You can’t imagine how strange it was to sit there, listening to Radio Lab interviewing Jasper Laurence about hook worm, while on my arm itched a patch of Jasper’s worms.
I guess I always figured they were his worms, both literally and figuratively, but thought it best not to ask too many questions. Still, Jasper my friend, your continued wellness fills me with the spirit to go on. Any idiot can be an optimist, it takes a special kind of fool to do something so ridiculously proactive as taking hookworm for the cause.
This addresses another issue I’ve been considering, quackery. I have precious little tolerance for it. Almost everything in alternative medicine, so far as I have seen, is magical thinking. From the ‘power of prayer’ to the role of vaccination in Autism; there are no methodical, scientific studies to back up the hype. But for the “Old Friends Hypothesis” there is a paper trail. Here in, infact, might be found the one problem with Autoimmune Therapies that I have; Jasper has accumulated for himself quite a bit of anecdotal evidence, but not much in the way of reproducible results. I would suggest, however, that this is not his fault. The company is still very small, there just are not enough cases of any one kind to make a statistically significant sample. Further more, I must say that Jasper seems to go out of his way to suit the needs and desires of each client. This makes for so much personal variation in treatment that it becomes difficult to qualify results over a large sample. Then again, Jasper Laurence did not set out to start a research company, he looked at the research and decided that it was within him (if you’ll pardon) to help us.
Yet it stuns me each & every time I encounter someone whose disgust at hookworm therapy is such that they become violently offended. I suppose that such a visceral response can only come from the fear that N. americanus will crawl from me to them. They accuse us of being irresponsible, a public health hazard, a menace, they simultaneously and just as vociferously accuse us being deluded, naive morons; two conditions which could not rationally exist simultaneously, If the worms are a sham, we are all in very little danger. Yet there is something unsettling about that ultra close up shot of Necator americanus’ sharp little teeth looking for the arch of a tender foot. But that does not make us mad, or deluded. The medical establishment is willing to give us anti organ rejection drugs, used for transplant patients; the antibodies of mice lab grown biologics of humans and other animals; steroids until our connective tissues fall apart; Imuran, Methotrexate, Humyra, 6MP; toxic drugs that cause terrible and occasionally fatal side effects. And beyond that take out our digestive tract little by little, curing nothing, until we have no gut at all. In the face of this, the risk of anemia is actually a kind of self preservation.
So my worms arrived yesterday, at 10:30AM. Both Necator americanus and Trichuris trichiura. There was very little itching under the Americanus bandage, and the trichiura solution tasted mildly bitter. And I see that it is now October 11th, exactly one month from the day I lost the last batch, but I hope for the best. My fellow travelers have all told me that it is easier the second time around, the worms and having gotten acquainted, are old friends, so to speak. I’ll keep you updated, about as well as I have been so far, because as a society and a civilization, we are all on this journey together.
