Jump to content

dixonpete

Advanced Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    203

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    22

 Content Type 

Profiles

Forums

Events

Blogs

Celiac.com - Celiac Disease & Gluten-Free Diet Support Since 1995

Blog Entries posted by dixonpete

  1. dixonpete

    Hookworms and ChatGPT5

    By dixonpete,


    Hookworms
    I recently sprang for a ChatGPT5 subscription just to play with it and have found it to be a revelation. ChatGPT5 has become my new best friend helping me to explore and answer questions that have been nagging me sometimes for years.
    Of course our conversation turned to hookworms and celiac disease as well as my other condition, ulcerative colitis. ChatGPT5 had an awful lot to say on the topic and was able to summarize past research for me and tell me where future ...
  2. dixonpete
    Not much going on to report. My last inoculation of 25 Necator americanus hookworm larvae occurred April 11 2025, and I'm due to start incubating Aug 27 2026 and inoculate again with 25 larvae Sep 3 2025. Over the years I've seen my celiac/ulcerative colitis symptoms return six month-ish after inoculation, so I've settled on a frequency of a little less than 5 months, or in this instance, 4.79 months.
    Human hookworms (NA) don't reproduce in the body and since my immune...
  3. dixonpete
    Took about 20 minutes and 1/2 of that was clean-up. As per what has become my usual process, I prepared five small jars with the expectation of only using the one jar with the greatest population of larvae. Today is August 29th, so given that a week appears to be sufficient time for the eggs to hatch and the larvae to do their thing of migrating down to the water at the bottom of the jars, the harvest date will be Friday September 5th.
    This time I'll be having a crack...
  4. dixonpete
    A couple of therapists who use hookworms in their practice and a Crohn's patient talk about their use of hookworms and other helminths. Hookworm treatment is the same for celiacs as it is for Crohn's or any other Inflammatory Bowel Disease condition.
     
  5. dixonpete
    I did a 5-day fast in March that really messed up my stools making faecal sample collection problematic. Apparently I'm one of the few people that really need fiber always going through my system to prevent things going to hell, so next time I fast I'll be doing that even though it does break the spirit of fasting.
    Seven days ago I set up 5 small jars for incubation. When I looked at them today 2 were barren of larvae, 2 were ok but a little sparse, and one was grade...
  6. dixonpete
    https://www.helminthictherapywiki.org/wiki/NA_incubation:_super-simple_method_by_Laurel?fbclid=IwY2xjawIGlQJleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHUN-S9qo1ycPwriUfGr-_YYKVdu0kU_SuuYPPVcA_4q4Q4lrinbrr9g1Yw_aem_yAzwI8x20ZQN4ZIfGsUJzQ
    It's very close to what I do, except I wet the stool to make sure it doesn't harden and I use 5 jars at time since experience has taught me that some jars will be barren.
  7. dixonpete
  8. dixonpete

    An early incubation and inoculation

    By dixonpete,


    Hookworms
    I did another test incubation that turned out to be successful. Though it was a month early, I didn't see any harm in inoculating early with 25 larvae.
    This time I used 5 jars. Three had zero larvae, one had an ok yield, and the last had good/very good population. The included pic is from that last jar. With that kind of density, collecting the needed number of larvae is quick work. 
    This experience reinforces to me the necessity of using multiple jars. Five ...
  9. dixonpete
    Published 12 September 2024: Health-promoting worms? Prospects and pitfalls of helminth therapy
    A good summary of the topic with the low-down that more research is needed. In regard to celiac disease, the article says that while clinical studies haven't shown substantial results, self-treaters show consistent success (like me).
    I've mentioned this before, but doing a gluten challenge at 20 days post inoculation for a hookworm/celiac trial is doomed to fail. ...
  10. dixonpete

    Well how about that!

    By dixonpete,


    Hookworms
    I'm still trying my hand at hookworm incubation. This time I set 5 jars going all using the same method, namely small, hermetically sealable jars stuffed with a coffee filter smeared with a small amount of egg infected stool (mine) with about a 1/2 cm of mineral water at the base and left for 9 days. I made sure the filter paper always touched the water and that the stool was moistened well before smearing. To the best of my knowledge, I prepared each jar in exactly the same...
  11. dixonpete

    A two for four incubation

    By dixonpete,


    Hookworms
    Last week I set four small jars going, and today I gave them a look. Two of the jars were completely devoid of larvae. The other two were "B-" results, enough for inoculation but would require a fair amount of work collecting the larvae as the observed quantity was low. Think maybe 5% of best jars I've seen so far.
    I'm becoming convinced this is truly all about the quantity of eggs in the stool. If the colony is having an off day and not releasing many eggs, resulting...
  12. dixonpete
    Yesterday I inoculated myself with 25 Necator americanus larvae from the small red jar. There were so many larvae, all I had to do was find a couple of drops that had the number of larvae I was looking for and pipette them onto the bandage. No messing with sucking up individual larvae and placing them in a tube. Much quicker, and why having a large crop is a good thing. Why choose the number 25? I didn't feel like bothering with more frequent inoculations, and 25 was as high...
  13. dixonpete

    Incubation failure

    By dixonpete,


    Hookworms
    I followed the same technique I used last time that yielded such huge results, but this time basically I got zilch from two small jars. A few corpses and several uninspired zombie looking larvae moping around under my microscope's lens. Not enough to consider spending the time trying to get a harvest for an inoculation.
    The only thing different this round was the heat. It's been consistently over 30C in my non-air conditioned apartment this week. Damn global warming...
  14. dixonpete
    I had an interesting experience today. I set up 3 practice jars 8 days ago.
    The first of the large jars was ok, maybe a little light in larvae. The second large jar was BARREN! I think I saw one larva in my sample. The third, small jar was a surprise though, it was booming! Squirming larvae hanging from the chandeliers, partying like it was 1999. Huge numbers. We're talking 12 larvae in a 40X field of view! Previously I think the record was maybe 4, and that was searching...
  15. dixonpete

    The crux of hookworm incubation

    By dixonpete,


    Hookworms
    When I first got into hookworms to treat my several severe GI immune conditions, I was confused and filled with trepidation. Six years later, it all seems pretty simple, but I suppose perhaps everything is like that when you are starting out. 
    The first step is to purchase larvae from a provider listed in the Helminthic Therapy Wiki and when they arrive, slap them on your arm.
    Afterwards to save money, if you are into DIY, several months later you can start ...
  16. dixonpete
    It took watching a YouTube video to figure out how to use it, and it's a bit touchy, but it does allow me to take pics and video of what I see under the microscope. The device came from AliExpress and costs under $5. 
    Here's a video of a particularly active larva. Let me know in the comments if the link isn't working.
    This larva was from a recent incubation and examined at the 6-day mark. Between the two jars there were hundreds of larvae.
    <...
  17. dixonpete
    I was in a bit of a rush and didn't finesse the job as well as I would have liked. I ended up using too much stool in one jar and not enough on the other. The overweight one might tear through the threads and sink into the water, and the light one might not have enough stool to generate many larvae. This experience tells me there's some technique to this, and I'm thinking going forward I'll tape down the threads to the outside of jars before placing the stool on the filter...
  18. dixonpete
    Probably more concise than reading through my blog entries. Note, I'm now doing 10 larvae every 2 months.
    Hookworms successful against colitis and celiac disease after medicine fails
    âš­Home>Personal stories>Detailed stories>Hookworms successful against colitis and celiac disease after medicine fails
    I currently inoculate with 25 Necator americanus larvae every 5 months to keep myself in remission from celiac disease and ulcerative colitis. T...
  19. dixonpete
    This afternoon I tried the last one of those AliExpress sub-$20 microscopes. All told there were four, and I'm including a pic of the most promising one where the tube is suspended above a platform.
    Even with top and below lighting and a sample where I knew there was a larva directly in the center of the drop, I still couldn't see it. I could sort of make out other debris, but no, just no.
    It's still a cute tool, though. You plug into your computer's USB port...
  20. dixonpete
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHRZkZ_b1sg
    Ted Simon uses an incubator and vermiculite. His channel offers several other hookworm related videos, including one where he shows using a microscope to harvest the larvae.
    My method doesn't use an incubator or vermiculite and I get good results, but I can't claim consistency as I don't have that much of a track record yet.
  21. dixonpete
    I just had a last look at those two jars and this is what I came away with.
    The first jar's water probably had about 100 larvae total, the second had substantially more, in the order of 200-300. This estimate is based on how much water was in each jar and how much water I pipetted out of each into a petri dish and scanned. In the second jar that I launched 2 days after the first, I placed more stool onto the coffee filter. More stool = more eggs = more larvae. Collecting...
  22. dixonpete

    Health update

    By dixonpete,


    Hookworms
    For long time followers of this blog will remember my account of my time at the start of my GI-trouble journey, which largely started in 2005-2008 when I was hit with an abscess, multiple corrective surgeries, ulcerative colitis and celiac disease. This was a particularly bad time in my life. After going gluten-free things got much better, I healed, but I was still left with many food sensitivities, including IBS symptoms and horrible gas.
    Since I've been using hookworms...
  23. dixonpete

    I did a couple more practice jars

    By dixonpete,


    Hookworms
    Both were successful. I think I have incubation down pat now, though I can see how a few refinements of technique might lead to larger larvae yields, not that such increases are necessary if I'm only going to be using 10 larvae at a time.
    Once again, the technique is pretty simple. Just use a hermetically sealable jar with 1/4" of mineral water (not distilled, not chlorinated) and put a coffee filter in that touches the water. You can probably see the threads hanging...
  24. dixonpete

    A few more points about incubation

    By dixonpete,


    Hookworms
    It's been a rapid few days of learning about hookworm incubation. Here's what more I've learned. Most importantly, any microscope that can do 40X will suffice.
    That's because it turns out the concern about the distance from the lens to the plate for pipetting was a red herring. All one needs to do is lay down a bunch of very small drops on the slide or Petri dish and use the microscope to find drops that have the required number of larvae. Note the placement of the ...
  25. dixonpete

    My first incubation was a success!

    By dixonpete,


    Hookworms
    The incubation worked.
    The biggest expense was the microscope I bought off Amazon, an AmScope SE306. I picked it because it would give plenty of room for pipette work above the sample. I paid ~$370 Can.
    The other supplies needed were variously sized pipettes, petri dishes, mineral water, adhesive gauze bandages, bleach for cleanup, paper towels, a garbage bag to cover my desk, and glasses for eye protection. And of course, most importantly, nitrile disposable...
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

NOTICE: This site places This site places cookies on your device (Cookie settings). on your device. Continued use is acceptance of our Terms of Use, and Privacy Policy.