A dirty cure for asthma?

[Guest guest]

Dear Asthma List,I'm new here, so please excuse me if this post is in any way not appropriate.  I've been a chronic asthmatic for about 20 years. Unrelated to this, I've also studied soil eating or geophagy for many years in a scientific context (if interested, see this piece  which discusses some of my work on geophagy in wild birds).Today, I want to share some personal experiences I've had over the past year regarding asthma, specifically the possibility that consuming the right kinds of soil may in fact be alleviating some of my asthma symptoms. I did write to the moderator months ago asking for guidance on whether it would be useful to post, but I never heard back. Also, please don't hesitate to write to me off the list and cc me (at jamie@...) with any replies. I'll keep an eye on this list for follow up posts.When taking clay for gastrointestinal discomfort, and coincidentally running out of my inhaler at the time, I discovered that I no longer had asthma symptoms. It's now been about seven months and I've had no symptoms, and as I mention below, no hay fever either.If you're interested in why I think this may be happing, please read the piece below which I wrote the following to a friend who's a professor at a nearby university; it explains a bit more of the story and the potential mechanism. Of course this could still be a complete coincidence, but it's starting to seem more and more real all the time as each month passes.  Maybe you saw this piece  in the New York Times earlier this summer which caught my eye because they found a very clear link between something happening in the gut (in this case a mild infection of hookworms) and profound changes in the incidence of asthma and hay fever. Perhaps a similar mechanism is at work here, that is the clay is doing something to the lining of the gut which is similar to the effect of the helminths' secretions, i.e. something suppressing immune response in the gut can have downstream consequences for allergic and autoimmune responses elsewhere in the body.  Although few people are aware of it, about 70% of our immune tissue is in our gut (see wiki entry here ), so there is ample opportunity for this part of our immune system to sample what we eat and what we breathe and respond accordinglyAt this point, I'm really interested in talking to other asthma sufferers to see if they have a similar response to ingesting clay. Naturally, I'm hoping to avoid is coming across as a snake oil salesman or an alternative medicine kook as I am neither. I'm simply someone who has suffered with chronic asthma for decades, never imagined I would live without medication, and still can't quite believe that my Advair dispenser still reads 57 after getting it about seven months back. If this is more than a coincidence, I'd really like to see if it might help others alleviate at least some of their asthma symptoms. I'm well aware of the risks of alternative medicine, playing around with asthma meds, etc, as well as ingesting anything like this which one's doctor hasn't approved. The clay in question is directly comparable to FDA approved active ingredients of anti-diarrheals for many years. I would very much like to hear if any adult asthma sufferers on this list would be interested in discussing this further, and perhaps seeing if they have a similar response to this treatment.Thanks very much for listening, D. Gilardi, Ph.D., Californiajamie@..._______________________ As you know, I've been interested in clay for many years, but for the past decade I've never bothered to chase down a supply here in the states either for bird or human consumption. In recent months, I finally got around to buying some bulk clay for use in various contexts, primarily to see whether it would be at least as useful as anything else for various GI issues like esophagitis, diarrhea, cramping, etc.. No big news there, maybe some benefits, but too sloppy a set of questions and symptoms for an n of one to be useful one way or another.What has been interesting however, is that for the first time in 20 years, this spring I've had no asthma whatsoever. I've used inhalers on a daily basis since my early 20's and the only time I've not needed such medication daily was when I was at sea in the Pacific for weeks at a time. Aside from being delighted to not have to deal with any of this (and for the first time contemplating the possibility of not spending the rest of my life on asthma meds), I began to wonder if the change was related to the daily consumption of clay, given the coincident timing. I would have left it there at the sort of cocktail-party level of amusing coincidence, except for another experience I had this spring. Despite these really annoying north winds and the standard springtime assault of allergens in the air, I've had no hay fever or allergy symptoms this spring whatsoever. My family have all been sneezing up a storm, but in years past, I've always been the one to have all the symptoms, the one to take the allergy meds, etc ... pretty consistently, year after year, spring after spring.So, having studied clay and its various potential functions in the vertebrate gut for many years, I naturally grew to wondering if maybe we've been overlooking the potential of clays to mediate immune responses in the gut with potential consequences to various allergy and auto immune issues both in the gut and systemically. From what I gather, there is substantial potential here given the quantity of gut associated lymphoid tissue in conjunction with the demonstrated capacity for clay to induce changes at the cellular and acellular level in the gut. Thinking back, the best sort of loosey-goosey explanation I've used for what clay does to the vertebrate gut is that it seems to have the ability to cause the lining of the gut to "relax" in various ways, whether that's esophagitis, colitis, or any irritated area in between. The thinking until now has always been framed around the chemical irritation of the gut from secondary compounds in food and the various nasty chemicals produced by various microbes in the gut causing various GI symptoms. Thus, the gut is being attacked by these chemical insults, and the clay comes along, adsorbs some of those, stimulates additional mucous secretion, causes an increase in the protein cross linking of that mucous, and also changes the proportion of cell types (increasing goblet cell density if memory serves).In any case, it never really occurred to me that there might be consequence to the immune system, but looking back now, of course it makes sense that some of this inflammation and irritability of the gut lining has an immune component. But more importantly, what if an irritated gut has cascading effects throughout the rest of the body, perhaps causing excessive reactions to external and internal stimuli (i.e. allergies and auto immune responses, respectively)?