I had another appointment with my ME specialist doctor today, who I refer to in this blog as Dr. C. I'm going to have to keep this update brief with, essentially, bullet points only:
Dr. C states that a colleague in Belgium has developed a drug specifically to treat enteroviruses, which Dr. C said would be the big breakthrough that ME patients have been waiting for. (This of course assumes that ME is caused by enteroviruses, which Dr. C is 100% certain of) The drug is now in development by a European drug company, but it is supposed to take 2 years from now to finally hit the market.
The animal testing for this drug had very good results. It eliminated all traces of enteroviruses in the bodies of mice. Dr. C asked the inventor if it also eliminated enteroviruses in the brains of the mice and he did not receive an answer. This is a concern.
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On a personal note, Dr. C stated that the pain under my left rib, he believes, is pleurodynia caused by the coxsackie B virus. Pleurodynia is basically just a sharp pain in the chest, usually caused by coxsackie B. We discussed the fact that a few years ago my coxsackie B test results showed very high titres for the B5 strain of coxsackie, and they have been dropping slowly ever since. This is a common pattern for coxsackie B, to have the titres slowly drop back down over the coarse of about 5 years.
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I also confessed to Dr. C that I've been taking mints that have caffeine and B vitamins for a daily boost, and that I have generally felt better since starting to take them (no surprise there), but I asked if he would be concerned these mints would lead to a major collapse or crash. He said that as long as I didn't have any side effects like heart palpitations, he was OK with me using the mints in moderate amounts (consistent with typical coffee consumption of caffeine.)
