Darkfield Microscopy- The River of Life

Your bloodstream is like a river. It transports oxygen, nutrients and other lifegiving agents throughout your body to maintain health. It is also the medium for detoxification, delivering cellular waste to the liver and kidneys for elimination from the body. By its very nature, blood can serve as a predictor of health and indicate illness well before symptoms appear. Blood samples through conventional testing can be normal even when the person is extremely unhealthy. Instead of a river, unhealthy blood can resemble a swamp, and it’s a sure indication of latent or undiagnosed problems.

A darkfield microscope works the same way a standard microscope does, but it uses a different system to illuminate the specimen. A standard microscope passes light through a slide into the eyepiece, which can overwhelm the eye and render small structures invisible. A darkfield microscope uses a light condenser to illuminate the specimen from the slide. Cell structures and microorganisms appear to glow against a black background. Live blood samples are magnified 1,500 times and displayed on a video screen. Practitioners can detect early signs of illness by studying the shape and functioning of red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets and the presence of metabolic byproducts and pathogenic microorganisms. These are clues to serious health problems seen with Darkfield Live Cell Microscopy that cannot be seen in other tests or screenings.

Distortions of red blood cells and their inability to stay intact on the slide, for example, can indicate a nutritional deficiency, oxidative damage caused by free radicals, or undesirable bacteria, fungi, or amoebas in the bloodstream. The vitality of white blood cells can also be determined by observing the condition of the cell wall (smooth, ragged, or leaking cytoplasm). Also, you can see if the white blood cells have the vitality to perform their job or are sluggish and stagnant. This assessment of the “qualitative” or functional status of the blood must be looked at. Other lab tests only quantitatively measure blood components. Dr. Douglas Brodie MD, Dr. Katrina Tang MD, and Dr. Maarten Klatte MD believe that looking at the form and motion of the blood components, which include living organisms, is very important to do rather than just looking at “measurements” of the blood if you are to know the true condition of the blood and health of the person.

You may see an aggregation of platelets, which play an important role in blood coagulation. Sticky platelets are attracted to inflammatory sites in the arteries and allow the build-up of arterial plaque, a chief cause of heart attacks and strokes. The small doughnut-shaped dots in the platelet aggregation could be mycoplasma, an infectious microorganism linked to cardiovascular disease, autoimmune diseases, and cancer.

Red blood cells that are agglutinated and stacked on top of each other is called a Rouleau pattern. This diminishes the ability of the cells of the body to receive oxygen and this sets a person up for all kinds of pathogenic disease. Kristin has been trained and certified by the original Michael Coyle school to interpret Live Cell Microscopy.