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Medical data is for informational purposes only. You should always consult your physician, or one of our referral physicians prior to treatment.

Supplement to

The Art of Getting Well

Conquest of the Amoebae

Robert Bingham, M.D.

Foundation for Eradication of Rheumatoid Disease

AKA The Arthritis Trust of America

7376 Walker Road, Fairview, Tn 37062

Robert Bingham, M.D.

When a mountain climber reaches the top of a tall ridge, he sees

a higher one ahead. Medical science faces the same challenge. Now

that bacteria have been mastered, and viruses are for the most part

understood and subject to some control — only the human parasites,

of which amoeba constitute a large part — remain a field of mystery

in the infectious diseases, yet to be conquered.

They are complex living creatures, organisms responsible for

several human illnesses, and probably are the causes of some chronic

diseases whose origins are as yet unknown. These are complicated

one cell “animals,” clever at invading our bodies and evading our

defenses. Their very strange life cycles make them scientifically

intriguing, but medically difficult to diagnose and treat.

Amoebae are far more complex than viruses and bacteria. They

are microscopic creatures which live as parasites in the human body.

They cannot survive for very long on their own, being killed by

drying, sunlight, chemicals of many sorts, and by the large white

blood cells of the body, the macrophages — for which they may

easily be mistaken under the microscope. (Unless isolated by the

thermotropic technique described by the late Dr. Roger Wyburn-

Mason.)

Amoebae very often invade the body of another life-form to

survive. From that host, they take food and shelter, in return they

add nothing of which we are aware. Because they depend on their

human hosts, they must not cause death until their own life cycles are

complete, and their “feasts” on the tissues of the patient are ex-

hausted.

For this reason, the diseases they cause produce chronic, long-

term and debilitating effects. The characteristic signs of these infir-

mities are pain, swelling, inflammation, weakness and anemia —

because they live in soft structures such as synovial linings and the

fluids of the joints, and release toxic substances which may cause

gradual destruction to adjacent tissues.

Most varieties of amoebae are relatively harmless. With im-

proved sanitation, effective hygiene and safe water supply, we have

little to fear from them. But the person who is weak, ill, in great

stress, or poorly nourished is at greater risk of infection. The fact

that they are destroyed by bile and bile salts indicates the role of the

liver and the gall bladder in the defense of the healthy individual to

amoeba which enter the gastro-intestinal tract.

While the living parasites cause the active disease and the spread

of the infection from one part of the body to another, killing the

parasites may release toxins which produce symptoms which make

the disease temporarily seem worse. This is a cause of the Jarisch

Herxheimer reaction. (Herxheimer reaction is a clinical confirmation

of the cause of the disease and an indicator of the therapeutic benefit

of the drug. The correlation is close.)

Though the Rheumatoid Diseases are of fairly recent origin in

medical history and recognition of the pathology, dating back to not

more than 200 years or less, their spread parallels the advances of

modern civilization. These are the most common in the most civi-

lized countries, where diets are richest in fats and proteins and high

in processed white flour foods and refined sugar. These organisms

“eat well,” to begin with at least, on their well-nourished hosts, and

are rarely found in lands where almost all foods are “natural and

unprocessed,” and the “natives have a lean and hungry look.”

Some of these amoebae have a voracious appetite; they can

practically eat their weight in blood in seconds. Then, when one joint

has gone through the acute phase and suffered all the damage from

the infection and inflammation, and the amoebae are “feeding less

well;” then, the amoebae travel around in the patient’s body looking

for “other joints to conquer,” often aided by the administration of

cortico-steroid drugs, prescribed by a well-meaning physician who

is “treating the symptoms but not the disease.”

But the doctor’s dilemma can be understood and appreciated.

How are you going to treat a patient who has rheumatoid arthritis,

said to “have no known cause and no known cure?”

With many parasites, there are known animal, insect and human

vectors and carriers. These are not known or identified for the

specific amoebae we are accusing as the cause of the rheumatoid

disease.

We do not know how they are transmitted; they do not seem to

spread from man to man. But they have been found in many water

and food supplies and in the intestines of apparently healthy persons,

as well as in “all tissues of the patients with the acute active forms of

Rheumatoid Disease”(R. Wyburn-Mason.) [Since this was written,

we've accepted that many microorganisms might cause similar health

problems.]

In many persons, there is probably natural immunity to the

amoebae believed to cause “inflammatory rheumatism,” as rheuma-

toid arthritis is often called around the world. That they do contain

antigens is shown by the antibodies and “immune complexes” against

amoebae which they develop in affected patients. Resistance is de-

pendent upon the good health and natural immunity of the patient

(This may be from birth, and the transmission of immunity from the

nursing mother to an infant occurs in the early “colostrum milk,” and

may be weak or absent in the “bottle-fed” baby.)

The treatment goal of the future may well be a specific vaccine

for the amoebae, developed from the blood (human sera) of “recov-

ered” patients with high antibody titers.

But why should the physician feel discouraged when a patient

does not seem to respond to treatment with one of the anti-protozoal

drugs?

There are some good biological reasons to consider:

1. The amoebae are capable of some very clever immunological