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)