Research

Despite all the research that has been going on for the last one hundred years, we are no closer to understanding the underlying cause of many illnesses, especially cancer, neurological disorders, arthritis and autoimmune diseases.

Modern research is targeted at treating the disease rather than the cause. Therapies for many diseases, target the immune system, mainly by immunosuppression (dampening down the immune response despite not knowing what it is responding to) or more recently by attempting to block signals from cells that turn the immune system off (in cases of inflammation such as arthritis) or on (in cases of cancer where the tumour has turned off the immune system so it doesn’t react against it).

While this ongoing research will eventually give us insight into the mechanisms of response to disease, we are no closer to understanding the disease process.

In a similar manner, our understanding of the immune system has come on in leaps and bounds. However, the reality is that we still have a long way to go in our understanding of how the immune system works.

Disease Specific Research

Want to know more about your disease specifically? Here at Hey Jude research is an important part of what we do and so we have compiled notes on the latest medical research on all of the diseases listed below.

Click on each disease to find out more. (Details will be added shortly)

This has been shown by the failure of numerous immunotherapies to show any beneficial response and in some cases the outcome has been exactly the opposite of what was expected resulting in severe illness.

One hundred and twenty years ago, nothing was known about microbes. Disease was purportedly caused by humors in the air. It was only when the great men like Pasteur, Koch and Metchnikoff showed for the first time that many diseases were actually caused by microbes and how are immune system dealt with them.

Those were the golden years of microbe discovery followed by decades of failure to find further microbiological agents as the cause of other diseases.

We must remember that the greatest doctors never considered tuberculosis a bacterial infection at the end of the 19^th century. It was only when the physician Robert Koch used a different growth medium from the standard that was used for bacterial growth, did the bacteria show up. Up to that point, TB was considered a disease caused by something they didn’t understand and was put down to ‘humors’ in the air.

The only thing that has changed in this context is we have replaced the word ‘humors’ with ‘environmental factors’.

This does not mean that microbes do not cause some of these illnesses. It is more likely our failure to grow and isolate these organisms and then culture them from diseased tissues.

This has been confirmed by the fact that many diseases such as peptic ulcer, Whipple’s disease, Kaposi’s sarcoma, some lymphomas and cervical and head and neck cancers, have now been shown to have microbiological causes.

Furthermore, the works of Virginia Livingston-Wheeler, Alexander-Jackson, Florence Siebert, Irene Diller, and Alan Cantwell have shown the presence of microbes within tissue samples of diseases such as sarcoidosis, scleroderma and cancer.

A bacterium can exist in different forms but this is is not standard teaching. The research of Lida Mattman and Gerald Domingue on bacteria that have lost their cell wall (cell wall deficient forms of bacteria), and evidence that some bacteria can produce spores or seedlings that can pass through fine filters which supposedly only viruses can pass through, means our understanding of microorganisms is far from complete.

Fortunately, there are still a few with an interest in this field such as Nadya Markova in Bulgaria who has shown that despite what all conventional doctors and microbiologists will tell you, bacteria continue to live and circulate in the blood. The role of these microbes remains unclear but there presence especially in people with chronic disease, suggest that they could be the underlying cause or they are responsible for ongoing chronic inflammation.

The biggest problem is convincing doctors that these organisms are not contaminants. If these doubters were to study the evidence in detail, there is little room for doubt that they play a role in many diseases of which at present we have no or very little understanding.

Below are references spanning back over a hundred years, which should make people sit up and take notice. These investigations, were performed by doctors and scientists, who were recognised world wide as distinguished in their field.

We have included Livingston –Wheeler, as there is no doubt of her major input into the research of bacteria in disease. Some will point out her erroneous description of a novel bacterium that was found on further experimentation to be a well-recognised bacterium.

However, in that case the specific bacteria she shared with another researcher, was likely to be a contaminant, and not the type she described. Her vast experience in this field of research over decades makes it highly unlikely that she would have failed to recognise this common bacterium.

It is the aim of ‘Hey Jude’ to continue to raise money for continuing research for organisms that may be involved in causing these disorders. It is only through original research and thinking, is it likely we will ever solve the mystery of so many diseases.

We will leave the research into mutations of genes and related areas to others, for the simple reason that we feel this is the end product and gives us little insight into the underlying cause of the disease.