If America needs anything, it’s not another chain of fast-food restaurants or a deeper political divide—it’s a healthcare system where doctors genuinely care, take the time to research, and treat each patient as an individual, rather than relying on one-size-fits-all prescriptions that too often fail. Every year, much of the so-called medical “research” seems to recycle the same tired treatments—offering little in the way of real comfort, care, or cures that patients desperately need. In this blog, we aim to share information that may open new avenues, showing readers that there is more that can be done beyond the standard recommendations often given in American medicine. If even one person feels inspired to take their health into their own hands and do their own research, we will consider it a success.
Bartonella disease is one of many illnesses that can make life unbearable if it progresses too far. Yet doctors in the U.S, even if they diagnose it correctly, generally continue to treat it too timidly, with the disease outstripping attempts at a cure. For patients, the result can be a lifetime of pain. Our for-profit health care system bears much of the blame.
Recently via my TikTok account, where I’ve talked about the failures of the U.S. health care system, I received a heart-rending message from a woman whose 24-year-old daughter had become increasingly sick. From a once bright girl, full of life, and top of her class, she suffered through physical hardships that weighed on not only her, but her entire family. Her symptoms included weight loss, severe pain, and fatigue that had grown so overwhelming that she could barely move. For months, the many doctors and specialists they consulted had no answers, until finally she was diagnosed with something called Bartonella disease. But even after the diagnosis, the treatments prescribed, consisting of various courses of antibiotics, were inadequate and ineffective.
It’s a measure both of this mother’s desperation and the inadequacies of health care in this country that she turned to me—a person she knew only as someone online who had questioned the for-profit model of the U.S. medical establishment—for possible help and answers. The case also provides an illustrative example of how under our current for-profit health care system, doctors lack the time, incentive, and perhaps the knowledge to treat patients as individuals and seek out the best research that might uncover more effective treatments. It reflects the depressing reality that today, U.S. medicine’s primary focus is on generating revenue. Doctors are pushed to find the quickest “fix”, which sometimes can do more harm than good, and to rely on one-size- fits-all answers. The system also prioritizes expensive drugs and procedures rather than cheaper and more effective remedies that don’t fatten profits. But it doesn’t have to be this way. If our focus were on what’s best for patients, and if we prioritized genuine research that would push the boundaries of what we know about medicine, we could have a medical system as effective, say, as that of South Korea, where medicine is incredibly personalized and life expectancy is separately on the rise for men and women.
To appreciate this more fully, it’s worth looking at the above example involving Bartonella disease in more detail, wading through some of the medical terminology, to see how the young woman’s doctors might have handled her case differently—what they might have learned that would have led to more effective treatments earlier on, before the disease tightened its grip on her body. The case is representative of what far too many patients in this country endure. The first thing to understand about Bartonella disease is that Bartonella bacteria are “Gram-negative.” Their outer membranes are less penetrable than those of “Gram-positive” bacteria, making the bacteria harder to reach via traditional antibiotics. Most antibiotics are designed only to attack Gram-positive bacteria.
Bartonella species can cause either acute or chronic infections and are responsible for a range of clinical conditions, including organ damage and neurological damage. They even have the ability to cross the blood-brain barrier. Transmission can occur in any number of ways, including through a cat scratch or via blood-sucking fleas, sandflies, mosquitoes, or ticks, making it an opportunistic pathogen that can cause complications that seem random or unrelated. Often people don’t remember any incident that resulted in contact with the bacteria. The bacteria can persist in the bloodstream due to intraerythrocytic parasitism, causing systemic diseases including bacteremia and central nervous system pathologies, particularly in immunocompromised individuals.
In an article titled, Identification of FDA-Approved Drugs with Activity against Stationary Phase Bartonella henselae by Tingting Li et. all. the authors state:
“Bartonella henselae can cause illnesses ranging from mild and temporary to very serious and hard to treat. Persistent infections are especially difficult to eradicate. In the U.S., commonly prescribed antibiotics such as doxycycline and erythromycin often fail to completely address all stages of the disease, particularly stationary phase bacteria, leaving patients at risk for ongoing symptoms.”
In other words, it’s not a simple disease. Relying on antibiotics deployed in a trial-and-error manner often allows the infection to continue to progress as symptoms worsen. What would make a real difference would be trials that test alternative forms of treatment. Understanding the four stages of Bartonella typically progresses through four stages: 1) an acute phase with initial entry and mild symptoms 2) a dissemination phase where the bacteria spread through the bloodstream 3) an intracellular persistence or stationary phase where the bacteria hide inside cells and become resistant to many antibiotics 4) a severe disease phase involving organ complications and lasting health issues.
Challenging Limitations: Standard Medical Treatments and Antibiotics
The typical approach when handling Bartonella is to prescribe a course of antibiotics, and, if symptoms persist, they just prescribe another. While the antibiotics may seem to work during the acute actively replicating phase, as the infection progresses as the bacteria invade erythrocytes and endothelial cells, evading both host immune responses and antibiotic exposure. Frontline antibiotics in the U.S.—including rifampin, erythromycin, azithromycin, doxycycline, and ciprofloxacin—are generally effective against the early-phase bacteria but demonstrate markedly reduced activity against stationary-phase bacteria, which remain metabolically dormant and burrowed inside red blood cells. This intracellular persistence contributes to chronic or relapsing infections, highlighting the limitations of standard antibiotic therapy in fully eradicating the pathogen.
What can be done to treat this terrible disease once it progresses? Right now, not a whole lot. Aminoglycosides—a class of powerful, fast-acting antibiotics such as gentamicin and streptomycin—do work better than the antibiotics named above against Gram-negative bacteria
in the persistent later stages. Even so, gentamicin enters erythrocytes slowly and reaches peak levels below the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) needed to fully eradicate intracellular Bartonella, leaving bacteria protected and able to continue propagating.
Recently however, there have been small wins —they don’t make all the difference in the world but alas—, some doctors and researchers have set out to find a more effective treatment for late-stage Bartonella disease. As noted above, Bartonella’s ability to hide inside erythrocytes and other host cells protects it from both the immune system and antibiotic exposure. This points to focusing on drugs that can alter the cellular environment —for example, hydroxychloroquine which we’ll touch on later— or that target both growing and stationary bacteria, such as daptomycin, methylene blue, and aminoglycosides. But a standard treatment that reliably helps patients has yet to be funded, studied, or normalized in the U.S. While U.S. medical studies aren’t proposing novel treatment ideas, they are performing some limited tests to see if other drugs may be more effective. Researchers have tested an FDA- approved drug library to identify agents effective against stationary phase B. henselae, or in layman’s terms, attacking the bacteria after it has taken root and is no longer in a growth stage.
Using high-throughput screening, 110 drugs were found to perform better than ciprofloxacin against Bartonella, and 41 of the 52 top candidates were confirmed under the microscope to be more effective than erythromycin at killing off the stationary, late-stage bacteria. Specifically, pyrvinium pamoate, daptomycin, methylene blue, clotrimazole, and aminoglycosides were able to completely eradicate stationary phase bacteria after just three days in lab studies.These findings suggest that repurposed FDA-approved drugs could provide more effective treatments for persistent Bartonella infections. It’s a mystery why they haven’t been tested sooner.
Helper Drugs: A Valuable Role That the U.S. Largely Ignores
The U.S., to put it plainly, has a deeply flawed health care system. We would argue that it’s horrible. This becomes especially clear when novel or innovative medical practices fail to reach patients who are suffering. So-called “helper drugs” used alongside antibiotics, for example, have been shown to be effective in eradicating Bartonella and other bacteria from the body. But they are used far more commonly in other countries than here. In Australia, for example, drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin have been studied as adjunct therapies for persistent bacterial infections, including Bartonella.
In their book “Covid Through Our Eyes”, Australian authors Robert Clancy AM and Dr. Melissa McCann presented findings that suggested that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin were associated with a marked reduction in mortality rates among patients with viral illnesses like Covid-19. As some people chose to take these drugs instead of the mRNA-based vaccines, it was done as an alternative treatment. Specifically, all-cause mortality appeared less among those treated with these medications compared to those getting mRNA-based vaccines. Recent testimony before the U.S. Senate suggests this view is no longer dismissed as a fringe theory. Hydroxychloroquine raises the pH inside lysosomes, altering the intracellular environment where Bartonella often hides deep within the cell and thereby making it easier for the appropriate antibiotic to cause structural changes inside a “Gram-negative” cell that allow the medicine to penetrate the cell’s tough membrane. This change alone can make antibiotics more effective and has been shown to help alleviate stubborn Bartonella cases. But few studies have been conducted to further confirm that drugs capable of getting past the “Gram-negative” bacteria’s membrane have a higher chance of killing them off. Evidence for hydroxychloroquine in this role is limited and mixed, meaning it is not considered a first-line therapy. Doctors generally prescribe it only alongside other drugs when there is a strong clinical reason—essentially as a last line of defense against infection.
But this approach—using helper drugs as adjunct therapy only as a last resort—makes no sense given that the very nature of Bartonella disease is defined by persistence and resistance to antibiotics in its later stages. If the bacteria are at their most vulnerable earlier on, it seems logical that all available offensive tools should be deployed at that stage—not simply because every study confirms it, but because once the infection advances, the effectiveness of both helper drugs and antibiotics diminishes. When it comes to treating Bartonella patients, there are cases where a more aggressive and individualized strategy not only is justified but is essential. A one- size-fits-all course of basic antibiotics is more than simply inadequate: With each passing day that the disease progresses and aggressive treatment is delayed, the likelihood of ever achieving a true cure becomes slimmer.
If we were to do a deep dive into why these helpful drugs aren’t being used here, we’d likely find that because ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are cheap to produce and don’t generate big profits, the health care system has little interest in researching them. Why would drug companies pour resources into something that won’t make them big bucks—and that, in fact, might undercut revenue from their more expensive drugs?
Looking more broadly into the pernicious effects of the for-profit health care model, it’s inherently at odds with any motivation to find “one-and-done” outright cures. If a disease is chronic, and requires ongoing medication, patients continue to generate profits. If a patient is cured, that source of money dries up. Relatedly, with health care such a big part of the U.S. economy, it’s not farfetched to think the country isn’t putting funds towards finding one-and-done cures because the temptation to generate continued profit off of patients, and in turn, raise the GDP is so overpowering.
The helper drugs we’ve referred to are cheap to make and sometimes even naturally occurring, meaning there can be no patent exclusivity. They are incredibly versatile, with various modes of operation. For example, they have been found helpful for viral as well as bacterial infections. Australia and other countries have found success using hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin for complicated infections like Covid-19, likely because these countries invested in the requisite research and refused to let profit margins dictate medical progress. As a helper drug, not a standalone treatment, hydroxychloroquine may work by boosting antibiotic effectiveness against persistent intracellular Bartonella infections. As more research is done, the standard for this disease may change. Another area to investigate is how supporting the immune system could play a complementary role in managing Bartonella and similar infections. Supplements like Vitamin D, C, zinc, K2, and magnesium may help strengthen immunity, improve energy levels, and support overall health.
A personalized treatment plan that combines antibiotics, helper drugs, and immune support is likely the best approach for persistent or complicated Bartonella infections. With diseases this fast-moving and life-altering, it’s futile to stick to a stale and flawed rulebook. Personalized medical plans are not emphasized here, to say the least. But let’s hope they become more common. There are better approaches to Bartonella’s disease and other grave diseases as well, and my aim with this article was to shed light on how we might go about improving patient outcomes.
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