So if I’m understanding you right, swordmaker, you’re saying the plaques, or at least the core of the plaques, are made of tangled masses of spirochete bodies but no one has noticed this fact. Presumably because all the researchers so far have used the wrong kind of microscope. Is this correct?
Perhaps... Something forms the framework that catches the crud... It may be hidden by all the rest of the stuff that accreted over years of build up. We SEE the spirochetes forming these masses. . . why, we simply don't know. Maybe they are spirochete orgies. Sometimes they die in those masses. We see them in the oral environment, not in the body. Not enough is known about the spirochete life cycle because there has been no way to follow the entire life cycle!
Most blood born studies have been done with stained slides—I.e., dead bugs, immotile—so they could see them. Only more recently have studies started using the phase contrast microscopes, but even that is difficult. We have to look at these very tiny bacteria at 1200X, and they are STILL very small in the field of view, so finding and following a living spirochete in a 3D media, to spy on its lifestyle is tedious. The one we found that invaded and killed the leukocyte and then left the dead body, did it over a period of six hours! We couldn't watch the whole procedure, we just left the microscope aimed at it and kept checking back on the situation, and recorded it.
Once, we found what we thought was a giant spirochete that extended from one side of the field of view to the other! We watched it for a while then it suddenly broke apart into at least a dozen spirochetes! They had formed an end to end daisy chain out of themselves for a reason known only to spirochetes! Do they repeat these behaviors in the bodies of hosts, or only in oral environments, or only while being watched under a phase contrast microscope? Who knows? I certainly don't!
We've seen other Spirochetes suddenly start moving in the same direction across the entire field of view moving in an entirely synchronized fashion! It's very strange and eerie!