Dr. Philp McMillan,  John McMillan

 Imagine plumbers across the country discovering that every water main they open contains a strange buildup of mineral deposits. Not just in one neighborhood or city, but across dozens of municipalities, the same disturbing pattern emerges: pipes clogged with material that accumulates over time. These aren’t normal mineral deposits that dissolve with treatment; they’re dense, fibrous blockages that resist standard interventions. This pattern of progressive accumulation isn’t just happening in municipal infrastructure. A similar process occurs in human blood vessels through something called fibrinaloid microclot complexes. Understanding this progression, from invisible deposits to infrastructure failure, is crucial. It’s the difference between effective treatment and watching your system corrode from the inside out.

The Mineral Deposits That Aggregate

Think about how scale builds up in pipes. It doesn’t start as a visible crust; it begins as microscopic mineral particles suspended in water: calcium, magnesium, and dissolved solids. Individually, they’re harmless. But under certain conditions (hard water, temperature changes, chemical imbalances), these particles aggregate, sticking to pipe walls and attracting more particles. Layer by layer, the invisible becomes visible, and the passable becomes impassable.

Fibrinaloid microclot complexes (FMCs) follow remarkably similar physics. Your blood normally contains a soluble protein called fibrinogen. When injured, fibrinogen converts to fibrin, creating a mesh that stops bleeding. This is healthy clotting—temporary, degradable, and carefully regulated.

However, when chronic inflammation occurs (from viral infection, vaccination reactions, or underlying conditions), this system goes awry. Research published in 2024 showed that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein directly interacts with fibrinogen, triggering abnormal structural changes. Instead of neat, organized clots that dissolve when healing completes, you get dense, tangled structures resembling overcooked spaghetti soaked overnight: congealed, matted, and impossible to separate.

The critical detail is that these microclots form with tightly packed fibers, preventing your body’s natural “pipe cleaning” enzymes from penetrating. The pore size between fibers becomes too small. It’s like trying to flush mineral deposits with water when what you really need is a power drill.

Dr. Yannick Kok, laboratory manager at Ayus Laboratories in Switzerland, has made these invisible structures visible. His research demonstrates that FMCs incorporate not just fibrin but amyloid proteins and inflammatory debris, creating aggregates that resist natural dissolution pathways. Ayus Laboratories, as the official licensee of technology pioneered at the University of Stellenbosch, has developed methods to quantify these structures with precision that standard blood tests cannot achieve.

From Hairline Cracks to Infrastructure Failure

Here’s where the plumbing metaphor becomes critical: small deposits don’t stay small. In municipal water systems, a little scale attracts more scale. The rough surface created by initial deposits becomes a nucleation site for further aggregation. Flow patterns change, and pressure builds unevenly. What started as barely detectable narrowing becomes a significant blockage, leading to structural failure.

The microclot progression follows this escalation precisely. Small FMCs lodge in capillaries (your body’s smallest pipes), creating localized circulation problems. Tissues downstream don’t receive adequate oxygen, prompting increased inflammation. More inflammatory signals trigger more abnormal clotting, with the initial deposits serving as scaffolding for larger aggregations.

Marcus Klotz understands this progression from painful personal experience. In late 2020, the Austrian researcher contracted COVID and became severely disabled, confined to a wheelchair. Rather than accept his condition as untreatable, he spent his functional hours researching scientific papers. His investigation led him to apheresis therapy, and after traveling to Germany for H.E.L.P. apheresis treatment with Dr. Beate Jäger, he felt “reawakened from the dead.” Four months later, he was kitesurfing again.

This personal recovery drove Klotz to establish the Apheresis Center in Larnaca, Cyprus, in February 2022. Now in its fourth year, the center has treated over 1,200 patients with post-viral and post-vaccination syndromes. His research has since moved to Zurich, Switzerland, where he continues developing multimodal treatment protocols.

Describing his first treatment filter, Klotz recalls: “This is actually my first personal filter. This is a picture of my filter when I had long COVID.” The filter shows approximately 15 centimeters of white precipitate, visible proof of what had been circulating invisibly in his bloodstream. For context, a “normal” cholesterol treatment might show a few millimeters of deposits. This wasn’t scale; this was systemic infrastructure collapse.

Clinical evidence supports this progression. Patients with long COVID show venous blood oxygen levels of 17-19%, while normal ranges are 47-70%. That’s like opening your tap and getting brown sludge instead of water. Your tissues are starved because the delivery system is compromised.

A Systemic Corrosion Pattern

The microclot phenomenon extends far beyond COVID. Research has identified FMCs in Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, type 2 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, migraine, ME/CFS, and sepsis. The common thread is chronic inflammation.

These findings suggest that we’ve been treating symptoms in isolation when we should be examining the underlying infrastructure damage. Certain triggers (viral proteins, environmental toxins, autoimmune cascades) activate the clotting system in ways that create these resistant deposits. The specific disease depends on where the blockages concentrate and what other systems fail as a result.

Long COVID patients carry the highest burden of these deposits. Their pipes are the most clogged; they’re simply further along the same deterioration pathway affecting multiple chronic conditions.

When Standard Approaches Stop Working

Consider how you’d respond to extensively corroded pipes. Would you treat the problem by adding more water additives? Would you address a clogged main line by testing your tap water’s mineral content and declaring everything “within normal limits”?

This is precisely how mainstream medicine approaches these conditions. Standard blood tests come back normal. Clotting factors, platelet counts, and inflammation markers all appear acceptable. Doctors prescribe supplements and medications to manage symptoms. These are additive therapies.

“Most clinicians and practitioners have hit the ceiling with additive treatments, medications, supplements, substances that they can give to the patient, especially in chronic illness,” Klotz explains. “Eventually, you will hit the ceiling.”

The problem becomes clear when you understand what’s actually happening in the pipes. You’re adding treatments to a system that’s fundamentally blocked, preventing the treatments from reaching where they need to go.

The Three-Stage Infrastructure Repair

The emerging treatment paradigm that centers like Klotz’s Apheresis Center have developed recognizes three necessary components, and the order matters.

Subtractive Therapy: Power-Flushing the System

Apheresis physically removes the deposits. H.E.L.P. apheresis (Heparin-induced Extracorporeal LDL Precipitation) uses controlled acidification and heparin to precipitate and filter out protein-based aggregates, making the invisible deposits suddenly visible and removable. Inuspheresis®, developed by Plasmaselect and used in specialized centers across Europe, employs double-cascade filtration at the nanometer scale, capturing particles that standard testing can’t detect. These aren’t gentle interventions; they’re the medical equivalent of hydrojetting your pipes—aggressive removal of accumulated debris. A typical treatment takes two to three hours, with patients requiring multiple sessions. The filters themselves tell the story. Before treatment, they’re pristine white. After treating a long COVID patient, they can show dramatic accumulation of the filtered material.

Modulating Therapy: Fixing What Corroded the Pipes

Whole-body hyperthermia and immune rebalancing address the inflammatory cascade that created the deposits. You can clean the pipes, but if the water chemistry remains corrosive, you’ll be cleaning them again in six months. Hyperthermia devices like the Heckel HC3000 bring body temperature to fever range (39.8°C), helping free autoantibodies from receptors and activating the immune system’s natural regulatory mechanisms.

Strategic Additive Therapy: Preventing New Deposits

Only after removing existing clogs and addressing the corrosion problem do targeted supplements, peptides, and medications become effective. Senolytics target “zombie cells” that perpetuate inflammation. Specific nutraceuticals support the cleanup process when taken at strategic points in treatment. This is when IV treatments, peptide therapies, and carefully timed supplement protocols can effectively reach their targets. The sequencing makes the difference between temporary improvement and lasting recovery.

Making the Invisible Finally Visible

The plumber’s advantage is that he can directly inspect pipes. Medicine’s historic disadvantage has been that microclots existed below our detection threshold, invisible to standard testing. That technological gap is closing. Ayus Laboratories’ FibriScore® test uses imaging flow cytometry with fluorescent dyes that bind to amyloid structures, quantifying both the number and size of FMCs in a blood sample. For the first time, clinicians can see what’s actually flowing through the pipes rather than inferring from indirect measurements.

The Cytek ImageStream® technology combines the statistical power of flow cytometry with the visual clarity of microscopy. Every particle passing through the machine is photographed, measured, and characterized. The result: patient reports show dramatic differences between healthy individuals (minimal FMCs) and long COVID patients (sometimes three-fold elevations in total microclot area).

FibriScore® is particularly valuable for treatment monitoring, revealing whether interventions are working. Post-apheresis samples show marked reductions, visible proof that the cleaning worked. One patient Kok tracked showed total microclot area dropping from 49.30 mm² to 7.60 mm² six days after treatment. Another showed sustained improvement over five months, from 60.09 mm² to 20.31 mm².

Other accessible tools are emerging for clinicians who want to inspect their patients’ “infrastructure.” Nail fold microscopy examines capillaries under the fingernail, the only place in the body where these tiny vessels run parallel and can be directly observed. Venous blood gas analysis measures downstream oxygen deprivation. Immune competence testing, borrowed from organ transplant medicine, assesses whether your system can mount appropriate responses. These aren’t exotic diagnostics requiring specialized labs; they’re practical inspection tools any motivated clinician can deploy.

The Infrastructure Crisis We’re Not Acknowledging

The comparison to municipal plumbing breaks down in one critical way: when a city discovers systemic pipe problems, they acknowledge them. They allocate resources and warn residents. Medicine has been slower to respond.

The microclot hypothesis still faces dismissal in mainstream circles, despite mounting evidence from multiple research groups across continents. The resistance persists even as the evidence accumulates: imaging studies, treatment responses, and quantifiable diagnostic tests.

Perhaps the hesitation stems from uncomfortable implications. We’re talking about widespread infrastructure damage from both viral infections and vaccination responses. We’re acknowledging that standard testing misses the problem entirely. We’re suggesting that treatments like apheresis (expensive, technically demanding, and not widely available) may be necessary for thousands of patients.

Dr. Philip McMillan, who has coordinated research between various groups since early 2020, predicts that within 2-3 years, this understanding will become mainstream knowledge. Whether that timeline proves optimistic or pessimistic depends partly on how many more people’s systems deteriorate while we wait for consensus to catch up with evidence.

Patients can’t afford to wait for scientific consensus. They’re living with compromised circulation right now. Their tissues are oxygen-starved right now. Their symptoms are real right now.

Understanding that massive blockages don’t appear spontaneously—that they emerge from microscopic aggregation enabled by chronic inflammation—transforms treatment from symptom management to infrastructure repair. It shifts focus from testing water quality to actually cleaning the pipes. It means recognizing when your system needs more than supplements and lifestyle changes. Sometimes the pipes need professional attention.

Your circulatory system is organic infrastructure. The time for preventive maintenance is now, before microscopic problems become visible catastrophes. The question facing medicine is: will we act on the evidence we have, or will we continue to wait while patients’ circulation systems deteriorate?