 treatment in April 1998. I was really sick. I'd lost about five kilos in weight [more than ten pounds] and I couldn't eat anything. I had these abscesses in my rear end and was really ill. So I started on the treatment, and it was a rough ride in the first few months, because you get high fevers and general exhaustion. When it got towards the end of June, I suddenly started feeling better and, by the end of July, a lot better. Last year, I was dead; I couldn't do anything at all. Now I lead a perfectly normal life, with the exception of not eating dairy products."
Joe Solek, a 47-year-old dentist from Chicago who was diagnosed with Crohn's disease in July 1997, is also on Hermon-Taylor's antibiotic regimen.
"It's really funny because my internist, the guy who has been doing my colonoscopies since 1986, thinks [the antibiotic regimen] is unnecessary treatment. ...But my last colonoscopy was in December 1998, and he said to me after the procedure, 'Boy, this is very close to normal.' He said if he had to rate my disease on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the worst, I'm a one. I asked if that was due to the medication, and no one really knows.
"I'm a dentist," continues Solek. "[Because of] the lack of research and clinical trials, I'm surprised I'm doing this. But all I have to lose is money. Is this the placebo effect? I don't know. Why couldn't this theory [of a connection between Mp and Crohn's disease] be the case? Especially in light of the fact that it causes a very similar disease in cows. It's an uphill battle because traditional medicine doesn't think there's a connection."
"Now, of course, the proper way in clinical research is to do a pilot study and expand into a randomized control trial," says Hermon-Taylor, who acknowledges that the results Crohn's patients exhibit from his antibiotic regimen are only a step above anecdotal evidence. "We were actually denied the funding to do a randomized control trial. So I did the best that I could with what I've got." To date, 25 of Hermon-Taylor's grant proposals -- submitted both in the U.S. and Great Britain -- to study Mp and its possible connection to Crohn's have been rejected.
Chiodini lost count of the rejected grant proposals he submitted to the National Institutes of Health, the USDA and the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America between 1984 and 1994. He estimates having submitted over two dozen, and not a one was funded. In 1994, he lost his job at Rhode Island Hospital due to a lack of funding and was later thrown out of the building for smoking in a nonsmoking area. On March 25, 1994, the hospital packed up the entire contents of his laboratory and shipped it to an unheated storage space, effectively destroying 10 years worth of research. He has not worked in a laboratory since.
Alan Kennedy was on a family vacation at the age of 12 when he fell ill. His symptoms looked like appendicitis. In the course of surgery, the doctor discovered it was not appendicitis he suffered from, but Crohn's disease.
It wasn't until after his second surgery in 1996, almost 20 years later, that Kennedy heard about Hermon-Taylor's work. He traveled from his home in Ireland to Hermon-Taylor's office in London to visit the professor and learn about the possible connection between Mp and Crohn's.
A computer scientist, Kennedy immediately recognized the impact a Web site could have in getting the word out about this theory and the underfunded but important research supporting it. After conducting a six-month exhaustive investigation of the available literature with the help of Hermon-Taylor, Kennedy launched a Web site on March 16, 1997.
Karen Meyer of Temple Terrace, Fla., stumbled onto Kennedy's Web site shortly after it went up. Her son had Crohn's, and she took the information contained there to his doctor, who agreed to prescribed Hermon-Taylor's antibiotic regimen for him.
"About a year after he began the [antibiotic] treatment in May 1997," says Meyer, referring to her son, now 24, who was diagnosed with Crohn's at age 17, "he had to have another surgery, and his surgeo