"I have no idea," I said. "But don’t you dare take anything until I do."

That night, I spent the evening at our medical library examining the claims behind these alternative medicines. Tammy had been right: there was a whole culture of people with inflammatory diseases of all kinds, clamoring for help. In almost all cases, their diseases were chronic and progressive. The prescription medications they were taking often had unacceptable side effects, and they were legitimately afraid of the effects these medications might have on their long-term health. Traditional medicine was not providing acceptable solutions for these people, and they were desperate for answers from other quarters.

But if there was help to be found, it wasn’t going to be from natural product companies, which seemed to prey on the hopes and fears of desperate sufferers, trading in great promises that could only end up in profound disappointment. I was appalled by the misinformation about diet and supplements I was reading in the materials I found. At best, the information was useless, the "prescriptions" not much better than snake oil. At worst, the recommendations were outright dangerous -- combinations of supplements at dosage levels that could have potentially fatal results, like platelet stickiness and heart attack. It was scary stuff.

At the same time, I couldn’t dismiss everything I found as quackery. As silly as some of the scientific claims were, I could also see the gleam of real treasure there. Sure that I wasn’t the only scientist to make these inquiries, I went to Medline, a list of about eleven million references from medical journals, to see what the medical community had to offer. I looked for clinical trials designed to test alternative therapies for inflammatory disease.

Unfortunately, what I found there wasn’t much more conclusive. There weren’t a lot of studies, and for the most part, the ones I did find lacked real scientific vigor. Many of them hadn’t used a placebo control group, which meant that there wasn’t a real standard against which to compare their results. Most of them hadn’t taken place in a major medical center setting, where the researchers could ensure strict compliance. And in some cases, there was a question about how the outcomes had been measured. From a scientific perspective, the research was inadequate, to say the least.

But again, there was just enough possibility to intrigue me. There was a large body of evidence indicating a connection between inflammatory disease and diet – specifically, the fatty acids in our diet, which happens to be my own primary area of expertise.

I sat up for several long and sleepless nights thinking about Tammy’s options, and my own. At the time, I was on the faculty at Johns Hopkins University. I had two major grants funded by the National Institute of Health, and I was consulting for three major pharmaceutical companies. In other words, I had a lot of research money at my disposal. I was a world-recognized scientist, specializing in the way that fatty acids are metabolized in the body on a cellular level, and it was very clear from the research I’d found that there was overlap between my field of expertise and inflammation.

As the sun came up on my last sleepless night, I realized I had an opportunity to help my sister, and millions of people like her. Wasn’t it time that I started looking at the forest, instead of so closely focusing on the trees?

And so it was that with my colleagues at Johns Hopkins (and building on the work of countless scientists and researchers before me), I began my quest to develop safe, effective, scientifically-based, natural approaches to preventing and treating inflammatory disease through diet.

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