Author Archive

Review of Parasites and Their Treatments: Parasite Detox & Parasite Cleanse Guide

https://theplqn.substack.com/p/review-of-parasites-and-their-treatments?

Review of Parasites and their Treatments: Parasite Detox and Parasite Cleanse Guide

How to safely and effectively get rid of parasites
DR. ASCENSION’S HEALTH HUB
Dec 14, 2023

Disclaimer: I am a physician for 25+ years, and I’ve worked on establishing clinical practice guidelines for numerous healthcare entities (insurers and hospitals) as part of my career. Having said that, I’m not your personal physician. I believe that each person deserves personalized care based on their symptoms, test results, presence or absence of risk factors associated with parasites, diet and lifestyle, personal & family history, etc. This post is to provide you with the necessary information about 2 types of parasites: protozoa and helminths (worms). Compared to many countries who have many risk factors, including their environment and contaminated food/water supplies, the US nearly does not have the number of parasitic infections than they do. However, recent surge of illnesses, rise in inflammatory bowel disease and auto-immune disorders, association of parasites with cancers, and the fact that COVID was treatable by anti-parasitic drugs, people are reevaluating whether ‘parasites’ are a real problem in the US as well. For this reason, the information provided below, should help one evaluate their own risk so that they can determine the need for treatment and/or a cleanse, with their physician’s guidance. Please keep in mind the following:

  1. While i’ve tried to make it a thorough review, there are numerous parasites. There maybe some missing, either because they don’t infect humans, or there were no recommended treatments found for them. Feel free to add comments if I missed any that you want more information on.
  2. This review does not cover fungal infections or viral infections. Many viruses are known to cause cancers as well, such as, EBV, HPV, HCV, etc. They have their own treatment protocols.
  3. I’ve included recommended treatments based on review of multiple sources. If there is new evidence that supports the use of a drug for a parasite that I have not listed, feel free to add in comments, so I can review the study and add to the recommendations.

What are Parasites?

Parasites require a host to survive and spread. The adult forms of parasites live and feed from within the host (animals, humans). The eggs and larvae are what ‘spread’ through various means (food, water, flies, bugs and mosquitos). Most parasites, go undetected, and people are ‘asymptomatic’ because the parasite does not disturb the environment. Sometimes, there are slight symptomatic changes, but the person doesn’t think of them as worm related. For example, feeling more hungry, desiring more sweet foods, bloating or indigestion, abdominal discomfort or pain if you don’t eat, and general fatigue and malaise. These maybe signals sent by the parasite, so you take the actions that benefit them, i.e. survive, and have a constant source of food.

General To-Do’s and Not-To-Do’s about Parasites

Here are some To-Do’s:

  • Vitamin rich foods or supplements:
    • Carrots, sweet potatoes, and squash are high in beta-carotene, which turns into Vitamin A, which helps to resist parasitic worms and larvae.
    • Eat foods rich in Vitamins C & B
      • B12 is depleted by many worms
      • Folic acid (Vitamin B9) also depletes from malabsorption due to worms
  • Minerals such Selenium and Zinc: Selenium and Zinc are required for immune function and resistance to infection
  • Include more garlic in your meals: raw garlic has sulfur containing amino acids that are anti-parasitic
  • Ensure you have “good” bacteria in your gut by taking probiotics or eating probiotic rich foods like yogurt. (see below regarding probiotics used for natural treatment and prevention of parasites)
  • Perform ‘gut cleansing’, such as with psyllium, beetroot, flaxseeds or supplements containing Senna
  • Wash all foods well, including vegetables and fruits, prior to use

Here are some Not-To-Do’s:

  • Don’t eat raw or undercooked meats, fish, crustaceans, and snails
  • Avoid coming in contact with any animal feces or saliva, including from pets
  • Avoid coffee, sugar, alcohol, and refined grains

More information on natural prevention and treatments is provided later.

Anti-Parasitic Treatments

Parasites can be treated both naturally and with anti-parasitic medications. Natural herbs and supplements can help maintain an internal environment that prevents parasitic infections in the first place. Some herbs and supplements however, do directly reduce adult worms and egg count. But the effectiveness rate is not as high as anti-parasitic medications that have very targeted mechanism of action. More on natural treatments later.

You are likely to come across Ivermectin, Fenbendazole, Doxycycline and others drugs as treatments. Febendazole is a benzimidazole, and is just one of many other benzimidazoles available, such as albendazole, parbendazole, mebendazole, flubendazole, etc. It is a common practice for drug manufacturers to make different compounds under the same class of drugs, and those products are used in different markets and for different purposes such as animal vs. human use. Fenbendazole is used with animals and majority of data and studies on this drug are from animal studies. So while fenbendazole and albendazole are the same class of drugs, albendazole is a product recommended for use in humans but requires prescription, whereas fenbendazole is over the counter for animal use. What matters most is whether fenbendazole and albendazole have the same level of efficacy. Based on a review of many comparative studies, the efficacies vary based on parasite type. One was superior than the other in each study, but all were animal models. Efficacy studies on humans are available for albendazole, mebendazole, flubendazole, triclabendazole etc. Below, when discussing each parasite and treatment, you will notice that albendazole was recommended as ‘drug of choice’ for many parasites due to higher efficacy, compared to mebendazole, flubendazole and other benzimidazoles. Therefore, these drugs do not all work equally in terms of efficacy.

My review below is based on studied, recommended and approved drugs for the treatment of each parasite in humans. (See link for article)

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**Comment**

A wonderfully thorough article.

For more:

 

Category:

Parasites, Treatment

Tools, Hope, & Healing in Lyme Disease: Dr. Joseph Jemsek

http://

Tools, Hope & Healing in Lyme Disease with Dr. Joseph Jemsek

Mar 24, 2026
A webinar and Q&A on tools, hope and healing for those affected by Lyme disease with special guest Dr. Joseph Jemsek.
Sponsored by the National Lottery Community Fund and facilitated by Lyme Disease UK Patient Ambassador Morven-May MacCallum.
Joseph Jemsek, MD, trained as an infectious disease specialist and dedicated the first 20 years of his practice to patients with HIV/AIDS. In the early 2000s, an influx of patients from all over the United States started flooding his practice, the Jemsek Clinic, complaining of chronic symptoms of Lyme disease. This was the start of an unexpected new chapter that would change the course of Lyme disease treatment and of Dr. Jemsek’s own life. Dr. Jemsek evaluated over 15,000 cases of Lyme and other tick-borne illnesses and introduced dozens of pioneering treatment innovations.
You may sign up for Dr. Jemsek’s newsletter, Choose Life Over Lyme!, where he’ll be sharing twenty-five years of insights from his work decoding Lyme disease, at ChooseLifeOverLyme.com
You can access his guide Self-Help Tools to Manage Lyme Borreliosis Complex co-created with Lyme Disease UK here: lymediseaseuk.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Self-Help-Tools-2026-.pdf
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**Comment**
Highly recommend!  Dr. Jemsek is not treating patients anymore but his expertise is phenomenal.  He was also persecuted for prescribing long term antibiotics to treat chronic Lyme by the North Carolina Medical Board which restricted his medical license, but was vindicated. You won’t regret the time you spend watching this.
For more:

Category:

Lyme, research, Ticks, Treatment

Lost Signals: Study Shows VAERS Buries Vaccine Harm & CDC, FDA Admit to Using ‘Mostly Useless’ Tool

https://imahealth.substack.com/p/lost-signals-new-study-shows-how?

Lost Signals: New Study Shows How VAERS Buries Vaccine Harm

VAERS already catches only a fraction of vaccine harm. New research by Jessica Rose reveals the system is losing even more data to fixable flaws.
Independent Medical Alliance
Mar 31, 2026

America’s vaccine safety system already catches only a fraction of the harm that occurs. That much has been known for years. VAERS is a passive reporting system, and most adverse events are never reported at all.

But what happens to the data that does make it in?

A new study by Jessica Rose, a computational biologist, immunologist, and IMA Senior Fellow, shows that VAERS is losing critical safety data from the inside. The system’s own infrastructure is so outdated and poorly maintained that real signals of harm are being buried by fixable data problems. When Rose cleaned the data and reassembled what had been scattered, she found safety signals for fetal loss and cardiac arrest that had been there all along, invisible to anyone using the system as designed.

“The main claim to fame here is that I pointed out some of the problems inherent in VAERS that most people, unless they’re using it as part of data analysis, wouldn’t really know about.” — Jessica Rose

📖 Read and Download the Full Paper

Minimizing Signal Loss and Optimizing Pharmacovigilance in VAERS (JIM Vol. 2, No. 2, 2026) — Author: Jessica Rose

👉 Visit the Journal of Independent Medicine to create a free account and download the full article.

What’s Broken in VAERS?

VAERS was built in the 1980s and has operated with the same basic infrastructure ever since. Reports are submitted through an online form that takes about 30 minutes to fill out. There are no pull-down menus. No standardized formats for vaccine lot numbers or dates. The form has session timeouts that can erase a report before it’s finished. And the system creates multiple IDs for the same patient rather than linking a serious reaction to a follow-up death report.

The people filing reports experience these problems every time they sit down to submit one. But the people relying on the data to detect harm may never realize what’s being lost.

Rose showed just how small the fixes can be. Two simple corrections to vaccine lot numbers (capitalizing letters and removing stray spaces)  recovered 8,871 reports that had been invisible to analysis. Not because the data was missing. Because the system couldn’t recognize its own records.

(See link for article and video)

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https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/cdc-fda-admitted-mostly-useless-tool-detect-covid-vaccine-safety-signals/

CDC, FDA Admitted to Using ‘Mostly Useless’ Tool to Detect COVID Vaccine Safety Signals

Federal health officials knew the statistical tool they relied on to look for COVID-19 vaccination safety signals in VAERS was “mostly useless,” according to internal documents obtained by Sen. Ron Johnson and analyzed by scientists at Children’s Health Defense. CDC and FDA researchers used the tool anyway to create analyses they tried to publish that supported the vaccines’ safety.

by Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D.
April 1, 2026
files and covid vaccine

Federal health officials knew that the statistical tool they relied on to look for COVID-19 vaccination safety signals in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) was “mostly useless,” according to internal documents obtained by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and analyzed by scientists at Children’s Health Defense (CHD).

The documents show that officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) internally acknowledged that the tool — empirical Bayesian (EB) data mining — had “blind spots” that rendered it “mostly useless” for picking up on safety signals of COVID-19 vaccines.

Yet, the agencies used the method in analyses and attempted to publish findings from those analyses — including studies that supported the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.

Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., CHD senior research scientist who analyzed the documents, told The Defender:

“Imagine a night watchman has to find something on the ground. But instead of holding a flashlight, he is wearing sunglasses. In the morning, he says he didn’t find anything. That’s true, but it’s because he was using a tool that impeded his ability to see.”

The records obtained by Johnson’s office include emails between CDC and FDA researchers from 2021 to 2023, along with draft manuscripts and peer reviewer comments.

In one case, researchers sought to publish an analysis in The Lancet Infectious Diseases using EB data mining on early COVID-19 vaccine data. They dropped the plan only after a reviewer wrote that the likelihood of detecting a safety signal using the method was “likely close to zero.”

FDA official Dr. David Menschik, who initially was a co-author on the paper, wrote to the study’s lead author in December 2021 saying he knew the method was essentially useless.

“We acknowledged this in the limitations and understand that there is a considerable bias toward the null when using our data mining methods in this current, unprecedented situation,” he wrote.  (See link for article)

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Category:

Activism, research, vaccines

GBS as an Initial Manifestation of Lyme Disease: Diagnostic Challenges

https://www.cureus.com/articles/467640-guillain-barr-syndrome-as-the-initial-manifestation-of-lyme-disease-diagnostic-challenges

Guillain-Barré Syndrome as the Initial Manifestation of Lyme Disease: Diagnostic Challenges

Ahmed Elnour • Naveed Sultan • Abdul Monem • Khalid Ghalib

Published: March 20, 2026

DOI: 10.7759/cureus.105552

Open Access
Peer-Reviewed

Cite this article as: Elnour A, Sultan N, Monem A, et al. (March 20, 2026) Guillain-Barré Syndrome as the Initial Manifestation of Lyme Disease: Diagnostic Challenges. Cureus 18(3): e105552. doi:10.7759/cureus.105552

Abstract

Lyme disease is a common tick-borne infection in the United States and Europe that may involve the nervous system during the disseminated stage. Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) is an acute immune-mediated polyneuropathy usually triggered by infection; however, its association with Borrelia burgdorferi is uncommon and can pose diagnostic challenges.

We report the case of a previously healthy 61-year-old female patient who presented with progressive ascending weakness and areflexia suggestive of GBS. During hospitalisation, she developed bilateral facial nerve palsy, prompting further evaluation. Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) findings and electrophysiological studies supported acute inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, while serologic testing confirmed Lyme disease. The patient received intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) followed by intravenous ceftriaxone and achieved complete neurological recovery.

This case emphasizes the need to consider Lyme disease in patients presenting with acute inflammatory neuropathy, particularly in endemic regions, as early diagnosis and targeted therapy can significantly improve outcomes.

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**Comment**

The researchers state that the association between GBS with Lyme is uncommon, yet nobody is counting cases!  How can they know?

Answer: they don’t.  They shouldn’t state things that are pure conjecture.

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Category:

Lyme, research, vaccines, Viruses

A Bacterial Toxin Facilitating Chronic Infection

https://www.biozentrum.unibas.ch/news/detail/a-bacterial-toxin-facilitating-chronic-infection

A bacterial toxin facilitating chronic infection

Some pathogens persist in the body causing chronic infections. Researchers led by Prof. Christoph Dehio and Prof. Tilman Schirmer at the Biozentrum, University of Basel, have now discovered a mechanism of highly selective targeting of host proteins by a bacterial toxin that is critical for the bacteria to establish chronic infection. The study recently published in “PNAS” provides new insights into the activity and function of bacterial toxins.

The bacterial pathogen Bartonella (purple) in interaction with human host cells (green).

When pathogens invade our body the immune system is put on alert. The body’s immune cells are recruited to the site of infection and an inflammatory reaction is initiated to rapidly eliminate the invaders. Some pathogens, however, have developed clever strategies to evade this line of defense. Bartonella is one of them. Manipulating the body’s cells to its advantage enables the pathogen to persist in the host.

Researchers led by Prof. Christoph Dehio and Prof. Tilman Schirmer at the Biozentrum, University of Basel, have now elucidated an important mechanism how Bartonella  ensures long-term survival in the body. It injects a bacterial toxin into the body’s cells, which deactivates a specific group of proteins important for the immune response. This mechanism is vital for the pathogen’s capacity to cause chronic infection.

Bacterial toxins modulate signaling pathways in host cells

In mammalian cells, so-called Rho GTPases serve as molecular ON-OFF switches controlling a wide range of signaling pathways and thus pivotal cellular activities, such as cell movement, cytoskeletal dynamics and also the innate immune response. Due to their central regulatory role, this protein family is a target of choice for bacterial toxins. These thwart cellular signaling and facilitate the pathogen to survive in the host. However, many bacterial toxins targeting multiple GTPases cause massive collateral damage to the cells and typically limits pathogen survival to the acute infection phase.

Bartonella subtly colonizes the host

In contrast, Bartonella hijacks the host in a “gentle” way. The pathogen employs toxins that very selectively target host cell functions. In doing so, Bartonella reduces the efficacy of the immune system without causing collateral damage, enabling the pathogen to persist in the host. “We have now been able to elucidate the mechanism of highly selective recognition of specific host proteins by the Bartonella toxin Bep 1,” says Dehio. “Bep 1 exclusively targets proteins of the Rac-subfamily but not the other members of the large Rho GTPase family that are typically inactivated all together by toxins with primary acute infection patterns.”

Elucidating bacterial toxin selectivity

Employing a combination of structural analysis, modeling and biochemical methods, the researchers have now been able to elucidate the mechanism underlying this unique target selectivity. “The spectrum of target proteins is determined by large on shape complementarity and the electrostatic interactions of a short structural element in Bep1 with two protein segments unique to the Rac-subfamily,” explains Dehio. This simple, yet elegant, evolutionary treat equips Bartonella with a precise molecular tool to selectively interfere with host signaling.

Original publication:
Nikolaus Dietz, Markus Huber, Isabel Sorg, Arnaud Goepfert, Alexander Harms, Tilman Schirmer and Christoph Dehio. Structural basis for selective AMPylation of Rac-subfamily GTPases by Bartonella effector protein 1 (Bep1). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) 2021

Contact: Communications, Katrin Bühler

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**Comment**

This right here, is why patients remain sick.  We are typically filled with multiple stealth pathogens with the capability to quietly impede the normal mechanisms the body uses to clear infections.  Sadly, Bartonella is not the only organism capable of this guerrilla warfare – Borrelia, the causative agent of Lyme disease also changes its outer surface protein to remain cloaked and accepted by the immune system.  If antimicrobials are used, it also has the ability to shape shift and go into a dormant state only to reemerge when conditions are conducive for growth.

When will mainstream medicine get the memo?

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Category:

Bartonella, research