In the summer of 2002, a young woman on vacation in Central America began to experience a series of curious symptoms. Twenty-one-year-old Lisa was traveling in Costa Rica and Panama when she started having severe diarrhea, nausea, and lost her appetite. Like everyone traveling abroad, Lisa knew that a mild intestinal disorder could happen, so she went to the doctors during the trip. Doctors prescribed one or another antibiotic, which for a while improved her condition. But the disease always returned. Lisa tried her best to ignore her bowel problems and enjoy her vacation.
However, after returning to her native Switzerland, the young woman began to worry. She lost more than seven kilograms of weight, and defecation occurred frequently and with painful urges. Neither antibiotics nor antiparasitic agents had any effect on the disease. In the end, a specialist diagnosed Lisa with Crohn’s disease.
At the age of twenty-odd, the most urgent question for Lisa was how to cope with this disease for the rest of her life. She recalls thinking, ” I’m young. I have several decades ahead of me. I need a plan.” Lisa started taking prednisone, an immunosuppressive steroid, which immediately helped. The pain receded. The inflammation has decreased. However, this steroid had side effects: Lisa was constantly hungry; she was constantly sweating profusely; her legs swelled from time to time; she became depressed. In addition, she was concerned about the possibility of premature osteoporosis (reduced bone density) due to long-term use of steroids.
Alternative treatments such as Chinese medicine, bioresonance therapy, and the elimination of wheat, dairy, and eggs from the diet did not help. As soon as Lisa stopped taking prednisone, the inflammation invariably returned.
Then, in the winter of 2006, a conversation changed her life. An old friend of Lisa’s knew a man who had very successfully tested the method of treating Wainstock with a pig whiplash.
By that time, the German company Ovamed was already producing pharmaceutical-grade whipworm eggs based on the Wainstock Protocol. This company, which collected parasite eggs from miniature Danish pigs that were raised in ultra-pure conditions, developed a production process that received approval from European regulatory authorities (the patent belongs to the University of Iowa).
Lisa ordered ten doses of the eggs of the whipworm T. suis or TSO. By then, she had been taking prednisone regularly for five years. Now she began to take 2,500 eggs once every two weeks — a SIP of salty liquid from small vials stored in the refrigerator. After two months of taking TSO, Lisa gradually reduced her steroid use. Crohn’s disease remained under control. The inflammation did not resume. “I haven’t been back to my old self since,” Lisa says.
It was an expensive method of treatment: about 300 euros every two weeks, or 7800 euros per year. Insurance companies do not cover such costs. But for Lisa, the results-remission without the side effects associated with taking steroids-fully justify the cost. (However, she is still taking another immunosuppressor, imurek.)
“It really changed my life,” says Lisa, who now works as a practicing psychologist in Zurich. — I’ve been sick for a long time. And since then [since I started taking TSO], I don’t feel sick anymore. I can live the life I used to live.”