Homeopathic Human Growth Factor Study: Notes from an Interview with Barbara Brewitt

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HEALTH CORNER
By JuleneTripp Weaver

Homeopathic Human Growth Factor Study: Notes from an Interview with Barbara Brewitt, M.Div., Ph.D.

I have to start off by saying how this new study and my growing understanding of it has given me an enormous hope for the future. Most studies leave me feeling empty; most drugs used for AIDS related symptoms, or as antiretrovirals, are dangerous creating hazardous side effects. In addition, the most recent studies indicate the HIV virus mutates every 2 days no matter what drugs one uses. All this does not offer much in the way of hope. But Barbara Brewitt's study may hold the key to tricking this very smart virus.

Why a trick? Because this study is based on the principals of homeopathy. Homeopathic medicines are energetic medicines, they work on a vibrational level in the body. One of the basic principals in this type of treatment is to use a minimun dosage. Because of the very low dosage it may trick the virus into not mutating. The dosage is so low that, unlike a drug, it doesn't present anything to mutate against. The dosage of Growth Factors continually retrains the body to return to its healthy state, thus the immune system would simply get stronger. The growth factors have a very like resonance to the HIV virus, they are actually made from retro viruses, and they influence the transcription sites back to normal. The HIV virus replicates by reverse transcription, taking over the sites on the cells that allow them to take the cell over.

I spent an hour and a half interviewing Barbara Brewitt, the principal investigator of the study. I started out wanting to know the basics, what is her background? Barbara's undergraduate focused on mathematics, her masters was in Divinity, and after several years working with juvenile delinquents as a minister and psychotherapist she pursued an early dream to answer the question, "What is the cause of disease?" She says her turning point was seeing so many of these youths getting sick with cancer. She went to the University of Washington for her Ph.D., at the School of Medicine, in the Dept. of Biological Structure, she focused her studies on growth factor biotechnology. She published, received several awards, and was invited to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to do her Post Doctoral studies.

At NIH she continued learning how growth factors manipulate or have effect on the cells ability to divide or differentiate. She learned about the gene structures that regulate DNA and tell it what to do and when to do it. She also began a homeopathic study group and was introduced to bio electric medicine equipment by a chiropractor who used it on acupressure points. She began to see positive effects on people's health from the use of this new technology, In Dr. Brewitt's words, "I brought together these three different paradigms; one is bioelectrical medicine, the second is homeopathy, and the third is growth factor biotechnology."

Now Barbara Brewitt has her own practice out of the University Health Clinic. She has a reputation for healing the difficult: chronic fatigue syndrome, epstein bar virus, and HIV. In 1992 Dr. Brewitt started her experiments with two HIV positive people. She gave them growth factor signals through her bioelectrical machine, now called the LISTEN, every single day for three months. In each of them their CD4, CD8, and total T lymphocyte raised significantly. With this information she wrote several grant proposals which were turned down. Determined, Dr. Brewitt started her own company, Biomedical Explorations, LLC, to get private individuals to back her research.

Homeopathic growth factors are a brand new class of pharmaceuticals; the LISTEN machine is from a branch of medicine called bio electric medicine, it measures conductance points (acupuncture points) giving a window into the health of the whole body. "The premise of this equipment is rather simple, you take a probe provide five volts through the skin, measure an electrical acupuncture point and you can see on screen exactly the health and vitality of that particular conductance point."

Dr. Brewitt's hypothesis is, "If we can bring the chi or the electrical potential back to balance over and over and over again we can retrain the body to know how to do that. The body normally does that regularly, the situation where a person has, quote, a dis-ease they are out of balance and they have forgotten how to come back to balance." She explains, "in HIV there are two oscillating components: the lymphocytes and the virus. Research has shown that people who are sick have very disturbed oscillatory frequencies that are much higher and it takes longer for them to correct. In HIV where its normal rhythm (cycle of replication, thriving, and death) is two days, it has also speeded up the CD4 lymphocytes oscillatory rhythm, so, their cell turn over is now much higher than it used to be before HIV. The immune system, in an HIV infected individual, is replicating a billion new CD4 lymphocytes every two days, thus changing the physiology and metabolism to a higher level than before. At this rate the CD4's will eventually go into chaos and drive the immune system to destroy itself."

"It is a well known in chaos theory if you have two oscillating components one will go into chaos and the way to rescue that is to bring in a third oscillatory component." According to Dr. Brewitt what this study is doing is to, "introduce a third oscillatory component that will retrain the immune system to oscillate normally, chaos ends and if that becomes the dominant oscillation it will drive HIV into chaos, then HIV will collapse and the virus can no longer survive." This is the basic theory and hypothesis that Dr. Brewitt is working from. Because of how this theory works, "the timing of when people take the growth factors is very important because it sets up a daily rhythm that will help their body recover."

The Phase I Clinical study was a double blind, placebo controlled trial. Participants had CD4 counts between 200 and 500. A computer randomly assigned people to either a treatment group (eleven people) or to a placebo group (ten people). Everyone was on some form of natural therapeutic and no one was on an antiretroviral conventional drug. Physical exams, electrical conductance measurements (on the LISTEN machine), and blood tests were done monthly. After two months some of the significant results are listed below:

So now the study has been approved for Phase II and is in progress. It is an open label study, meaning everyone is on the treatment, that will continue for a year. Eight more people have been enrolled. Dr. Brewitt claims they have refined and added new questions to be answered in this study, they are: "1) Can we reproduce the findings we had in phase I? 2) Will the new group of people have an increase in their lymphocytes? Will the viral load, which we are now measuring every month, actually go down in all the groups on treatment? (We didn't have the money to measure viral load in Phase I), and 3) What's the long term stability of the original treatment group over the long haul? Can they keep taking these Growth Factors and still maintain a good lymphocyte CD4 count?" She further speculates on the long term effects, "we saw basically a stabilization of lymphocytes, not a big increase and that will be a question to see, can we get more information on what other natural medicines might allow the body to enhance the lymphocyte count or does it take some time to lower the viral load and that will then have consequences on the immune system being able to raise lymphocyte counts." Already since Phase II has started they are seeing a downward shift in people's viral load results.

For now the study in progress is closed and the only one of its kind, but Dr. Brewitt has been invited to be the keynote speaker at a Bio electric medicine conference in Australia. They want to replicate the study Dr. Brewitt has initiated here in Seattle. Dr. Brewitt's hope is that this will be available to a lot of people soon. This study is on the cutting edge of science, and the fact it is already showing significant results gives me hope for the future.

Glossary

Growth Factors - These are natural proteins present in the human body at low concentrations that regulate cell division and differentiation and participate in important feedback loops between major systems in the body, like the immune and nervous system. Growth factors are communication proteins.

Erythrocyte Sedimentation Rate (ESR) - The erythrocyte sedimentation rate, ESR, which is an indicator of infection, it is measured through a blood test. During HIV infection it usually floats upward.

Viral Load - HIV is an RNA virus, so every time HIV replicates it will cause RNA to appear in the plasma. Viral Load is a lab test that measures blood (plasma), using molecular biology techniques, for how many new copies of RNA are present. It measures how much virus is being replicated in the last twenty-four hours, and sense the virus is turning over every two days and producing new virus, you can get a sense of how fast the virus is running through that person's body.

T Lymphocyte (same as T cell) - A thymus derived white-blood cell that participates in a variety of cell mediated immune reactions. Three fundamentally different types of T cells are recognized: helper, killer, and suppresser (each has many subdivisions). [STEP]

Placebo - An inactive substitute for the real drug, it is made to look like the real drug and is given as if it were the real drug, but it contains no active ingredients, it is in effect a zero dosage.

Double Blind - In a double blind study neither the people who directly administer the treatment nor the subjects who receive it know who is getting the drug and who is getting the placebo.

Phase I study - FDA drug testing phase for safety testing and pharmacological profiling in humans. The first step in human testing of a drug. A Pilot study that investigates the toxicity of the drug being used in a small number of humans. They are typically short-term.

Phase II study - FDA drug testing phase for effectiveness testing in humans. The stage at which drug effectiveness is established. Proceeds only if Phase I studies show toxicity to be within acceptable levels. Involves a larger number of participants and seeks to determine if the drug actually works and what short-term side effects it causes. Typically there is still a double blind design with placebo. In this study Phase II was approved to be an open label study.

Open Label Study - A type of clinical trial in which researchers and participants know who is taking the experimental drug. [STEP]

Barbara Brewitt's currently sells "Cell Signal Enhancer" drops from her organization, Biomed Comm Inc., in Seattle, WA. The phone number is (206) 284-3433, the Fax is (206) 284-6585. Her e-mail is biomedcomm@msn.com and her web page is http://www.biomedcomm.com.