Scraping my net over the bottom of the Web, I found Ovamed GmbH, a company in a village near Hamburg that claims to be licensed by the Thai Ministry of Health to sell TSO (Trichuris suis ova) for treatment of Crohn's and UC in those "with a medical recommendation."
And another outfit, Autoimmune Therapies, will sell you a similar product. Here's what they say: "Helminthic therapy, nature's most powerful probiotic, harnesses nature to heal, restoring the helper organisms we co-evolved with and that our immune systems depend on to function correctly, and is based on sound science. Stop treating the symptoms, fix the problem." You can judge for yourselves the accuracy of those statements. They say they sell anywhere except the USA.
There are many more, springing up all over the world, wherever evidence-based medicine is not currently the fashion.
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I was under the impression that the Helminthic therapy worked. Is it the way they present their product that you don't like?
ReplyDeleteLori, I think that depends on what you mean by "works". Small-scale trials have shown that the therapy can work (and seemingly quite well), however, without data from large-scale clinical trials the efficacy of these treatments is incompletely understood. Helminthic therapy looks to be a promising treatment but if you look at the sites he has linked it is considered a "natural medicine" (and that only in Thailand). To me this means that we probably don't know enough about it to treat lots of people with it.
ReplyDeleteThe only published trial that I'm aware of was the 2005 Iowa trial, with small numbers and "open-label" where both patients and doctors knew they got the worms; there were no controls. And it was ended at 24 weeks, so long-term safety was not addressed.
ReplyDeleteIn order to achieve higher evidence level, randomized control trial with large sample size will be needed(Conventinal Tx + worm vs conventional Tx + placebo). It might be interesting how the manufacture is going to make placibo for that.
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