John Scott, now a world expert on helminthic therapy, periodically sends me links to particularly spectacular wormy success stories. And in my new year clean out of my box I have just found two.
(By the way, if you have not already done so, and if you are even remotely interested in helminthic therapy, you should visit his new Helminthic Wiki site.)
The first story seems to slot in rather well with my recent blog on TILT. I wonder if this girl had suffered the sort of toxic assault that Dr Miller describes? The second describes a young man’s success in treating his psoriasis (notoriously resistant to all treatments) with the same Necator Americanus.
And even for those of you who do not have any acute health issues now, maybe a dose of worms could be a way of staving them off in the future. If you wish to investigate further, go to the Helminthic therapy for well people page of John’s site.
And finally….. Cost.
The high cost of acquiring a dose of healing worms has, up till now, stopped a number of people who might otherwise have been prepared to give the therapy a try. However, John reports that you can now buy a dose of 5 hookworm larvae for as little US$85, so it is very much more affordable than it used to be.
Case history 1.
A 12 year old female identical twin suffered, two years ago, a sudden onset of extreme and debilitating allergies to dust mite and cat dander. Associated asthmatic episodes, severe vocal chord dysfunction, chronic and debilitating hay fever, that was barely touched by prednisone, various antihistamines, nasonex etc…
Her condition initially hospitalised her – at times for up to a week, where they would struggle to stabilise her with pred, nebs and antihistamines – once back at home and on a host of drugs she still couldn’t go to school full time.
Cleaning measures at home included a state of the art air scrubber, steam cleaning her bed and room a couple of times a week, washing all her bedding weekly, pillows and covers included despite all being dust mite covered, changing her sheets and pillow cases a couple of times a week. Despite all this she was a miserable, inflamed, irritated, depressed, emotional rollercoaster who missed camps, couldn’t swim without severe anxiety, didn’t have the confidence to participate in sports and was seeing a speech therapist on a weekly basis to deal with breathing issues and anxiety. Her condition meant she couldn’t stay at motels nor other people’s houses. The amount of time spent out of school meant that she had to repeat a year.
Then came 2 doses of helminths, first dose of 10 Necator americanus (NA) April 15, second dose 20, Nov 15.
First dose showed incremental improvement which allowed her to drop each medication one by one over a period of just 6 months. Though she dropped her daily medications, at this point she still regularly took antihistamines to beat back the hay fever. Her bedding was still regularly washed and her room kept as clean as possible. Air scrubber was still necessary.Around 7 months after first dose the vocal chord dysfunction gradually faded away.
After second dose stabilised, there was another noticeable improvement again: reactive antihistamine use dropped off. She started forgetting to take puffer and tablets when she went away to other locations – could tolerate other people’s houses, stopped taking days off school for allergy related illness. Mood and attitude to life changed. Started enjoying being physical again, started being social again, depression and social withdrawal resolved. Mental capacity/concentration improved beyond sight. She became a normal kid, with manageable hay fever and very occasional mild asthma only associated with massive allergy interaction or respiratory illness.
Today, she regularly rides her bike 14 kms to school, even in cold weather. Rarely looks hay feverish – though sometimes has a few days of struggle. She plays saxophone (something she would never have contemplated starting 2 years ago!) and is hardly recognisable in comparison to the person who had to fight so hard for air 2 years ago.
Her recovery has been nothing short of miraculous and the only thing that it can be attributed to is the NA. She is keen to have some more to try to mop up the last remnants of allergy – while she *almost* never requires medication, it does lurk a little at times, especially when in very dusty, carpeted, cat occupied areas. But is a completely different person in comparison to the miserable, debilitated girl she was.
This post appeared on a helminthic therapy Facebook group. John say this is s an extremely active and interesting group so, anyone who really does want to know more about helminths might wish to join it.
In the same email John had also pointed me towards a book published last March by another helminthic therapy experimenter – The Worms Inside Me: My experiment with helminthic therapy by Beth Anderson. His comment on the book:
Beth was an almost life-long allergic asthma sufferer who was also struggling to control her weight and blood sugar, and had developed what she thought was age-related pain and inflammation in her joints. She had also been researching helminthic therapy when a cousin died unexpectedly at a tragically early age from complications of multiple sclerosis.
Then, while still reeling from this loss, Beth was offered a free dose of HDC by a total stranger she had met on a local mailing list. A package changed hands in a parking lot, and Beth began a journey that very quickly transformed her life.
On Day 22, Beth wrote in her journal that, without realising it, she had, for many years, been one of the “sickies”, with a seriously curtailed life, but denying and masking the diminished nature of her existence. Now, after just one dose of HDC, she felt she was living like someone her own age, or perhaps even younger.
Beth now wishes she had tried helminthic therapy much sooner, and reports that HDC has affected every aspect of her being in the most positive way possible. “It was like walking out from a black-and-white movie into a world of Technicolor…. I feel that I have been brought to life, given a second chance.”
Case History 2.
The second case, the young man with psoriasis, appears as part of the The Way of Alpha – strong – primal – instinctive – blog. An interesting read in itself…
However you will find the hookworm/psoriasis blog here. It goes in some detail into the theories underpinning helminthic therapy before describing how, at the age of 30, the writer’s relatively mild psoriasis flared not only into rampant lesions but into multiple food intolerances, gut issues, anxiety and self doubt.
He did have some initial fairly vigorous, although anticipated, reactions. But, over the next 10 months, a single dose of 25 Necator Americanus virtually resolved not only the psoriasis but all of his other attendant digestive, intolerance and mood issues.
Many thanks for this. What a wonderful resource John Scott’s Wiki website is.
I read the blog of the second person you reference http://www.thewayofalpha.com/blog-1/2017/10/10/hook-me-up-treating-autoimmune-disease-with-hookworm-inoculation – not for the fainthearted! I have read elsewhere about blood iron overload, particularly as you get older, and at the end he has this interesting comment:
Through the excellent and thought provoking work of P.D Mangan published at Rogue Health and Fitness, I have recently been made aware of the role of iron in aging and chronic disease. ‘Ferrotoxic’ disease is briefly surmised as the range of conditions for which body iron burden is a contributing factor, and is increasingly being linked to a host of the usual chronic diseases such as malignancies, endocrine disorders and cardiovascular disease. (Zacharski 2014)
A number of striking points come to mind upon reading about the issues of increased iron burden. Firstly, the body has no means of removing excess iron, instead storing it as ferritin.
Why would the body not evolve a mechanism through which to remove excess iron, given how reactive and potentially damaging the molecule can be?
Well, it never had to. There were always parasites gradually removing it through blood loss. Helminths are well documented to cause anaemia if the parasite burden gets too high (Crompton 1993) and as we have seen, helminths are consistently prevalent in humans without access to modern sanitation. A situation that was the norm from our evolutionary conception up until a few generations ago. Consider this. Each NA harvests around 0.03ml +/- 0.015ml of blood per day from its host. Even a mild NA infection of 100 worms will remove 3-4 mls of blood per day, over a litre of blood per year, causing an iron loss of around 675mg per year.
Is it possible the removal of Helminths from our natural biome is leading to a potentially detrimental increase in ‘normal’ iron levels?
Along with many other questions surrounding Helminth infection, this is something I would implore researchers to investigate.
What a fascinating thought – I wonder if John had followed up on that one….