A new way

For many who suffer from autoimmune disorders such as Crohn's Disease, Ulcerative Colitis, Multiple Sclerosis, Asthma, Allergies, etc., there is a burgeoning therapy that is safe, organic and without long term side-effects. Though still in its infancy and not yet embraced by the medical profession, the evidence is mounting in support of helminthic therapy, or less correctly: worm therapy.

More and more scientific studies are showing the "hygene hypothesis" and the "old-friends hypothesis" to be true; we in the west are too clean for our good. It is clear that people who grow up in third world countries are far less likely to suffer from an autoimmune disorder than those of us who grow up in western cities. Even Palestinians have less autoimmunity than their Israeli neighbours, due to their living conditions being much less sanitary.

It is common knowledge now that "good bacteria" are important in out digestive tracts for proper assimilation of food. Who would have believed 50 or even 20 years ago that it would be normal for people to buy bacteria for consumption from their local chemist?

For many of us, "good bacteria" are only part of the equation. There are numerous other living organisms that have been a part of human evolution. Now in recent times we have "cleaned" our environments of many of these organisms and clearly the results are not good.

At the core of the concept of helminthic therapy is the idea that all complex organisms function as ecosystems. Every large multi-celled organism is dependent to a very large degree upon other organisms that use its body as their "home". This dependency is not trivial; we depend upon microbes to function. Not just to function properly, but to function at all.

We are a walking rain forest in a sense, and we function like one.

Helminths are relatively harmless to us, and indeed we have evolved over milions of years together. It is not hard to see the correlation between us eradicating so many of our symbiotic friends and the onset of so many more diseases.

Helminthic therapy has helped many people around the world and continues to be the last hope for so many people who have found the drugs to either not help at all, or be too harsh for them.

Though studies are being undertaken with regard to worm therapy for autoimmune diseases, the only way that the treatment will ever be offered is if they find a way to isolate the molecules with immune effects from the helminths that can then be packaged and used as drugs. READ: When drug companies can make a lot of money from it.

There is no need to wait decades to produce very expensive, dangerous drugs when a very effective, simple, natural solution is at hand. Instead of treating the symptoms we can fix the problem by restoring the ecosystem formed by our bodies to its natural state by reintroducing missing beneficial organisms.

Helminthic therapy, or worm therapy, is available now in Australia. Click here to learn all about howworm therapy can be shipped to you.

References

(1) Strachan, D. P. 1989. Hay fever, hygiene and household size. (The Hygiene Hypothesis) Br. Med. J. 299: 1259.

(2) Cookson, W. O. C. M., and M. F. Moffatt. 1997. Asthma: an epidemic-in-the-absence-of infection? Science 275:41.

(3) Wills-Karp, M., J. Santeliz, and C. L. Karp. 2001. The germless theory of allergic disease: revisiting the hygiene hypothesis. Nat. Rev. Immunol. 1:69.

(4) Yazdanbakhsh, M., P. G. Kremsner, and R. van Ree. 2002. Allergy, parasites and the hygiene hypothesis. Science 296:490.

(5) Shi, H. N., C. J. Ingui, I. Dodge, and C. Nagler-Anderson. 1998. A helminth-induced mucosal Th2 response alters non-responsiveness to oral administration of a soluble antigen. J. Immunol. 160:2449.

(6) Fox, J. G., P. Beck, C. A. Dangler, M. T. Whary, T. C. Wang, H. N. Shi, and C. Nagler-Anderson. 2000. Concurrent enteric helminth infection modulates inflammation and gastric immune responses and reduces Helicobacter-induced gastric atrophy. Nat. Med. 6:536.

(7) Lynch, N. R., I. Hagel, M. Perez, M. C. D. Prisco, R. Lopez, and N. Alvarez. 1993. Effect of anti-helminthic treatment on the allergic reactivity of children in a tropical slum. J. Allergy Clin. Immunol. 92:404.

(8) Wang, C.-C., T. J. Nolan, G. A. Schad, and D. Abraham. 2001. Infection of mice with the helminth Strongyloides stercoralis suppresses pulmonary allergic responses to ovalbumin. Clin. Exp. Allergy 31:493.

(9) van den Biggelaar, A. H. J., R. van Ree, L. C. Rodrigues, B. Lell, A. M. Deelder, P. G. Kremsner, and M. Yazdanbaksh. 2000. Decreased atopy in children infected with Schistosoma haematobium: a role for parasite-induced interleukin-10. Lancet 356:1723.

(10) Turton, J.A. (1976) IgE, parasites, and allergy. The Lancet ii:686 (text not available online, too old)

(11) Inoculating Celiac Disease Patients With the Human Hookworm Necator Americanus: Evaluating Immunity and Gluten-Sensitivity

(12) Doetze, A., J. Satoguina, G. Burchard, T. Rau, C. Loliger, B. Fleischer, and A. Hoerauf. 2000. Antigen-specific cellular hyporesponsiveness in a chronic human helminth infection is mediated by Th3/Tr1-type cytokines IL-10 and transforming growth factor-Beta but not by a Th1 to Th2 shift. Int. Immunol. 12:623.