Most of the time when you’re running a fever, or think you have a cold or the flu, what your immune system is actually fighting is a parasite. It’s not that colds (the Rhinovirus) or the flu (Influenza) don’t exist, only that you’re incredibly unlikely to get them. What you’re likely to get is a parasite, and since the symptoms of a parasite are virtually identical to colds (nasal congestion, lung congestion, coughing, fever, headache) and flus (fever, upset stomach, vomiting, back pain, diarrheal response), it’s easy to overlook the obvious.

The problem is that sometimes picking up a parasite doesn’t cause any symptoms at all. You could have 10 different parasites and not know it. But how many are you likely to have? THAT is the question….

In the article titled Parasite Statistics, I provided a quantative analysis of parasites. In this outline, we are taking a qualitative approach where your opinion counts: you will learn how to guess how many parasites you have and you will probably be correct. Let’s use the concept of a thermometer to understand how many parasites you are likely to have.

Here’s how it works. Look at this image of a thermometer. The numbers represent your number of species of parasite and the goal is zero, obviously.

The Parasite Thermometer

Now think about the state of your health. Choose which description from the list below summarizes your general feeling of wellness (or unwellness – is that a word?).

You have 6 choices:

1. Healthy: You have no complaints or issues, have the energy to work, play and exercise. You get the occasional cold and headache like everyone else but you always bounce back. Any muscle or joint pain responds to manual therapy and goes away, allowing you to get on with your life. You spend very little time worrying about poor health. If anything, you are proactively pursuing good health.
2. Run Down: You’re developing a number of minor issues and maybe one symptom in particular is making itself noticed: blood pressure, blood sugar, skin conditions, low energy, migraines, congestion, something. There will be one or two aches or pains that don’t go away even with therapy and are getting in the way of play and exercise. You’re feeling tired but not exhausted. You try vitamins, massage, take a vacation, tell yourself you’re just working too hard. It’s manageable.
3. Sick: That symptom that wouldn’t go away didn’t go away, it got worse. It got bad. You booked in for a bunch of appointments, saw a specialist or two, they ran tests (Oh those wonderful, inconclusive tests…). Nothing really showed up except the usual markers of aging (higher blood pressure, higher blood sugar, maybe some hair loss, a noticeable skin condition, deteriorating vision, cognitive issues). Nothing you can quite put your finger on unless it’s everything. You’re sick more often than you’re well. You start to enjoy the well spells because they don’t last as long. You have neither the energy to play nor exercise and possibly, work is getting difficult. You’re worn out. You’re not sick enough to give it a name but it’s always in the background, waiting to turn into something with a name.
4. Medical Condition: Finally, it got a name. All those diverse, seemingly unrelated malaises over the years have turned into something productive. A really well bred, salt-of the earth medical condition, one you’ve always heard about but never thought you personally would get. Or maybe you’ve never heard of it. What was it called again? A disease, a condition, a syndrome, a dystrophy, a sclerosis, a -plasty, a -plasia, an -itis, an -osus or an allergy. It could have been one of 1000 terms from the impressive diagnostic medical jargon invented in the 20th century but now it’s yours and you’ve had to suffer through the symptoms. Your life is now about this condition, which you carry around like a brand. But it’s manageable. If you take the right medication, follow the right diet, do the regular checkups, avoid the usual suspects you can live with it.
5. Chronic Illness: And you live with it. Except it gets worse. Symptoms diversify; they become new symptoms, new medical conditions, new -itis’s and -osus’s. Soon you’re nursing a cornucopia of conditions. Cancer starts to develop. Maybe you go through chemo or radiation or maybe you just keep it under observation. There are pills for this, potions for that, you’re juggling so many medications you wonder if you should have just become a pharmacist. You carry around a pillbox of what you need to take each day and a list for when to take it. Life has become about the process of managing illness. Your relationships, your job (if you still have the energy to work), your free time are all about your medical conditions. You can’t do things anymore, not the things you used to. You don’t play and you don’t exercise, you feel a lot like a Doctor Seuss character (“/and all we could do was sit, sit, sit, /and we did not like it, not one little bit” – from The Cat in the Hat).
6. Critical Care: Eventually, there is a collapse. It comes as an attack, a stroke, an embolism, a thrombosis, a fit, a breakdown, an episode. There is a period of hospitalization accompanied by a feeling of hitting rock bottom in your health. The handfuls of pills you’ve been taking are no longer working and your collection of conditions slowly wears you down. Your health is out of control, your body doesn’t respond to treatment. Your primary medical caregivers are managing things as best they can but they act like it’s a losing battle. You may use this opportunity to come to terms with higher spirituality or you may indulge in fear and both of those reactions are normal and okay.
7. Crisis: The spaces of time between collapse and recovery shorten, until there is one, long, continuous state of collapse. Sometimes it is accompanied by peace, sometimes by panic, and not just yours: you can see these various reactions in the eyes of those around you: your loved ones, your doctors, your friends. Everybody wishes you well but nobody knows what to do about it. A crisis is an immanent problem with no apparent solution.

The way to figure out how many parasites you are likely to have is to take the description you chose that best summarizes your health, look at where that sits on the parasite thermometer below and look at the numbers on either side of it. That’s probably your range of the number of species of parasites you have.

Interpreting the Parasite Thermometer

1. Healthy: You probably have 4 or 5 parasites. You can live with that your whole life and barely know. Just eat a little more to feed your stowaways and every time you get the sniffles, call it a cold or the flu. Hey, maybe a headache really is just a headache.
2. Run Down: You probably have 5-10 parasites. They’re each siphoning off a different portion of your nutrients, each causing a different symptom. Probably one is the worst (either the biggest or the most of it). Essentially you’re starving from within but you’d never guess it’s malnutrition because you eat properly. The early onset of symptoms that will later turn into major medical conditions are felt here simply as minor deficiencies or surpluses that can be managed with careful dieting and lifestyle changes. This stage can be deceptively simple because rest really does help.
3. Sick: You probably have 10-15 parasites. Most are behind the scenes but 2 or 3 are probably in the forefront, causing noticeable symptoms. You’re not aware that they’re parasites, just that something serious is going on. This also explains why your symptoms seem somewhat unrelated. You’re looking for one root cause while there are in fact 10-15 root causes. Who would have thought? Often you can move from “Sick” back to merely “Run Down” by targeting and eliminating a key troublemaker, like a tapeworm or intestinal fluke. But if you don’t, you’ll notice one thing the most in this phase: rest no longer helps.
4. Medical Condition: You probably have 15-20 parasites. Once you pass the tipping point, your number of parasites increases quickly. Your immune system can’t fight them off so now, every time you’re exposed to one, it sticks. This is why some people’s health seems to deteriorate so quickly: they’re starving from within and at the same time processing the waste of all these different organisms. Some of them feed on your lunch, some are less polite and feed directly on you. The manifestation of the medical condition is an expression of the dual problem of running nutrient-deficient because you’re feeding multiple parasite colonies combined with processing all their cumulative waste, which is full of bacteria and metal toxicity that in itself clogs specific organs. Whatever organ gets clogged will be the one that develops the medical condition.
5. Chronic Illness: At this stage you probably have 20-25 parasites. The ones that caused the medical condition have more or less taken over your immune system. But they are joined by new parasites at every new exposure. Eating for 20-25 is a losing battle. The feeling of starving from within is not often felt as hunger. Instead it is the expression of nothing working properly. Even the skin doesn’t repair itself, on the outside you start aging quickly and your insides feel the same way.
6. Critical Care: You probably have 25-30 parasites. I have seen exceptions to this rule. Sometimes a person will be at the critical care stage with only 15 parasites, sometimes only 10. You either have 25-30 small parasite colonies or 10-15 large colonies. Whichever it is, an alarming portion of your body weight is parasites. The only way out of this place is to focus on eliminating your parasites at the same time that you’re managing your symptoms. Otherwise it is a battle you will lose.
7. Crisis: You probably have 30 or more parasites. Or, as mentioned above, whatever number of parasites you do carry has taken over your system entirely. The cascading process of nutrient deficiency, lymphatic backup, organ starvation and organ toxicity is quickened by shutdown of the digestive, circulatory and endocrine systems. The human body wasn’t meant to host 30+ parasites.

There are some exceptions to this way of looking at things. I’ve seen people with only 3 parasites whose whole life is on hold because of serious health complications, and others who seem more or less healthy that have a parasite count in the 10-20 range. So, this isn’t intended as an exclusive summary so much as an inclusive summary with possible outliers. The important concept to grasp is one of overall parasite quantity: it doesn’t matter if your thousands of parasites are all one kind or spread out between 20 species-if you’re losing that many nutrients and processing that much waste you’re going to feel it. On that note, the exception you will never see is this: someone with health complications but no parasites.

Toward a New Science of Healthcare

What I’m proposing is possibly the most revolutionary concept in the history of medicine: that you can turn back the clock on your health problems by getting rid of your parasites. In fact, I’m proposing that parasites are the factors that cause these various stages of physical, mental and emotional degeneration.

I think the reason we as a society are only coming to this realization now (as opposed to any time in the thousands of years leading up to now) is that the technology to find and eliminate parasites is finally becoming available.

Part 1 (finding them) is still somewhat of a challenge. This is the area that I would like to see more professionals doing major work in. I have developed a way to find the top 100 or so parasites people are likely to get with a muscle testing analysis but this is not yet widely available and from a teaching standpoint, the methodology is a bit complex as it requires a specific understanding of organic chemistry, nuclear physics, pharmacology, parasite microbiology and medical physiology. But it works, it is repeatable and I am slowly teaching the process to people. Personally, I wish someone would invent a device that does what I use neurological muscle testing for, that way everyone on the planet could benefit immediately.

Part 2 (eliminating them) is now fully available. For example, about 50 of the top 100 parasites you’re likely to have (all tapeworms and flukes) can be treated by different combinations and dosages of a medication called Praziquantel, which was only invented in the 1970’s. Prior to that, if you wanted to get rid of a tapeworm you had to sit in a bucket of milk… Another 30 can be treated by Mebendazole, and most of the remaining culprits respond to Albendazole, Metronidazole and Ivermectin.

So as a global society, let’s agree we’ve got Part 2 covered. Part 1 is lagging behind. Stool testing is inadequate, mostly because of legal, financial or methodological reasons. Live blood analysis is coming along but only addresses blood parasites, not stool or tissue. There are currently no tests for tissue parasites besides what I’ve developed with my muscle testing parasite screen (the only other method is a tissue biopsy, which is needlessly invasive and often dangerous). The whole issue of Part 1 (finding which parasites you have) is complex, I’m not pretending it’s simple. But we’re a culture living in denial and it needs to stop. Parasites are the problem and we’re pretending medical conditions are the problem.

As I outlined in my write-up on Parasite Statistics, it is incredible common to have a parasite. What I’d like to convey here is that dwelling on symptoms, medical conditions, illness and crisis is unfortunately missing the point. The point is that parasites bring about the underlying factors that result in the manifestation of illness, and that illness can be better managed by identifying and eliminating parasites than by identifying and trying to eliminate symptoms.