Not all crows’ feet respond to dermarolling

Many of our customers reported a reduction of wrinkles and improved skin texture. From my own experience, I reduced the wrinkles between my eyebrows (11′s) with single needling and on my forehead and around the lips (this area was really painful to roll) with dermarollers. The wrinkles are still visible but they filled in noticeably. Unfortunately, my crows’ feet are not responding to dermarolling. Perhaps due to the fact that they are constantly reinforced by muscle activity by smiling (I do not use Botox). Do not expect that all your wrinkles will respond the same way to dermarolling.

The advantage of wrinkles being filled in by the collagen production triggered with dermarolling or needling is that the results are really long-lasting compared to injected fillers. Restylan, Perlane or other fillers based on cross-linked hyaluronic acid are very expensive and they are relatively quickly metabolized by the body, so they have to be re-injected every few months. The results of dermarolling, a cheap method, will last for years, although they are not “permanent” because a dermaroller can’t stop aging and the wrinkles will eventually start to re-form. Dermarolling maintenance is necessary.

You should know that a dermaroller and other microneedling instruments such as dermastamp or the single needle can only affect the skin itself and not the underlying structures (fat, muscles etc). For this reason, they cannot for example improve “hollowness” under the eyes caused by fat recession (as we age, the subcutaneous fat recedes), neither it can significantly improve the nasolabial fold because it is not a wrinkle but a fold caused by a drop of the facial structures. Long-term dermarolling thickens the skin, fills up wrinkles, lines and scars but it has a limited effect on the nasolabial fold.

Dermarolling can’t fully remove stretch marks

Don’t believe claims that it can. Neither can any laser-based device. Stretch marks are deep scars in the dermis and there is currently no method that can remove them. Dermarolling or needling can very significantly improve the appearance of stretch marks but it cannot make them disappear.  What you can expect after many months of dermarolling and needling of stretch marks:

• improved texture
• improved color – the color blends much more with the surrounding skin
• slightly less indentation and/or width
• tiny areas of normal skin appear in the stretch mark (islets of normal skin)

Especially when dermarolling is combined with single needling, you can expect a combination of at least a few of the above.

I am often asked whether needling can gradually replace scar tissue with normal tissue, e.g. when done monthly, for years.  My honest answer is that needling scars is a new method that has not been around long enough to know the answer. So far, none of our customers achieved a complete resolution of their stretch marks. Also not of surgical scars, nor scars that resulted from serious injury. A couple of customers said that some of their smallest, shallowest stretch marks had disappeared (initially, the stretch mark broke up and became fragmented and the fragments gradually disappeared after more needling). The most common feedback is that their stretch marks improved but have not vanished; not even after one and half year of monthly needling.  Since scars are merely a cosmetic issue, our body does not bother to replace scar tissue with normal skin. Skin microinjuries (which is what needling or dermarolling does) are a clever trick to force the skin into remodeling and regeneration. The microinjuries are not big enough to cause more scar tissue but they are big enough to trigger healing processes and regeneration. Unfortunately, the induced regeneration doesn’t completely replace scar tissue by normal skin; it normalizes the skin only partially.

Whether partial normalization of scar tissue is the terminal point of microneedling or whether the scar tissue will gradually be replaced by normal skin until the scar is gone is still unknown. Until we know, it is unethical to advertize a dermaroller for stretch mark removal. Nonetheless, any improvement of a stretch mark or scar is a victory. Until very recently, there was no method able to achieve even a noticeable improvement.

It may be possible, but it is also still unknown whether or not dermarolling can partially prevent stretch mark formation in pregnancy.

Dermarolling can more-or-less reverse skin aging

The skin consists of two main layers. The epidermis and the dermis.

The epidermal cells turn over quick. The epidermal cells are constantly being produced at the bottom of epidermis, and then they travel up and are eventually sloughed off from the skin’s surface. It takes about twenty days for the cells to get from the bottom of the epidermis to the skin surface where they are sloughed off. This continuous process slows down as we age but it is still extremely rapid, compared to the turnover of the dermis.

The cells in the dermis have an extremely slow turnover. The half-life of dermal collagen is about fifteen years!

What does this mean:

You are born with millions of collagen cells in the dermis.

• When you are 15 years old, 50% of the original collagen cells remain (the rest were replaced).
• When you are 30 years old, 25% of the original collagen is still in your skin.
• When you are 45 years old, 12.5% of the original collagen is still in your skin.
• When you are 60 years old, 6.25% of the original collagen is still in your skin.

And again, the newly formed collagen has a half-life turnover of about 15 years.

When you are for example 60 years old, some of the original collagen you had as a newborn is still in your skin. This collagen has been subjected to sun damage and other damage for 60 years. It is no wonder we get wrinkles and sun-damaged skin! Elastin has an even longer half-life turnover. It is about 70 years. Sigh.

When collagen gets damaged, the body immediately repairs it but unfortunately, as we age, the repairs turn out rather provisory and to make matters worse – we’re faced with diminishing collagen levels.

This extremely slow turnover of the cells in the dermis is the reason why a tattoo in the deep dermis (>1 mm) lasts a lifetime. A Tattoo will slightly lighten over the years but its pigment weathers the decades. “Permanent” makeup is not inserted that deep so it doesn’t last as long  as a tattoo.

The big deal with dermarolling is that you can trick the body to trigger collagen and elastin much sooner than the natural rate of turnover.

Dermarolling with needles that reach the dermis causes tiny microinjuries in it and the body sees it as a high priority to fix them. These microinjuries will trigger new collagen. But sadly, the skin will never be as perfect as when you were young.

Ablative methods, such as acid peels or ablative lasers can’t be used to reach the dermis due to the risk of scarring and hypopigmentation. But a dermaroller very easily can go that deep, because it does not ablate the skin, it only pricks it. Since the pricks are surrounded by untreated skin, the regeneration happens very quickly. It takes long to achieve results because every time you roll, you only prick small fractions of the skin. Be patient and repeat the microneedling procedure on yourself as often and as long as it takes.

Dermarolling will speed up the turnover of dermal cells and this can slow down (but not stop) the signs of skin aging. Maybe not all signs but at least some.

Dermarolling and hyperpigmentation, melasma

Usually, hyperpigmentation is the result of locally uneven/excessive melanin production. Melanin is the pigment that determines the color of our skin. When our skin is exposed to the sun, it produces more melanin as a natural protection – melanin absorbs UV. Unfortunately, melanin is not always produced totally evenly, especially in individuals with darker skin.

Uneven/excessive melanin production can also be the result of skin trauma – sun burns, acne, cuts, bug bites etc. If the hyperpigmentation resides in the epidermis, it responds very well to dermarolling. If it is in the dermis (deeper part of the skin), it also responds but it takes much longer. Hyperpigmentation in the dermis is too deep for acid peels but not too deep for a dermaroller. You have to avoid excessive sun exposure and always use a sunscreen. Ignoring this advice may lead to a reappearance of  the pigmentation.

Using a dermaroller to facilitate the skin penetration of skin whitening creams can be a very successful treatment for persistent or deep hyperpigmentation or melasma but you have to be careful with hydroquinone (a common skin whitening agent). The long-term usage of a high percentage of hydroquinone in combination with sun exposure can cause dark pigmentation. Do not apply high concentrations for a very long time.

I hesitate to recommend a dermaroller for melasma. Dermarolling triggers inflammation and inflammation or any kind of skin irritation can in principle worsen melasma. For the same reason, a dermaroller should not be used on Rosacea. Always do a test patch first if you use a dermaroller for melasma.

Dermarolling works against hypopigmentation

Treating hypopigmentation with dermaroller and needling showed very good results. Hypopigmented skin has malfunctioning or absent melanocytes (melanin producing cells). Skin needling triggers melanocytes production and enables migration of melanocytes from the surrounding skin into the hypopigmented area.

Dermarolling acne scars – patience rewarded

If you got what it takes – the patience and perseverance for long-term dermarolling, dermastamping and single needling – you are destined for success. Major improvement of acne scars was the most common feedback we have received.

Some of our customers combined dermarolling with other methods such as saline injections or the suction method. Both methods are explained on our forum.

Dermarolling to reduce pore size – not really

Not many customers were successful in reducing the pore size. Pores are not scars, pores are ducts in the skin and there is currently no method that can reliably and permanently reduce them. Dermarolling however often helped normalize acne prone skin and post-acne pigmentations.

Dermarolling sun-damaged skin works well

You can expect excellent results in renewing the sun-damaged skin of the face, décolleté and to a lesser extent of the forearms and the back of the hands.  Application of Tretinoin (Retinoic acid or A-Ret) further boosts improvement.

Needling sagged skin – works but no miracles

Dermarolling can improve mild skin laxity and crêpey skin on the face, neck and body or a wrinkly post-pregnancy abdomen, provided there is not too much excessive skin. The bulging, sagging abdomen after pregnancy is often due to the abdominal muscles not having gone fully back to their original position – this can only be fixed by a tummy tuck.

You can greatly improve a tummy tuck scar or a C-section scar by needling. The scar will soften and becomes less visible. Dermarolling cannot get rid of excessive skin after major weight loss. Skin folds can only be fixed by plastic surgery.

Wild claims to sell more rollers

Some websites say that dermarolling reverses gray hair, completely removes cellulite, helps with slimming, enhances breast size and so on. It’s all nonsense.

I remember my grandfather who was almost completely bald at the age of twenty told me that when he started getting bald at such an early age, he was extremely depressed. Shortly after, he met my grandmother who did not care about his baldness and they lived happily together for sixty years!

Chronic stress and unhappiness about one’s body can lead to clinical depression that is difficult to improve without medication.

The culture of  being “perfect” and young is very distressing for many of those who do not feel “perfect” for whatever reason. While I certainly do support looking after oneself, I do not support the advertizing industry’s overblown ideal of eternal youth, the ridiculous cult of beauty which only purpose is to make you feel bad because the worse you feel the more money you will spend on looking and feeling better.

Bombarding you with “beautiful” people, “perfect” skin and heavily photoshopped glamor models is good business. You will spend more in increasingly desperate, but largely fruitless attempts to look like the shiny people in the shiny magazines.

The same with fashion. Let’s be honest: Fashion is for those who want to look like everyone else! Surely, wearing new clothes is enjoyable and I don’t say you should spend twenty years wearing the same shoes, but do not lay waste to your mood and bank account by succumbing to the pressure of always having the latest mobile phone, hair – or heel style.

To be honest, Big Cosmetics is not even the main cause of this vicious circle of trying to throw money at the inevitable forces of nature. They simply abuse our instincts to their advantage. Our genes are programmed to reproduce – everything in nature submits to this prime goal. This whole issue of feeling the need to be sexy is nothing else than our genes bullying us into doing what they are programmed to: To procreate.  We are slaves of our own DNA. What’s at play is a survival-of-the-fittest scenario and the struggle to become the alpha male/female, a desirable procreation partner in an environment of competing genes. If you realize this and manage to more or less resist playing this game, you will be relieved and can enjoy looking good without the need for extremes and perfection.

Lots of supposedly physically “perfect” people have unhappy relationships anyway.

A daughter of a friend complained to her brother that she was ugly and he said:

“You are quite pretty but you are not gorgeous. That’s actually an advantage because that will keep superficial people away from you.”

Don’t obsess over things that can’t be changed. Or else you’ll suffer through your life. Focus on what you can change.

There currently is no method that can remove stretch marks. You can only improve their appearance, for example with dermarolling. Concentrate on achievable goals such as staying or becoming slim and toned (unless you really feel OK as you are), waering hairstyle that fits you and especially: Being pleasant to be with.

Why do you want to be perfect? To find a loving partner? Who do you think has a greater chance to find a nice partner? Who would you prefer as a partner?

Someone with stretch marks who’s overweight, depressed and usually snappy and in a bad mood?

..or a person with stretch marks who’s mostly in a good mood, has done his best to look good but who ignores his stretch marks, is a pleasure to be with?

I don’t blame stretchmark-afflicted people when they become depressed. Not at all. I totally understand it. It is extremely difficult to withstand the competitive environment we’re in.  I only say that you should try to change what you can and decide to ignore the rest and that will likely result in finding an agreeable partner and it will also prevent your life being “suffered through”.

I’m not promoting a plattitude like: “Don’t worry about stretch marks, it can always be worse”.  It’s not a competition of what is worse. It is about the approach you decide to have.

Important to remember: Living with a person who’s merely covered with stretch marks is very easy but living with a person who has low self-esteem is extremely difficult. Low self-esteem ruins everything.

There are billions of people on this planet. You just need to find one good, loving person for yourself who will not care about your stretch marks.

A tip for summer:

When you go swimming, make the decision that you will not look at the others at all, decide that you will not spend the entire day observing how many stretch marks others have or don’t have and how unlucky you are., etcetera. People with many stretch marks usually don’t go to the beach anyway. They stay at home and write desperate emails how they stay at home, cry and overeat, which makes me sad.  If you don’t feel comfortable  exposing your stretch marks in a swimsuit, cover them with UV swimwear. I have written a forum posting about it:

http://forum.owndoc.com/showthread.php?400-Swimwear-to-cover-stretch-marks

“The scientists said the Fukushima prefecture, as a whole, “is highly contaminated” – especially to the north-west of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/japan/111115/japan-radioactive-soil-unsafe-farming

Update: Food in entire northern hemisphere polluted with Plutonium:

Update: Tokyo radiation levels exceed those in Chernobyl exclusion zone:

Update: Dangerous levels of radioactivity measured in Oklahoma City dust / rain:

Update: Japanese Government refuses to evacuate or test Fukushima radiation victims:

Full Internet Censorship of all Fukushima facts:

http://www.examiner.com/civil-rights-in-jersey-city/japan-passes-law-to-cleanse-internet-of-bad-fukushima-radiation-news

Massive radiation levels in Canada – covered up by government:

http://www.straight.com/article-415211/vancouver/fukushima-brings-big-radiation-spikes-bc?page=0%2C0

We would like to explain the seriousness of the Fukushima nuclear accident.

Common misconception:

“The amount of radioactivity dispersed by a major nuclear accident such as Fukushima is negligeable in comparison to that of a nuclear bomb such as the one dropped on Nagasaki”.

Let’s look at the Plutonium isotope Pu239:

In “Fat Man” – the codename of the nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki, about 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of the 6.2 kilograms (14 lb) of Plutonium in the pit (about 17%) fissioned. [1]

This means that the radioactive fallout, the “leftover” of the nuclear explosion of “Fat Man” over Nagasaki was made of about 5 kilograms of Plutonium 239 and the nucleotides it spawned.

Fukushima reactor #3 was a MOX (Mixed Oxide Fuel) reactor [2], at least 5% of the fuel being a mixture of 80% Plutonium 239 and 20% Plutonium 240. [3]

Fukushima #3 contained 90 tons of fuel. [4] Since at least 5% of that fuel is Pu239/240, the total amount of Plutonium in its core is at least 4500 kilo, or roughly a thousand times more than the Plutonium fallout caused by the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki.

So on the back of the envelope, if 100% of Fukushima 3′s reactor core exploded, the fallout would have been about 1000 times worse than Nagasaki. How much of Fukushima-3 did end up in the atmosphere?

You be the judge:

This looks like a gigantic explosion to me (YouTube deleted the original, clearer clip due to a Japanese TV Copyright claim), but I’m no expert, so I went to nuclear engineer and expert witness for the Three Mile Island accident Arnold Gundersen’s blog, where he says that in his opinion, the explosion was a “detonation, not a deflagration as happened in the other reactor building”, and he thinks the spent fuel has been instantly vaporized and turned into black dust due to a prompt criticality as the fuel rods melted and reached critical mass. He says that the Plutonium powder is now being carried over the Pacific and will reach the continental US.

So if we just look at how much Plutonium isotopes are released into the environment, the Fukushima accident is comparable to a thousand 21 kiloton nuclear bombs going off. Mr. Gundersen debunks the claims that “little radiation” was released due to a “Hydrogen explosion”. The dark color of the cloud points to vaporized fuel rods. The extreme upward energy of the explosion points to a high-energy detonation, not a gas explosion. If we believe in a less serious explanation of events – only the reactor core and not the much larger spent fuel pool went up into smoke – then most, if not all of the reactor core vaporized and was dispersed as a fine dust high into the atmosphere – five tons of Plutonium powder blowing East.

In Plutonium fission bombs such as the one dropped on Nagasaki, 98% of Pu is Pu239. [5] In reactors, only about 80% of the Pu is Pu239, 20% is Pu240. Not all isotopes of Plutonium are the same radioactive. Pu240 has a half-life of 6563 years [6], making it 3.7 times more radioactive than Pu239, which has a half life of 24100 years. [7].

So if 100% of Fukushima number three nuclear reactor core exploded, 900 kg of Pu240 would have been released, with an equivalent radioactivity of 3300 kilo of Pu239.

This is the truth: Fukushima #3 could have released 1380 times more Plutonium-related radioactivity into the environment than the nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki. This is excluding all the nasty isotopes such as Iodine 131, Cesium 137 and Strontium 90. Plutonium is mainly an alpha-radiator. Alpha particles are the most dangerous of all radioactive radiation. One alpha particle typically knocks 100,000 electrons out of their orbits. In more practical terms this means that a single alpha particle can easily damage DNA enough to cause cancer. The cheapest commercially available radiation monitor that can adequately detect alpha particles in food and soil costs around 3000 dollars (e.g. a Ludlum alpha scintillation counter/scaler combo), making it impossible for people with an ordinary Geiger counter to detect them, because specialized mica-windowed pancake tubes or scintillation counters are required. This is far beyond the capabilities of the great majority of devices sold online. To detect alpha radiation in air requires even more complex devices. Note how we assumed that only the reactor core exploded – something proven in the pictures published on Cryptome.org. If Arnie Gundersen is to be believed however, the explosion occured in the spent fuel pool. Spent nuclear fuel contains an even higher percentage of Pu240 than core fuel. And 40 years worth of spent fuel was in that pool. If it all went into the atmosphere, we’re looking at more than ten thousand times more alpha-radiation in the Plutonium fallout than happened at Nagasaki. At Nagasaki, the Pu particle sizes were extremely small, as they were created by a nuclear explosion. You would need to breathe in many of such particles to be exposed to a lethal dose. The particle sizes created at Fukushima 3 are of a range of sizes, and many particles have been created with sizes easily spread by the wind and ultimately lethal when inhaled. Four reactors have suffered a full meltdown, fuel pools are on fire and there is no end in sight.

Meanwhile, radiation levels in rainwater in the US are incredibly high. This man uses a pancake mica-windowed Geiger tube that is the only Geiger counter that can acceptably detect Alpha radiation:

 
And it’s getting rapidly worse:

 
In Tokyo, there is severe radioactive contamination:

As we have come to expect of our governments, radiation monitoring networks worldwide have either shut down or stopped releasing data to the public. Alpha radiation levels in airborne dust are not disclosed to the public. The “open source” networks of volunteers with Geiger counters show not much cause for alarm – but that’s because their Geiger counters can’t detect nearly any alpha radiation. It is irrelevant what the background levels are. All that counts is how much of which radionucleotides end up in your body. You can’t find that out by using a Geiger counter. You’d need much more sophisticated equipment than a Geiger counter. This is why we rely on the authorities to inform us. The EPA announced it would stop all radiation monitoring for the next three months! Since the half-time of Iodine 131 is only eight days, that means if a massive contamination of milk would occur tomorrow, there would not be a trace of it left three months from now! Fukushima has half a dozen fuel pools and reactors in full meltdown, the radiation there breaks records every day, the entire site is a smoldering pile of smoke-spewing rubble, releasing gigantic amounts of radiation each day, but the EPA decided to cease monitoring. We would like to provide a link to this scandalous announcement, but it is on their “latest news” section without permalink provided, and their notice will be gone by the time you read this. Here is a copy:

The EU has 20 times less strict radiation level limits for edibles than Japan [11], so Japan will start exporting their contaminated cattle feed to the EU soon. Even when their feed is above EU limits, it can be mixed with uncontaminated feed to just pass. Eventually, Plutonium particles will enter the human food chain. Meanwhile, the EU stopped monitoring Plutonium in food/feed imported from Japan: “It is appropriate to restrict the obligatory controls to iodine-131, caesium- 134 and caesium-137.” [12] In Japan, Web hosting companies and ISP’s have been asked by the government to censor “illegal information that could cause unrest” [8]. The man in our picture at the top of this article is a crying Toshiso Kosako, chief nuclear advisor for the Japanese government. He said that school children in Fukushima province are under serious threat due to the nuclear fallout and that the government has covered this up [9]. Mr. Kosako said that his conscience forced him to resign. Meanwhile, radiation far from the Fukushima power plant greatly exceeds the levels above mandatory relocation at Chernobyl – and the Japanese government is covering it up [15].

Fallout simulation with the voice of nuclear physicist Michio Kaku:

Last but not least, we offer here for free download the book (it has been made available for free by its authors) that claims almost a million people worldwide died of cancer due to Chernobyl, of which 270,000 people in the US. They used 450 scientific studies to arrive at that conclusion. The book has 349 pages and is pretty hard to digest, as it is a scientific work. The Fukushima accident already released radioactivity on a par with Chernobyl and will likely turn out worse [10] [13] [14].

Chernobyl killed 980,000 people (PDF eBook)

Updates:

Fukushima reactor #4′s reactor fuel storage pod is on fire:

This fire is spreading enormous amounts of radioactivity and is very much worse than a mere core meltdown:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16fuel.html?_r=1

For more in-depth facts about the Fukushima disaster go to:

http://enenews.com/
http://www.fairewinds.com/updates
 
Update:

Tepco now admits that the meltdowns exceed Chernobyl:
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-05-25/fukushima-containment-vessels-may-be-leaking-tepco-says.html

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/06/201161664828302638.html

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man
[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12724953
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOX_fuel
[4] http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/03/how-much-fuel-is-at-risk-at-fukushima.html?rss=1
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pu-240
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_plutonium
[8] http://japanfocus.org/-Makiko-Segawa/3516
[9] http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/04/government-adviser-quits-post-to.html?ref=hp
[10] http://enenews.com/experts-fukushima-going-kill-200000-increased-cancers-worse-chernobyl
[11] http://www.owndoc.com/pdf/EU-radiation-limits.pdf
[12] http://www.owndoc.com/pdf/EU-secret-radiation-food-scandal.pdf
[13] http://enenews.com/wikileaks-representative-climate-scientist-studying-radiation-fukushima-worse-disclosed
[14] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/01/fukushima-chernobyl-risks-radiation
[15] http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201105070143.html

Novartis says that Lufenuron has no interactions with other medications, the substance is very stable and chemically inert, apart from functioning as an anti-catalyst to Chitin synthesis. So I always say: “Sure, you can combine the two”.

I never knew what MMS really was. I had read it stood for “Miracle Mineral Supplement”, so I suspected it to be a mineral supplement containing Magnesium and Phosphorus or something. I do not frequent alternative health forums and never visit sales sites for “miracle” products – they are a dime a dozen and it’s impossible to keep up with the latest scam – so I had no idea what MMS was, until yesterday.

It turns out that MMS, instead of curing cancer, causes cancer!

MMS is Sodium chlorite, a common form of household bleach, a toxic industrial disinfectant, a powerful oxidant (= free radical) that causes cancer when ingested in small quantities and massive organ damage or death when taken in significant quantities. There also is a “MMS2″, containing another form of bleach, used to scrub swimming pools’ walls for disinfection (it’s not added to the actual water because it would make people sick).

I thought: “How come people haven’t been dropping dead from that stuff in droves – it’s so heavily promoted that it must be killing off gullible folks left, right and center?”

The answer is simple: One bottle contains only 4 fl. oz. (118 ml), of which 22.4% is Sodium Chlorite (better known as household bleach):

You’d have to drink a couple of those small bottles to be lethally poisoned, so I guess that is rare, since the instructions say not to take more than 15 drops per day. Not that we should pay much attention to the treacherous FDA but just to show that it’s not just me who says MMS is poison: The FDA said this about Miracle Mineral Supplement:

“The product, when used as directed, produces an industrial bleach that can cause serious harm to health. The product instructs consumers to mix the 28 percent sodium chlorite solution with an acid such as citrus juice. This mixture produces chlorine dioxide, a potent bleach used for stripping textiles and industrial water treatment. High oral doses of this bleach, such as those recommended in the labeling, can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and symptoms of severe dehydration.”

Even the FDA sometimes says the right thing, like a broken clock showing the correct time twice a day. Canada banned the sale of MMS because a Canadian who took it nearly died. Other countries banned its sale as well. By itself no proof of a bad product, as Stevia is illegal nearly everywhere as well, as a sweetener.

25 mg of Sodium chlorite per bottle. That would make the bottle and its packaging an order of magnitude more expensive than the cost of the bleach it contains.

When I see products heavily advertised using terms like “miracle”, I always look at their profit margin. When it is above a thousand percent, alarm bells go off and I investigate. I did that with the $4 dermarollers sold for $80 (2,000% profit) and I am now doing it with a tiny bottle with 20 cents of bleach sold for $20 as “Miracle Mineral Solution” or “Miracle Mineral Supplement” (MMS). 10,000% profit – you’d truly expect a miracle.

Let’s not dwell too long on the man behind MMS, “Bishop” James V. Humble. He usually appears with a gemstone on his forehead nowadays, to appeal to magical thinkers. He bought his Bishop title from a religious title mill “Church” of which both the founder and his successor were criminally investigated for child rape. He needed that title so that it was easier for him to start a tax-exempt “Church”. Instead of attacking the vendor, we should judge his claims on their merit: James Humble claims that MMS cures all disease known to mankind including Malaria, Diabetes, Influenza, Crohn’s disease, Herpes, Arteriosclerosis, Tuberculosis, CFS, Hepatitis A, B and C, Cancer and of course AIDS. Everything except dying of old age. MMS enlarges breasts too! “A teenage girl, overweight with depression and failure to develop breasts, was given MMS. The next day her breasts started to grow.” Yes people, MMS truly works wonders. If not for your health or breast size, then certainly for Mr. Humble’s finances. Bishop Humble the Bleach Healer. Funny how he had a massive spinal tumor removed in early 2009. MMS clearly didn’t work for him.

A cure for all ills, where have we heard that before? Every couple of years someone becomes wealthy with a miracle cure. It seems none of these miracle cures work, because millions of people keep buying one after the other and they still feel the need to email me and tell me they tried all those magical potions – fruitlessly. When they, with a mixture of hope and scepticism inquire about Lufenuron, I nearly always tell them not to buy it. You can try it yourself. Email me, pretending you are sick, you think it’s Candida and you’ve tried everything. I’ll tell you that unless there is strong medical evidence that you indeed have Candida, don’t buy Lufenuron. I’ll tell you that what is commonly thought to be Candida is often not Candida at all. I’ll try to discourage you from buying Lufenuron if you have no positive  antibody test or visible sores. People should first get educated on what could be the cause of their health problem, instead of wasting money on “miracle solutions”.

I have not been able to find any references to studies done with MMS that suggest that even one sick person has been cured, neither did I find any evidence based in science that would suggest that MMS could kill pathogens in the body, as opposed to on surfaces. The ravingly positive testimonials are fake, published by spammers, MMS resellers and affiliates. In fact there is ample evidence that MMS (bleach) taken orally causes, not cures, cancer. MMS contains hundreds of times more bleach than allowed in drinking water and that rule is for a good reason: Bleach is a powerful oxidant and free radical, and the reason people are advised to eat antioxidants is because they neutralize oxidants. Why do oxidants need to be neutralized? Because they cause cellular damage. Cellular damage leads at best to premature aging and at worst to cancer. Oxidants ravage RNA, leading to cell apoptosis, tissue necrosis and, if the immune system has a bad day – cancer. More about how MMS causes cancer here.

Mr. Humble the magical potion millionaire says that MMS “kills all bacteria, pathogens, viruses, cancer cells” and whatnot, but – another great miracle – the gut flora is left in peace! Mr. Humble abuses microbiological terms like “aerobic” and “anaerobic” to make you believe that that’s actually possible. As far ar Mr. Humble is concerned, the invention of Penicillin was a waste of time. A few drops of bleach in your lemonade cures Tuberculosis, Cancer and AIDS and enlarges your boobies too.

From http://www.health-science-spirit.com/MMS.html

“Jim Humble, a chemist and metallurgist accidentally discovered the MMS by using a whole bottle of Stabilized Electrolytes of Oxygen (S.E.O.) to immediately cure a companion of malaria during a jungle expedition. S.E.O. contains about 3 % sodium chlorite. Humble gradually realized that S.E.O. is too weak”.

Let’s ignore the fact that Jim Humble is no chemist, but focus on the claim: Malaria was instantly cured by drinking a 3% bleach solution, but 3% was too weak. It was in fact extremely much too weak, since Jim increased the concentration in his Miracle Mineral Supplement roughly tenfold. Then how come Malaria was instantly cured? That page contains so much baloney and downright ridiculous gobbledegook that I could debunk every sentence as hilarious nonsense but it would take an article ten times this size. Just as one crazy man can ask more questions than ten wise men can answer, it takes quite some scientific reasoning, backed up by references, to refute the baloney in those claims. Such as the claim that Lyme disease is caused by a virus, instead of the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi (s.l.) And that bleach can’t damage body cells. The abject advice is given to rinse out burns with the MMS bleach, causing of course even deeper tissue damage, increasing the risk of permanent scars. There are countless web pages devoted to the crapolic MMS cult. Literally every sentence is nothing but lies, disinformation, pseudoscience and psychological manipulation.

Mr. Humble bought his Bishop title from a religious title mill. Hoping to get rich quick, he started as a gold prospector in Africa, but he found a richer goldmine in sick people’s gullibility and he now is a billionaire. He says he has more than 5 million customers.  Say that each customer buys on average 5 bottles during their lifetime, that’s 5,000,000 x 5 x $20 = five hundred million dollars. Tax-free, since “Bishop” Jim Humble owns the “Genesis II Church of Health and Healing”. Yup, if you don’t want to pay taxes, do as Ron Hubbard of Scientology did: Start your own cult. James Humble made at least twice that amount and is a billionaire because it’s not just bleach he sells. Books, DVD’s, ebooks, courses, seminars, consultations, the lot.  On top of that, he sells pastor titles. His pastors give away MMS on street corners, but they “solicit donations” in return that go to a numbered offshore account belonging to Mr. Humble. For his “legal defense fund”. Sick but rich individuals are asked up to donate up to one million dollars to the “Church” as a sign of gratefulness for their “cure”.

Because various countries would like to arrest Mr. Humble for causing the deaths of their citizens, he exiled himself to the Dominican Republic, a country without extradition treaties. Imagine the splendor of his mansions and the beauty of his mistresses. The man is more liquid than Bill Gates. The best Cuban cigars are but a short yacht trip away. Mr. Humble can afford the world’s best lawyers, wealth managers, and tax attorneys, search engine optimization experts, web designers and forum spammers. He employs his own private army of affiliates – ready to rip their enemies – anyone with a brain – to shreds. I think I should also launch a “miracle supplement”.. Caustic soda, anyone? (Kills all pathogens stone dead, leaves the body alone because “its got electrolytes!“)

Why MMS does not kill pathogens in the body, but the body itself

On the MMS disinfo pages it is claimed:

“When a chlorine dioxide ion contacts a harmful pathogen, it instantly rips up to five electrons from the pathogen, in what can be likened to a microscopic explosion… harmless to us, but terminal for pathogens.”

The big lie here is the “harmless to us” Because this also happens with the first human cell the bleach ion encounters. Since the chance that those ions touch a body cell before they touch a pathogen is almost infinitely high, in reality, when you drink bleach, all it does is cause cell damage to your own body, leaving virtually no bleach left to kill any pathogens.  So it’s a double lie. All damage is done to your own body, and none to any pathogens – except perhaps some in your throat. Bleach indeed kills pathogens – but the catch is that bleach absolutely can’t distinguish between your cells and bacterial/viral/fungal/parasitical cells. It kills the first cell it stumbles upon. It denatures the first protein it sees, cuts through DNA like a hot knife through butter. The problem is that the average person just doesn’t grasp this simple scientific principle. When confronted with the incessant barrage of lies coming out of James Humble’s multi-level marketing machine, it’s all too easy for a little seed of hope to grow and from there it’s a small step to pulling out a credit card.

“Bishop” James Humble is a criminal, plain and simple. Megalomaniac liar as he is, he claims to have saved the lives of 100,000 people. I say on the contrary: He undoubdedly has contributed to the death of many sick people who could otherwise be saved. By promising them that MMS cures all disease, he encourages patients to cease unpleasant, but life-saving treatments in favor of his bleach. With his admitted 5 million customers, if just one in a hundred suffered from cancer and only one in a thousand of those decided against that extra treatment that could save their lives, then we have over four dozen poor sods who died because they believed that quack’s lies. Such cynical, yes psychopatic liars must be cut out of society. The damage they do is too great. It’s not the billion dollars stolen from the weakest in our midst. It’s not the spreading of magical belief systems-for-profit on an industrial scale. It’s the globally spread hope and faith in a poison that makes the sick sicker and bereaves children prematurely of their ailing parents and grandparents – not to mention those deluded individuals who administer this vile broth to their toddlers in the hope they’ll stop crying – because that happens too. We occasionally get people who want to feed their babies Lufenuron “just in case” so it’s inevitable that they’d do the same with MMS because it’s good for you and totally harmless, right? And when it’s harmless and good for you, the more the better, right?

Several countries have already put out arrest warrants for this ruthless thug.

“Jim Humble is wanted in Malawi Africa and other African countries surrounding it, and has at least two arrest warrants out for him, regarding the poisoning and death of several people who have died due to taking this procedure and giving them false information. On his websites he is careful not to say it cures just helps conditions, but in Africa he says it does cure all, the problem is he has been saying it cures everything from aids to hep and more, these peoples immune systems are already compromised so if they take this in heavy doses they become very ill or die!”

From that same page:

“I’m a chemist, and I can tell you for a fact that chlorine dioxide will attack anything that it can grab electrons from. That includes healthy cells in the body, such as the stomach and gut lining. That causes irritation which results in nausea, vomiting and diarrhea as the body desperately tries to rid itself of the poison you have ingested. Chlorine dioxide cannot tell a toxin or a bacterium from a healthy human cell, it will happily damage any of them. If you took enough MMS to get blood concentrations of chlorine dioxide high enough to kill a single pathogen, you would probably die, though that would take about 400 ml or a couple of bottles full. Antibiotics are far more potent at killing bacteria than MMS, and far less toxic. Dicloxacillin, for example, is 100 times more potent at killing bacteria than MMS, and 20 times less toxic.”

Noone knows exactly what this man is up to. He say he’s working with prison authorities in African countries to do experiments on prisoners, to give but one example.

MMS affiliates and magical thinkers alike will be saying: “Bishop Humble is the victim of a Big Pharma/FDA witchhunt, they want to neutralize him because he found the cure for all disease!” Sure. When I start selling caustic soda as the cure to all ills, I’ll also eventually be “witch-hunted”.  The real witch hunting is done on MMS forums. Anyone who speaks against MMS is immediately banned, like Rhys Morgan, a boy with Crohns disease who explained why he thinks MMS can’t cure disease – on the contrary.

MMS doesn’t work, period. It can’t work, because it would have to violate a few laws of nature to do so. Ions would have to have brains and legs to direct them to pathogens, instead of random body cells. Of course you can believe in miracles and believe “Bishop Humble” on his honest-to-God word, since this do-gooder, in his own words, descends from a line of priests all the way to Jesus.

Articles debunking MMS:

http://healthwyze.org/index.php/component/content/article/460-the-debate-between-healthwyzeorg-and-jim-humble-about-whether-mms-is-a-fraud.html?showall=1

http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Editorial/Miracle%20supplement%20dangerous%20to%20Kenyans%20%20/-/440804/1014118/-/1luiwo/-/

http://www.smh.com.au/national/deadly-chemical-being-sold-as-miracle-cure-20100108-lyvl.html

http://lizditz.typepad.com/i_speak_of_dreams/2010/08/bleachgate-or-mineral-miracle-solution.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/sep/15/miracle-mineral-solutions-mms-bleach

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/sep/17/miracle-mineral-solutions-mms

http://noodlemaz.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/bleachgate-the-plot-thickens/

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/213275-MMS-Miracle-Mineral-Solution-or-Trojan-Horse-Your-Body-and-DNA-Decide

http://blogs.plos.org/takeasdirected/2010/09/19/bleachgate-more-miracle-mineral-solution-madness/

http://www.nation.co.ke/News/Malaria%20drug%20endangers%20Kenyan%20lives%20/-/1056/1012418/-/11e26ja/-/

http://cenblog.org/terra-sigillata/2010/09/20/bleachgate-uk-and-kenyan-press-raising-awareness-of-miracle-mineral-solution/

http://noodlemaz.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/link-roundup-bleachgate/

http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/investigations/2010/10/the-miracle-mineral-solution-c.html

http://parafort.com/ri/?p=1154

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/207643-Down-the-Rabbit-Hole-The-Assassination-of-JFK-Bishop-Jim-Humble-And-The-Nexus-Conference

http://curezone.com/forums/am.asp?i=1109319:

“Anyone on the board been cured of cancer, herpes, AIDs, hepatitis? I haven’t read about it. And as for the 1000′s of people cured of Malaria in Africa? I’m a researcher. I research everything, and I’m good at it. I have spent months trying to find info on the Malaria cures in Africa. The government of Malawi knows nothing about it. It isn’t in any of the African newspapers. There is no evidence whatsoever, other than Jim Humble’s word. And how is it that it can cure Malaria in 4 hours, AIDS in a day, and you guys have been taking it for months and nothing but nausea and diarrhea? People keep saying, “Jim Humbel says that it’s pathogen die off”, or “Jim Humble says to increase the dose” He isn’t a doctor, he isn’t even a chemist. He hasn’t seen the patient, how does he know? I think that the referral to a cult comes from the book that Humble wrote about him having lived 100′s of previous lives and the difference between him and others is that he remembers.”

The articles of association of the “Genesis Church of Healing” of this criminal genius show that it’s nothing but a tax-exempt multinational corporation that intends to aquire real estate and business holdings worldwide:

http://genesis2church.com/articles-of-association/

If you have at least 1200 dollars to spare, the sleazeball will relieve you of your cash in a “private consultation”:

http://www.mareaweb.net/mms/NEWS011.htm

Jim Humble in his gold-digging  days:

Update

Humble’s army of affiliates have gone into full-blown attack mode and even come with threats of violence. In an attempt to educate this poor ignorant soul, I was sent a PDF made by Jim Humble. That PDF purports to explain exactly how MMS destroys pathogens on a molecular level. After reading it, I became strengthened in my belief that Mr. Humble knows full well that his MMS is a fraud, because someone who’s able to use all the scientific-sounding terms such as “electron shell” and even draw a (falsified) 3D model of one, clearly has done some research into the chemistry involved. Meaning, he is educated enough to know the truth, but he chose to misrepresent it in order to sound credible. If he would merely have come with vague claims that could still be attributed to ignorance. Someone who publishes a very scientific looking PDF full of three dimensional models of the quantum mechanics of molecules and who uses all the applicable professional lingo, but who lies about the facts every step of the way clearly is a deliberate fraudster. Me calling him a ruthless thug was appropriate, and I am not taking it back. People are dying because of this scam. I fervently hope that Humble will sue me, because the outcome will prove once and for all that his whole setup is a scam:

1. Humble claims that electron shells fully envelop covalently bonded molecules (or polyatomic ions). That is a gross misrepresentation of basic chemistry that nicely helps draw the wool over our eyes.

2. Humble claims that by pulling some of the electrons out of their outer shells, that the entire molecule will disintegrate into separate atoms. That is nonsense for many reasons, one of them being the threedimensional electron orbital structure of molecules and hence the need of a lot of electron-pulling in many places simultaneously- impossible to do unless half of the blood serum would be replaced by MMS.

3. Humble claims that part of the MMS “curing mechanism” involves the creation of free oxygen atoms, and that that free oxygen is totally harmless because “it can not oxidize things but become part of the water or carbon dioxide in the body”.  This is complete nonsense. An oxygen atom will immediately destroy the first random molecule it comes into contact with – whether it be that of a pathogen or that of your body.

4. Then follows a claim on how oxygen “can’t do damage to the body”, because its oxidation strength is “only 0.95 Volts”. This claim is patently false. Oxygen is very harmful – so harmful in fact that breathing pure oxygen for just a few hours will result in permanent brain damage due to central nervous system oxygen toxicity. Every IC ward nurse knows this, and adjusts the supply of supplemental oxygen such that the patient never breathes pure oxygen, or even 50% or 40% oxygen. The devices used are designed in a way that the patient can never breathe pure oxygen, because it would kill in less than a day. Under higher pressures than atmospheric pressure, Oxygen can kill in minutes. Every NITROX SCUBA diver knows that. Even the 21% oxygen in our air damages our cells and  tissues all the time, and our body has to repair that damage all the time. It has even been postulated that the oxygen in the air we breathe is a small contributor to causing lung cancer.

5. Humble also says that the Chlorine split off by his carcinogenic concoction is nothing to worry about, because it “turns into harmless table salt by combining with Sodium in the body”. Well, no. There is no free Sodium (Na+) in the body for the Chlorine atom to attach to. Instead, it will severely damage the nearest protein molecule or DNA strand or anything else it touches.

6. Humble claims that there is a big difference between the proteins in bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites and in the proteins in our bodies. He says that MMS kills only the proteins in the pathogens, but not in our bodies. But he is wrong. There is no such fundamental difference. All proteins react the same to free radicals.

There are many more wild, unsubstantiated claims and plain untruths in that PDF. For the layperson, it looks like an impressive explanation of fundamental biochemistry principles. For anyone with a basic knowledge of highschool chemistry, it is unadultarated baloney.

They call it “Anti Aging Acupuncture Breast Enhancement treatment”. This is of course complete nonsense, as dermarolling  thickens the skin only – and by less than a millimeter. Dermarolling  or microneedling certainly can’t in any way, shape or form increase breast size. More about that later in this article.

Apparently to maximize profits whilst at the same time being able to defend themselves against the exposure of the absurd claim that microneedling can increase breast volume, they say: “It is essential that the roller is used with the Anti Aging serum, the herbs are vitally essential to the process”. Amazing. They have a magic potion that can make your breasts larger. Magical thinkers may believe such claims, but us scientific folks prefer to see some evidence before we pay 85 + 30 dollars for a tiny bottle of self-made liquid and a roller which familiar design looks identical to that of the worst dermaroller in our dermaroller review.

White Lotus Anti Aging presents some pictures, for which we found strong evidence that they are fraudulent:

They go through great lengths assuring us that their images are in no way manipulated, and that 99% of all images online are Photoshopped but theirs aren’t. They are in fact correct in saying that their images are not manipulated. But that is the only truthful thing they say about those pictures that we republish here, for review purposes (fair use). The breast pictures are deliberately misrepresented, and do not at all show breast enhancement, if anything at all, they show in fact breast reduction, as we will show below.

First of all, we need the original photographs on their website, not the reduced versions that you see in your browser. In order to save an image in a browser, you right-click and select “Save”. However, White Lotus has disabled that, because when you right-click, this message appears:

That’s strange.. The common way of protecting images is to put a Copyright message on them, the so-called “watermarking”. That way, if people reuse your images, they’ll be advertizing for your site, so that is an effective deterrent. Of course, putting a copyright message on an image that is in fact copyrighted by someone else is an illegal act, so if you do not really own the copyright, you can’t do that and have to resort to other means. The message gives the impression that White Lotus owns the copyright, but in fact it only says that they are “copyrighted”. Clever.

We do not have the same budget as White Lotus but our badly paid webmaster is not born yesterday and knew a way to download “their” photo’s anyway: He simply did “File – Save page as HTML”. Then he had the actual images as they are stored on White Lotus’ server, and a timestamped copy of their entire “dermarolling before and after” page. He said we needed it in case they would deny our evidence or even sue us, or take them offline or alter them. Update: We received a legal threat from White Lotus, saying they consider suing us for defamation-related damages. They did not explain how their “before” picture is dated after their “after” picture.

Misrepresenting pictures

Our webmaster told us something we were very surprised about but it is true: When you make a photo with a digital camera, the camera embeds a lot of information into the image. Invisibly. This is called EXIF and the details can be read on Wikipedia here. If you have a way of retrieving that EXIF information, you can see when the picture was taken. The camera puts the date and time into the Jpeg image. Digital camera’s have an internal clock, like video recorders etc. have. And that information survives image editing – it keeps being preserved, even when you cut and paste it into Photoshop. This is to make the life of professional photographers and media people easier. They need to have a reliable method of verifying the “credentials” of the photo, so to speak. Scanners also embed EXIF data. EXIF data is reliable – it has been used as evidence in court cases involving the manufacture of child porn.

There is an online service where you can paste the URL of an image and get some of that EXIF info:

http://regex.info/exif.cgi

I encourage you to go to White Lotus’ before-and-after pictures and verify for yourself that what say is true. Here is the “before” picture, taken from

http://www.whitelotusantiaging.co.uk/dermaroller_before_and_after_s/68.htm

Update: White Lotus has removed the evidence, as was to be expected.

..and here is the “after” picture:

Update: White Lotus has removed the evidence, as was to be expected.

The “after” picture was taken 33 days before the “before” picture!

We asked our technical wizard webmaster to go through all before-and-after pictures on that page and he told us the following:

- Almost all photographs are made with the same camera, the Olympus FE210. Meaning, they were not submitted by individual customers of their dermarollers but rather their source is a clinic of some sort.

- The photo’s that have (sometimes obscured) faces on them are in his opinion not created with a camera or scanner, but they have in his opinion been copied from a PDF displayed on screen because they lack EXIF data and they are of much lesser quality than the other images.

Conclusion: These photo’s are likely not copyrighted by White Lotus. In our opinion, those photo’s were neither made by White Lotus, not were they submitted by their customers. In addition to that, White Lotus’ assertion that they portray “before” and “after” pictures is demonstrably false.

White Lotus has crossed the line of what can be tolerated when they started to claim that dermarolling can increase breast size. It’s scamming, plain and simple and we do not want our customers to tell us that there is something wrong with our rollers and our vitamin creams because “Their breasts didn’t get bigger, as they do when White Lotus’ products are used”.

Another reason is that White Lotus has crossed another line when they started to spread deliberate nonsense on their site. Nonsense intended to take sales away from bona-fide, ethical competitors and move those sales to them. White Lotus spreads the rather monstrous lie that using vitamin A products in association with microneedling may cause “liver damage”. They keep stressing that their serums are “natural” and that anything else is “artificial” and “toxic”. This FUD is part of their business strategy – vitamin creams are much more expensive than self-made herbal potions, and their business model requires big profits in order to be able to  grow large, using affiliates and agressive, expensive marketing.  They claim many things and most of it is utter nonsense, but those wild, unsubstantiable claims serve to move customers away from us consciencious, scientific-oriented small-scale vendors and towards their multi-million dollar business with their magical Chinese herbal potions that make your boobs bigger. Their pictures prove it – or do they?

We have no problem with healthy competition, but White Lotus is a cynical company. They peddle quackery. They charge outrageous prices for dirt-cheap, low-quality products and they spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about competitor’s products. They use every dirty advertizing trick in the book to win confidence and to increase their Google ranking – including paying seedy search-engine-optimization companies to spam the whole internet with links to their sites. White Lotus does not care about your skin – they care about their bottom line. If they truly cared about your skin, they would not bash proven vitamins in favor of their unproven “herbal serums”. White Lotus runs a multi-level marketing business, where you can sign up as an affiliate to peddle their wares. Such a scheme is only feasible when there is a huge margin on the products. That’s why they sell the cheapest dermaroller on the Chinese market. That roller costs around three dollar fifty, bulk wholesale. It has such a floppy handle that it’s impossible to apply constant pressure or even hold a steady course, to give but one example why this is a bad roller.

The claim that dermarolling enhances breast volume by increasing collagen is ludicrous.

Breasts consist mainly of fat. There are also mammary glands, blood vessels, nerves and fibrous tissue but the main “structural material“ in the breasts is fat and the size of your breasts depends on how much fat you have in them.

Breasts themselves have no muscles (apart from nipple muscles to erect the nipple and nodule muscles). That is why you cannot enlarge breasts by exercising and female bodybuilders have almost no breasts (most of them have implants) due to their extremely low body fat content.  There is a muscle behind breasts and underneath breasts but not in breasts.

There is no way a dermaroller can cause the production of fat or anyhow enhance breast volume. A dermaroller cannot even reach the fatty tissue. A dermaroller affects the skin only and to the depth of the needles used. That means that not even if White Lotus magical miracle potion would do everything it claims to do such as “increase blood circulation”, it would only increase blood circulation for a while in the skin.

Dermarolling increases collagen production in the skin and can thicken the skin somewhat, but microneedling can’t possibly increase breast size by more than half a millimeter or so. Half a millimeter of gain is a great improvement for the skin because the skin itself is only a couple of millimeters thick.  Thickening the skin by for example 0.2 mm will noticeably reduce wrinkles, scars and improve overall skin texture but anyone claiming that this will improve the volume of your cleavage is trying to fool you.

Microneedling can improve the skin texture of your breasts, it can improve the appearance of stretch marks on the breasts, it can improve pigmentations, sun damage and other skin related problems. Dermarolling/microneedling is excellently suited to improve scars that were the result of breast augmentation surgery though.

But there is no way it can enhance breast volume or lift the breasts – regardless of what expensive “serums” you roll into the skin on your breasts. Contrary to what the miracle serum peddlers want you to believe, increased blood flow and other phenomena can’t possible result in larger breasts, even if their claims were true about increased blood flow in the breast tissue, which they are not.

Silicone/saline solution implants, or injections with one’s own fat are used to enhance breast size. Microneedling can’t help you with that, and if your goal is to enlarge your breasts, you should not buy our products. Neither should you buy from White Lotus.

How to recognize the scammers

You know how you can immediately recognize dermarolling scammers? They sell their own “miracle serums” instead of clinically proven vitamin creams and ointments. Vitamin creams are expensive. They are made in pharmaceutical companies and sold in pharmacies. They have proven themselves in countless medical studies and conform to strict quality requirements. Such vitamins are expensive and not much money can be made with them, hence the need to sell self-produced “serums” that cost nearly nothing to produce and can be sold at a huge profit margin. The most expensive part is the bottle and the cost of sending. Stay far away from those peddling their own serums, potions, herbal extracts and essential oil mixtures. More on how to recognize dermarolling scammers.

Scammers are recognized by how much they spam on forums and on how many “spammy” sites link to them. We do not post on forums. We do not advertize. We do not sell magical miracle lotions that cost half a dollar to make. If you want bigger breasts, don’t try dermarolling – it’s a waste of time.

The common meaning of “normal” is “of the standard type”. But according to the dictionary, “normal” can also mean “natural”. In biology specifically, “normal” can also mean “of natural occurrence”.

After long and careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion that most personality disorders are in fact not just “normal”, they are better than “normal”: They are nature’s way of optimizing group survival. For an evolutionary standpoint, having a small percentage of personality-disordered individuals is long-term advantageous to a tribe, compared to a tribe that has significantly less (or more) of those individuals.

This article brings good news to many of those diagnosed with a personality disorder. You may have been born with specialized, rare characteristics that are so important for the long-term survival of your society and the welfare of the human race that evolution has provided society with “disordered” people such as yourself. Just like any modern society needs specialized professions, human civilization, from the Papua’s in the rain forest to inner city Copenhagen needs you – that is the reason you exist in virtually all populations and have existed in a sizeable percentage since the beginning of written history and likely since time immemorial. The interesting aspect about all PD’s I’ll be covering below is that those diagnosed with it consider themselves normal and the others “strange”. Some people with Aspergers for example don’t understand how others can tolerate living in what they perceive to be a mess, a chaotic, disorganized state of  life. A psychopath sees people with a conscience as flawed, weak, sheep. Schizoids think of emotions as irrational, annoying, counterproductive reflexes. “Aspies” call us “neurotypicals” and Schizoids call us “normies” and they don’t envy us at all.

Unrestrained by an education in psychology or psychiatry, and with a strong skepticism of both almost-to-be-called pseudosciences, I divide personality disorders into hereditary PD’s and acquired PD’s.

In this piece, I will talk about the so-called “hereditary” or “genetic” personality disorders, leaving acquired PD’s such as Borderline Personality Disorder (often caused by an absence of love in childhood in the presence of abuse) and ADHD (may be caused by food chemicals, medications, environmental toxins, infections) out of consideration. I also won’t talk about late-onset brain diseases that aren’t PD’s at all, such as Schizophrenia – I suspect that this disease is caused by a brain infection or (semi) autoimmune reaction. Of course the cause of PD’s is still controversial, but here’s my view for anyone who’s interested.

The word hereditary suggests that such disorders somehow are inherited from the parents, as in an unlucky genetic combination, resulting in a personality disorder. I think that perhaps such PD’s are not truly hereditary at all, but that there could be a deeper mechanism at work that ensures that no matter who your parents are, the fundamentals of the DNA replication mechanism or perhaps the protein synthesis from that DNA ensure, in a “Russian Roulette” fashion, that you may later end up having being diagnosed with Aspergers, Psychopathy, Schizoid Personality Disorder or Homosexuality.

Mentioning Homosexuality here is deliberately provoking yet in my opinion correct. I reclassify homosexuality as a PD because it is a hereditary aberration from the norm, and I think that homosexuality has the same cause as the other hereditary PD’s. There is overwhelming evidence that homosexuality is a result of gene expression. That should not be the controversial part. The remarkable aspect is that I claim that homosexuality is “normal” in the sense that evolution ensures a healthy 5% homosexual subpopulation in, likely, every population group, from Azeris to Zulus. With “healthy” I mean that at least in our recent evolutionary past, a roughly 5% incidence of homosexuality gave a tribe an evolutionary advantage over a tribe with a lower or higher percentage. The figure of 5% would yield a survival benefit of the tribe that would more than offset any lowered reproductive rates. Primitive tribes were largely polygamous and strongly culture-driven, so having a modest percentage of homosexual men abstaining from intercourse would not result in a lowered birth rate, and it is unlikely that lesbian women would be able to resist peer pressure, cultural expectations and being “given” to some brute and his brothers.

It is likely that homosexuality, in the past, had little to no evolutionary disadvantage in terms of raw baby-production. But what would its evolutionary advantage be? Think of the strong cultural limits and boundaries that have traditionally existed in primitive tribes that dwelled the savannah or rain forest. We know from plentiful anthropological research that the roles were strictly gender-divided. Strong, semi-religious taboos prevented women from participating in hunts, for example. The “female brain” of a homosexual man could have been of a small average benefit, in a hunting party. Call it the benefit of “female intuition”, although that is an oversimplification. Homosexual men have partially female brains, in spite of the fact that those brains are bathed in Testosterone instead of Oestrogen. Sex hormones are powerful modifiers of behavior and even intellectual prowess.  Homosexuality breaks cultural gender taboos and basically forces a modicum of male POV into female society and vice versa. This can’t be a bad thing. Gay computer scientist Alan Turing played a role in an allied victory of WWII with his revolutionary intuition that “by finding contradictions we can deduce the truth”. His algorithm cracked the Nazi code. I suspect that the unique combination of a partialy “female brain” plus Testosterone plus talent can result in amazing scientific discoveries, due to the fact that female brains have more connections between the brain halves and Testosterone helps with certain mental tasks – or perhaps Oestrogen impairs them. I say this because I have talked to transgendered men receiving Oestrogen. One told me that he suddenly had become remarkably worse at map reading and much more emotional to boot. Remember:  I’m only voicing some ideas here – no references to studies – even though they do exist.

What about the evolutionary advantage of having a few percent of psychopaths (euphemistically called “Antisocial personality disorder” nowadays) in the tribe? Surely, such antisocial, egotistical folk would hardly be missed? Certainly, psychopaths aren’t the most loyal of friends, neighbors and citizens, but we should not ignore the possible tribal-evolutionary benefits of their particular character. Tribes were often engaged in warfare. Tribes were in constant competition with each other and fearlessness was highly prized. Tribes abducted each other’s women and the most respected hunters were the most fearless ones. The most successful hunters and warriors were richly endowed with the favors of women. Psychopaths make excellent warriors and hunters because they are nearly fearless without necessarily being reckless. The most successful warriors are those without conscience or mercy. A conscience precludes one from efficient genocide – meaning one leaves competing genes in the gene pool – and mercy allows possible future enemies to remain alive. Hence the psychopath gene does not only perpetuate itself but it also contributes to tribal survival by supplying the tribe with the meat of larger animals, slaughtering its enemies and providing it with fresh women. Contemporary psychopaths are spreading their genes far and wide – they are greatly overrepresented in politics, business and finance. Most of the world today is ruled by them. Psychopaths make excellent surgeons because they are not affected by the death of their patients – allowing them to remain in the profession, approaching each operation without distracting nervousness. It is a widespread myth that all psychopaths are murderers and thieves. Many of them have leadership jobs and the majority never even get into significant trouble with the law. It is estimated that as much as 4% of all people are psychopaths. Psychopaths in positions of power are often revered by their tribe, electorate or subjects as heroes, defenders of the nation and enforcers of progress, unity and prosperity. Even though this is not always the case, there are examples where mass-murdering psychopaths such as Mao Zedong, at the great expense of human life and liberty, imposing harsh decrees, pulled a country out of poverty and into a leadership role. I’m not defending the psychopath’s psychopathic actions – it merely shows that their genes can be favored by evolution by the sheer consequences of their often nefarious actions towards other gene pools. A good example on how psychopaths can work for the general benefit of their tribe or gene pool, whilst cynically sacrificing the lives of hundreds in another gene pool, is this article on the Japanese meltdowns. US top officials want “suicide cleanup teams” to go into the area to sacrifice themselves, otherwise the jet stream will bring pollution to the US. Psychopaths can do maths with human lives and coldly make life-and-death decisions pertaining other’s lives. Ordinary people would get emotional and the loss of live would be far greater. And one wonders what kind of “disorder” turns some seemingly ordinary people into heroes – the kind of heroes battling now to contain the radiation in Fukushima.

Another common PD is Schizoidism. Schizoid PD has nothing at all to do with Schizophrenia. Schizoid people are benignly “anti-social” in a rather interesting and often highly productive way. A schizoid person can’t form strong bonds. They often won’t marry or have kids. They have no empathy in the sense that they do care, but they don’t understand other people’s emotions. A Schizoid won’t feel very affected when you praise or reproach them. They are extraordinary emotionally stable people. They do care about others and maintain stable but generally shallow long-term relationships. They can’t “read” emotions because they don’t understand emotions and they think emotions are often exaggerated and irrational. Schizoids are analytical, generally risk-averse and emotionally cold. They don’t care about what others think of them. And they prefer to be alone. Not the type of person to produce much offspring. Why would nature ensure a modest yearly production of Schizoids, if it were bad for the population? After all, evolution has become pretty efficient after all those millions of years? It is highly unlikely that evolution is so flawed that it keeps producing societal misfits, useless miscreants millennium after millennium. Bad genes eventually leave the gene pool one way or the other. If Schizoids were a liability they would have disappeared a long time ago.

Schizoids often have jobs that other people would find mind numbingly boring. Someone has to do the boring jobs. Schizoids can spend a lifetime doing them conscientiously. They are overrepresented in scientific research as well as menial jobs such as cleaning. The special benefit that Schizoids bring to a primitive tribe could be that their personality is excellently suited for the responsible task of night sentry. They like solitude and have a very strong sense of responsibility. They often prefer boring jobs. Typical Schizoids are very responsible people and they crave job security. Intelligent Schizoids – and most Schizoids score above the average – can be found in the highest echelons of scientific research where they use their special talent for tenacious attention to meticulous detail. Where others would have given up already due to a waning interest, a Schizoid could spend her entire productive life looking for a way to cure cancer or to find a commercially viable method for chemically assisted nuclear fusion. Franz Kafka was Schizoid.

Asperger Syndrome: I am convinced that these people fulfill an important role in society. They always have and they always will, in spite of the fact that they are frustrating to deal with. People with Aspergers are also known as “highly functioning autists”. The “highly functioning” often refers to functioning on a higher level than neurotypicals in certain fields. The very best computer programmers in the world are often those with Aspergers, because Asperger Syndrome makes it easy to hyperfocus on one topic for days on end. The most complex computer algorithms can be imagined, created and refined by a programmer with Aspergers. Errors are intolerable to their rigid mind. Things have to be perfect. If I ever had to fly to the moon in a space rocket, I would prefer to have an Aspie assemble and test the live support equipment, tighten the nuts and bolts and supervise the safety procedures during launch. Asperger people can become the world’s biggest experts in complex fields because their mind has the unsurpassed ability to focus. Like Schizoids they are loners, but unlike Schizoids they can be very emotional. Many have a relentless drive to learn everything there is to know about a certain subject and then apply that knowledge with laser-like focus. Things have to be done to schedule. Things have to be arranged properly. In tribal days, these authorative, neurotic sticklers to protocol and detail would have made sure that the preservation of foods would be done properly, thereby preventing spoilage and the starvation of tribe members. It has been suspected that Albert Einstein had Aspergers. This twelve year old boy also has Aspergers, and is treading in Einstein’s footsteps.

People with Paranoid personality disorder (again, we are not talking about paranoid schizophrenics!) would have been the proverbial guard dogs of tribal society. Due to their unusual attention, their raised awareness to whatever may be subtly wrong, they are often wrong but also sometimes right when the rest of the tribe is still unaware of the danger. Perhaps they sensed a hidden maliciousness during the last visit of a powerful rival tribe’s chief. Not the slightest detail escapes them. They have a sensitive nose for danger. They’re sometimes wrong and sometimes right. Even if they were often wrong – it wouldn’t matter much in terms of tribal survival. But if one of them could ever sense serious danger (floods, food poisoning, surprise raids) and avert disaster then that would be to a great evolutionary advantage. Perhaps we’re not listening enough to our ever-so-slightly “paranoid” fellow men, because some of what they suspect may actually be true.

Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder also aids tribal survival. They likely were priests, enforcing religious morals upon the tribe, such as to avoid the tribe from perishing due to sexually transmitted diseases like Syphilis. Wikipedia says that this PD is characterized by rigid conformity to rules, moral codes and excessive orderliness. Exactly what a tribe needs: The enforcement of hygiene and other beneficial behavioral code amongst its members to the benefit of all. The enforcement of the social contract, in spite of the fact that it may not be apparent why it is enforced. The obsessive-compulsive does not care – things are enforced because “they are the way they are because they always have been so” – end of discussion. Religious fundamentalism has powerful genetic roots. They were the enforcers of moral/religious rules of chastity and monogamy, where deviation of those rules would have meant the eventual demise of the tribe.

Conclusion:

We should stop trying to treat many of the “personality disorders”. Most PD’s are nature’s way of creating a small quotum of non-ordinary people to do what isn’t done by the average Joe or Jane. Many personality disorders are hereditary and can’t be “treated” and it would be counterproductive for society to do so. People with PD’s should be considered fully functional members of society and not thought of as having a flaw in need to be treated. No matter how hard people with PD’s are to deal with in at work, privately or in school. They have unique strengths and the society that doesn’t take advantage of them does it to its own detriment. Some personality disorders should not be regarded as disorders but as natural, helpful character properties created by God or evolution. Not normal as in conform the norm, but natural as in nature producing these “disorders” for a very good reason.

This picture is from March 2011, after five months of needling. The customer is very happy with the results and posted them originally on our forum.

Dermarolling before and after pictures – 2

This photo is taken before microneedling, but after acid peels that had no significant result. The photo is taken under halogen illumination inside a bedroom.

And this photo is taken one and a half year later, in September 2010, outside in a sunny garden. The photo was taken six weeks after her last needling.

She has needled her stretch marks every 4-6 weeks for one and half years and she will continue. She has used a 1.5 mm dermaroller and the single needle, topical vit. C and Infadolan. She densely needled the stretch marks from different angles, to various depths up to 2 mm with quite some pinpoint bleeding.  No other treatment was employed. Stretch marks are still there but the overall improvement is amazing. The stretch marks tanned for the first time since they had formed. (The straight red lines are caused by swimsuit pants). The photos are not manipulated in any way.

Dermarolling before and after pictures – 3

This customer has her own blog.

This picture is from her blog. She bought our dermarolling products. “Sarah and John Vaughter” can be made out on the instructions:

This is a “before” picture:

This is a picture after three rolling sessions and two agressive single-needlings:

Such improvement usually takes more needling sessions. Click on the picture for an enlargement.

Dermarolling before and after pictures – 4

The  next customer’s photos are of a vaccination scar, treated with the single needle. The scar is 35 years old.

The same vaccination scar immediately after needling with the single needle:

And here is the same vaccination scar after four needlings, one months apart. The photo is taken five weeks after the last needling.  The hardened collagen scar tissue is mostly gone and the scar tanned for the first time since it had formed. She has used the single needle, topical vit. C and Infadolan.  The scar is much less visible now.  No other treatment was employed.

The middle photo was taken inside, the others outside in full summer light.

You can use single needling to improve both atrophic and hypertrophic scars, stretch marks, surgical scars (including liposuction, breast augmentation and tummy tuck scars), scars resulting from accidents including burn scars, acne scars, etcetera. You should not use it on keloid scars.

You can also improve individual wrinkles, especially the ones between the eyebrows and on the forehead.

The needle has to be very thin with a long taper. Our single needles are custom made according to our own design.

The “stretchmarked” skin is usually thinned both in the epidermis and the dermis (skin layers). Stretch marks/scars usually have abundant collagen in them but that collagen is in the form of a scar – the collagen layout is different from that in normal skin and the elastin fibers are abnormal as well.

Pricking the stretch marks densely with a single needle will crush the hardened collagen bundles and that should smoothe the texture of the stretch marks and make them less bright and shiny. With repeated needling, the indented scars fill up a little. Although the scar will never completely disappear.

If you are lucky, the repeated micro injuries caused by pricking the skin will make the stretch marks heal with a better collagen layout and a fiber configuration that is a little more “normal skin”-like. Old scars usually have poor blood supply. Needling often triggers angiogenesis – the growth of new blood vessels. Needling can also induce melanocyte production and that will enable the stretch marks to tan or partially tan. All this is individual, so we can’t give hard guarantees.

If your stretch marks are very shallow (unfortunately, most of them are not), they could even disappear entirely but so far, no current method can totally remove deep stretch marks. All we can do is improve them over time. Remember – there are no silver bullets or magical solutions. All real improvement takes time, effort and the endurance of some pain.

Dermarolling before and after pictures – 5

This customer tried to improve her skin texture – successfully.

Before (Sep. 12, 2011) and after dermarolling (Jan 14, 2012).

In an in-depth article, I exposed the FDA for what they truly are: Big Pharma’s and Big Agro’s enforcement agency. In a massive propaganda campaign, Cargill, the producers of Truvia, spread the disinformation that Truvia was the same as the natural sweetener Stevia, calling it “nature’s perfect sweetness”. The ugly truth is that Truvia is far from perfect and far from natural.

To be fair, not everyone experiences Truvia side effects:

My wife and I, along with many people we know, use Truvia daily with no ill side effects. Many of the reviews I read on your site that deal with headaches have similarities. Almost all of them have switched from an artificial sweetener such as Sweet & Low, Splenda, Equal, etc. One of the withdrawal symptoms from aspartame is severe headaches, this was the case when my wife quit drinking diet soda. After a week of being free of aspartame the headaches subsided.

As for the other reviewers with cramping, bloating, and loose bowel movements, perhaps they just have a sensitivity to Truvia. I think it is reckless to consider a product unsafe to the public due to a handful of reviewers sensitivities. For example, I’m allergic to processed chocolate; would it be foolish to insist that candy bars or fudge be banned or come with a warning label? I am aware of my adverse reaction to chocolate so I simply don’t consume it.

These are just my thoughts on the matter, for what they are worth. Besides, I’m not a doctor, much like your reviewers.

Sincerely,

Jerry Thоmpsоn

But here is another “handful” of people reporting bad effects of Truvia. I get one or two of those emails a day.

I have been using Truvia for about 2 months and I finally put the pieces together today about why my blood sugar has been so bad.  I have had low blood sugar for most of my life and I have had to watch what I eat so not to make it worse.  However for the last 2 months I have had a terrible time controlling it.  I finally made the connection the other day about Truvia.  Without a doubt, that stuff drops my blood sugar big time.  Very dangerous for me to use that stuff.  Plus it makes me feel very anxious and dizzy.  It should not be on the market at all and to relate it to Stevia is a marketing lie.  Stevia has never bothered me in all the years I used it.  I just thought Truvia was the same thing but a bit cheaper.  I was very wrong. They are nothing alike.

Rоbert Amidоn

As soon as I saw this new sweetener, I went right to google and began looking up info on it. i have always been an opponent of Aspartame (derived from a heart drug I heard?)

I noticed one person at least was mentioning that the Erythritol in it  was NOT a natural substance. I would like to point out that nearly everything on earth is “natural”, for instance Uranium is a natural substance but as you know it is NOT safe to even be near it. Mercury is also “natural”. I am left to wonder if a genetically modified plant can still be called “natural”?

Bеn LеMire – Salem, OR

Heart palpitations.  They were coming every day and really scary.  I couldn’t figure out what the heck, I eat an extremely natural diet, supplemented with Truvia.  The next day after stopping the Truvia they went away, and I finally felt normal.

Shеrеnе

“Suitable for people with Diabetes.”  Yes, it is – if the intent is to kill us off!  Just did search on Truvia because of the symptoms I am experiencing with the product (poison), are the same symptoms others have reported on your website.  I take care of myself, have become a full-blown vegetarian, eat organic, take high-quality vitamins and supplements, exercise, and stay away from all sugar substitutes.  But , I read about how good the product is and decided to try it.  Well, that was about 4 days ago and from the very first I noticed I was practically falling asleep at my desk – very early in the morning, and I am a morning person! The morning after I first used it, I woke up with my hands numb and very cold. Throughout the day, a kind of soreness remained. Sometimes they can be the symptoms of Hypoglycemia. Then I started feeling the sides of my stomach as if someone had used me as punching bag.  Then I got sharp abdominal cramps, gas, and very loose stools.  I also started getting weird cravings, and a craving for carbs.  I have become light-headed, losing my balance, and have become bloated, a very uncomfortable feeling!  I also noticed I started getting headaches and light symptoms of migraine which I used to suffer from 40 years ago.

Mіndy Sіlva

I switched from my usual Sweet & Low & Splenda about two weeks ago. I too was looking for a healthier alternative. I noticed (and couldn’t figure out until now) that I am having problems with constipation unlike any I have ever experienced in my life.  I do get quiet a bit of gas in my stomach but this is completely different.  Bleeding almost every time I go to the bathroom and alot of pain.  I also noticed strange twitching in different muscles & muscular pain.

Brіtt Brоlund

The first time I saw Truvia on the market shelf I was excited that there was something more natural than splenda. I first tried Truvia on fresh strawberries… It was really good. The next day my tongue was swollen and painful. I had a few sores on it too! I had a serious migrain, and loose stools. Uggh! I couldn’t function.

Susanne- Hawaii

A few years ago I put up on a website info that Erythritol causes eye pains. No one knew that it had side effects then. How do I know this?  I’m in the R&D field of healthy beverages and personally test most nutraceuticals and food ingredients we receive. If I react badly, it doesn’t go into a drink. Of course, other people may not have a problem with what I react to, due to their bio-individuality. Those that use Truvia™ & PureVia™ and have reacted to it, may be affected by the erythritol in it (that is why they add in the erythritol…to cover that bitter taste).  But, it may also be the leftover chemicals used in the extraction of the stevia that are causing their problems.

I’ve used Stevia since 1980 when it was available as dried green leaves. Later the slightly bitter stevia powders became available. Now, I use only water extracted stevia which is sweet and without a bitter aftertaste. Organic stevia is preferred.

We were given samples of Erythritol for use in beverages. The first time I tried it, my eyes ached. I put that sugar substitute in the realm of Aspartame & Sucralose which also cause eye pains. And, I tested Aspartame in 1979. By 1981 I had to quit using it as it caused my eyes to flicker. It took a while to figure out that the problem was caused by a greedy aspartame manufacturer using less expensive methanol alcohol instead of ethanol alcohol in the bonding process of the two chem lab amino acids. Methyl alcohol was what old time alcoholics went blind with.

Sucralose in 1998 was okay until 2003 when I found the same effect as erythritol.

There are a number of other low-calorie sweeteners available such as Lo Han Kuo (licorice aftertaste), and a few new ones that we are testing now. Some are quite good without side effects, so far.

Whenever I go to an industry trade show where they give samples of their products out, I always ask if the product was sweetened with Aspartame, Sucralose or Erythritol. If no sign is present or they don’t know, I pass on the free sample.

J. David

After using two packets of Trivia yesterday in my coffee at work, I experienced the worst nausea that I have ever had.  Very disappointed in this effect of this very heavily advertised, expensive  product.

Lindа Wаxmаn

For several months now ive been using Truvia in my daily Chai tea, and my occasional coffee, i thought it was the perfect alternative to fattening sugar, and over-processed sweeteners. Shortly after i began using Truvia i devoloped headaches, in fact it was more of a constant headache that just got worse from time to time. I never had a steady diet, so i never considered any change in diet to be the cause. I also found that no matter how tired i was, i found it impossible to sleep most nights. Getting out of bed when i did get to sleep was even harder. I began going days without adequate sleep then sleeping for 14-15 hours a day for days at a time! It wasn’t until i quit drinking tea and coffee so i could whiten my teeth, that the headaches went away almost completely and i slept normally again. I thought it was the caffeine that may have been causing all my problems, so i began drinking diet sodas to test my hypothesis, but the only thing it did was make me hyper! I continued to be puzzled until my friend, who was trying to go completely organic, showed me your website. After reading all the side effects other people have gone through, i bucked up and made myself a cup of hot tea with two packets of truvia. Sure enough, i had a headache within the hour and has to take a supplement to get to sleep for the next two nights.

pesооkeiy@aol.com

I have been using Truvia for about 6 weeks.  I have noticed that I am tired all day long.  I was into my second phase of P90X and I had to quit.  P90X had taken from 175 to 158 and I was full of energy all day long.  I had switched from Stevia to Truvia.  I think I will go back to Stevia and see if I get my normal energy back.  I believe Truvia is the culprit for causing lack of energy.  This is the only diet change I have made.

Tony Bаtes

The day after I started using truvia in my coffee, (2packets per cup, 2 cups) I lost my sense of smell and taste. I just made the correlation today, but I stopped taking it. I hope my senses come back. Has this occurred with anyone else?

Rick

Dear Sarah,

I just googled Truvia and your website came up.  I’m so mad right now!  Let me tell you a little about my situation:

I’ve been a relatively healthy young adult who has always been aware of what I’m eating and maintained healthy eating habits.  With a history of diabetes on my grandparents side, I’ve also maintained a low sugar diet.  My artificial sweetener of choice has always been splenda.  I’ve purchased the same products for a while, and, never noticed the “switch” they did on me!!  I suppose I didn’t notice until today.

Memorial Day weekend, I got incredibly ill.  It started out as kidney spasms and has maintained as a severe left side ache.  (Upper abdomen through to my back).  This pain proceeded to get so bad that I was having difficulty eating, so, I went to me Dr.  My Dr told me I had a pretty severe kidney infection, gave me some antibiotics and told me to call him if I wasn’t better in a few days.  Well, since I was unable to really eat, I had switched over to a mainly liquid diet to stay healthy.  I’ve used Odwella drinks for a while, so, I stocked up on them.  I also continued to eat the same yogart, drink vitamin water 10, etc.  First round of meds didn’t work.  After 4 rounds of antibiotics, my side started to get better and kidney infection seemed to be cleared up.  A few days later, it was back and worse then the first time, so, I’m now on round 5 of antibiotics!

I’ve racked my brain trying to think of anything I’ve done differently that might have caused this?  Most of my meals I prepare myself, I don’t eat fast food, and, rarely eat out.  So, nothing was coming to mind.  Until tonight.  As I sat here eating yogart and drinking my vitamin water, I noticed this new symbol on my containers.  I had no idea what this was, or, when these products switched to Truvia!  I googled it, and, that’s when the side effects start making sense!!

*Uti’s
*Kidney infections
*Lightheadedness
*Insomnia
*Rashes
*Low blood sugar
*Carb Cravings

I got them, all of them!  I started getting a weird unexplained rash in April and it randomly comes and goes with no cause?  My sleep pattern has been completely irrational.  I’m always very tired.  I’ve been low carb for years, and, suddenly started craving weird carbs.  Unexplained blisters in my mouth.  It’s like a light bulb went off in my mind.

Of course, I know the first thing I have to do is eliminate all of these products!  I threw them all away!!  I’m really angry that the products I used for years switched without me even noticing.  Now, I’d like to know what else can I do?  If in fact by eliminating these things from my diet causes me to be over this month of hell, what’s the next step?  I called the 1-800 line on Truvia’s website and got a case number, but, I must say, the guy was a real ass.  Said there were no reported adverse side effects of Truvia, and, certainly nothing like I was saying.  Really?  Then why do you have the 800 number in the first place??

Jеssica Fischеr

Truvia makes it burn badly when I pee.  I tried truvia months ago for the first time.  I noticed that later in the day when it moved through my urinary system it really burned when I peed.  I stopped using the product and the burning went away.  Yesterday I took a sip of my wife’s Vitamin Water Zero.  Again, I only took one sip.  Last night, the burning was intense.  I went and checked the refrigerator and realized it was a coke product and sweetened with Truvia.

Please get this stuff off the market!

Mikе Albеrt

I have been using Stevia (with no sugar alcohols) for years and had absolutely no side effects.  We moved and couldn’t find it in this dinky town so I tried the Truvia.  Used it for a week and started having absolutely horrible migraine headaches that were accompanied with severe neck pain…..never had that. Stopped it and they went away.  Clearly I cannot handle Stevia mixed with other things.

Chris and Dawn Hakeem

I too tried to replace Sweet and Low with Truvia, the abdominal pain was unbearable. I thought I would give it some time to adjust but after reading your website I will send it back to the manufacturer. Thanks for all the info.

Gеrri, Olympia, WA

I am responding to your article about Truvia…I had the worst abdominal cramps of my life last night after drinking a very large cup of green tea sweetened with Truvia.  I got no sleep and felt like I swallowed knives pointing in 8 directions.  I will never touch the stuff again! I had no idea why I felt that way until I checked out other comments about this sweetener.  I am still slightly curious if it was something else, and am tempted to try it again – because I was initially attracted to a sweetener made from a leaf – but the experience was just too painful! I would not recommend.

Hеather E. Kеphart

I just found your site and thank goodness. I wanted to share that I started using Truvia and after 1 packet a day for about 2 weeks I developed this metallic taste and my tongue began burning. I am still having the issues, but only stopped using Truvia for the past two days. The mouth was significantly better today, but not gone. Hopefully, it will be gone soon.

Thanks for your site,

Maria Keyes

I use artificial sweeteners, mostly to sweeten my coffee, because I have Type 2 Diabetes.

For the past 6 years, I’ve used another brand of stevia without experiencing the acid reflux which the new product, Truvia, has caused.  During the first few months of using the other brand of stevia back in 2004, onions and garlic, whose taste I really like, tasted and smelled really bad.  After a few months that taste change went away, and onions and garlic tasted and smelled normal again.  However, after trying the new stevia brand of Truvia over about a two-week period, I woke on three successive mornings with acid reflux and the most horrible taste in my mouth that I’ve ever experienced.  During the past week since I stopped using Truvia and returned to the other brand of stevia which I’ve used since 2004, I’ve not experienced any acid reflux or bad tastes in my mouth.

Darlеnе Ford

I started using Truvia several months ago and I started noticing that every time I used it my chest would feel tight and achy.  The doctor says it’s not my heart.  I went to an allergy doctor and he says I have developed asthma.  I’ve never had asthma before and I’m 62!  I started making the connection with the Truvia and skipped it for several days and the asthma symptoms went away.  Started using it again and the symptoms came back.  I truly believe it is the Truvia.

Cheryl

Having a lot of allergies and chemical intolerances, I called Truvia after purchasing the sweetener and using it a couple of times because the ingredients listing was not detailed enough.  They refused to tell me what the “natural flavorings” are derived from saying that it is proprietary information and was not derived from any of the “major” allergens which she named off.  The problem is that the major allergens as defined by the FDA exclude many other food and plant products that many are allergic to, such as corn.  I asked her if they are derived from corn, which I am very allergic to, and got the run-around in relation to the flavorings, answering that the erythritol comes from corn. I asked her a few more times about the flavorings and she would beat around the bush and say various things such as ” I don’t have any information here that indicates corn”, or something similar.

I am taking it back to Walmart to get my money back.

Rick Hаnsen

I used Truvia for the first time this morning, and within 90 minutes I started having diarrhea every hour for about 3 hours.  So much for this sweetener it’s going in the garbage.

Pеtеr Wеnson

Hi Sarah,

Thank you for creating this forum for people to discuss their experience with the product Truvia.  I was so excited to see an all natural product on the market, especially one that tasted great.  I had been using it and had not seen any adverse effects initially.

Over the past month however, I began to have severe pain in my upper back, neck, arms, and hands (with numbness).  I had a back injury a few years ago and was diagnosed with Thoracic Outlet Syndrome.  I thought that this medical issue must be the cause (or Multiple Sclerosis-when you feel that bad, your mind starts thinking the worst).

I would wake up feeling crippled and reach for the coffee in hope to revive.  It wasn’t working; in addition to my pain, I was feeling exhausted, foggy, and depressed.  Last Wednesday, after the first cup of coffee didn’t work, I made another, and yet another later.  I found myself worse after every cup. Midday lying on the couch, at my end, something clicked and I found your site.  Though most of the people have abdominal issues (and I had some of those too), the first post I saw was in regards to upper back, neck, and arm pain.

I have not had Truvia since last Wednesday and I am slowly feeling better.  It is important that until more research is done, we, the public save others from this dangerous product.

Sincerely,

Jane

Time and time again. By at least a dozen medical researchers. In at least ten countries. Since 1911 – the past one hundred years. Several older but also recent autopsy findings linked to in this article found that all deceased MS patients’ brains harbored living Lyme spirochetes. Even when tests, notorious for their large percentage of false negatives were used on living MS patients, staggeringly many tested positive for active Lyme borreliosis.

Then why isn’t this common knowledge? Surely, those thousands of MS experts and MS researchers can’t be all wrong?

Let’s examine the reality on the ground.

1. Multiple Sclerosis Societies.

Every Western country has at least one MS Society. Each of those tax-exempt societies typically receives tens of millions of dollars in funding from various sources, year after year. The people running those societies usually award themselves CEO-level salaries and run them as one would run a highly commercial corporation. Advertising is used to solicit funds but if you don’t read ads then you’ll bump into them, one day, begging you for money on the street. For all those billions that have been pumped over the decades in those hundreds of MS societies worldwide, not a single one has ever done anything really useful for MS patients. The worst that could possibly happen for the bosses of those setups is that the cause of MS would become known. A known cause would either mean the development of either a cure or at least better symptom relievers, and that would rapidly result in the obsoleteness of their money making machine – the chicken that lays the golden eggs if you will. Such MS societies are working in concert with MS “researchers” employed by Big Pharma.

2. Big Pharma.

Multinational pharmaceutical corporations are the only ones doing MS research nowadays, mainly using donations to MS societies. Those multinationals decide which researchers get the cash. Researchers wanting to test the postulation of bacterial etiology of MS are shunned as if they were crackpots. Big Pharma makes billions a year on MS symptom relievers and they trickle millions down to their footsoldiers, the “MS experts”. A cure would be a severe financial blow. Even more so, because there is strong evidence that many other neurological illnesses are caused by germs as well. Because due to the phenomenon of immune privilege there is an inadequate immune response in the brain and spinal cord, making these organs the ideal place for certain slow-dividing spirochetal bacteria to entrench, multiply and cause lesions. The entire concept of antibiotic-resistant, hard-to-test-for chronic CNS infections leading to a dearth of neurological syndromes has to be suppressed and what can’t be suppressed will be craftily discredited. Better to give every expression of a neurological infection its own name such as “MS”, “Alzheimers”, “Parkinsons,” “ALS” and “Fibromyalgia”. And fund armies of ignorant “experts” to obfuscate the issue, whilst boycotting, firing, censoring, smearing and suing those few real experts that refuse to stay in line. Big Pharma is in business to make money, and money is made when people are ill, not when they’re healthy. Anyone standing in their way is relegated to the sidelines. Patents are being bought and shelved so that cures will never see the light of day.

3. Patient advocacy groups.

MS patient groups are, without exception, populated with clueless individuals for the simple reason that those who did their homework and read the relevant research have been ostracized by the group. They always were and they always will, because that’s how group dynamics works. As soon as you insist on voicing an opinion outside of the mainstream, no matter how well argued – you’ll be an outcast, a pariah. They don’t want rogue activists, “lone nutters”, giving them a bad name. Also the advocacy groups are raking in the dough and are run by folks whose main concern is that membership dues are paid in time. No MS, no advocacy group. Of course if there ever will emerge a lobby group insisting on more microbiological research pertaining Multiple sclerosis, they’ll be branded “lunatic fringe” and their efforts will be in vain.

4. MS “experts”.

Those “experts” get away with calling themselves thus, because Big Pharma gives them their seal of approval in the form of research grants and medical media exposure. However they are only experts in doing exactly what Big Pharma wants them to do: Obscuring the cause of Multiple Sclerosis! In return, the “experts” get regular cash injections for their “promising research” and other goodies such as all-in holidays to exotic destinations. There never will be a cure for MS until the scandal breaks and new antibiotics are developed that work better than the few currently available antibiotics that cross the blood-brain barrier. As it stands, it has been more than twenty years ago since any new antibiotic was developed. As soon as it was found that Minocycline helped with MS, its manufacturer, Lederle, tripled its price.

After long consideration I came to the conclusion that at least a crucial part of this debâcle was due to a real conspiracy – mainly a conspiracy of silence of those few MS researchers bright enough to realize that the cause for MS has been known for at least a hundred years. As is always the case with medical cover-ups, it continues to exist due to a mix of ignorance, indifference, cowardice and corruption.  The saying goes: “Do not attribute to malice that what can be adequately blamed on ignorance”. All the “experts” really are interested in is being “experts”, not curing Multiple sclerosis.  However it still is a conspiracy. It is completely normal for conspiracies to succeed because the lion share of the people who could point it out don’t care, are too lazy to get educated or feel too intimidated to stick out their necks. Microbiologist Tom Grier calls them cowards. The fact that most conspiracies are silently facilitated by an army of “useful idiots” with a stake in it being kept under the rug does not make it any less a conspiracy.

Evidence for a conspiracy of silence

Now I’ve given my opinion. You may find it harsh – I call it mild.

You don’t have to believe me, when I say there is a conspiracy. Believe Alzheimer and Parkinson’s disease expert Dr. Alan B. MacDonald M.D., Staff Pathologist at the St. Catherine of Siena Medical Center. He wrote:

(published online 10 July 2006 in Volume 67, Issue 4, page 819-832 in Medical Hypotheses)

“Conventional thinking about spirochetal cyst forms is divided between two polar spheres of influence; one a majority community that completely denies the existence of spirochetal cyst forms, and a second group of academically persecuted individuals who accepts the precepts of such antebellum scientists as Schaudinn, Hoffman, Dutton, Levaditi, Balfour, Fantham, Noguchi, McDonough, Hindle, Steiner, Ingraham, Coutts, Hampp, Warthin, Ovcinnikov, and Delamater. Microscopic images of cystic spirochetes are difficult to ignore, but as has been the case in this century, academic “endowments” have nearly expunged all cystic spirochetal image data from the current textbook versions of what is the truth about the spirochetaceae. If the image database from the last century is obliterated; many opportunities to diagnose will be lost. Variously sized cystic spirochetal profiles within diseased nerve cells explain the following structures: Lewy body of Parkinson’s disease, Pick body, ALS spherical body, Alzheimer plaque. Borrelia infection is therefore a unifying concept to explain diverse neurodegenerative diseases, based not entirely on a corkscrew shaped profile in diseased tissue, but based on small, medium and large caliber rounded cystic profiles derived from pathogenic spirochetes which are hiding in plain sight.”

Note how he claims that the majority of researchers deny the existence of spirochetal cystic forms. Denial is defined as knowing that something exists, but deliberately refusing to acknowledge it for ulterior motives.  By putting “endowments” between question marks, he implies that Big Pharma bribes universities and publishers into censoring the very existence of spirochetal cysts from medical textbooks.

And if you think Dr. MacDonald is a lone loon, read the fascinating and terrible personal story and Lyme-vs-MS lecture by microbiologist and Borrelia expert Tom Grier. He says MS is merely a symptom of Lyme disease and not a disease onto itself. And he says the medical establishment is arrogant, ignorant and corrupt:

Also listen to the below audio. Tom explains in these MP3′s all you need to know about Lyme disease – including why Lyme tests routinely come back false negative – it’s all deliberate and it’s getting worse. Medical politics. And remember that Tom as a microbiologist sticks to the traditional textbook curriculum on the transmission of Lyme – by ticks. However, it has been established that a wide variety of bugs can at least carry the disease – and that it even is found in human semen, blood, urine and saliva. This would explain why MS statistically ever-so-slightly can “run in the family”.  It may partially be caused by a genetic propensity for not being able to clear the infection, but it may also be because bed bugs, fleas, lice, mosquito’s and sexual intercourse or even mere kissing can possibly transmit the bacterium to a lesser extent as Ixodes ricinus ticks can. However, medical research shows that while on antibiotics, no human-to-human transmission is likely.

(60, 50 and 72 MB)

But surely, there must be evidence of this corruption? There is, but it is hard to find and one has to read between the lines. We discovered some evidence, by chance, in training material not intended for the general public. We found on a Dutch radiology site a lecture, in English by Frederik Barkhof, M.D. Mr. Barkhof has been on the receiving end of a lot of Big Pharma money for his research into MS, research severely prejudiced against the infectious theory of MS.  I’m not saying that he deliberately researches the wrong things, I’m saying that Big Pharma cherishes those who do. His lectures are used to “educate” the country’s radiologists, who are sternly warned to tow the party line when it comes to the cause of brain lesions:

What we found is deeply worrying. The radiologists are instructed in ominous, derogatory language never to disagree with the “suspicion of MS”. So when the doctor says:  “I think it should be MS”, the radiologist should just shut up and agree, even if he disagrees and thinks it’s Lyme disease. So that later, when it turns out to be Lyme after all, the doctor can say: “But the radiologist also thought it was MS!”. The result is that Lyme as a cause for MS will remain denied – by orders from above, citing statistics of “Lyme causing MS-like symptoms is rare, so never diagnose the cause as Lyme”. Statistics based on false assumptions, statistics used to disallow rectifying those same faulty statistics. So the actual evidence inside the brain, seen by the radiologist who scrutinizes those pictures all the time and is qualified, by his training and vast experience and feedback of actual diagnoses from hundreds of doctors treating thousands of patients, is thrown into the garbage. Ignored. We now know that it is national policy in the Netherlands to intimidate radiologists into keeping silent about their own diagnoses of Lyme neuroborreliosis when their instructions are “MS”. It’s usually the infectious disease specialist that gives that instruction, voiced as a “suspicion”. The ID specialist is urged to “suspect MS” by his hospital, which is contractually bound to “suspect MS” by their insurance company. Whether it’s private or government insurance is of no consequence because both are under the control of “advisory boards” controlled by Big Pharma. Big Pharma “owns” key politicians as well. There is plenty reason to believe that the Dutch policy is set from above and reflects in fact EU and US policy. The Dutch were just sloppy enough to leave a trace. Because this rare piece of evidence may be removed, we mirrored the lecture here.

The instruction to new radiologists literally is: “There must be other ways to impress your colleagues”. As in: “Don’t be a wise guy and know your place”. They must have had “trouble” with “wise guys” before. A Radiologist’s Lyme diagnosis is of no value and has to be self-censored when the MD that requested the MRI suspects it is MS. Otherwise the Radiologist is just looking for attention, “trying to impress his colleagues”. Because “Lyme is much rarer than MS”. Yeah. Based on the opinion of doctors, based on statistics those doctors made up out of thin air, based on their baseless opinions. Not on actual scientific research. The actual research always finds spirochetes in MS’s patients brains. Except when this “research” is paid for by companies selling symptom relievers for MS and other neurological syndromes. We found 25 (twenty-five) studies where living Lyme bacteria were found in the brains of Multiple Sclerosis patients. We list twenty in this article and we make an additional five of the most recent research studies available for download as PDF’s further on. I remind you that even when taking the “debunking” studies at face value, absence of evidence in some studies is not at all evidence of absence in the real world (spirochetes in the brain of MS patients), especially not because of the simultaneous presence of undeniable evidence, shown in the studies summarized later.

“Ruling the medical machine by decree” is the norm everywhere. Dissidents must have mental issues, they’re “trying to impress their colleagues”. Noone in the modern western medical machine cares, or is allowed to care, about medical science. Everything is geared towards maximizing Big Pharma’s profits and paying tribute to the royally remunerated “experts” in their ivory towers. Doctors have degenerated into vulgar drug pushers with a veneer of professional legitimacy. The grim reality is that Western doctors are wholly disinterested in their profession or their patients’ wellbeing and even if they are, they lack the guts to stand up against the machine. And even if they would, they would get crushed like those few that do rebel and find themselves made examples of.

Millions of people suffer from “Multiple sclerosis”. It slowly rots the central nervous system. And that’s when you’re lucky. Because it can also kill quickly. Quick or slow, it is a most horrible way to die and the fact that this suffering is wholly preventable and that this fact has been willfully suppressed and ignored for ten decades is a scandal worthy of reconsidering the remarkable, undeserved immunity that the medical world enjoys. Only in the most egregious cases of direct medical negligence are there usually mild consequences for the offender. But what about the preventable deaths and suffering of countless thousands of MS patients every year? Wikipedia, citing this study, says: “Two thirds of the deaths in people with MS are directly related to the consequences of the disease”. That’s a 66% mortality rate, making MS one of the deadliest diseases – more lethal than HIV infection and cancer.  This Norwegian study puts it at at least 34% but says that how much more than 34% is hard to say because the coroner puts “misleading information” in the death certificate instead of MS. And of course they could not follow the entire group to their deaths, so more will have died due to MS after the study ended. About one in a thousand people in geographically affected area’s have MS. Conservatively, that amount to at least ten million people, of which around six and a half million will die due to the disease. A  wholly unneccessary, Holocaust-size scandal of agony and death, repeating over and over again – and it’s getting worse.

The painful truth is: There is no such thing as Multiple Sclerosis. It’s the name of a symptom. A symptom of a disease of “unknown” cause. But the real cause has been known for a hundred years: The spirochete Bb s.l., Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme neuroborreliosis, Lyme disease. MS doesn’t exist. MS is Lyme neuroborreliosis. MS is Lyme disease. It’s a bacterial infection you can get from a tick bite.

Noone in the MS patient advocacy community or in the MS research community, let alone the self-appointed “MS expert” doctors will react favorably when you mention the proven cause of MS – Lyme spirochetes. MS patients don’t like to see themselves as “infected with a tick bacillus”. A worrisome concept indeed, and of course even though the cause of MS is officially “unknown”, the “expert” will dismiss any involvement of bacteria in the strongest of terms. Those “experts”, knowing full well that they have no clue, fear any challenge to their authority and often choose the attack as their best defense. They know all too well their only task is to prescribe useless pills. Big Pharma would like to keep their monopoly on symptom relievers till there are no humans left on this planet to cheat out of their money. The MS advocacy groups and societies will politely ask you to keep your rather unpopular opinion to yourself. You’ll be at best considered eccentric and at worst a delusional nuisance.

But were those fifteen researchers who found living Lyme bacteria in the brains of a great majority of Multiple sclerosis patients all lying?

1911 Buzzard Spirochetes in MS. Lancet 1913 Bullock MS Agent in Rabbits. Lancet 1917 Steiner Spirochetes The Cause of MS. Med Kiln 1918 Simmering Spirochetes in MS by Darkfield Micro 1918 Steiner G. Guinea Pig Inoculation with MS infectious agent from Human 1919 Steiner MS Agent Inoculation into Monkeys 1921 Gye F. MS Agent In Rabbits Brain 14:213 1922 Kaberlah MS Agent In Rabbits. Deutch Med Works 1922 Sicard MS Spirochetes in Animal Model. Rev Neurol 1922 Stepanopoulo Spirochetes in the CSF of MS Patients 1923 Schlossman MS Agent in Animal Model. Rev Neuro 1924 Blacklock MS Agent in Animals. Journal of Path and Bac 1927 Wilson The Rat as A Carrier of MS. British Med Journal 1927 Steiner G Understanding the Pathogenesis of MS 1928 Steiner Spirochetes in the Human Brain of MS Patients 1933 Simons Spirochetes in the CSF of MS Patients 1939 Hassin Spirochete-like formations in MS 1948 Adams Spirochetes within the Ventricle Fluid of Monkeys Inoculated from Human MS 1952 Steiner Acute Plaques in MS and The Pathogenic Role of Spirochetes as the Etiological Factor. Journal of Neuropathology Exp Med 11: No 4:343 1954 Steiner Morphology of Spirochaeta Myelophthora (Myelin Loving). MS Journal of Neuropathology and Exp Neurol 11:4 343 1954 1957 Ichelson R. Cultivation of Spirochetes from Spinal Fluids of MS Cases with Negative Controls. Procl. Soc. Exp. Biol Med 70:411

Even publications trying to debunk the spirochetal etiology of MS had to face the inconvenient facts:

Can we trust these old studies? Critics sneer that since some other researchers failed to culture the spirochete, the bacteria found, photographed wriggling under the microscope must have been Fata morgana’s. What to do with those pesky scientists, “trying to impress their colleagues”? In the end, the noisy negativists just don’t believe the results. This is a common phenomenon in science: The establishment hates to step from their pedestal and will, due to  disinterest, incompetence and stake at a failed outcome botch reproducing research, to announce that the original publication wasn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. They had the chutzpa to do this with dozens of scientists who found spirochetes in MS patients’ brains. This kind of monkey-behavior is the norm in science. I refer to Pons and Fleischman – now thoroughly vindicated – but their field still suffers from lingering ridicule – and even legalized boycotts by Big Oil.

We now know that it’s devilishly hard to culture spirochetes, and that they simply weren’t able to do it in those days.

If MS patients really do have living Lyme bacteria in the brain, surely there must be recent findings too, from respected researchers in a variety of Western countries, using state-of-the-art methods? There must be high-resolution photographs of the actual, living Borrelia spirochetes cultured from the brains of those people?

Sure there are! In spite of the ongoing onslaught against such investigations, there still are researchers naive or brave enough to venture into the career-destroying terrain of rediscovering the cause for diseases that have become major money makers for their exploiters. So yes, there are plenty of modern studies, reporting live Lyme bacteria in the brain of MS patients.

Medical research hidden from the public

I had to purchase two of these studies under the condition that I would not make them available in any way, shape or form. This is a standard condition, when buying the right to read it from an online database. The research is “eyes only”, so to speak. Not intended to become known to the plebs. They may get nervous, see. Becoming a nuisance and all. It was only recently, that the entire world’s scientific research has become locked up in databases owned by multinational publishing giants, asking ridiculous fees for a few pages copied from a journal. So I had to commit the crime of violating Copyright Law, because the two I purchased ($48,- and $31,-) were the most interesting ones – one included pictures of the actual pathogen – the Borrelia bacteria in their cysts, and Borreliae expelling their DNA granules. Note how the research that MS has nothing to do with bacterial infection is freely available on the web. This research is copied and pasted freely by its proponents, and the medical databases – publishers owned by Big Pharma – don’t seem to mind the violation of Copyright. Done by a MS disinfo-expert from a EU country. Interestingly, the only countries publishing recent research into the link MS – Lyme are a outside the iron fist of mainstream medicine – outside the EU. Norway is not in the EU. Neither is Switzerland. Neither were Poland and Romania, at the time the research was done. It’s a familiar pattern. Helicobacter Pylori, the cause of 95% of all peptic ulcers, also was discovered in 1958 by a “rebel” from a country at the fringe of mainstreamness – Greece. He barely got away with experimenting with antibiotics without being revoked their medical licenses for “malpractice”. John Lykoudis was fought every step of the way by the establishment:

“He encounter[ed] formidable obstacles in convincing the medical establishment, the Greek regulatory authorities and the pharmaceutical industry. In fact, Lykoudis spent the rest of his life engaged in incessant activity to propagate his treatment of PUD and gastritis. His archives, some made recently available by his family, make it clear that he was fully aware of the importance of his discoveries. They also convey an almost suffocating sense of frustration…”

“[He was] completely shunned by the medical establishment of his time, or at best, considered an eccentric provincial physician…”

…he was referred for disciplinary action to the Athens Medical Association, of which he was a member, ‘because (a) he prepared and distributed an unapproved medicinal preparation…and (b) he made his method publicly known to attract patients’…On 6 November 1968…the Disciplinary Committee, presided over by a neurology professor, fined him 4000 drachmas…

A more serious problem for Lykoudis was his indictment in the Greek Courts.

“In 1966, Lykoudis attempted to publish his observations in the Journal of the American Medical Association, but his manuscript entitled “Ulcer of the Stomach and Duodenum” was rejected…Unfortunately, no copy of this manuscript survives for re-evaluation in the light of current knowledge.”

In the latter instance numerous former patients came to his support; one of them testified that Lykoudis “treated also many poor ulcer patients free of charge.”  We are not told the outcome of the indictment.

Lykoudis died in 1980 without knowing that he would soon be vindicated.

It’s a familiar fate of innovators in medical science – victims of the Semmelweis reflex, an expression of mob behavior amongst primates. Ignace Philipp Semmelweis met a similar fate, as well as many others before and after him. The problem with medicine is the fact that it’s based on dogma’s, adhered to by people of mostly barely above-average intelligence.

Here is recent research showing that MS is in fact Lyme disease – download them, print them and show them to your “expert” – likely to no avail:

1986 (USA): Relapsing fever/Lyme disease – Multiple sclerosis. Medical Hypotheses, volume 21, issue 3,  pages 335-343

Synopsis: In MS, the plaques have their origin around veins in the central nervous system. This corresponds with the lesions found in neuroborreliosis. The geographical spread of MS correlates strongly with mean annual temperature. The geographical distribution of the ticks that transmit Lyme disease have a similar geographical distribution. There have been MS “epidemics” in the past where 40 times more cases of MS occurred than normal. Those epidemics appear to correlate with the large-scale introduction of dogs or other animals that are hosts for ticks. Postulates that Borrelia spirochetes may be acting as the trigger in MS, setting off an autoimmune reaction in which patients produce antibodies that attack their own nerve fibers. Mentions that Borrelia eat myelin as well. Notes how many particular and peculiar Lyme symptoms are shared with MS symptoms. Mentions a small study in which two out of eight MS patients tested positive for Lyme disease.

2000 (Poland): Lyme borreliosis and Multiple sclerosis: Any Connection? A Seroepidemic study. Ann Agric Environ Med. issue 7, 141-143

Synopsis: 10 out of 26 MS patients tested positive for Lyme borreliosis. Notes how it is virtually impossible to make a distinction between late stage Lyme disease and Multiple sclerosis, not even with MRI. Diagnosis of MS vs. late stage neuroborreliosis are guesswork – there are no reliable tests for either. Conclusion: Multiple sclerosis may often be associated with Borrelia infection.

2001 (Norway): Association between Multiple sclerosis and Cystic Structures in Cerebrospinal Fluid. Infect 29:315

Synopsis: Borrelia cysts were found in all ten out of ten patients diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. No bacteria were found in a control group. The most modern methods such as a transmission electron microscope were used by a specialist in this narrow field – this may explain why a 100% infection rate was found by Brorson, as opposed to lower rates in other research. The cysts turned into spirochetal bacteria when cultured. Remarks that the bacterial infection theory of MS was abandoned because antibiotics did not help. Remarks that Borrelia bacteria have mechanisms to evade the immune system and survive antibiotics, and offers research evidence for that. Concludes that all ten MS patients have been infected with a spirochete. Dismisses the common criticism that “all those MS patients were also infected with an unrelated Lyme disease” by pointing out how unlikely that is, especially seen the ample research evidence for a spirochetal cause of MS. Concludes that MS could very well be a chronic infection. Points out that there is microbiological and clinical evidence that spirochetal bacteria could be the cause of MS. Notes that the spirochetes may not necessarily be of the genus Borrelia burgdorferi. The chance that 100% of MS patients would also have Lyme neuroborreliosis is astronomically small – about one in 1000^10, a smaller chance to find a speck of dust lost in the Universe. Epidemiologically speaking, Brorson’s findings are near-absolute proof that MS is caused by spirochetal bacteria.

2004 (Switzerland): Chronic Lyme borreliosis at the root of Multiple sclerosis – is a cure with antibiotics attainable?

Synopsis: Notes that worldwide, MS prevalence parallels the distribution of the Lyme disease pathogen Borrelia burgdorferi, and in America and Europe, the birth excesses of those individuals who later in life develop MS, exactly mirror the seasonal distributions of Borrelia transmitting Ixodes ticks. No other disease exhibits equally marked epidemiological clusters by season and locality. Cites research whereby spirochetes were found in the brains of MS patients as early as 1928, and that in over 250 control cases of diversified diseases there never were spirochetes found. Notes that this research has been successfully replicated decades later by different scientists. Points out that a considerable body of clinical evidence supports the concept that cystic L-forms of Borrelia Burgdorferi may cause MS. Dismisses skepticism towards this concept with science-based arguments. Dismisses the hypothesis of genetic origin of MS using scientific research data. Includes graphs showing a direct correlation between the number of MS patients and the number of ticks transmitting Lyme disease. Dismisses the “environmental toxin” hypothesis of MS using scientific research data. Explains how Borrelia could cause all MS symptoms. Recommends trials with antibiotics for MS patients.

2009 (Romania): Controversies in late Neuroborreliosis and Multiple sclerosis – case series

Synopsis: Found a significant percentage of people diagnosed with MS in fact having neuro-Lyme. Concludes that it is probable that MS is caused by an infectious agent and recommends testing MS patients for Lyme disease.

Bacteria are the cause of Alzheimer’s as well

So much more could be written about this subject. Such as the fact that spinal cord lesions together with a lesion in the cerebellum or brainstem is very rare in neurological diseases and almost exclusively occurs in only MS and Lyme disease. There is a lot of hard evidence that Fibromyalgia, Parkinson’s, CFS, Lupus, Crohn’s ME, Pick’s disease (FTD, Frontotemporal dementia), Alzheimers’ disease and ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) are also caused by spirochetal bacteria. 14 out of 16 deceased Alzheimer’s patients had living Treponema spirochetes in their brain. Please people – it is not normal to have bacteria in your brain! The only result can be brain damage of a type and pace commensurate with the type of bacterium and the state of your immune system and personal genetics. Countless millions of people dying the most horrific slow deaths due to infections that are near-impossible to detect with currently employed diagnostic methods, but certainly treatable in the sense that further deterioration can usually be stopped and often even reversed in clinical trials and anecdotal evidence:

(Patients with ALS and MS improved on antibiotics)

These graphs show a worldwide, strong, direct connection between the number of ticks transmitting Lyme disease and the birth excess of MS patients. The evidence is everywhere and we should demand proper treatment for MS: Antibiotics. The Swiss study has a geographical map with MS prevalence that explains why for example the Sami and the Inuit don’t get MS: It’s too cold for ticks in Lapland. But Big Pharma keeps searching for a “genetic” or “auto-immune” cause..

In the heydays of medical and general scientific research, anyone with enough money, time and skill could test a postulation in their own lab. You only fully realize how dependent we are on Big Pharma to do our research for us when faced with the fact that it is a criminal offence to culture bacteria without a license (“Terrorist bioweapon production”). And it’s a criminal offence to sell antibiotics without a license.  And it’s a criminal offence for a pharmacy to sell anyone with antibiotics without a prescription. And it’s a criminal offence to smuggle antibiotics into a country. And it’s a criminal offence to give medical advice without a license. Even though it’s a fact that antibiotic resistance emerged due to under-use, not over-use, of antibiotics. Tuberculosis is an example of that. Doctors don’t understand microbiology and antibiotics are too extortionally expensive to be used long enough to cure many infections.  They merely entrench into the CNS where they emerge as serious syndromes, years later. In short: It is a criminal offence for any non-MD to find  the cure for MS. And MD’s who try will be sued for “malpractice” – “over-prescribing of antibiotics”.

Rent-seeking pharmaceutical multinationals

We’re being increasingly curtailed, medically. In the year 2000 the Netherlands proposed making the import, without a license, of a test that can test for potentially deadly diseases a criminal offence punishable by at most two years in jail. I was flabbergasted when I heard it and I do not know whether that law actually silently went on the books, to be used as a trump card when some millionaire tries to sue some “experts” for malpractice. Big Pharma’s enforcers need to feel safe. To Big Pharma, you are most profitable when you die very slowly – but silently! God forbid you’d be able to prove in court that you’ve been misdiagnosed! Tiny US protectorates such as the Netherlands and Norway are at the forefront of implementing Big Pharma’s dictates. Norway implemented the full Codex Alimentarius ruleset decades ago, based on the recommendations of an advisory board, staffed with people with daytime jobs in the pharmaceutical industry. All vitamins and minerals are restricted drugs in Norway, requiring a license to import. No company except the largest corporations are granted such a license to import in clinically significant amounts. Making it a criminal offence (max. three months in prison) to import a significant quantity of vitamin C. “Statens Legemiddelverk” will always decline a license and casually mention that attempting to import any commercially significant amount of vitamin C is a criminal act. I have their letter to prove it.

What can you do to get proper “MS” treatment?

MS “experts” will keep resisting the truth to the point of absurdity. They will first come with the hilarious claim that every MS patient in the study also had Lyme neuroborreliosis and that both are separate, unrelated illnesses. When the statistical impossibility is pointed out to them, they’ll insist that finding living Lyme bacteria in people’s brains is perfectly normal. They will claim that antibiotics help MS patients because they “reduce inflammation”, but that Big Pharma has much better “inflammation reducers” (a few thousand times more expensive than generic, unpatentable Doxycycline). They’ll say that the few dozen scientists who published the above research are conspiracy nuts. Whatever it takes. They’ll lie, and say that a few weeks of antibiotics kills any bacteria in the CNS. A most hilarious statement, given that it takes even years to clear up acne with antibiotics, let alone the immune-privileged CNS, where no T-cells circulate and where most antibiotics can’t even reach. They’ll lie and say that their negative tests can be relied upon. They’ll lie, and say that a tick bite followed by a bullseye rash is the only way you can get Lyme disease. And perhaps in the very far future, when finally the truth can’t be suppressed any longer, they’ll shrug it all off as a technicality, a “we couldn’t have known because the research was flawed”, a misunderstanding, a non-issue and will reluctantly prescribe some atrociously expensive antibiotic that will be the only one “approved” for MS.

When you have been diagnosed as having one of the CNS syndromes mentioned above, you or your loved ones should insist on the following:

- The most reliable testing for Lyme disease attainable. Beware: Even the best tests are woefully unreliable (false negatives due to deliberate test mis-design). If it means sending serum or lumbar fluid to another lab, your “expert” should allow this. If not, find another “expert”.

- When testing positive for Lyme, insist on the best treatment attainable. In most cases this means open-ended treatment. At least years, but likely a life-long regimen of high-dosed blood-brain-barrier penetrating antibiotics. If your “expert” won’t go along with this, find another “expert”. Threatening legal action is useless – MD’s spend a lot of time in University learning all the dirty tricks on how to cover their ass.

- Ask your “expert” to do a trial with oral antibiotics. Do not get fooled into taking only abx that can’t reach the CNS! Doxycycline can be used if you don’t get much sun exposure, otherwise Minocycline is about the sole other oral option. If your “expert” doesn’t agree, find another “expert”. However they’re a dime a dozen and they’re nearly all useless. You may have to seek diagnosis and treatment abroad. Please note that people with serious CNS involvement (such as ALS patients) can easily be killed by a strong Jarish-Herxheimer reaction, so please do your homework before starting antibiotic therapy. Since antibiotic resistance is very uncommon in Borreliae, a very slow increasing of the antibiotic dosage should be done, to keep the “herx” within safe bounds. Be advised that antibiotic therapy often causes new lesions initially, while others diminish in size, so symptoms may first exacerbate before they get less. All this takes months, so don’t get discouraged prematurely. You likely will have to be on antibiotics for the rest of your life and progress is measured month-by-month, on an overall, average basis.

- If you are completely unable to obtain proper diagnosis and treatment, you can, as a last resort, source Doxycycline from one of the few countries where it still is not a criminal offence to sell antibiotics without prescription. You’d have to commit the criminal offence of smuggling it into your own country – but your life may depend on it. Treating yourself with such antibiotics is not an offence – yet – but it may land you a psychiatric diagnosis of “severe delusional parasitosis endangering the patient’s life” if your doctor finds out. People have been locked up in asylumns and force-medicated (unfortunately with the wrong medications) for less.

Medical studies that show antibiotics help against Multiple Sclerosis

There are a few studies (such as this PDF about Minocycline against Multiple Sclerosis) that show that antibiotics work, so that’s not too controversial any more. What remains controversial is why antibiotics work. People, including medical doctors, like to interpret facts in such a way that their world view doesn’t get demolished. Doctors like to believe that infections are not the cause of neurological problems. That simply is too disturbing a thought. So when antibiotics are proven to stop and even reverse the symptoms of MS, they are quick to deny any relation to bacteria, but claim: “It must be some antiinflammatory effect of the antibiotics”. The first study shows that antibiotics as a treatment for MS work:

Targeting leukocyte MMPs and transmigration: Minocycline as a potential therapy for multiple sclerosis.

Brundula V, Rewcastle NB, Metz LM, Bernard CC, Yong VW.

Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Calgary, Canada. Multiple sclerosis is characterized by the infiltration of leukocytes into the CNS. As matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) facilitate the passage of leukocytes across matrix barriers, we tested the hypothesis that targeting MMPs could attenuate neuro-inflammation. We report that minocycline, a widely used generic drug with a good safety record, inhibited MMP activity, reduced production of MMP-9 and decreased the transmigration of T lymphocytes across a fibronectin matrix barrier. In addition, minocycline was efficacious against both mild and severe experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) in mice, an animal model of multiple sclerosis. When severe EAE was produced, minocycline pre-treatment delayed the course of the disease: when maximal disease activity occurred in vehicle-treated EAE mice, minocycline animals were relatively normal and had minimal signs of inflammation and demyelination in the CNS. When tested in mice afflicted with mild EAE, minocycline attenuated the clinical severity of disease throughout the course of treatment. These results indicate that minocycline may constitute a safe and inexpensive therapy for multiple sclerosis.

PMID: 12023318 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

Borderliners are people with unhealed third degree burns to their emotional system. This means that a borderliner is in a constant state of emotional suffering of varying intensity. This suffering is so great and the societal and personal consequences of their peculiar character are so severe, that about one in ten borderliners eventually commits suicide. The emotional pain suffered by a bordeliner is such that they may be willing to exchange their predicament with a terminal cancer patient, as long as they would be emotionally “whole”. In essence, the self-aware borderliner can’t imagine a greater pain. Sadly, the borderliner, even when given genuine affection, usually feels uncomfortable with it or experiences it as insincere.

BPD improves with age

Borderliners’ wide spectrum of problems can’t be blamed on bad genes, narcissism or carelessness. They often don’t finish an education, hold a job or stay in a relationship – and there is nothing they can do about it. The borderliner’s psyche is that of an emotionally shell-shocked person. If you were to throw a firecracker at the heels of a person with a war trauma, he’ll take cover, initially, while you’d better beat a hasty retreat or experience his fury. No matter how often you tell a person with BPD to “just forget about the past, chill out and start enjoying life” – this won’t work.  A borderliner’s efforts to ignore the problem, apply himself and be like a normal person remain fruitless, because the borderliner is not just in a “state of mind”. We can make the analogy that it is more a hardware problem, than a software problem. As a child, the emotional processing part of the borderliners’ brain did not develop properly. Some parts were undeveloped and certain coping- and defence mechanisms became overdeveloped. It is impossible to fully rewire those neuronal pathways, but things can in fact be done to slowly revert some of the damage. And borderliners mellow with age as well.

BPD is extremely difficult to treat because the abberant neural pathways were formed in early childhood and reinforced for years afterward, in the child’s most sensitive formative period. These abnormalities are real and visible in brain scans – both of brain stucture and activity. We can’t really speak of abnormalities for they likely are sanity- and even life-preserving coping mechanisms that have proven beneficial to the borderliner as the target of abuse. To the pre-borderline child, the environment appears chronically life-threatening and there is no help available (on the contrary) from the family. These survival mechanisms cope with the abuse either actively (agressive-defensive behavior) or passively (social withdrawal and emotional coping strategies such as the creation of a fantasy world in which the borderliner is a loved and respected hero). In the borderliner, some important emotional neuronal pathways have never formed, such as feeling comfortable when  given affection, and the ability to express their own desire for closeness. Whereas schizoids and psychopaths are usually content with their personality disorders and in fact consider “normals” to be impaired by their emotions or concience, borderliners are constantly aware of their “strangeness”. They are unhappy misfits. They are hypersensitive, badly control their emotions and may have feelings of inferiority. And if you’d ask a borderliner: “What makes you happy”, they’d likely say: “Nothing, really”. Most borderliners don’t have the ability to be truly happy, not even for a short while.

Essentially, BPD is what happens to a person when you spend years mentally and physically torturing them from early childhood. The torture consists at least in withholding all physical and verbal expressions of love, and often it there is the active component of telling the child that he is hated and worthless. Broken promises, emotional neglect and verbal abuse. Often, threats are made of various types, such as to harm or kill the child or expel it from the house. Borderliners often were regularly beaten or even sexually abused and generally have been treated without a modicum of emotional support or even a basic respect for them as a human being with feelings.  The most irrepairable damage, the most vicious torture of all is the near-total absence of parental closeness. Instead  there is rude verbal and physical rejection of the infant, resulting in the absence of any kind of bonding. This leaves severe, permanent scars and is perhaps the main cause of BPD. A classic example of the background and behavior of a person with BPD is here. Many ignorant comments by armchair psychologists, blaming the victim, assuming it’s all a trivially solved attitude problem of a selfish and lazy narcissist, instead of severe brain damage caused by years of extreme child abuse.

Ironically, the overwhelming underlying cause for such a childhood is personality disorders in their parents. An example would be a passive father who for some reason (drug addiction, illness, disability) doesn’t participate in the childrearing an overbearing, highly controlling mother with Aspergers syndrome.  Some parents treat the child as an annoying object they are stuck with, a frustrating entity with unfortunately a mind of its own. This sometimes rebellious, attention-craving little person should be turned into an obedient drone who follows strict schedules and procedures, robbing it of everything that makes it a person. Privacy is denied. Myriads of rules and restrictions are imposed and punishments inflicted at the slightest infraction. Any form of affection is withheld. Physical contact is taboo, except when it can’t be avoided, and then it is done with coarse indifference or annoyed hostility. Emotional closeness is zero. The child will feel under permanent threat and constant surveillance. It comes to realize it has no rights, only duties. It is denied its basic humanity. There is no refuge. No alternative ways of receiving or expressing affection are available. The infant grows up a feral child concerning matters to do with love. To ward off insanity, coping mechanisms develop. The borderliner withdraws in solitary hobbies and lying becomes second nature, such as not to provoke anger in people with power over him. Petty theft such as shoplifting occurs as a surrogate for “receiving something nice”. The child retracts into fantasy world of its own making in which it is the center of positive attention, admired and respected by all. Terrible nightmares are common, such as dreams in which the child is chased and killed by a parent.

Borderliners need love and want to give it, too

Borderliners are misunderstood. Some call them “emotional vampires”, a bottomless pit for love, a one-way street, unable to reciprocate on affection, using people for temporary relief and discarding them as used bubble gum. The borderline person comes across that way due to a total lack of love throughout their entire childhood. It should not come as a surprise that borderliners have one gigantic need: The need to feel loved. No person has a greater need for genuine affection than the borderliner. A borderliner needs love like a person with scurvy needs vitamin C. And they desperately want to give themselves to those they feel affection for – but they often have great difficulty doing so. Borderliners are so emotionally insecure that it is easy to hurt them. And because they have never experienced the safety of the knowledge of being loved, they’ll “split” you one way or the other: They will immediately and often permanently reclassify you from “friendly” to “hostile”, and a small perceived slight can terminate a relationship before it had a chance to come to fruition.

This oversensitive black-and-white thinking may make borderliners look “needy”, but that would be oversimplification.  Their sense of belonging in the relationship need regular reinforcement in the form of tenderly expressed physical affection and a genuine interest in, and respect of their persona. If that condition is fulfilled, they can become loyal partners, even when things aren’t always perfect. in the relationship. Borderliners do very badly with people who make careless hurtful remarks or who are unable to regularly express affection. A borderliner’s fragile sense of acceptence easily becomes a feeling of being a tolerated burden. He will never again want to be an undesirable element and thus will crudely cancel a relationship in which he is hurt once too often.

Self-treating Borderline Personality Disorder

There are ways in which the borderliner can undo a little of the damage inflicted to him. The best thing a borderliner can do to partially heal himself is to be around people who give him the feeling of being loved and accepted. The more a borderliner experiences affection, the more often he is treated kindly, the more self esteem and confidence is built up. The fragile self  is slowly bolstered and it becomes possible to see people as more colorful entities than merely black and white, good or bad, loving or indifferent.

Such a therapy is very hard to attain. I know someone – a classical case of Borderline Personality – who was seriously contemplating suicide. During a long phone conversation I suggested him to go on a long holiday instead. He ended up quitting his job, selling most of his belongings and embarking on a long journey of working his way around the world. Originally an office worker, he held various more glamorous jobs such as windsurfing instructor and he had many flings and short relationships. This way, he learnt that he could be a desirable, respected, loved person. He was significantly “deprogrammed” after years of living that way. His partners initially suffered the consequences of dealing with an emotional invalid, but his travels eventually boosted his self confidence and made relatively stable love relationships possible for him. The likelihood of accelerated improvement is increased when the borderliner understands what it is that ails him. But they are damaged goods and they always will be.