Vital journeys in life often start with the intense desire to help someone that you love. If almost 50 percent of Americans has an inflammatory disease, then certainly every American’s life has been touched by this epidemic, and I am no exception. It was my own personal experience with inflammatory diseases in people that I cared about that motivated me to dedicate my life to this research.

My sister Tammy was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis (RA) at the age of thirteen. I truly believe that if Satan were to design a disease, it would be this one -- an opinion that’s shared by those who live with RA, and the doctors who treat it. It’s truly a monstrous affliction: an incurable disease characterized by excruciating pain and gradual debilitation.

Tammy is one of the bravest people I’ve ever met. Although she’s been suffering from this demon of a disease since childhood, I don’t think I’ve ever heard her complain – but the physical evidence of her disease is written all over her body for everyone to see. By the age of thirty, her hands were so grotesquely deformed that it hurt just to look at them, and her knees were enormously swollen with bony protuberances, places where the chronic inflammation had damaged so much tissue that the shape of the joint was permanently damaged.

To control her disease, Tammy had progressively moved up to more and more serious medications. By the fall of 1997, she was taking a medication called methotrexate, originally designed as an anti-cancer drug. It is a very powerful drug, and it is very toxic. The immediate side effects included mouth sores, diarrhea and a loss of appetite, but there was also a long-term threat: taken in high enough concentrations for long periods of time, methotrexate can eventually threaten every major organ system in the body.

The medication was expensive, the side effects made her very uncomfortable, and as a mother with three small children, she was worried about its effects on her future health -- but like many RA patients, Tammy simply didn’t have a choice. This drug was her only hope. The worst part was that the methotrexate wasn’t even all that effective. Despite this heavy-duty medication, Tammy still couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs or tie her own shoes. And no matter what she did, her disease continued to worsen.

After two full knee replacements and five surgeries to rehabilitate and replace the joints in her hands, Tammy was at the end of her rope. She had heard in communities of RA sufferer support groups an excited buzz about "alternative therapies" promising increased function and pain reduction. The possibility of help was tantalizing, but inaccessible -- there was absolutely no consensus about what worked! Some sufferers were claiming terrific results from eating diets that contained supposedly anti-inflammatory foods, and from taking huge doses of antioxidant vitamins and fatty acid supplements. Dosages varied wildly, depending on who you asked, and nobody seemed to be all that concerned about science or safety.

Understandably overwhelmed by the contradictory information whizzing back and forth, Tammy called me. At the time, I was a faculty member at the prestigious John Hopkins Asthma and Allergy Center and an internationally recogbized expert in asthma.

"I need to try something else," she said. "My doctor is telling me I’ve exhausted my options, but what I’m doing clearly isn’t working, and I can’t go on like this. Isn’t there anything else I can do?"

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