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From: Mark Stroud
Sunday, 10:14 a.m.
For the last 14 years, I have been searching for a reason for my
sickness. I have been thrown around from doc to doc without a
diagnosis, or if they have tried to diagnose me then it has been "all
in my head".
When I finally found the cause, I was amazed at just how unreliable
the testing for this pathogen is. That's why I have pulled out all the stops
and I finally found a way to see what appears to be Borrelia Burgdorferi in a tiny drop of blood from
my finger.
The technique described below is so astoundingly easy to do yet we still
hear that Bbsl is not very easily found in the blood leaving 1,000s of potential
lyme patients with a non diagnosis.
So I've spent a lot of time looking for a solution that's easy to use...
Now, I am not saying that this procedure is to be used
as a diagnosis tool for your own illness. That would be wrong.
It is more of an interesting hobby to prove to yourself what is really
going on. It appears that you can not only see the spirochetes,
you can see the l-forms as well (see the videos at the top of this
page)
That said, let's get into the procedure...
I look at my own blood under a normal
microscope. My microscope was bought from Digilens in the far
east but there is nothing special about this scope, so perhaps you can
find an equivalent locally or on ebay.
As I said, there is nothing special about this microscope, but I
will say that it is a "BIO" microscope and one that follows the
DIN standard. The DIN standard means that the objective lenses
are interchangeable with other DIN standard scopes. (don't worry if
you don't understand what that means at the moment - all will be clear
later)
About the microscope.
You will notice from the picture below that the
objective is quite big. This is a full size microscope with the DIN
standard of lens. It is this lens that looks directly at the
slide.

I modified the scope and put a different lens on it.
More on that later.
Below, and just under my finger, is what I place the
slide on and that is called the "stage". There is adjustment
underneath the scope so that you can move the slide around without
touching it.
Under the stage is the condenser. This is responsible
for focusing the light onto the slide you are looking at. It is
important to have an adjustment on this for the dark field modification,
but a little hard to explain why at this point..
The pic below is showing the condenser.

OK, now for the modifications..
I found that the darkfield condenser needs to be the same diameter as
the brightfield one on your scope - otherwise it will not fit! I
measured the one out of the scope above and it was 37mm in
diameter. I also found later that it is worth taking a note of the height if the
condenser. If it is too short, it will not make contact with the
slide and will not work. This was the case with the condenser I
bought, and I had to modify it to work.
Below is the darkfield condenser and objective I
used. I bought the condenser and the objective from the same place
as "a pair". The objective is a 100x with an IRIS (OIL
filled). I bought mine from Labserv Technologies.
Again, there is nothing special about the condenser, but
it was a darkfield condenser with a 100x objective with the IRIS.
The IRIS is important.

Objective - 100x with IRIS (OIL filled):

Darkfield condenser

With the scope above and the condenser used above, I
needed to modify the condenser to make contact with the slide (it was
too short). To do this, I first removed the two centering screws.

Then unscrewed the bottom ring of the unit.

And then removed the condenser from the rest of the body
by unscrewing it.

Remove the stainless steel part and re assemble the two
black halves.

Next, I attached it to the scope. With the
ring unscrewed in the first instruction, I balanced the
condenser in the recess and then fitted the ring into the scope with the
centering screws that came with the original scope. See the pic
below:

Of course, if I had bought a darkfield condenser that was
made for my scope, I wouldn't have needed to do this modification ...
With the darkfield condenser in place, I then attached the 100x , OIL filled objective and IRIS. This
was simply
done by unscrewing an objective from the scope and screwing in the
replacement.

Last of all is the lighting. Now, I can see the bacteria
in the blood with the normal 20W halogen light and in fact, the video1
at the top of this page was done with the light from the original scope, but it tends to be quite
dim and the focus is not all that great.
I have found that
upgrading the scope to a 50w halogen is better, but then it starts to
melt things inside the scope because of the increased heat from the
halogen... The halogen lights are also white - which means that they
give off all colours in the spectrum.
The items I am looking at are 0.2 micro meters or 200
nano meters in width which is just under half the wavelength of green
light. Viewing things this small, there is noticeable diffraction
as the light passes through the slide. The angle of diffraction varies
with different wavelengths of light, so I used a monochromatic
light source and the diffraction only happens once so I get a clearer
image.
It is for this reason, I have developed a system to
deliver a very clean monochromatic green light under the slide.
This is done with a 5 Watt LED. The LED I used is from Lumileds.
The output power of the LED is equivalent to 50 normal
LED's and is the one I used to get the results shown in some of the movies at
the top of this page.
The LED light source needed a heat sink to take away the
extra heat generated by the illumination process. Infra red (heat)
will also cause the image to blur if there is enough of it - especially
if a black and white camera is used to view it with.
Here is the finished lighting assembly with the power
supply for the LED. The LED needed to be current regulated to the
specification of the LED I used which was about 1 amp.

To focus the light straight into the condenser, I then
unscrewed the top lens off of the brightfield condenser and placed it on
the top of the LED lighting like this:
 
Finally , I unscrewed the lens on the microscope that
would normally collimate the light into the condenser and put the LED
assembly in it's place. See below.
 
Now my microscope was ready to go, so fist things first -
I WASHED MY HANDS
Then I cleaned a slide and cover slip with 90% ethanol
(bought at the chemist)
Then I dipped each corner of the slide lightly in Vaseline
and put it on a sterile surface for later. This will make sure that
the final slide is air tight. That part can be skipped if the
slide is not to be kept longer than a couple of days.
Then I sterilized a needle and put on a sterile surface for
later.
I WASHED MY HANDS AGAIN and allow them to
air dry. Then I swabbed the finger that I was going to prick with 90%
ethanol to kill any germs on my skin. Waited for them to air
dry. It was important to have dry hands at this point.
I took the sterile needle and carefully pricked my finger
so that a small amount of blood came out.
I then put the smallest amount of blood on the slide and quickly put the cover slip on the top before it
dried.
Then I put a spot of immersion oil on the condenser
and put the slide on top so that the condenser oil is in contact with
the slide. To get rid of air bubbles, I moved the stage around with
the controls underneath.
Next I put a drop of oil on the top of the cover slip and
bring the objective into contact with the oil on top did the same to get rid of the bubbles.
To view, I centered and turned
on the light source and opened up the iris all the way (anti clockwise as
I looked down on the slide).
I made sure that the end of the objective just touched
the top of the cover slip. (most are sprung loaded at the tip, so you
can see the tip slightly retract as it touches the cover slip.
I then centered the darkfield condenser so that
it is in line with the objective. Once I had done this, I could see the light come centrally through the eyepiece.
Once I could see the light, I needed to back off on the focus until
I saw
the red blood cells on the slide. This is usually not very much, so
I found that if I backed off and the oil came separated such that there is an air
gap, I had more than likely gone too far.
When I had the blood cells in focus, I carefully
turned the IRIS on the objective so that the dark background and
the objects light up white (or the colour of my illumination).
With the scope set up, I was now ready to look for the spirochetes! They are
more easily found in the plasma, but I believe that allot of the red
cells are infected as well - you just can't see them so easily.
I found that if I left the sample overnight, I saw more
as the Borrelia seem to come out of the cells when the nutrients are low.
Mark Stroud
Mark Stroud. mstroud@lyme-diagnosis.nospam.org.uk
(pls remove the .nospam)
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