Pete Dixon

Dr. William Parker says you can't know ahead of time how many helminths to infect yourself with, and taking too much can make you "very, very sick," and it can cause a lot of the same symptoms that might be trying to treat, such as anemia, mental fog, severe gastrointestinal pains, muscle aches, etc., and being infected by too many can cause an inflammatory state--exactly the state that many people considering such a therapy might be trying to mediate.

I also don't buy the "bored teenager" immune system theory he proposes--hinting that back when most people might have been infected with helminths they had better immune systems and were somehow more healthy than people without helminths are today--this, in my opinion, is utter BS. Just look at the vast increase in longevity over the last 150 years--AFTER parasitic worms were eliminated in the vast majority of the population. Harking back to some supposedly more healthy time period in human history when many people were infected with such parasites is absurd. The reason why so many people were infected in past times is because they are contagious, and back when most people had them the average life expectancy was 30-50 years!

There is a good reason why mainstream doctors don't recommend this type of therapy for ANY purposes--it can be dangerous, it's contagious, and there is very little accepted scientific evidence that hookworm infection can treat people for anything in a better way than FDA approved medications.

Last, he admits that we haven't got any placebo controlled trials on whether they effectively treat seasonal allergies, yet he still makes the claim. What type of doctor is he, one who doesn't believe in science?

More info:

Before the development of effective treatments for hookworm infections, the average life expectancy was lower due to the cumulative effects of hookworm disease and other prevalent health conditions of the time. Hookworm infections, particularly in regions with poor sanitation and malnutrition, contributed to chronic anemia, malnutrition, developmental delays in children, and reduced work capacity in adults.

Key Factors:

Widespread Infection: Hookworm was endemic in many warm, humid regions, particularly in the southeastern United States, parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Chronic Illness, Not Immediate Death: Hookworm infection alone rarely caused death, but it significantly weakened individuals, making them more susceptible to other diseases. The overall life expectancy in heavily affected regions could drop by several years due to the compounded effects of malnutrition and secondary infections.

Historical Life Expectancy:

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, life expectancy in heavily affected areas was often between 30–50 years, depending on the region and other health challenges.

These figures reflected not only hookworm but also high infant mortality rates, infectious diseases, and lack of medical care.

Effective treatments, starting with vermifuge compounds like thymol in the early 1900s and later advancements with modern anthelmintics like albendazole and mebendazole, greatly reduced the prevalence and impact of hookworm infections, contributing to improved health outcomes and life expectancy in endemic areas.

Parker didn't exactly go out of his way to sell Helminthic Therapy in this video, did he? In other videos online he's very much positive towards HT, especially Inflammatory Bowel Disease and MS.

Acetaminophen is on the list of World Health Organization's Essential Medicines, yet according to Wikipedia it also is responsible for thousands of emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and deaths. Dose maketh the poison.

Most of us have seen the distended stomachs of kids carrying thousands of hookworms in their bellies. With Helminthic Therapy, self-treaters generally use 25 or fewer hookworms, sometimes only 3 or 5. That's all it takes to get the changes in the immune system that we are looking for.

Usually this level of infection is asymptomatic. Aside from a little itching at the inoculation site I've never noticed my hookworms. Protocol these days is to start with a very low dose, that 3-5 number I mentioned, and work up depending on side effects, if there are any, and improvement of symptoms of the condition being treated. 

Hookworms are only infectious if you are planning on defecating on the ground and running around barefoot, which is, incidentally, how canine hookworms are spread. Other than that, the number of hookworms doesn't grow past the number inoculated because the human hookworm lifecycle requires the larvae to mature outside the body.

People don't infect and continuously re-infect themselves for years without reason. They see results that they like and keep going, often getting full remission from conditions that were impossible for modern medicine to treat. You know my story, ulcerative colitis and celiac disease. My colitis had gotten so bad by 2018 that literally every day I was literally screaming in pain, and any accidental gluten exposures were devastating. That's all gone now, with colitis only occurring with a handful of foods that widely known to induce colitis. It's 95% better, and my celiac reactions are zero. Hookworms have been a huge win for me. I was badly sick for 13 years and I didn't need to be.

It's a shame that Helminthic Therapy is difficult for a number of reasons to prove effective in the lab, but you shouldn't discount the testimony of people whose lives have been changed by the treatment. We aren't deluded, and we aren't lying to you.

There are many different anti-inflammatory drugs that are effective in treating ulcerative colitis, have you tried any?  

At this point I am free of colitis unless I ingest alcohol, peanuts/pistachios, and as I discovered just this week, red meat.

I prefer pork and chicken over red meat anyway, and since alcoholism runs in my family losing alcohol I probably shouldn't regard as a great loss. Losing out on peanut butter sandwiches does suck though. In all, these three sensitivies are not a big deal. Not knowing about them would be.

Back in 2018 pre-hookworm colitis was a constant 3, with exposure to any meat protein ratcheting it up to a 10. That put me definitely on the radar for colon cancer.

I'm ok with the status quo and don't see the need for medication. In 2018 when I was desperate I was put on prednisone. It did absolutely nothing besides make me unable to sleep. I don't believe the mountain of Mesalamine suppositories I took in 2005/6 did anything either.

Removing the problematic foods is definitely the way to go, especially when there are so few of them. I do expect I'll find a few more though. Still very manageable.

4 hours ago, Scott Adams said:

There are many different anti-inflammatory drugs that are effective in treating ulcerative colitis, have you tried any?  

Anti-inflammatory drugs can present a raft of issues, and, unlike helminths, they are often not appropriate for long-term use.

"Treatment of moderate to severe IBD involves the use of immune modulators and/or biologics, which have several toxicities and side effects, such as predisposition to infections, cancer, and demyelinating diseases in addition to others. Helminths or helminth products are attractive therapeutic avenues given their safety profile."
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10135676/

On 12/23/2024 at 1:17 PM, Scott Adams said:

I also don't buy the "bored teenager" immune system theory he proposes--

I don't buy it either. I think a much better explanation is that humans evolved with hookworms just as hookworms evolved with us. The immunoregulatory activities that hookworms conduct to avoid expulsion from the gut have over time been incorporated into how the gut immune system works as a whole, and without hookworms present the gut immune system is incomplete and dysfunctional.

A missing cog in the wheel as it were.

You must realize that going backwards in time, 100-150 plus years ago, when the human lifespan was roughly half as long on average than it is now, people were often infected with hookworms as well as many other chronic diseases and parasites, for example tuberculosis, trichinosis, tapeworms, etc., were also very common, but this does not mean that we need those things to be healthier. As I mentioned, eliminating such diseases and parasites from the general population is part of the reason that our lifespans have doubled in a but more than 100 years. I'm not sure I even buy the argument our immune systems are "incomplete and dysfunctional" without hookworms, but one could make an argument that some people's immune systems, without hookworms, might go into overdrive without them, although I still believe that we have developed pharmaceutical treatments in such cases that have been shown to be effective in dealing with most of these cases, and those treatments are far safer and more reliable than trying to maintain specific numbers of hookworms in millions of individuals with different issues and different immune systems.

Necator americanus is particularly well adapted to humans. Personally I don't know of any cases outside of accidental overdoses where Helminthic Therapy self-treaters have suffered harm from NA.

Sometimes the treatment doesn't help, and very occasionally side effects are intolerable. In those cases, if desired the worms can be killed off. Regular medical drugs also have issues. Probably half the drugs I've taken in my life either didn't help or I reacted to. In fact, just this year I had a horrible reaction to an antibiotic. Nothing's perfect in this life.

When I started with NA the now standard dosing protocol was not in place. I began with 25 larvae which would be regarded as a huge dose today. Outside the initial rash at the inoculation site I've never had issues. Problems only began when my hookworms aged out and died and I quickly got sick again.

I would never argue that HT will go mainstream. People react far too negatively to the very idea of deliberately introducing worms or worm eggs to their bodies for that to happen. That doesn't mean millions of people wouldn't have better lives if they tried it. I sincerely believe their lives would be better, often much better. In the United States, more than 300,000 colonectomies, or colectomy surgeries, are performed each year. Probably a lot of that is because of ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease. HT is very effective with those conditions, and presumably those patients tried all the drugs before resorting to surgery. But they probably didn't try HT, and to my mind, they obviously should have.

You’ve touched on some big issues that really need evidence for a fuller understanding.

I agree that we don’t need tuberculosis or trichinosis, and that the reduction in these and many other infections has undoubtedly contributed to the increase in longevity seen in the West in the past century. And yet some infections can actually be beneficial, as can be seen from this brief book excerpt.

https://mywikis-eu-wiki-media.s3.eu-central-2.wasabisys.com/htwiki/Lawrence_Johnson_and_the_chiggers.pdf (PDF)

The trick is to differentiate between those infectious agents that can safely provide benefits and those that can’t.

Although it’s true that humans are living much longer now than they did 100-150 years ago, our species has actually never been so sick as we are today!

The benefits of industrialisation, such as clean water, improved sanitation and food storage and preparation methods, plus antibiotics, have greatly reduced the risks from infection, but, over the 20th century, this risk was gradually replaced by that of chronic illness.

One in three people around the world now has a range of chronic health problems such as asthma, cancer, heart disease, arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), diabetes or dementia. Taking the disease that’s the focus of this group - celiac disease - as one example, it can be seen that its incidence increased significantly worldwide between 1900 and 2024. A systematic review and meta-analysis found that the incidence of celiac disease has been rising by an average of 7.5% per year over the past several decades.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32022718/

Today in the US, over half of all adults have a chronic disease and the situation is getting worse. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that, by 2050, chronic diseases will account for 86% of all deaths.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7077778/

Many chronic diseases are immune-related and it is not helping the fight against their rise to epidemic proportions that, as well as doing so much good, industrialisation has removed organisms that are singularly effective in moderating human immunity - helminths. Some helminths are pathogenic so these are obviously no loss to us, but the now largely complete removal of this type of organism from the human environment has left the human immune system without a key moderator whose contribution to human health had previously been fine-tuned over millions of years of co-evolution with its hosts.

A connection between the gradual loss of helminths and the rise of immune-related disease was first noted in 1968, when medical researchers began to observe a relationship between a reduction in helminth colonisation and an increased incidence of autoimmune disease.

https://mywikis-eu-wiki-media.s3.eu-central-2.wasabisys.com/htwiki/Autoimmune_disease_and_parasitic_infections_in_Nigerians.pdf (PDF)

By the year, 2000, it was very clear from epidemiological data that various immunological and autoimmune diseases are much less common in the developing world than the industrialised world.

This arresting graphic was prepared by the late Robert Summers (Professor Emeritus, Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Iowa) when he collaborated with other Iowa researchers to mount the first clinical trials using helminths as therapeutic agents.

A preliminary study was mounted in six patients with acute, chronic IBD who had previously all failed pharmaceutical therapies. The study was so successful that, after treatment with porcine whipworm ova (TSO), five patients went into remission, and the sixth improved substantially. .

https://web.archive.org/web/20090515230524/https://www.nytimes.com/1999/08/31/health/in-pursuit-of-autoimmune-worm-cure.html

Further studies by the Iowa team then demonstrated the potential of this treatment, with 79% of patients with Crohn’s disease who were given TSO responding with a significant reduction in symptoms.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1774382/

The fact that more recent trials using helminths have failed to repeat these early successes is due largely to seriously flawed trial methodology, as is explained in detail here:

https://www.helminthictherapywiki.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy_research#Problems_with_clinical_trials_using_live_helminths

The pharmaceutical treatments that you have described as being "far safer and more reliable" than helminthic therapy are in fact often not so. The effectiveness of currently available pharmaceutical treatments approved for autoimmune and inflammatory disorders varies, but one report indicated that their average effectiveness for a broad group of autoimmune diseases was no more than 50%.

https://www.ifm.org/articles/autoimmune-disease-treatments

Moreover, pharmaceutical treatments for autoimmune diseases are often associated with long-term side effects including the following.

* Immunosuppressive drugs increase the risk of viral, bacterial and fungal infections.

* NSAIDs and corticosteroids can cause gastrointestinal issues such as ulcers, bleeding, constipation, diarrhea and heartburn.

* Some medications can cause cardiovascular problems. E.g., cyclophosphamide can lead to cardiac side effects ranging from mild electrocardiographic changes to fatal cardiomyopathy.

* Corticosteroids can cause endocrine disruptions, leading to cushingoid habitus, hyperglycemia and diabetes.

* Long-term use of corticosteroids can cause musculoskeletal effects leading to osteoporosis and aseptic necrosis of the bones.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3151601/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5481723/

https://grassrootsfunctionalmedicine.com/featured-post/side-effects-autoimmune-medications/

The vast majority of the side effects resulting from the use of helminthic therapy to treat autoimmune diseases are transient and only occur in the first few weeks of treatment. Being largely dose-dependent, these brief side effects can easily be moderated by careful attention to dosing. Longer-term adverse effects only occur in very rare cases.

https://www.helminthictherapywiki.org/wiki/Self-treating_with_HDC#Side_effects_and_adverse_reactions_to_HDC

https://www.helminthictherapywiki.org/wiki/Self-treating_with_TTO#Possible_TT_side_effects

https://www.helminthictherapywiki.org/wiki/Self-treating_with_TSO#Side_effects

https://www.helminthictherapywiki.org/wiki/Hookworm_side_effects

It was largely because of having faced disappointing results and significant long-term side effects from the available pharmaceutical treatments, that patients took matters into their own hands when mainstream medical research switched from trialing the use of living worms to exploring the use of synthesised helminth proteins - an option that is, incidentally, still many years, if not decades, from readiness for clinical use.

The subsequent endeavours of entrepreneurs saw the commercialisation of TSO and the introduction for self-treatment of three further mutualistic helminth species: Necator americanus (NA), Trichuris trichiura ova (TTO) and Hymenolepis diminuta cysticercoids (HDC). When self-treatment with these organisms was eventually investigated by researchers using socio-medical studies, it was found to be very safe - much safer in fact, than many, if not most, pharmaceutical treatments, and effective in approximately 75% of cases of immune-related disorder - a success rate matched by very few drugs.

https://mywikis-eu-wiki-media.s3.eu-central-2.wasabisys.com/htwiki/Overcoming_Evolutionary_Mismatch_by_Self-Treatment_with_Helminths.pdf (PDF)

https://mywikis-eu-wiki-media.s3.eu-central-2.wasabisys.com/htwiki/Practices_and_outcomes_of_self-treatment_with_helminths_based_on_physicians_observations.pdf (PDF)

As for mainstream pharmaceutical treatments being preferable to maintaining specific numbers of helminths in millions of individuals with different issues and different immune systems, the latter approach is already being used successfully by many thousands of self-treaters who are happy to trade the need for a modicum of experimentation to individualise the treatment for the impressive benefits and freedom from long-term side effects that they derive from hosting worms.

https://www.helminthictherapywiki.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy_personal_stories

And the current concentration on the use of pharmaceutical treatment options will eventually become unsustainable, as one team of researchers concluded last year.

"It is anticipated that continued attempts to achieve health using pharmaceutical-based approaches that do not address the underlying, biological causes of disease will continue to fail. This ongoing failure will be reflected in the continued growth of chronic disease burden, ever-increasing human suffering, and a financial cost that will eventually overwhelm even the wealthiest of countries. The question is, how long will humanity suffer under the burden of environmental mismatch before taking effective action in the light of biology?"

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11202117/

Too much there to address, but here are a few things to address:

• Chronic diseases are solely due to industrialization: Chronic diseases have multiple causes, including genetics, lifestyle choices, and environmental factors.
• Helminths are beneficial for everyone: Not all helminths are beneficial; some can cause serious health issues. The idea that reintroducing helminths can universally improve health is not supported by robust scientific evidence.
• Pharmaceutical treatments are ineffective and harmful: While pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, they are often effective and have saved countless lives. The effectiveness and safety of treatments vary depending on the condition and individual response.
• Helminthic therapy is a safe and effective alternative: The evidence for helminthic therapy is mixed, and more research is needed to establish its safety and efficacy.

My perspective on this topic will always be informed by my personal experience. I had had four GI related surgeries and was poised to have another big surgery, a colectomy, all because of my Inflammatory Bowel Disease. Hookworms put a stop to all that, including my reactions to gluten. I've had six years experience now doing hookworms, including 3X where I lost my colony and each time got GI-sick again very quickly. To you my case represents an anecdote, to me it's a daily reality that allows me to enjoy a normal life.