As humans, our environment consistently exposes us to a variety of dangers. Tornadoes, lightning, flooding and hurricanes can all hamper our survival. Not to mention the fact that most of us can encounter swerving cars or ill-intentioned people at any given moment.

Biofilms form when bacteria adhere to surfaces in aqueous environments and begin to excrete a slimy, glue-like substance that can anchor them to all kinds of material

Thousands of years ago, humans realized that they could better survive a dangerous world if they formed into communities, particularly communities consisting of people with different talents. They realized that a community is far more likely to survive through division of labor– one person makes food, another gathers resources, still another protects the community against invaders. Working together in this manner requires communication and cooperation.

Inhabitants of a community live in close proximity and create various forms of shelter in order to protect themselves from external threats. We build houses that protect our families and larger buildings that protect the entire community. Grouping together inside places of shelter is a logical way to enhance survival.

Read more

Four years ago this Australian native’s joint and muscle pain was so bad that he was barely able to walk, and his cognitive function had diminished to the point where he could hardly think straight. Plagued by intense chemical sensitivities, his days were spent indoors wearing a carbon respirator. Today, after about three years on Autoimmunity Research Foundation’s Marshall Protocol, he could talk for hours about how much better he feels and his wide array of symptoms are essentially gone. Meet Peter de Jager.

Can you describe the progression of your disease?

It’s difficult to tell when I first started to feel sick, since it developed so slowly. Even as a teenager I wondered how people could run long distances, breathing through their nose! – I couldn’t, I was already a mouth-breather.

In my early twenties I had a bout of glandular fever (Epstein-Barr virus) from which I took a long time to recover. In the late 1970s I constantly had small scabby sores in my nose.

Read more

Translational medicine. The concept was invoked frequently last week at the Days of Molecular Medicine Conference (DMM). It’s an approach to medicine in which researchers are urged to take the data they have collected in the laboratory and find a way to apply it directly to patients. The term also suggests that researchers and doctors must work together, and that collaboration among researchers in different fields is essential if medicine is to advance.

Our group in front of the Karolinska Institute

The Marshall Protocol epitomizes translational medicine, which is why, in my opinion, our poster presentations at the Conference were, for the most part, viewed with great interest and optimism.

The researchers who filled the lecture and poster halls at DMM had travelled to Sweden from the most prestigious universities in the world. It didn’t take long to realize that many of them have spent their entire careers looking for faulty genes that might be able to cause mental illnesses such as autism or obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Read more

Join biomedical researcher Dr. Trevor Marshall as he explores the molecular data that forms the backbone of the Marshall Protocol.

Patients with diabetic neuropathy may not notice minor injuries due to loss of feeling in their lower extremities. Since the Vitamin D Receptor is inactivated by bacterial ligands, a small cut or sore can become infected, and flare into a limb- or life-threatening condition in as little as three days. These wounds are so difficult to heal that most of medicine considers them a lost cause and treats them with amputation. Amputations are often considered to be the beginning of the end for patients with diabetes.

Dr. Randall Wolcott

70% of diabetics who undergo an amputation die within five years due to the stress placed on their hearts from their altered circulatory system. During those five years they are likely to have more amputations and to rate their quality of life worse than cancer patients, according to some studies.

Nationally, an estimated 82,000 people with diabetes had lower-limb amputations in 2002, according to the Centers for Disease Control. But thanks to a doctor at the Southwest Regional Wound Care Center in Lubbock, Texas, who has teamed up with researchers from Montana State University’s Center for Biofilm Engineering, this situation is changing. After sending samples of the sludge on his patient’s wounds to the Center, Dr. Randall Wolcott was informed that his samples were largely composed of bacterial biofilms.

Read more

Although it may not seem like a topic immediately related to the Marshall Protocol, I believe that it’s difficult to truly envision the new bacterial pathogenesis of inflammatory disease without taking horizontal gene transfer, or the ability of bacteria to swap DNA, into account. In other articles on this site, I’ve described how people with inflammatory disease gradually accumulate a “pea soup” of pathogens. I like the term because it hints at the fact that everybody’s bacterial load is unique and also brings to mind the image of something stirred or mixed. Everyone with Th1 disease acquires a large mix of different pathogens, but even the image of a great number of different but isolated pathogens does not do justice to the variety of different bacteria that each patient harbors. This is because, if bacteria can trade DNA, they are constantly trading genetic material which allows for the constant creation of new species, with new characteristics and new survival abilities. So the bacterial loads we harbor are probably much more complex than we envision and certainly more complex than what conventional medicine envisions. After all, conventional medicine is still trying to tie one pathogen to one disease, and that’s only if they even decide to factor bacteria into the picture at all.

In order to better understand horizontal gene transfer, I spoke with Dr. Peter Gogarten at the University of Connecticut and Dr. James Lake at UCLA, both of whom are leaders in the field of gene transfer. Both of them were extremely friendly and seemed excited to speak with me about the phenomenon. I asked them the same questions. Here is how they responded:

Read more