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Got Allergies? Take a Worm
"Biotherapy" treats everything from irritable bowel disease to allergies with maggots, leeches and intestinal worms.
Fri Nov 12, 2010
- Advocates of "biotherapy," the use of animals as medical treatments, are meeting in Los Angeles.
- Clinical practitioners have been reluctant to adopt these treatments, but supporters say the science is on their side.
- Many parasites evolved alongside people and are essentially bio-engineered for humans.
It's only in the past decade that federal regulators have approved the use of both maggots and leeches to treat problems associated with amputations and other severe wounds. Click to enlarge this image.
iStockphoto
Practitioners of "biotherapy" — or the use of living animals to treat human ailments — say science is beginning to back up their anecdotal claims that maggots, leeches and intestinal worms may be effective in the fight against everything from irritable bowel disease to allergies and psoriasis.
They're meeting this week in Los Angeles for the International Conference on Biotherapy to compare notes and strategize how to overcome the high gross-out factor that many patients and doctors have about these wiggling human parasites.
"There's always reluctance in any establishment to embrace change," said Ronald Sherman, a conference organizer. "But once medical practitioners and therapists actually try the therapy, they are our biggest supporters."
Sherman is a former infectious disease specialist at the University of California, Irvine. He also runs a lab that sells live maggots to hospitals and medical centers to treat wounds.
That cure was first described by Persian physicians in 980 and later refined in the 1920s by William S. Baer of Johns Hopkins University. But it's only in the past decade that federal regulators have approved the use of both maggots and leeches to treat problems associated with amputations and other severe wounds.
Now supporters hope the feds will approve something called helminthic therapy, which is the use of parasitic whipworms to battle auto-immune disorders like Crohn's disease or severe allergies. Filmmaker Sharon Shattuck featured these critters and their supporters in her new documentary "Parasites: A User's Guide.""
