When I first got into hookworms to treat my several severe GI immune conditions, I was confused and filled with trepidation. Six years later, it all seems pretty simple, but I suppose perhaps everything is like that when you are starting out.
The first step is to purchase larvae from a provider listed in the Helminthic Therapy Wiki and when they arrive, slap them on your arm.
Afterwards to save money, if you are into DIY, several months later you can start to incubate to provide your
Not much to report. My GI issues have all cleared up, but that's probably because I've gone gluten-free for the month of June. My entry wound has almost entirely healed. Aside from a touch of redness it should be 100% in a couple of days. That steroid cream made a huge difference, not in pain or discomfort really but certainly in aesthetics. Previously the entry wound was ugly enough to scare children.
The way the life cycle of the hookworms works after about a week the larvae drill through
This week I've been reading up on self supply of hookworms, not just to save money but to ensure access. Covid made getting larvae difficult, and here in Canada it's hit or miss once the cold weather sets in. Larvae don't like temps below 5C and they can die in transit because of the cold. Providers usually resend for free but that still means being symptomatic for the duration. I once spent an entire winter gluten-free because of a DOA shipment.
I've been shopping supplies on Amazon - a bi
In the last blog entry it was late July 2018 and my larvae had just arrived. Before going further there is a fair amount of history leading up to that moment that probably should be discussed.
Back in 1999 at age 35 and single again I had my first inkling of what was to come. I was into body building at the time and consumed a fair amount of protein powder. I developed a painful reaction to it. I talked to the vendor. They had never heard of any problems. I shrugged it off. Going forward th
I've had plenty of gluten goodness sitting in my freezer for a month now and the siren call from them was too much for me to bear. A donut and a Crustini sacrificed themselves for science last night. Aside from a little gas I've had no reaction - just feeling fine. So that it's it, 30 days and I'm back in remission.
I apologize for the dramatics but as all celiacs know, risking a gluten exposure is not for the faint of heart. Back in the day I've had some hella violent reactions where I bec
Back in the summer of 2018 I was reaching a pivotal moment in my life. I had had celiac disease and ulcerative colitis since 2006, but the colitis had flared to an 11 and wasn't responding to drugs. Prednisone disrupted my sleep but didn't even begin to take the edge off my colitis pain. Daily I was going into the shower, closing the door, cranking the radio, and literally screaming because I couldn't take the pain anymore. I had talked to my doctor several times about the prospect of colectomy
For long time followers of this blog will remember my account of my time at the start of my GI-trouble journey, which largely started in 2005-2008 when I was hit with an abscess, multiple corrective surgeries, ulcerative colitis and celiac disease. This was a particularly bad time in my life. After going gluten-free things got much better, I healed, but I was still left with many food sensitivities, including IBS symptoms and horrible gas.
Since I've been using hookworms, by and large I've
It's been a rapid few days of learning about hookworm incubation. Here's what more I've learned. Most importantly, any microscope that can do 40X will suffice.
That's because it turns out the concern about the distance from the lens to the plate for pipetting was a red herring. All one needs to do is lay down a bunch of very small drops on the slide or Petri dish and use the microscope to find drops that have the required number of larvae. Note the placement of the drops, remove the slide o
https://doi.org/10.1093/ibd/izad110
Published June 15, 2023 in the journal of Inflammatory Bowel Diseases, this study is expressly for ulcerative colitis, but because the focus was on safety and tolerance of hookworms as a treatment, the results should apply for any of the myriad conditions people use hookworms to treat. It's a pilot study paving the way for future full-scale randomized controlled trials regarding efficacy.
The study used 30 Necator americanus larvae. The self-treatin
This afternoon I tried the last one of those AliExpress sub-$20 microscopes. All told there were four, and I'm including a pic of the most promising one where the tube is suspended above a platform.
Even with top and below lighting and a sample where I knew there was a larva directly in the center of the drop, I still couldn't see it. I could sort of make out other debris, but no, just no.
It's still a cute tool, though. You plug into your computer's USB port and using an app like VLC
It's been suggested that I clarify my claim of being celiac. Something of some importance as I am making the claim that at least for myself using hookworms has improved my life as a celiac, and making that claim on a celiac-oriented site no less.
I have never had a positive biopsy test for celiac disease. There, I've said it.
That said, I maintain that there is very little doubt that I am celiac, and the only reason I don't have that positive test is that I get far, far too sick to be
It took watching a YouTube video to figure out how to use it, and it's a bit touchy, but it does allow me to take pics and video of what I see under the microscope. The device came from AliExpress and costs under $5.
Here's a video of a particularly active larva. Let me know in the comments if the link isn't working.
This larva was from a recent incubation and examined at the 6-day mark. Between the two jars there were hundreds of larvae.
I believe the answer to that question is an unequivocal yes.
Celiac disease is a debilitating condition that uncontrolled exacts a huge toll on people impacting both their health and their quality of life.
Controlled, by which I mean sufferers make serious effort to avoid gluten, celiac disease still lurks in the background waiting to act on diet missteps and likely contributes to the development of a variety of other health conditions.
Hookworms help with the primary expression
I did another test incubation that turned out to be successful. Though it was a month early, I didn't see any harm in inoculating early with 25 larvae.
This time I used 5 jars. Three had zero larvae, one had an ok yield, and the last had good/very good population. The included pic is from that last jar. With that kind of density, collecting the needed number of larvae is quick work.
This experience reinforces to me the necessity of using multiple jars. Five seems to be the right numbe
So you've made the decision to try Helminthic Therapy. What do you do now?
1) First you join the Facebook Helminthic Therapy Group @ https://www.facebook.com/groups/htsupport and make an introductory post. Tell the members about what you hope to achieve and a bit about your medical history. The regulars there are veterans at HT, use helminths (usually hookworms) themselves, and can answer any questions you might have. John Scott is the leader of the group and has been a hookworm host for ye
My renewal date came up on the weekend based on my new inoculation schedule of 5 months and I reordered larvae. All much simpler than it used to be, but I guess that's what you get once you learn the angles. Just a quick email to confirm the price and a visit to PayPal to send the money, and then the Provider then gave me a tracking code. The larvae should arrive in 9-11 days.
Next month I'll order pipettes and vials from AliExpress and in 2-3 months I'll order a microscope and slides from
I just had a last look at those two jars and this is what I came away with.
The first jar's water probably had about 100 larvae total, the second had substantially more, in the order of 200-300. This estimate is based on how much water was in each jar and how much water I pipetted out of each into a petri dish and scanned. In the second jar that I launched 2 days after the first, I placed more stool onto the coffee filter. More stool = more eggs = more larvae. Collecting larvae from the fir
A few weeks ago I had a bad day marked by considerable GI distress. It was bad enough I figured I must have lost my hookworm colony.
Immediately I went gluten-free and was better, so I thought I'd have to pony up earlier than I expected for my next inoculation. After a further 4-5 gluten-free days I reintroduced meat and gluten expecting the worst, but there was nothing, everything was still all good. Since then I've been on a regular gluten diet and I've had days of perfection where there
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHRZkZ_b1sg
Ted Simon uses an incubator and vermiculite. His channel offers several other hookworm related videos, including one where he shows using a microscope to harvest the larvae.
My method doesn't use an incubator or vermiculite and I get good results, but I can't claim consistency as I don't have that much of a track record yet.
The Helminthic Therapy Support Group on Facebook maintains a repository of all its gained knowledge in the form of the freely available Helminthic Therapy Wiki (Google it). In it there's a listing of videos that the group has found most useful: https://helminthictherapywiki.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy_in_the_media#Featured_videos
I did a YouTube search for Helminthic Therapy and found a bunch more, many of them from people from the general public who did their own research. I noted factual
I'm still trying my hand at hookworm incubation. This time I set 5 jars going all using the same method, namely small, hermetically sealable jars stuffed with a coffee filter smeared with a small amount of egg infected stool (mine) with about a 1/2 cm of mineral water at the base and left for 9 days. I made sure the filter paper always touched the water and that the stool was moistened well before smearing. To the best of my knowledge, I prepared each jar in exactly the same way. I even weighed
Hookworms and the three other helminths are used for a variety of immune conditions, not just celiac disease. John Scott just pointed me towards a collection of blogs like mine where people discuss their experiences at length like I do: https://helminthictherapywiki.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy_blogs?fbclid=IwAR0U6tvguzLaQ0Tl-0gwC-zMPkJrMKIn2tZk018iHiDGuN8L0so01_lbcXA#Blogs
Which begs the question, what is the future for this blog?
What I've done so far is talk about my past, how I got
I suppose it's to be expected that a treatment that has the goal of manipulating the immune system could have side effects, and for some people that appears to be true.
Back when I started in 2018 with Helminthic Therapy (HT) I simply asked for 25 larvae from my provider because, well, the price was the same whether I ordered one or 25, so I tried to maximize my bang for my buck. I'm on the large side so I probably contributed to me not having problems with this strategy. Outside of the ini
I was in a bit of a rush and didn't finesse the job as well as I would have liked. I ended up using too much stool in one jar and not enough on the other. The overweight one might tear through the threads and sink into the water, and the light one might not have enough stool to generate many larvae. This experience tells me there's some technique to this, and I'm thinking going forward I'll tape down the threads to the outside of jars before placing the stool on the filter and then pipette water
