Prevention of the Iraq War-associated sickness : a prediction and a challenge to the Department of Defense

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, Feb-March, 2005 by Majid Ali

In Table 1, I present data revealing the real source of toxic exposure that destabilized her and led to hospitalization. Note the severe--in some cases near total--suppression of enzymes with crucial roles in cellular energetics by factors (mostly microbial toxins) released from the tissues surrounding dental cavitation and other parts of dead or dying teeth. The laboratory range of suppression of those enzymes in nontoxic subjects was less than five percent. How many cardiologists or internists in the country, might one ask, have been trained or are even aware of this source of serious and potentially life-threatening toxicity?

What does dental toxicity have to do with I-WAS? My essential point in the above case history is this: Those unfamiliar with clinical and laboratory diagnosis of cellular toxicity should not be permitted to dismiss Iraq War veterans as mere psychosomatic problems. The second reason for including the above case study is to underscore the point that integrative physicians diligently search for causes of cellular toxicity--mycotoxins, excess Krebs cycle metabolites, heavy metals, mitochondrial uncouplers, and others--which most mainstream doctors do not even think about.

A Proposal for a Clinical Trial for the Iraq War Veterans

Looking back, the experience with the Agent Orange-related sickness in Vietnam veterans and the Gulf War syndrome among veterans of the Persian Gulf conflict makes it abundantly clear that the one-disease/one-cause/one-drug model of the prevailing pharmacologic medicine neither provided us any understanding of the true nature of the veterans' chronic sickness, nor did it solve their medical problems. In the proposed clinical trial, I submit that the Oxygen Model be applied for the clinical evaluation and management of the unwell veterans. I described the Oxygen Model at length in Integrative Nutritional Medicine--Looking Through the Prism of Oxygen Homeostasis, the fifth volume of The Principles and Practice of Integrative Medicine.

The Goal of the Proposed Clinical Trial

The goal of the clinical trial will be to determine by true-to-life, long-term follow-up study whether or not optimal nutritional, detox, and self-regulatory measures can prevent the development of chronic debilitating illness among the Iraq War veterans, as it happened to a large number of Gulf War veterans.

Subjects of the Clinical Trial

I propose that 400 veterans of the Iraq War who state they are not as healthy one year after their service as they were before that should be entered in the clinical trial, to be conducted by the DOD as follows: (1) one-half of that veterans cohort be taken from the Eastern USA and be assigned to ten university internists, who have the freedom to manage their cases according to prevailing standards of laboratory testing and drug therapies of the pharmacologic model; (2) the second half of the veterans be taken from the Eastern USA and be assigned to ten integrative physicians, who are given freedom to evaluate the redox equilibrium and oxygen homeostasis of the veterans with established laboratory methods, and then manage their cases according to the accepted nutritional, detoxification, and self-regulatory approaches; (3) the trial be conducted for three years; and (4) the outcome of the study be decided by using predetermined clinical and laboratory criteria.