Although it was back in 1998 when I had just developed my first botanical formula to help people with Lyme disease, I have never forgotten what I was told by my friend, Lida Mattman, PhD, one of the most respected microbiologists and researchers in the Lyme disease world prior to her death in 2008. Dr. Mattman said, “David, in all of the hundreds of blood tests we have done on people from all over the world, whether the patient was treated with long-term, high-dose oral or IV antibiotics, or with any form of energy medicine, or even with your own botanical formula, not one person’s blood was free of Borrelia, even once they felt well again!”
Her statement fit somehow with what I inherently believed back in the recesses of my mind, that health is not the absence of microbes. While microbes can definitely cause disease in a predisposed individual, the microbe itself is not the final determining factor in whether or not a person gets sick. It is well documented that we all have many types of potentially pathological bacteria, such as the big name ones like Staph, Strep, and E. Coli, at all times, yet not everyone is sick. Even the most physically and mentally fit people have these bacteria, often including the bacteria associated with Lyme disease, yet they may never manifest symptoms of those bacteria until their body and life get out of balance enough for the bacteria to flourish.
A Brief History of My Research in the Lyme World
In 1999 at the International Tick-borne Diseases Conference, in New York City, a venue dominated at the time by the top microbiologists and infectious disease physicians from around the world, I presented a poster presentation documenting the laboratory verification that my botanical formula (Borrelogen), using just one dropper three times a day for one week, as a pre-lab test challenge, after which three day’s first morning urine was collected for testing using the then most sensitive Borrelia test, the Lyme Urine Antigen Test (LUAT) which looked for the pieces of dead Borrelia bacteria to show up in at least one day’s urine.
The LUAT test was considered positive with a score of 32, meaning 32 pieces of dead Borrelia bacteria was found in the urine. A highly positive LUAT test was considered a result of 45. A score of 45 was typically only seen with a pre-lab test challenge with antibiotics given for one week before collecting the three days of urine.
My poster presentation was demonstrating that after a one week challenge with Borrelogen, the three day urine test consistently show test results from 100 to >400, after which the lab quits counting. I recall at the conference one medical doctor with much incredulity in his voice, said to me that he had used the most aggressive antibiotic treatments and had only once or twice seen a LUAT score of 100. Yet he could not accept that a natural product could do more than his antibiotics. Twenty years later, I can tell you, not much has changed in the minds of many M.D.’s regarding the most advanced natural medicines, although some are coming around.
Having been a doctor only for three years at that point, and a Doctor of Chiropractic Medicine, not to mention also being the first and only non-medical researcher to ever present laboratory proof of a natural product being able to out perform antibiotics, I was was quite naive to the realities of the medical world and their responses to my presentation. The year 1999 was a much different time than today in the Lyme world. Back then, Lyme disease was not understood to be global and no one yet realized that many incurable illnesses and bizarre symptoms were actually caused by Lyme microbes.
In 1999, from a medical doctor perspective, if a patient felt worse after having taken an antibiotic, it was considered a Herxheimer Reaction (herx), the worsening of the patient’s symptoms from bacterial die-off toxins (a concept that has now been disproven) and the worsening of a person’s symptoms was to the medical community, a sign of good treatment. On the other hand, if that same medical doctor gave their patient my botanical formula (Borrelogen), based upon the overwhelming laboratory LUAT evidence, and the patient felt worse, it in their mind, meant that the patient was having an allergic or toxic response to the formula.
Instead of my formula being heralded as a breakthrough in the treatment of Lyme disease, it was largely relegated to “quack” medicine. I do understand in retrospect that my research and botanical formula was before its time, since now at some of the top medical conferences on tick-borne diseases, many medical doctors and PhD’s lecture on the use of botanicals and other natural medicines either as stand alone treatments or in combination with antibiotics.
The Significance of Dr. Mattman’s Words
Getting back to Dr. Mattman’s words, no treatment, even my botanical formula, Borrelogen, would kill all of the Borrelia and other bacteria associated with Lyme disease, I eventually wrote the first ever book published on the topic and eventually wrote four books over the years on healing naturally from Lyme disease. Each book taught that it was unnecessary to kill all of the bacteria. The last book’s title was, Beating Lyme Disease: Living The Good Life In Spite of Lyme, demonstrating this point right from the start. INPT has made that book largely out of date. The point was that bringing down the population of Borrelia and co-infections while restoring the structural and functional integrity and regulation of the body was all that was necessary to regain the quality of life lost to Lyme disease.
How did I know this was true? Because thousands of my patients, from around the country and around the world who had already exhausted all other medical treatments, were often better for the first time in years, and many cases of profound debilitating illness, wheelchair bound patients were able to walk and live a normal life again. Always, always, always these dramatic healings were the the result of a total body restoration program of care that addressed everything we could find that had gone wrong in their body, not just giving them products to help their body kill the infections. (Click to read how infections are like termites)
Still, for all of our successes, we cannot help or heal everyone. I have heard other veteran doctors, with several decades of treating under their belts, say how much harder people are to fix than when they first became doctors. Cases were and still are more and more difficult and non-responsive to treatments that in their words, “Used to be easy to fix.”
The challenge is to strive to win every case! This is an impossible challenge at this point in time, but it pushes us to develop even better technologies and treatments.
Interestingly, I stopped doing any Lyme testing for two decades, simply because the positive lab tests didn’t convince the patient or their primary doctor, since most often the person had never been to New England, where it was initially believed was the only place one could contract Lyme disease.
My Eureka Moment!
November, 2019 will always be a pinnacle date in my mind. I was flying to Boston to attend the International Lyme and Associated Diseases (ILADS) annual conference. At the airport store, I bought the latest Scientific American magazine. As I sat on the jet, I read an article on bacteriophage treatment of incurable bacterial infections. Epiphany after epiphany hit me as I read the article. I was highlighting, underlining, and jotting ideas in the margins of the magazine for the rest of the flight. It was a true, eureka moment and the birth of ideas that lead to me developing a new treatment I called, Induced Native Phage Therapy* (INPT).
INPT opened up an previously impossible idea, in fact I don’t think the idea had ever even been postulated, that for once we could possibly cause bacteriophages, that already exist inside the Lyme infected patient, to target and eliminate all of the population of Borrelia bacteria and that we could target naturally occurring bacteriophages to kill any other type of bacteria that is co-infecting the patient!
The ability of bacteriophages (phages) to completely annihilate a target population of certain types of bacteria has been well-documented over the last hundred years, however the technology of getting the bacteriophages that already live within the body to do so in a predictable manner, as in INPT, was never before achieved.
A Eureka Lab Test!
Interestingly, at the Boston ILADS conference was a speaker, Louis Teulieres, MD, PhD, introducing a new type of Lyme test developed by Leicester University Phage laboratory, the Phelix Borrelia-Phage test, a test with never-before-seen accuracy and sensitivity, both for recent infection and long-term infection, using of all things…bacteriophages as the test target for diagnosis.
This test, the Phelix Borrelia-phage test, is brilliant in that all other tests are striving to either find circulating antibodies (Western Blot tests) or they are looking for the DNA of the bacteria in the blood (PCR tests). Both of these tests are fine for what they are, however both are not that sensitive, since the immune system cannot “see” the Borrelia bacteria very well so there are not that many antibodies in the blood, and the PCR is not that sensitive since the bacteria are mostly in the tissues, not the blood.
Without the Phelix Borrelia-Phage test, the before and after success of INPT could never have been confirmed with such certainty. Call it chance, but I call it Divine synchronicity, that my epiphany coincided with the introduction of this amazing phage-based lab test at the very conference I was flying to attend!
The Phelix test is so much more sensitive than any previous type of testing, because it is only looking for the one type of bacteriophage that uses Borrelia as a host to replicate more of that type of bacteriophage. For every one Borrelia bacteria, there are thousands of circulating Borrelia-phages. Would you rather do a test that looks for the relatively few bacteria or the thousands to millions of these phages?
These Borrelia-phages are actually a specific type of virus that exclusively infects the Borrelia bacteria that cause Lyme disease. One of my epiphany ideas on the jet was the idea that, as the article said, bacteriophages are “ubiquitous in nature.” This led me to think that it is highly unlikely to impossible for all Borrelia to not already be infected with this unique type of phage, even when the bacteria was still inside the tick! The next idea was that when the tick or other vector bites the human, spitting the Borrelia bacteria into the body, those bacteria still have the Borrelia-phages. Both of these important ideas were later proven by a brilliant scientist, Tanja Mijatovik, PhD.
Although the article in the Scientific American magazine was discussing treatments with bacteriophages introduced from outside the body and placed into the body from various environmental sources, such as raw sewage or anywhere there are lots of bacteria. My idea was that we could instead use the bacteriophages already living inside the body to kill their host bacteria. A key in this idea is that prior science had been published that said that due to subtle chemical and environmental changes in the body, at times the bacteriophages can suddenly wipe out all of their host bacteria. Although this phenomenon had been observed, no one knew how to cause it to happen, prior to the development of INPT.
How INPT Works
The primary idea for me then was to use prior innovations I had developed, to introduce into the body a very specific series of subtle, digital biogenic coherent informatics imprinted into a hydro-alcohol liquid, which through tissue/system signal amplification would induce, or cause, through epigenetic switch manipulation, Borrelia-phages to switch from their normal state of lysogenic activity to lytic activity to rapidly kill their host Borrelia bacteria. The references provided are supporting literature to the concepts, however they may represent different means to the same end.
Keep in mind, that although these phages are viruses, they only infect a specific type of bacteria. A Borrelia-phage only infects Borrelia bacteria. Staphylococcus-phages only infect Staphylococcus bacteria, and so on. Essentially, these native phages keep bacteria populations in check, but normally only kill about 40% of their host bacteria as the result of high-jacking the genetic machinery of the bacteria to start manufacturing more phages. Since viruses cannot self-replicate, i.e., there are no male and female viruses, the viruses need a host to replicate and survive. This replication process taking place inside of the phage-infected bacteria eventually kills the bacteria, but not before that bacteria produces as many as 5200 of the phages. The technical term for this is lysogenic activity.
INPT seeks to cause the phage-bacteria relationship from lysogenic to lytic, where the phages essentially swarm all of their bacterial host and cut (lyse) the bacteria up into tiny pieces.
One can see the attraction to this idea, even though I wrote a book essentially saying it is unnecessary to kill all of the bacteria to get well. The concept was easy to write in my books, when no one could completely kill any bacteria through any means.
Why Be Excited About This New Lab Test?
A negative conventional lab test does not mean there are none of that bacteria left in your body. Almost everyone who has been treated for any general infection with antibiotics knows that usually your physician prescribes an antibiotic for 7-10 days. If your symptoms are gone, the doctor doesn’t do another lab test to confirm that all of the bacteria are dead. Your physician knows it doesn’t matter for most infections and that your body will keep that infection at bay from then on. Even in the treatment of Lyme disease, the typical physician (LLMD) will treat you for weeks to years with various antibiotics, until your symptoms improve, not until your conventional Lyme Western Blot blood test is negative. Your physician knows that those lab tests do not correspond to proving the infection is gone.
The exciting thing about the Phelix Borrelia-Phage Test is that if you still have Borrelia bacteria in your body, even after years of natural and prescription antibiotics, you will always have Borrelia-phages that are easily detectable with this Phelix test! If you have no Borrelia bacteria left, you will have no Borrelia-phages, since there are no Borrelia bacteria left to replicate more phages and within four days of the last Borrelia bacteria dying, the Borrelia-phages all die having no host to make more phages. No phages left = a negative test for Borrelia!
From Epiphany to the Present Day
From previously written lay science publications, it should be clear that we have achieved strong proof of concept with Induced Native Phage Therapy (INPT).
We have discovered so much to date, such as the fact that although INPT can definitely stimulate the apparent complete elimination of the target bacteria, often leading to dramatic symptom relief and restoration of health, it can in other people not work. It turns out, bacteria have defenses they can use when attacked by phages. One of these defenses is the CRISPR-cas enzymes that are of gene-splicing fame, which the bacteria can use to chop up the phages when they are attacking. Retrons are another defensive mechanism created by bacteria to defend themselves from phage attacks.
We have discovered that the Relapsing Fever-group of Borrelia bacteria defend themselves more effectively against phage attack than the Borrelia burgdorferii strain. These bacterial strains likely mount defenses which may also be more rapidly deployed by these and other strains of bacteria due to an enhanced innate quorum sensing, which is a rapid communication system within a bacterial population, enabling the entire population to synchronize its behavior using signaling molecules called autoinducers to collectively defend against phage attack.
It is a microbial arms race, however, since phages can then switch to disrupting the bacterial biofilms which interferes with the bacterial populations quorum sensing…and the war rages on. Doctors can also take advantage of the strategy of breaking up biofilms and use systemic proteolytic enzymes and other supplements, such as bee venum, manuka oil, and manuka honey to help break down the bacterial biofilms and thereby hinder bacteria defenses against the INPT remedy.
INPT has worked on all twenty different strains of Borrelia, however not all the time. The times in which INPT does not work to completely kill all of the bacteria seem to also correlate with people who have undergone years of natural and prescription antibiotics, which likely caused mutations of the bacteria that make them more difficult for the phages to kill.
In the people in which INPT does appear to work, according to clinical improvements combined with repeat negative Phelix testing, it is an achievement never before seen in medicine.
Induced Native Phage Therapy (INPT) is still in its infancy as a healing modality. Once publication in peer-review is completed, other researchers around the world will add to the science and improve upon the results.
The fact that INPT has definitely been shown to work, using the most sensitive testing ever developed is monumental in and of itself. In the words of a colleague with over three decades of experience in microbiology, “If you only got 50% of the the people completely clear of the infections using INPT, that would be astounding!” This point is made more impressive when considering that estimates are that the best antibiotics kill only 85% of the target bacteria, ever, leaving 15% of the bacteria now mutated and more treatment resistant.
Of course, I want to get 100% of the people well, which is why we continue pushing the technology to get better results. For now, if we get less than the 100%, INPT is still doing what no other treatment has been able to achieve, the complete elimination of the targeted type of bacteria, using something completely non-toxic since it is a frequency-based remedy that can be imprinted into a solution that contains just water and ethanol and taken orally. As a benefit it turns out that when phages kill bacteria there is minimal to no Herxheimer reaction, therefore it is well-tolerated by everyone.
Remember, when a doctor gives you Vitamin C or Vitamin D or other supplements to boost the immune system to help your body fight infections, the same basic concept applies with INPT. We are working with some already in the body, native phages. We do not put phages into your body. INPT stimulates phage that are already there in your body, and every type of good or bad bacteria in your body is already infected with its own type of bacteriophage (phage). All that INPT is designed to do is to stimulate or induce the desired type of phages to attack and kill the specific type of bacteria we are targeting. We are working with your body’s nature processes. There are no chemicals or scary stuff used in INPT remedies.
You Need to Understand this Last Point!
A screwdriver can not drive in nails. Antibiotics cannot correct neurological damage or restore damaged joints or repair damaged organs. A tool, no matter how good it is, can only do what it is designed to do! Antibiotics and INPT kill bacteria. Neither cannot do more than it does.
Many people have the misguided idea that they will be well when their doctor can finally kill all of the bacteria. Hopeful now you understand why even taking something as potentially amazing like INPT or the next latest and greatest antibiotic will most often only work if the infection is caught very early. The damage caused by the infections might be corrected by the body’s own natural healing abilities, however in longstanding Lyme disease, the body will need all the help it can get to recover!
We have been taught, by well-meaning doctors, that when you get sick the antibiotics cure you. This is only true up to a point. If the infection has damaged tissues and systems in your body, then the damage will need to be repaired before you will get fully well. If the damage is just inflammation of the membranes in your throat as seen when you have laryngitis, then most often the body will eventually heal itself once the infection is brought down. If the infection has caused damage and scarring in the throat, then the symptoms will remain to some degree even when the infection has been resolved.
It is the same with INPT. Now that we can, at times, rapidly get rid of the infections, people are often upset when they do not feel much better. Often, even with repeated negative Phelix Borrelia-Phage tests, after having been tested as initially positive, because they still have symptoms the person thinks the treatment didn’t work and sometimes starts blaming the lab test as being flawed. Some people go back to the old testing of Lyme Western Blot to see if they are still positive. Often they are positive on Western Blot because the antibodies are still circulating even though the infection is gone.
Getting rid of the infection is phenomenal when we can achieve it with INPT! However, after years of damage, the person and their healthcare team will still be faced with the hard work of figuring out everything that has gone wrong in their body and restoring it all, before they stand a chance of getting back to the quality of life they once knew.
Talking With Your Doctor About INPT
Since no one has ever conceived of INPT before, there are no doctors that can speak intelligently on the validity of its science, although I have already hear from patients that their doctor prior to coming said, “It will never work!” Yet it did and according to the lab testing it does indeed work. A truly wise person will not pass judgement upon what they know nothing.
To learn more about INPT and Phages please click here.
*INPT technology is presently provisionally patent-pending until it is determined if it will stay a proprietary technology. INPT is not related to homeopathy, Rife technology, or Radionics.