They can talk to us ourselves. They can talk to each other. It doesn't have to be the same species, but they talk a lot to their neighborhood. And funny t All of a sudden, all the bugs will move one way. They all go down to one end. Maybe the food's there. Maybe the chow's on. Maybe the other end has somet And biofilms protect our good guys, if you will, from the w In these micrographs, you see the w It's really sticky and gluey. Oh, and the stable biofilms are made of lots of different organisms. Now, lime can also make a biofilm. It does it in a test tube. Shappy, and I t But it's a single organism biofilm. So it's not as stable, but maybe that's how the bug gets its foothold. Maybe that way it's protected from the antibiotic early, or your w And my question, and I t And lime's a great imitator. Maybe kind of knocks on the door and moves in and says, I'm Joe, remember me? Maybe there'somet And until I t So the original biofilms are found in oil flicks, and they got very interested in them because they were messing with oil. So they very quickly got funding to study them in the h But a guy named Gartha Airellick, who's now at Drexel, found that there are biofilms in the ear infections. When I went to med school I learned that really ear infections weren't usually bacterial, they were viral, you couldn't culture any bugs for mom, well it's because they're in biofilms, because you take the fluid out of the ear, and no you can't. But if you scrape, then you find out there's a whole myriad, there's a whole group of bugs in there causing many of those ear infections. And so a lot of our view of biofilms in the body have come from t But very quickly t If you have a knee replacement or a So that's what a lot of our studies have done. So e-flux p They p And then they also interestingly, I didn't mention they'll suddenly all move south or all move north. There's a signal that has been picked up. It's called a quor So a signal goes out that tells them what to do. Your neighbor says there's a fire down there, move away or somet And these p So they're a very functional part of bacteria, but they also kick out the antibiotics and they kick them out fast. When I first learned about these, I thought maybe that's why we have to give so much antibiotic in Lyme. We have to keep giving in and we have to give it a long time. And part of it is the cyst formation they do with this persister formation and kind of outlasting however long you're putting the antibiotic in But perhaps it's also that they keep kicking it out. The size of the genome is directly proportional to the now Borrelia bugdorferi, I believe, is the biggest genome in the bacterial group. But the genes that code for the e-flux p They're mostly part of the DNA. They are preserved. They developed a long time ago. And if you t Plants get eaten too. Roots get eaten too. And they're also symbiotic relations Life is life, whether it's plant life or animal life. We all have bacteria to deal with. And so another interesting there are substances that are being used that affect those p And a very big area of drug development right now is looking at bringing some botanicals into the antibiotic. And I mentioned silver later. We can t But so the PPIs, the proton p They have selective antibacterial, sometimes against pyrokeets. So one of the t But no one has ever told me that the reason the PPI works is because it's antibacterial. And we certainly know that most ulcers are caused by H. pylori. They're caused by a spirochetylbacteria. Same with some of the antidepressants or the anxiolytics, the drugs that are psyc Now some of these, the phenot They'd probably be toxic to stop that p But not true of the serotonin reuptake in And in fact, that's what the IDSA suggests we give our post-Slyme disease syndrome patients because they're depressed. So we should give them serotonin reuptake in Maybe we're helping a little bit by disabling the p And then verapamil, which is a cardiac drug, also inhibits a p So it's very interesting. One of my pet peeves is that we name drugs by their function as opposed to t But if we really understand the chemistry and the pharmacology of the drug, we could probably help people out a whole lot more, use less drug, target it a little bit better. So hot area of research, berberine. I don't know if . . The berberines are a group of chemicals that come from leaf extract, so olive leaf extract, w Those have activity against fungus and activity against some bacteria, and they're used a lot in botanical medicine. Well berberine, which is golden seal leaf extract, actually is a very good bacterial p And they're incorporating it in studies to see what they can link it up with. Palmitine coptus is one of the t And it's quite effective, and it also, to my surprise, has something in it to block that p And then this is not a botanical, but tygocycline is basically a tetracycline that has a p And it makes people sick as a dog, but it also appears sometimes totally cure life without anyt Silver. Silver is interesting in that a lot of people are using colloidal silver. I've used it for years. My impression is it doesn't work very well, except topically. But interestingly, silver does make the membrane, and this is not a p Some of the gram negative bacteria are very resistant to picking up the drug because they're big, they're big molecules. T And in t Now, the way they treated, they gave the mice peritonitis, and then they injected silver into the peritone And my impression of silver has been that it's probably an absorption issue, it's probably hard to absorb t But silver up-regulates. So this was interesting, the copper efflux p Remember, I said that the p And so this could also be, I was thinking why silver seems a plus minus is actually it up-regulates one of the p So methods of modulating efflux p You can block energy production. If they don't have energy, they can't run the p So you come in and you block ATP, they're looking at that. Now that's a pretty potentially dangerous t But again, because the bacteria is a little different than the eukaryote, maybe they can do it. You can trap iron. And I don't know if And the answer is no, you don't give them any iron because the bacteria are eating it. And so you can trap iron, cut that energy production and knock out the p They're also looking at biologics, These are the very expensive new, quite often dangerous, but effective sometimes drugs that would go just take out the p And then the other they just tweak it. And it has more affinity for the p So the p And these are kind of t I t You should just. . .