| Tired of suffering from Crohn’s disease, Michael, a 31-year-old financial planner from New York City, turned to a last resort – an underground network of “worm pushers” in cyberspace.
Michael, who asked that his last name not be revealed, chose to undergo helminthic therapy – infecting himself with Necator Americanus, or microscopic hookworm larvae, in order to put his autoimmune disease into remission. Helminthic therapy, also called worm therapy, is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, but it has seen significant success around the world. |
| Worms as medicine? Sounds crazy, but it’s consistent with the hygiene hypothesis — the theory that the organisms we consider harmful today were protecting our immune systems before modern medicine. |
| Prior to the 20th century, autoimmune diseases like Crohn’s, multiple sclerosis and lupus, as well as asthma and allergies, were virtually nonexistent. People didn’t bathe frequently, and they were exposed more often and for longer periods to animal dander and animal feces. Advocates of helminthic therapy suggest that exposure to those organisms immunized people to their bad effects. |
| Seeking a “cure” for his “incurable” disease, Michael contacted Jasper Lawrence, owner of Autoimmune Therapies and moderator of a Yahoo group of helminthic therapy, to arrange a meeting outside of the U.S. |
| Michael, who spent most of his 20s in and out of the hospital, undergoing several surgeries and taking a host of different medications, had followed Lawrence’s Yahoo group for three years and spoken to many of its followers. Symptoms of Crohn’s, an inflammatory bowel disease, include, but are not limited to, abdominal pain, diarrhea, weight loss, arthritis and fatigue. When he simply couldn’t take it any longer, Michael decided to take the plunge. |
| After purchasing the worms from Lawrence for $3,000, Michael infected himself by applying a bandage packed with worms to his arm. The worms seeped into his skin within several hours; the only side effect he felt was some minor itching, which was relieved by using Benadryl. |
| “I started feeling better after three months,” Michael said. “I stopped taking my medicine, and I usually get sick two weeks after a skipped dose. I also didn’t have food allergies anymore.” |
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Scientific Evidence
Miracle? Coincidence? Luck? Maybe, but a group of doctors, including Dr. Joel Weinstock, professor and director of gastroenterology at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, lend credence to the hygiene hypothesis.
Weinstock, who has been studying this concept since the early 1990s, has found that parasitic worms have a calming effect on their hosts’ immune systems. He took what he had learned and applied it to the hygiene hypothesis and, several years later, he and his colleagues started testing helminthes in mice with asthma, Type 1 diabetes, MS and inflammatory bowel disease. Sure enough, the diseased mice got better.
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| Weinstock published results from the helminth study in 2005, which said that 23 out of 29 Crohn’s patients went into remission. |
| Similar studies like Weinstock’s are popping up around the globe, and he suspects a “worm-based” pill may one day — and not too far off — help patients like Michael. |
Environment vs. Genetics
If infected with too many hookworms, you can become anemic, or worse – die, which is why Weinstock does not want patients with autoimmune disease running off to Central America to get worms.
“Most people who go for helminthic therapy do it as a last resort, as all conventional treatment failed them,” Michael said. “They usually have an autoimmune illness for many years, did a lot of research in their field, and are experts in their disease and its treatment.”
But Weinstock thinks there are greater lessons to be learned from all of this: One, the environment plays a greater role in autoimmune disease than genetics, and two, Americans may be going overboard when it comes to hygiene.
“I think we need to re-examine the elements of healthy hygiene and whether it improves life and what aspects are necessary,” Weinstock said. “Is it harmful for kids to get soil in their mouth? Maybe not. Are we using too much hand sanitizer? Perhaps we are going against evolution.”Read more at www.foxnews.com |
| Tired of suffering from Crohn’s disease, Michael, a 31-year-old financial planner from New York City, turned to a last resort – an underground network of “worm pushers” in cyberspace.
Michael, who asked that his last name not be revealed, chose to undergo helminthic therapy – infecting himself with Necator Americanus, or microscopic hookworm larvae, in order to put his autoimmune disease into remission. Helminthic therapy, also called worm therapy, is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, but it has seen significant success around the world. |
| Worms as medicine? Sounds crazy, but it’s consistent with the hygiene hypothesis — the theory that the organisms we consider harmful today were protecting our immune systems before modern medicine. |
| Prior to the 20th century, autoimmune diseases like Crohn’s, multiple sclerosis and lupus, as well as asthma and allergies, were virtually nonexistent. People didn’t bathe frequently, and they were exposed more often and for longer periods to animal dander and animal feces. Advocates of helminthic therapy suggest that exposure to those organisms immunized people to their bad effects. |
| Seeking a “cure” for his “incurable” disease, Michael contacted Jasper Lawrence, owner of Autoimmune Therapies and moderator of a Yahoo group of helminthic therapy, to arrange a meeting outside of the U.S. |
| Michael, who spent most of his 20s in and out of the hospital, undergoing several surgeries and taking a host of different medications, had followed Lawrence’s Yahoo group for three years and spoken to many of its followers. Symptoms of Crohn’s, an inflammatory bowel disease, include, but are not limited to, abdominal pain, diarrhea, weight loss, arthritis and fatigue. When he simply couldn’t take it any longer, Michael decided to take the plunge. |
| After purchasing the worms from Lawrence for $3,000, Michael infected himself by applying a bandage packed with worms to his arm. The worms seeped into his skin within several hours; the only side effect he felt was some minor itching, which was relieved by using Benadryl. |
| “I started feeling better after three months,” Michael said. “I stopped taking my medicine, and I usually get sick two weeks after a skipped dose. I also didn’t have food allergies anymore.” |
|
Scientific Evidence
Miracle? Coincidence? Luck? Maybe, but a group of doctors, including Dr. Joel Weinstock, professor and director of gastroenterology at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, lend credence to the hygiene hypothesis.
Weinstock, who has been studying this concept since the early 1990s, has found that parasitic worms have a calming effect on their hosts’ immune systems. He took what he had learned and applied it to the hygiene hypothesis and, several years later, he and his colleagues started testing helminthes in mice with asthma, Type 1 diabetes, MS and inflammatory bowel disease. Sure enough, the diseased mice got better.
|
| Weinstock published results from the helminth study in 2005, which said that 23 out of 29 Crohn’s patients went into remission. |
| Similar studies like Weinstock’s are popping up around the globe, and he suspects a “worm-based” pill may one day — and not too far off — help patients like Michael. |
Environment vs. Genetics
If infected with too many hookworms, you can become anemic, or worse – die, which is why Weinstock does not want patients with autoimmune disease running off to Central America to get worms.
“Most people who go for helminthic therapy do it as a last resort, as all conventional treatment failed them,” Michael said. “They usually have an autoimmune illness for many years, did a lot of research in their field, and are experts in their disease and its treatment.”
But Weinstock thinks there are greater lessons to be learned from all of this: One, the environment plays a greater role in autoimmune disease than genetics, and two, Americans may be going overboard when it comes to hygiene.
“I think we need to re-examine the elements of healthy hygiene and whether it improves life and what aspects are necessary,” Weinstock said. “Is it harmful for kids to get soil in their mouth? Maybe not. Are we using too much hand sanitizer? Perhaps we are going against evolution.”Read more at www.foxnews.com |
Alternate link: Click on the first link with the words “medscape.com” in the URL of this Google search.
| Nutritional therapy achieves better long-term outcome than steroids in children with active Crohn’s disease |
| “In children with Crohn’s disease, clinical trials have demonstrated that polymeric or elemental diet therapy is as effective as steroids in inducing remission, whilst avoiding steroid side effects,” |
| Of 44 children (median age at diagnosis of Crohn’s disease, 12.8 years) elemental diet therapy induced clinical remission in 40 (90%). Median time to remission was 6 weeks (range, 2-12 weeks), and median duration of first remission was 54 weeks (range, 4-312 weeks). |
| Of 16 children whose relapses were treated with elemental diet therapy, 12 (75%) went into remission. |
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“This data suggests that there are significant long-term benefits to using elemental diet therapy as first-line therapy for Crohn’s disease,” the authors write. “Steroids may be avoided in nearly half the cases, or their use postponed by 68 weeks.”
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| In a second study from Naples and Rome, Italy, 37 patients, aged 7 to 16 years, with active Crohn’s disease received nutritional therapy, while 10 comparable patients received methylprednisolone, 2 mg/kg/day for 4 weeks, with subsequent tapering over at least 4 weeks. |
| Within 8 weeks of treatment, 32 of the 37 children assigned to nutritional therapy and 9 of the 10 given steroids went into clinical remission. |
| Seven patients on nutritional therapy and none on steroids showed complete mucosal healing (P<.005) |
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“In children with active Crohn’s disease, exclusive nutritional therapy shows a more rapid effect than steroids in inducing clinical remission and is markedly more effective than steroids in producing healing of mucosal inflammation,” write Roberto B. Canani and colleagues. “Nutritional therapy alone is the preferred form of therapy for children with active Crohn’s disease.”
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| In an interview with Reuters Health, Mantzaris explained that Crohn’s patients in Mediterranean countries appear to have an inordinately high incidence of gastrointestinal infection with the Helicobacter pylori bacterium. In recent years, H. pylori has been identified by researchers as the cause of perhaps the majority of gastrointestinal ulcers. |
| Mantzaris and his colleagues wondered whether H. pylori treatment might reduce ulcerative symptoms in Crohn’s patients. To test this theory, they gave 30 H. pylori-positive patients with early-stage Crohn’s disease antibacterial drug therapy for 10 weeks. Another 40 H. pylori-negative patients received prednisolone, a standard medication used to fight Crohn’s disease. |
| The researchers report that, “after treatment, clinical remission (of Crohn’s disease) was achieved in all patients” — regardless of the type of therapy received. At the same time, H. pylori infection was eradicated in 28 of the 30 infected patients. |
| “What this shows is that by eradicating H. pylori infection… we achieved a remission of Crohn’s disease,” Mantzaris explained. |
| The authors stress that their findings do not mean that H. pylori causes Crohn’s disease. But it does raise the issue “of whether regimens aiming at eradicating H. pylori in infected patients with Crohn’s disease may also achieve remission of Crohn’s disease.”Read more at articles.mercola.com |
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| Cellular therapy with stem cells is revolutionizing the focus of treatment of many serious diseases. Replacing the cells of damaged tissue with other new cells from the same patient is already a reality. This is the basis of cellular therapy and regenerative medicine, the latest great advance in biomedicine. In this line, Hospital Clínic, Barcelona is leading the world in the application of an innovative cellular therapy that uses stem cells to treat Crohn’s disease, a chronic genetic disease that affects 1% of the population in Spain and which has considerable impact on the quality of life of the patients. |
| The procedure is based on an autologous bone-marrow transplant (when patients receive a transplant of their own stem cells) and now constitutes a treatment option to cure an intestinal disease that sometimes does not successfully respond to drugs and requires highly complex surgery that does not provide a cure. |
| the technique has been tested with excellent results: in an average follow-up period of 6 years, 80% of transplant patients are in a phase of total remission of the disease and the remaining 20% have shown considerable improvement following the transplant, and are now responding favorably to drugs.Read more at www.medicalnewstoday.com |
