These tests are a dramatic improvement over the relatively insensitive serum antibody and other tests that have been used to assay for systemic infections. Many patients with chronic illnesses are treated as psychiatric patients. However, when microorganism infections are identified in the blood, these patients should be treated as medical not psychiatric patients, just like any other patients with blood infections. This does not mean that psychological or psychiatric problems are not important in chronic illness patients. But if such infections are important in these disorders, then appropriate treatments with antibiotics or other medications that suppress chronic infections should result in improvement and even recovery.
Some physicians treat every other day with antibiotics.
We now recommend that patients who have been diagnosed with blood infections receive oral antibiotics for at least 6 months before using the 6-week cycles of treatment. Although patients starting such therapy usually have Herxheimer reactions and feel initially worse due to die-off or release of toxic materials from damaged microorganisms, they eventually stabilize within days to a few weeks and then slowly begin to recover. Unfortunately, the treatment requires long-term therapy, and recovery is usually very slow. The clinical responses that are seen are not due to placebo effects, because administration of some antibiotics, such as penicillins, resulted in patients becoming more not less symptomatic. In addition, they are not due to immunosuppressive effects of some of the antibiotics, because other antibiotics that do not cause immune suppression are also effective but only if they suppress the chronic infections.