It's proving difficult to find testimonials or reviews for Helminthic therapy, so I posted this. I am NOT condoning this therapy AT ALL. This is a controversial topic for some people, but some patients either want alternative treatments, education, or are desperate for relief.
Does anyone in the forums have experience with this treatment?Helminthic therapy is the treatment of auto-immune and inflammatory conditions using parasites to counter inflammation. Typically, a patient will ingest capsules that contain parasites, or their larvae. The parasites colonize the small/large intestines, and lessen inflammation in order to survive. This is thought to offer relief for a number of ailments.
It's easy to find an overview and explanation as to what exactly this therapy entails. This chapter preview offers an abridged exploration into the topic:
Helminthic therapy: using worms to treat immune-mediated diseaseFew double-blind studies have been performed in the U.S., and their experimental groups used less than 100 people. One particular experiment shows less than 50% of UC patients (13/30) showed any improvement with their symptoms. (
Link to study results here.) There was a lack of adverse reaction to the treatments, probably because patients only received one dose. There was also "...serious imprecision" in this study, which makes me reluctant to trust its data.
This publication reviews two studies to judge the efficacy and safety of helminth therapy (studies used a total of 90 participants).
This review concludes that "...clinical helminth therapy forms have proved less successful in the few published clinical trials conducted so far."
This is an additional resource that provides links to other studies:
Helminthic Therapy open Source WikiAnd this person's experience highlights some of the long-term negative effects of worm therapy, including mineral deficiency:
waitingforthecure.com/I/Does anyone have any additional insight or data to include?