462. On the Kindness of Strangers – by Robert Yoho, MD

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Summary

● My health has deteriorated sharply over the past six months. The fatigue borders on prostration, and the weakness has ended my climbing and hollowed out my gym workouts.

● I blamed Lyme disease. Advisors I trust read my new serology panel as the echo of an old infection rather than proof of an active one, and my DNA results agree with them: every organism tested negative by PCR.

● My six-week trial of Miracle Mineral Solution (chlorine dioxide) was marked by a sharp worsening of my Parkinson’s tremor and balance. I now read this as oxidative injury to my substantia nigra and as a lesson about my own sensitivity.

● A longtime reader, an entrepreneur who has studied alternative medicine for decades, brought me a set of treatments for both diseases. He reports recovering from 20 years of documented Lyme in a handful of days.

● I have decided to spend next week at the Biologix Center in Franklin, Tennessee, under the physician who developed the phage method, rather than attempt the protocol alone.

● Below, I lay out the evidence for each idea, including contacts, costs, and my assessment of where the science stands.

The policy that keeps saving my life

Blanche DuBois, at the close of A Streetcar Named Desire, tells the doctor leading her away that she has always depended on the kindness of strangers. She meant it as surrender. I mean it as strategy.

My policy is radical transparency. I publish my diagnoses, my mistakes, my lab values, and my half-formed plans, and I let the whole readership watch me think. That openness has handed me friendships and resources I would never have reached had I stayed sensibly covert. The secretive man protects his dignity and dies with his secret intact. The transparent man looks foolish for a while and might get saved by people he has never met.

I have experience with this. When my wife was dying of AL amyloidosis, a disease textbooks call incurable, the answer did not come from a famous center. It came from the network this newsletter built. Readers as far away as Australia, where Mark Kinnard walked me through the chemistry; Deb Butler in the Midwest; and from Great Britain, Becky Dutton pushed me toward the right surgeon and worked the problem with me. Together we reached the conclusion that turned everything around:

Judy’s mouth was the furnace. Her root canals were feeding a relentless inflammatory fire, and the amyloid followed the inflammation. The Australian dentist Robert Gammal had documented exactly this pattern in The Garbage Collector, his 700-reference indictment of root-canal dentistry, which catalogs one inflammatory and degenerative disease after another, each resolving once the dead, sealed-in teeth come out. His book showed me what my wife’s abscessed teeth were doing to her. A brilliant Spanish maxillofacial surgeon rebuilt her entire mouth with ceramic implants. Her “incurable” disease and her amyloidosis markers normalized.

She is alive because I told strangers everything. I write today’s report in the same spirit. I am sick; my two diagnoses are tangled together, and a stranger has once again arrived with a map. Watch me think.

Where I stand

For roughly six months, I have been sliding. The fatigue is the kind that empties a day before noon. I get to the gym and accomplish only a fraction of what I did a year ago. The climbing gym is finished for me because I have grown too weak to pull myself up anything. For a man who has built his identity around strength and stamina, this loss cuts to the bone.

I pinned it on Lyme disease. That story has a hole in it, and I owe you an explanation. Advisors I respect looked at my recent Vibrant panel and told me it reads like the fingerprint of an infection I cleared long ago, not the signature of a live one. My immunoglobulin M titers, the antibodies that rise in a fresh infection, were quiet. My immunoglobulin G bands, the memory antibodies that linger for years, showed elevations. Most telling, the PCR portion of the panel, which hunts for the actual DNA of the organisms, came back Not Detected across every single species: Borrelia burgdorferi, the relapsing-fever borreliae, Babesia, Bartonella, Anaplasma, and Ehrlichia, all negative. A body fighting a live spirochete infection tends to shed detectable organisms. Mine shed none.

I hold two facts in tension. My clinical picture screams that something is wrong. My testing whispers that the Lyme, whatever it once was, might be over. A careful man would tolerate that ambiguity. I am going to act anyway, and I will explain why once I have laid out the treatments.

The mistake I made with chlorine dioxide

First, a confession that doubles as a warning. Convinced my symptoms were Lyme, I ran a six-week course of Miracle Mineral Solution (chlorine dioxide), taking 21 drops each morning on an empty stomach. Chlorine dioxide is a strong oxidizer. Water utilities use it to disinfect, and paper mills use it to bleach. I thought the risks were non-existent, but I found out how fragile I was.

During those weeks, my Parkinson’s accelerated. My tremor grew, and my balance deteriorated. The advisors I trust attribute this to oxidation of my substantia nigra, the dopamine-producing region that Parkinson’s already strips bare. My dopaminergic neurons live and die by their vulnerability to oxidative stress, and I appear to be a man who oxidizes easily. A wiser protocol would have used the agent a few days a week, giving my antioxidant defenses time to recover between exposures, rather than hammering my brain daily. The damage has not reversed. I tell you this not to flagellate myself but because a reader somewhere is about to make the same daily-dosing error, and I would rather he learn it from my substantia nigra than from his own.

If you have pancreatic cancer or some other acute diagnosis, there may be an excuse to pound yourself with chlorine dioxide daily for a month or two, but I think for most people a little recovery every week is the smartest policy.

What I am taking now

I have not been idle while I plan the bigger moves.

I take Sugar Shift, the multi-ingredient probiotic that the citizen scientist Martha Carlin built. Her husband, John, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2002 and told to expect only decline. Martha, a former business turnaround expert, treated the disease as a systems problem and traced it into the gut. Her formula shifts the metabolism of dietary sugars toward mannitol, an antioxidant sugar alcohol, and rebalances the microbiome. John took it from 2017 until his recent demise from unrelated causes. He improved enough to shed the cane he had been leaning on, and by his wife’s account, he led bike groups in Colorado in his last years. When I interviewed Martha, she reminded me to stay on it. I have.

I also take Nutramedix herbal drops, a mainstay of the herbal approach to Lyme, and I am being screened for a fecal microbiota transplant to rebuild my microbiome from a healthy donor. That last item excites me most, because it rests on the firmest science of anything in this essay, and I will return to it.

The stranger with the map

A week ago, an 80-year-old longtime reader reached out. He is an entrepreneur who has founded and run companies, and he has spent his adult life studying alternative medicine with the intensity most people reserve for their careers. His message was, above all, optimistic, and optimism from a serious person is worth pausing to consider.

His own story is the headline. He had a documented history of Lyme disease for 20 years. His symptoms were severe and included brain infection symptoms of unstable emotions, including anger. He tried herbal regimens, including the well-known Cowden protocol I am on now, and, by his account, they failed him and most of the patients he watched try them. Then he found phage therapy and recovered in a few days. Two decades of illness, undone in less than a week. He is credible and has nothing to sell me.

He went further. He told me my Parkinson’s would probably improve with proper care. That is a foreign idea. Conventional neurology treats Parkinson’s as a one-way street. The standard of care manages symptoms with dopamine drugs and tells patients that the underlying loss of neurons will grind forward no matter what they do. No approved therapy reverses the degeneration. Within the last two months, I heard David Perlmutter, the celebrity neurologist, say on a live podcast that he has never seen a case of Parkinson’s reverse.

Perlmutter is no reflexive pessimist. He argues that Parkinson’s is largely a man-made, environmentally driven disease; he hosts researchers like Ray Dorsey who insist its rising incidence is preventable; and he leans more toward diet and lifestyle than most of his field. When a neurologist who is open to unconventional prevention still reports never once witnessing a reversal, the statement carries weight. My reader rejects that fatalism outright. His retort, when I raised Perlmutter, was that I would see my own case improve. I want to believe him with the discipline of a skeptic, so let me tell you what he sent, treatment by treatment, and show the evidence.

Referral one: the Lyme clinic and its phages

The clinic is the Biologix Center for Optimum Health at 554 Franklin Road, Franklin, Tennessee, about 20 minutes south of Nashville. Its founder, Dr. David Jernigan, is a doctor of natural medicine and a chiropractor who developed the method at the heart of my interest: Induced Native Phage Therapy (INPT). The clinic’s main line is 615-398-6196, the scheduling line is 855-955-1395, and the email is [email protected].

Ordinary phage therapy injects laboratory-grown viruses that hunt and kill a specific type of bacterium. Jernigan’s method claims to do something stranger. He proposes that every chronic bacterial infection already harbors its own native phages, dormant within the target organism, and that his signatures wake those phages so the bacterium destroys itself from within. Delivery is oral, with a few drops from small break-top ampules sipped through a straw several times a day for a few days. Jernigan reports that many infections clear within 12 to 24 hours and, because Borrelia produces no endotoxin, without the die-off misery of a Herxheimer reaction.

The published claims sound spectacular. Jernigan and colleagues published a retrospective in Cureus in 2021, covering the first 14 months of the method at one clinic. Of Borrelia-positive patients, roughly 92% tested negative after about four weeks. Jernigan owns PhagenCorp, the company that makes the product. The negative result was scored using the clinic’s own bioenergetic testing, a muscle-response method that mainstream laboratories do not accept as validated diagnostics, rather than by independent serology. A 92% cure rate, measured by the product’s owner using the owner’s unvalidated test, is not third-party proof. The bioenergetic testing used is well accepted in alternative circles, however.

The clinic’s online reputation splits along predictable lines. Its own site and social feeds brim with testimonials, including patients who report that years of chronic Lyme and mold illness resolved after intensive programs. The Better Business Bureau file also holds the other kind of review, including a patient who paid for a year and reported no results. Both are true at once, which is the shape of frontier medicine.

Programs run one to three weeks, and the clinic requires at least one week so its doctors have time to test and adjust. The fee for the first week was $7,200. Life Extension magazine has advertised discounts for its readers, 500 dollars off a two-week program and 750 dollars off a three-week program, which gives you the order of magnitude. Confirm current pricing directly, and ask what a week includes beyond the phages, because the center also sells hyperbaric oxygen, PEMF, ozone, and other add-ons.

You get to the science in Jernigan’s own words in his podcast interview on INPT. I watched it, and his sincerity comes through. That matters to me more than polish.

Would the phages cover my organisms?

I asked, if I skip the clinic and order the product through a physician, does the formula target every organism listed on my panel?

The relevant product is Inducen-LD/RF, the Lyme-plus-relapsing-fever formula, sold by PhagenCorp to licensed providers, not to patients. Its published target list is extensive, and I mapped it against my flagged results, band by band. My panel showed elevated immunoglobulin G to Borrelia burgdorferi across several proteins, with the OspC, p28, and OspB bands high enough to score in the risk range. It also showed cross-reactive elevations to Borrelia afzelii, a moderate signal for the relapsing-fever species Borrelia hermsii, a prior spike to Borrelia miyamotoi, and low-to-moderate co-infection signals for Bartonella henselae, Anaplasma phagocytophilum, and Ehrlichia chaffeensis. Every one of those organisms appears by name on the Inducen-LD/RF target list, which spans dozens of Borrelia, Bartonella, and Babesia species, along with Ehrlichia, the granulocytic anaplasmosis agent, and Borrelia cyst forms. According to the manufacturer’s stated scope, the formula covers my entire positive picture. The documented dose, printed on the product page, is one ampule by mouth twice daily.

The published mechanism is described in language that reads more like incantation than pharmacology, invoking photonic modulation and fractal regulatory frameworks. A companion paper from the same author stresses that the phage-induction effect is strain-specific: target one strain, and only that strain tests negative, while the others persist until targeted in turn. A broad cocktail naming 60 organisms contrasts with a mechanism that insists on precise, strain-by-strain targeting. And beneath it all hangs my PCR result. If no live DNA is present, there might be nothing left to clear.

The coverage question has a clean answer and a messy one. Cleanly, yes, the formula’s list includes all my organisms. Messily, my testing suggests the war might already be over, and the product’s own science argues that hitting the right strain is everything.

Why I am going in person anyway

I studied the option of ordering the phages myself. As a retired physician who resigned his license, I might not qualify as an eligible provider, but I have friends able to bridge that gap. I have decided against the whole workaround.

I reviewed Jernigan’s clinic in depth and concluded I am going to spend at least a week in Franklin, expense and all. My case is complex, with two diseases braided together, and his protocol is equally complex to match, layered with supportive therapies and sequencing I doubt I could reproduce from my kitchen, even with the vials in hand. His products look gentle enough that a person might take them all at once without toxicity, but gentleness is not the same as knowing what to take, in what order, and against which target. I want his evaluation, on me. Relying on his protégés in another city is second best. I would rather go to the source. The near-zero side-effect profile tips a doubtful indication into a reasonable bet: if the downside is small and the upside is my strength back, I cover my bases.

He has Parkinson’s testimonials on his website, and his staff said they treat it all the time successfully, so that’s another positive.

Referral two: plasmalogens for the Parkinson’s

The second referral goes after the Parkinson’s directly.

The clinician is Dr. John Whitcomb, MD, an internist and former emergency physician who now directs the Brookfield Longevity and Healthy Living Clinic at 17585 West North Avenue, Brookfield, Wisconsin. His office number is 262-784-5300, on Central time, and his staff answers phones Monday and Thursday and returns messages the rest of the week. He consults by phone in 30, 45, or 60-minute blocks, so no travel is required, and booking through him earns a 25% provider discount on the products. This is the easy first move, and I intend to make it soon.

Whitcomb is the clinical right-hand of Dr. Dayan Goodenowe, a biochemist who spent 30 years developing mass spectrometry tools to analyze blood and discovered that people with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s have low plasmalogen levels. Plasmalogens are a class of membrane lipids that decline with age and neurodegeneration, and the body cannot rebuild them from food. Goodenowe engineered precursors that the body converts into plasmalogens, sold as ProdromeNeuro (the omega-3 precursor aimed at gray matter and cognition) and ProdromeGlia (the omega-9 precursor aimed at myelin and white matter). His blood test, ProdromeScan, measures your plasmalogen levels for about $425 to $450, though it is optional because it would not change how Whitcomb treats me. Whitcomb reports neurodegenerative reversals, including a Parkinson’s case my reader cited, and he wrote a book, Fix Your Broken Brain, on the approach.

The preclinical Parkinson’s data are the strongest part of the plasmalogen story, with animal studies pointing to protection of dopaminergic function. The human clinical evidence is thin and early. Goodenowe’s own 2021 results, presented at an Alzheimer’s conference, reported that after four months of ProdromeNeuro, 73% of participants with mild to moderate cognitive impairment improved in cognition, mobility, or both. His 2022 study of 22 patients showed gains on a dementia rating scale as blood plasmalogens rose. Both were small, unblinded, uncontrolled, and conducted by the inventor of the product. The Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation concluded there is insufficient evidence to recommend plasmalogen supplementation, and no large randomized controlled trial has closed the question. The usual dose is two softgels daily, with an optional loading phase of four to eight, and the products cost on the order of 150 dollars a month. This is a promising off-label idea grounded in lipid biochemistry, which is well outside standard neurology.

The product supplements my reader recommended

ValAsta (astaxanthin). Astaxanthin is the red carotenoid that colors salmon and shrimp and is one of nature’s strongest antioxidants. It crosses the blood-brain barrier, which most antioxidants do not, and a robust preclinical literature shows it reduces neuroinflammation, supports mitochondrial function, and protects dopaminergic neurons in animal models of Parkinson’s. However, controlled trials in people are few, and a randomized trial of astaxanthin extract found no significant cognitive benefit at the doses tested. ValAsta is a patented form, a glucose-tagged astaxanthin in a liposomal olive-oil base, which its maker says improves absorption roughly eightfold. My reader doses by body weight, one milligram per kilogram per day, with more for an active problem, and warns against buying astaxanthin on Amazon because of label fraud. For me, the appeal is an anti-inflammatory that reaches the brain and lowers high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, targeting the inflammatory state of my Parkinson’s.

OSR#1 (emeramide, also called NBMI) is a lipophilic heavy-metal chelator developed by retired chemistry professor Boyd Haley. Its two thiol arms bind mercury and lead tightly; it crosses cell membranes and the blood-brain barrier, which conventional chelators cannot, and it raises glutathione, the body’s main intracellular antioxidant. The regulatory history matters. The Food and Drug Administration warned Haley in 2010 against selling OSR#1 as a dietary supplement. It has since moved into the drug pipeline as emeramide, with orphan-drug designation from both the FDA and the European Medicines Agency in 2012, Phase I and Phase II trials completed, and no marketing approval yet, leaving it in investigational and compassionate-use channels. Counterfeits sold online are labeled not for human consumption. I have been using it for 18 months. I take molybdenum alongside it to support sulfite oxidase. Given my apparent sensitivity to oxidation, a chelator that also raises glutathione makes sense to me. For more information about this subject search my Substack archives.

Methylene blue. I take 60 milligrams by mouth once a day. Low-dose methylene blue acts as an electron cycler in the mitochondrial electron transport chain, with antioxidant properties, and animal models of Parkinson’s show it protecting substantia nigra neurons and easing motor deficits. Human trials in Parkinson’s have not been done, so this too is a mechanistic bet rather than a proven one. No change is needed here, though I might discuss the intravenous route with one of these physicians.

The item with the best science: fecal transplant

My to do a fecal microbiota transplant has the best evidence in this whole essay. Several randomized, placebo-controlled trials have tested donor stool in Parkinson’s. A Chinese trial of 56 patients, published in 2023, reported improvement in Parkinson’s-related autonomic symptoms. The GUT-PARFECT trial at Ghent University, a phase 2 double-blind study published in eClinicalMedicine in 2024, found that a single transplant produced mild but long-lasting improvement in motor symptoms in early-stage patients. A larger randomized trial appeared in JAMA Neurology in 2024. The results are mixed and the effects are modest, but they are real, they are controlled, and the procedure has proven generally safe.

A note on evidence, since I am a physician writing to a physician-heavy audience

Here are the treatments ranked by how well they are grounded. The fecal transplant has multiple randomized controlled trials behind it. The plasmalogen and astaxanthin work rest on biochemistry and strong animal data, with human evidence that is preliminary and, in the plasmalogen case, largely produced by the inventor. Methylene blue has good preclinical support and no human Parkinson’s trials. The phage therapy rests on a single-clinic retrospective by the product’s owner, scored using a testing method that mainstream medicine does not accept, and on testimony like my reader’s. Emeramide has a real regulatory pedigree but no approval. Chlorine dioxide has been suppressed by the corrupted FDA but has a patient experience of 15 million people around the world. Double-blind placebo-controlled trials are now unethical considering this data.

A near-zero side-effect profile lowers the bar for trying something. A conflicted efficacy claim raises the bar for believing it. I am holding both bars at once.

Synthesis

I am a sick man whose symptoms are not fully explained by testing, the oldest predicament in medicine. My Lyme panel reads like an old scar rather than a fresh wound, and my Parkinson’s is the disease that conventional neurology insists only worsens. Into that gap walked a stranger with two decades of study, a personal cure story, and a refusal to accept the fatalism mainstream medicine hands us.

My decision is to act on the side of hope while keeping my eyes open. I will book the phone consult with Whitcomb this week because it is virtual, low-risk, and grounded in real lipid science. I am going to Franklin for a week and will put my complex case in front of the man who built the phage method, rather than improvising his protocol alone. I will keep the Sugar Shift, keep the methylene blue, add astaxanthin, and continue emeramide. I will push hardest on the fecal transplant because the randomized trials tell me that is where the odds are best. I will not touch chlorine dioxide again, but if you don’t have Parkinson’s, it’s probably the most compelling and safe treatment here.

So I will do what a man practicing radical transparency does. I will tell the truth, take the bet, and let you watch. I am trusting that among the thousands of you reading, someone knows what I need to know next. That is not a weakness in my method. It is the method.

I am off to see the wizards.