If you weren’t paying attention during the class where they explained the epochs of geological history, here’s some good news for you about the Devonian era (419 million to 358 million BC). You may have things in your digestive tract that look like they came from there.
I was reminded of this when someone I worked with recently passed the little parasite in the image below.
There is no way of knowing where this little guy’s tree of life began but from the looks of it, I can imagine it slithering around in some primeval ocean, maybe stuck to the bottom of a coelacanth or living in a tube under the sandy seafloor. These are cheerful ideas. It is less amusing to consider that this creature was living inside a human being in 2021. As if we didn’t have enough to worry about in 2021…
More often than not, the organisms that people pass in a bowel movement are not recognizable as classical parasite shapes like the nice tidy roundworms or leaf-shaped flukes we see in pictures. Instead, odd shapes will come out. Shapes that make you think you didn’t chew your food fully until you look at them more closely and they wink back at you.
Those who are familiar with my work will know that I have developed a novel way of analyzing parasites. I call this process a confirmation circle as it involves cross-referencing various metrics like vitamins, minerals, heavy metal samples and parasite medications with a muscle testing analysis of the organism itself. The key to performing this analysis is that you have to have access to a sample of the physical organism, and these are hard to get because people rarely poop them out, and then when they do, the reflex is most often to flush, not to retrieve the organism for a muscle testing analysis. This is one of the reasons why useful parasites samples, for muscle testing purposes, are so hard to come by. Most people flush down the evidence.
Below is the confirmation circle for this organism, which thankfully was not flushed, and then a short analysis will follow.
Confirmation Circle: Unknown Parasite
We will focus on 3 aspects of this particular confirmation circle:
1. Heavy Metal: Arsenic. It is a little-understood fact about parasites that they host bacteria, that in turn soak up and excrete heavy metals. While these bacteria cause the metal toxicity itself, the parasite produces the bacteria (by pooping), so in effect we can view the parasite as being ultimately responsible for the metal toxicity, as long as we understand that there is an indirect relationship.
Arsenic is associated with a host of inflammatory medical conditions including fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, bloating and food allergies. The organism in the picture above is the source of the arsenic-loving bacteria, which in turn absorb arsenic from various sources ranging from organic peaches to your cologne or perfume. You can’t avoid arsenic because it’s on the periodic table and you can’t avoid the periodic table because you’re living it in, you’re made of it, it is the universe.
The practical question here is, could the parasite, via arsenic, be the cause of some medical condition? Sure. While it is difficult to establish causality between a single parasite and a general medical condition, if you were hosting one of these things you would have to feel it on some level.
Think about how much you feel the effect of a single pill of tylenol when you have a headache. One pill and you feel better. This organism was much bigger than a tylenol pill and it was excreting a constant flow of arsenic-loving bacteria day in and day out for years, presumably. God only knows what symptoms it was causing, but nothing good. Arsenic is a deadly poison.
2. Digestive enzyme: Amylase. Amylase is the enzyme we use to break down starches. It is produced in the salivary glands and the pancreas. What if you had a parasite that was inhibiting your ability to produce amylase, or one that somehow suppressed the metabolic processes responsible for up-regulating amylase production? Starches are carbs, carbs are things like gluten, potatoes and rice. Do you think it might be possible that someone with this parasite would feel bloated when they ate gluten, for example? Some skeptics might object that there is no clear connection between parasites and food allergies. Well, gluten is a carb, carbs are starches, and amylase breaks down starches, so something that inhibits the breakdown of starches-carbs-gluten might very well cause a symptom. This looks like a connection to me, what do you think?
3. Medication: Praziquantel ¼. This is the most telling part of the analysis. We know that praziquantel is flatworm medicine so we can infer that this parasite must be some form of flatworm. This is evidenced by the further pictures of it, provided by the, well, what do we call someone who cared enough about science to come and see me, then poop the parasite out, catch it in a strainer, wash it all nice and clean, dry it off, put it on a paper towel and take a nice high-resolution picture of it, then send the picture back to me, then bring the parasite back in for a muscle testing analysis and give me permissions to use the picture in this article? The word benefactor of science comes to mind but I think the more technical term would be parasite donor (but personally, I don’t think that does them justice).
I can’t discern what that flat triangular piece is but it also muscle tested for praziquantel 150mg (i.e., 1/4 of a pill of praz) and came out in the same bowel movement, so it is probably part of the same organism. Here’s a flipped-upside-down picture of that same triangular piece. It almost looks like an apple peel, but I am assured the parasite donor didn’t eat any apples and by contrast, apples don’t muscle test for praziquantel (fluke medicine).
We find a particularly interesting feature on the body of the organism. I don’t know if you noticed those long, thin, dark brown grooves underneath the surface. I’ll try to enhance that in the picture below. Your instinct might be to assume this is the esophagus where it swallows its food, or the rectum where it excretes from, except of course that we know flatworms soak food in directly through their skin and excrete the same way, so it wouldn’t be a mouth or a rectum. Possibly it is some primitive digestive tract that we are seeing, in the same way that if you look at a translucent fish in an aquarium you might see its digestive organs.
The most telling picture of all was taken 4 hours later. In this image we can see that like a jelly fish stranded on the beach, the organism has almost completely dehydrated. If there was any doubt that this was a parasite, the dehydrated version should be conclusive proof. Only a jelly-like organism would dehydrate that quickly.
Unless it actually was a jelly fish from the Devonian era, but then how did it get into the toilet, inside a bowel movement of all places? No, it is a parasite. Well, it was… I’m assuming at this point it’s in the garbage somewhere so it can’t actually be said to be a parasite any longer. The verb ‘to be’ does presuppose something that is still alive. On a side-note, this is the sort of reason that you shouldn’t let your dog or cat root around in the garbage…
The fact is, every single person in the world will muscle test for praziquantel, and although that may not mean they have this particular organism, it certainly means that they have one of its cousins from the flatworm family. Praziquantel treats (and therefore indicates in a muscle test) flatworms. Whether you have symptoms from your flatworm is another matter.
So the next time someone tries to lecture you on Devonian paleobiology, you can say “been there, done that, and brought home a souvenir”.
This is of course meant to be poetic license. Parasites originated far back in the precambrian era. They already dominated the oceans during a geological period known as “worm world”, or the Ediacaran era, in 635-541 million years BC, as portrayed in one of my favorite paleobiology documentary videos: How Worms Ended Worm World by PBS Eons. Bless their hearts, they put on a good show. Here’s a link to that video if you’re interested.
If you’d like to learn more about using a muscle testing analysis to understand parasites, here are two options:
1. The Health Ladder
Check out my article about The Health Ladder: A Guide to Symptoms and their Root Causes.
This is a teaching tool I have developed over the years to illustrate the relationship between parasites and medical conditions. You might want to refer back to this article from time to time to remind yourself of how human health fits together. This is a helpful overview.
The Health Ladder is my copyrighted material but you are welcome to use it for personal, non-commercial purposes to educate yourself and your friends.
2. Experiments in Muscle Testing
If you’d like to read more about The Health Ladder, you can now read my book Experiments in Muscle Testing, available from Vitruvian Press on July 4/21.
In the US, July 4th is Independency Day. On this July 4th, I though it would be nicely symbolic if it was the day people learned how to become independent from a lack of understanding of health. Understanding won’t single-handedly solve any health problems you’re having, but it is the start of personal and political freedom, and it is the only way forward from this fearful health impasse we find ourselves in as a society.
This book has been in the works for 15 years and is a complete survey of everything you wanted to know about health but didn’t know who to ask.
There is a chapter on parasites (that’s chapter #5 of 36) and it also covers muscle testing applications in organ testing, nutrition, metal toxicity, viruses and other fun, practical things like how not to get the above parasite in your lunch while you’re traveling the world, and what your backup plan should be if you do get it.
Here’s a link to order the book. Depending on when you read this, the 540 signed, limited first editions may be sold out but there are lots of second editions available and ultimately, what matters isn’t what edition you get, it’s that you put this information into practice and be the change you want to see in the world.