Case Study: The Role of Chlorine Dioxide ("CD") and Low-Dose Ketamine ("LDK") in a Complex Neurodegenerative Case
The husband who wouldn't give up on the love of his life
Past
One of the blessings which befell me from my parents’ divorce was to have four sets of grandparents, all of whom were extraordinary people. Lee and Embury Jones were the stepmother and father of my stepfather, who I called Em. Lee lived to be 100 years old, and although she was a faithful Christian, reminded me more of the Buddha. Embury Sr., my grandfather, was an engineer who had graduated from Columbia University, and invented a welding process adopted by the American auto industry in Detroit, MI. That old-fashioned American ingenuity and decades of hard work helped make my grandparents millionaires, back when that meant something, i.e. before the age of billionaires. They were very generous people, and warmly welcomed us to their summer home on Torch Lake in Michigan every summer.
My happiest memories of those visits were from when Grandpa and I would take a sauna in the summer evenings. When we were good, hot and sweaty, we would run down to the lake and dive into the cool, refreshing water. Then we would go back to the sauna and do it again. Grandpa was a man of few words, with a gentle and kind demeanor. Looking back at these photos today, I have to wonder if the decline in his mental capacities was beginning that long ago. Grandpa developed Alzheimer’s dementia, and Grandma cared for Grandpa for several years, with the assistance of competent and caring nurses, in their home in Cincinnati, OH. The story of Romeo and Juliet, and their case study below, is dedicated to my grandparents, with gratitude for the love and grace which they modeled as they grew older.
Introduction
Yes, this is a case study, but it is also the story of man’s infinite love for his wife, his dogged persistence in the face of great odds and opposition, the extraordinary nursing assistants who have helped them both, and the tentative joy of reclaiming moments of health and connection.
Romeo and Juliet (not their real names) fell in love and married more than sixty years ago. They had children who they raised to be competent and decent human beings. Romeo held a leadership position in an academic institution, and Juliet was a master quilter, so skillful that her work has been shown in the professional category in contests at the annual fair. While she was still aware of her deteriorating cognition and physical health, the loss of this psychomotor skill, such that she couldn’t perform basic stitches, was a source of mental anguish.
We first met in November of 2022 during a telemedicine visit with the Leading Edge Clinic. Romeo coordinated the visit. He indicated that he reminded Juliet three times about our appointment, but that she had to be reminded again at the start. She had always done whatever she was directed to do by her doctors (which is why she got two mRNA Covid shots, and then a booster) and had been in excellent health, engaging in yoga, and exercising regularly. She watched over their food choices closely. She was proud of the children she raised, who are all “successful.” Romeo pointed out that they all have photographic memories.
All of a sudden, after her first and last Moderna mRNA Covid booster at the end of December 2021, she developed severe brain fog, and her memory rapidly deteriorated. Whereas Juliet used to be the spouse to remember and keep track of things, now it was up to Romeo. They went to multiple neurologists seeking answers. For what it’s worth, she had been on a statin medication for cholesterol for years. The doctors ordered an MRI looking for strokes, found that her neurological exam was normal, and told the couple that there were no signs of Alzheimers! Romeo and Juliet were afraid to speak frankly with their medical practitioners re: their concerns about the vaccine and the booster (having noted the temporal association between her booster and rapid deterioration) anticipating a negative response and possible fracture in the provider/patient relationship.
At the time of our first visit, Juliet was speaking very softly, which was a dramatic change for her. I got the sense that she had been a force of nature. She had been diagnosed with asthma within the last year. There were also new disruptions in her sleep pattern. She would wake at 2am and not be able to get back to sleep. Her PCP prescribed a strong sleep aid called Trazodone, and soon raised the dose from 50mg to 100mg because she started waking at 3am. One night Romeo went to look for Juliet and she was passed out on the toilet, having vomited. He called 911 and she was taken by ambulance to the ED. He wryly observed, “My wife is highly susceptible to medications.”
During that first visit, I didn’t hold back, and we had a detailed discussion of the findings of Dr Luc Montagnier re: Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) following Covid vaccination and boosters, as well as what interventions might be appropriate. Romeo and Juliet didn’t waver in addressing what promised to be a bleak path forward, steadfast in their love for each other and, in particular, leaning on Romeo’s unwavering commitment to do all that he could to save the love of his life.
We ordered some labs which I consider to be basic in such a case: amyloid fibrin micro clotting, spike antibody IgG, and ABeta 42/40 ratio. The results gave a thunderclap of warning. Micro clotting was stage/grade 4 of 4, severe and widespread. Spike IgG was >25,000 U/mL, in other words, off the charts, and has continued to be with repeated testing. ABeta 42 was 33 pg/mL, ABeta 20 was 242 pg/mL, and the ABeta 42/40 Ratio was 0.136. Although the measurement parameters have since changed, at that time anything less than ABeta 42/40 of 0.160 was highly predictive of Alzheimer’s disease.
For the sake of brevity, I’ll state that we tried anything and everything that we thought would help. At the end of March 2023, one of Romeo and Juliet’s sons called a conference, and during the video visit, he and his girlfriend, who worked as a nurse at an academic medical center, were forcibly lobbying for Romeo to relinquish his hold, and let Juliet be committed to a memory care center. By that point, I was inclined to agree with them. Because of our clinic’s experience with other female patients who developed CJD after a booster, I believed that this had befallen Juliet. I also thought that we still had a few clinical options, but the result of that meeting was that care of Juliet was taken out of my hands for nearly a year. Below is a summary of my thoughts on CJD which I shared with Romeo and his family after that visit.
COVID-19 VACCINES/BOOSTERS, PRION DISEASE, CJD AND DEMENTIA
Dr Luc Montagnier was a French virologist who won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus. He worked at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and taught at Shanghai Jiao University Tong University in China. Before his death February 8, 2022, he was a vocal critic of the COVID-19 vaccines, and mishandling of the pandemic by world governments and health organizations. Dr Montagnier's last contribution to science was as one of three authors of a study re: the presence of amino acids coding for prion disease in COVID-19 variants and vaccines. The pre-print of this study came into my awareness in June of 2022. It is titled "Towards the emergence of a new form of the neurodegenerative Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. twenty six cases of CJD declared a few days after COVID-19 vaccine jab." Accessing this study is extremely difficult at this point, and for this reason I have attached a PDF of it to your chart for today.
The most salient points are as follows: There are thirty amino acids from the original Wuhan strain of the virus which code for prion disease, and these amino acids were present in each new strain up until the Omicron variants, when they disappeared. Each of the three vaccines which Montagnier's team evaluated, also include these same amino acids, due to their integration of the genetic material of previous variants (as do each of the vaccines up until the present Omicron boosters). This means that each of us who was infected with COVID-19 before Omicron variants, as well as shot and/or boosted, has been exposed to genetic material which codes for prion disease.
Historically, CJD was a one in a million disease, and diagnosis was one of exclusion, requiring either a brain biopsy or post-mortem autopsy to confirm. It was also a disease which slowly unfolded over decades in its host, leading to neurological deterioration and eventual death. What Dr Montagnier's team explains in their paper is that there is evidence of a new form of CJD, which manifests on average 11 days after shot/booster, and leads to the death of its unfortunate victims on average 4 months later.
This was all a hypothetical for me until I had a patient with temporally associated CJD. She was a 74 year old woman, active, healthy, mentally sharp, and living independently. Within a week of her booster, she began to rapidly deteriorate, showing symptoms resembling a stroke, MS, Parkinsons and dementia. She died within a month, and her autopsy confirmed CJD.
In our practice we have been consulted on another similar patient, and I have third patient who I suspect has a more slowly progressing form of CJD following natural infection. A fourth patient is on a ventilator.
The take away is this: pre-Omicron variants and all of the shots carry the risk of promoting CJD and other neurological diseases. We have only a glimmer of how many people this will impact, but it is exponentially larger than the number of instances of CJD seen in the past. And, we have some insight into how one might approach this predicament, including the utilization of the body's innate healing processes, use of safe OTC supplementation, and HBOT. As with all disease, the earlier treatment is initiated, the higher the likelihood of a positive outcome.
We have endeavored to utilize the therapeutics available to us, approximating those under study for prion transport from the brain, as well as HBOT.
Editor’s note: the referenced resubmitted pre-print article was withdrawn after 132,000 reads on Researchgate. Regular readers will quickly understand the ongoing impact of Big Pharma driving censorship in all matters Covid.
During the next year, family in the healthcare field pushed for Juliet to stop our recommended treatments and submit to batteries of testing, and rounds of visits with specialist after specialist. I persuaded the couple to have one visit with me during that time, only by performing it pro-bono and explaining that it was for the purpose of research, i.e. gaining insight into the clinical trajectory of this patient so that we could better help others.
Romeo kept up a nursing subscription with the Leading Edge Clinic, so that I saw monthly reports of her clinical course. He felt compelled to take the step in June of 2023 to explicitly bar any access of his children to Juliet’s chart, afraid that they would challenge him for questioning the conventional medical care she was receiving, which was also failing to help her.
In February of 2024, Romeo returned Juliet to my direct care at the Leading Edge Clinic, having exhausted and been exhausted by the conventional healthcare system, with further clinical deterioration of Juliet’s condition, but hoping against hope to try new tools. He came to the right place. We call ourselves the Leading Edge Clinic, because we are curious, we keep searching, and learning, and in fact, we had some new therapies to try. It wasn’t a smooth ride, as the family system continued to lobby for institutionalizing Juliet and enrolling her in hospice. But Romeo simply would not give up, and he had the good fortune to hire some extraordinary women, who teamed up with him to keep Juliet at home, doing their very best to keep her out of the hospital.
It turns out that the greatest threat to Juliet’s survival wasn’t her coagulopathy, or her advancing dementia, but her incontinence of urine and stool, which lead to frequent UTIs and nearly monthly panicked trips to the ED for inpatient treatment of urosepsis. During each consecutive admission, it often felt to Romeo and his caregivers as if the entire hospital staff were aligned against them, pressuring them to give up, lean in and let go, releasing Juliet to hospice so that she could die peacefully.
Listening to them during a mid-January visit this year, I was reminded of the X posts I had read from bereft families in the United Kingdom. If they didn’t get to the hospital in time, it was “the driver” for their loved one, a combination of narcotic and sedative medication administered via continuous drip which hastens a patient’s demise. But, just the Friday before, Juliet was laughing along with visitors in her own home. Per Romeo and his nursing assistant, the hospital purposely withheld oral fluids, didn’t administer IV fluids, and repeatedly pressured him to put her in a nursing home.
Romeo felt like he had to engage in a battle to take Juliet out of the hospital against medical advice before she was euthanized. The repeated rounds of antibiotics to treat recurrent urosepsis were depleting her microbiome, leading to a downward spiral in her clinical condition. It was at that point that we began to discuss compassionate care use of chlorine dioxide to prevent the recurrent UTIs, as it was imperative to keep her out of the hospital, lest she be shanghaied into a nursing home and hospice during her next perilous visit.
Patient Profile
79-year-old female
History: Hypertension, hyperlipidemia, hypothyroidism, breast cancer (remote), asthma
Post-COVID-19 vaccination: Rapidly progressive neurocognitive decline, suspected prion disease/CJD-like syndrome, chronic UTIs, microclotting, and severe dementia
Clinical Course and Therapeutic Challenges
The patient experienced a dramatic decline in cognition, mobility, and independence following COVID-19 vaccination and booster, with symptoms including brain fog, memory loss, gait disturbance, and recurrent infections. Over time, she became nonverbal, bed bound, and dependent on tube feedings, with frequent hospitalizations for UTIs and urosepsis. Standard interventions (anticoagulation, HBOT, nutraceuticals, and anti-inflammatory agents) provided limited and temporary benefit.
Introduction of Chlorine Dioxide (CD) and Low-Dose Ketamine (LDK)
Chlorine Dioxide (CD)
Rationale and Use:
CD was introduced as an adjunctive and compassionate use therapy for chronic, treatment-resistant urinary tract infections (UTIs) and as a possible antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory agent.
Initially applied as a foot bath (10–30 activated drops in one gallon of water, soaking for 30 minutes) and later administered in small doses via G-tube (up to 1/2 activated drops in 4 oz water, titrated up to 6 at this time).
The goal was to reduce pathogenic biofilm, decrease infection frequency, and potentially modulate systemic inflammation.
Observed Effects:
Marked reduction in UTI frequency: "This is the longest we have been without serious UTI symptoms in the last nine months."
Improved urine clarity and decreased yeasty vaginal discharge, with no significant adverse effects reported at the administered doses.
CD was well tolerated, with caregivers noting improved hydration and a period of greater alertness and engagement.
Low-Dose Ketamine (LDK)
Rationale and Use:
LDK was introduced to address severe, treatment-resistant neurocognitive impairment and modulate glutamate-mediated neurotoxicity, as the patient had persistently elevated glutamate on previous urine neurotransmitter testing. (See my previous Substack for case study on the ZRT urine neurotransmitter)
Started at 25 mg sublingually once weekly in January, then increased to twice weekly in March, and eventually every other day, with careful monitoring for sedation and side effects.
Observed Effects:
After LDK initiation, caregivers noted:
Periods of improved attentiveness and eye contact, particularly for 3–4 hours post-dose.
Increased efforts to speak, with the patient verbalizing simple words ("no," "get up") after months of silence.
Improved swallowing and reduced coughing during oral intake, suggesting possible benefit for bulbar function, and decreased risk of aspiration.
No major adverse effects, though mild sedation was noted post-dose.
Timeline of Key Interventions and Outcomes
Discussion
Chlorine Dioxide (CD):
CD appeared to play a significant role in reducing the frequency and severity of chronic UTIs, a major source of morbidity in this patient. The improvement in urinary symptoms and reduction in secondary yeast infections allowed for better overall management and comfort. No significant toxicity was observed at the low doses used for foot baths and G-tube administration.
Low-Dose Ketamine (LDK):
LDK provided measurable, albeit temporary, improvements in cognition, alertness, and communication. The patient demonstrated increased efforts to speak and improved swallowing function, which had not been achieved with previous therapies. The primary benefit was observed within hours of dosing, suggesting a direct neurochemical effect.
Moving forward, the plan of care is to slowly titrate up the LDK, adjusting the dose to increase glutamate modulation and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) production.
The concurrent use of CD and LDK, alongside other supportive measures (probiotics, DMSO, anticoagulation, and careful BP management), appeared to stabilize the patient’s condition. While neither intervention reversed the underlying neurodegeneration, they contributed to improved quality of life, reduced infection burden, and periods of regained function.
Conclusion
In this complex case of rapidly progressive dementia with recurrent infections, the introduction of chlorine dioxide and low-dose ketamine provided tangible benefits:
CD reduced chronic UTIs and secondary infections, improving comfort and reducing hospitalizations.
LDK transiently improved cognition, communication, and swallowing, enhancing patient engagement and interaction.
Both interventions were well tolerated and provided value in a palliative, quality-of-life-focused context, where standard therapies had failed to halt decline.
Love to see both of these modalities in action. So many lives could have been saved…. With such simple and cost effective solutions like these! Thank you Scott and everyone at the Leading Edge Clinic for embracing these tools!!
I really enjoyed reading this.
Scott, you are the best!!