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Enzymes The Fountain of Life
by D. A. Lopez, R. Michael Williams,
and Klaus Miehlke
Book Review
The out-of-print Enzymes The Fountain of Life (available on Amazon) describes how enzymes treat numerous medical conditions in therapies standard in Europe and Japan.
It provides in-depth background for Anthony Cichoke's useful The Complete Book of Enzyme Therapy. The authors are American and German medical doctors, professors, and researchers: D. A. Lopez, MD (immunoenzymology), R. Michael Williams, MD, PhD (oncology), and Klaus Miehlke, MD (rheumatology). Despite their expertise, the book is in plain language with many examples and analogies.
It answers the question: How do enzymes work? There's also a short history of the discovery and use of enzymes in medicine.
It discusses all types of enzymes: the body's enzymes, including those for digestion and metabolism; those enzymes found in food; those used in food production, in industrial processes, and in medicine, including for laboratory tests and the standard treatment for blood clots; and the enzyme supplements used in standard European and Japanese medicine for the treatment of injury and disease.
Medical Treatment With Enzymes
But, the book's focus is the treatment of medical conditions.
A series of chapters describe how enzyme supplements are used for treatment of: rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, cancer, heart disease, herpes viruses, AIDS, traumatic injury, inflammation, and aging.
Here are examples described in Enzymes The Fountain of Life of how enzymes work to treat disease:
Inflammation
Common to many conditions and diseases is inflammation. It's the body's first step in repairing damaged tissue.
Inflammation is characterized clinically by: redness, swelling, warmth, and pain. These are symptoms of the healing process, as the body brings various "helper" cells from the blood and lymph system to the damaged tissue.
Temperature is raised in order to increase enzymatic activity. Invasive germs are battled. The body's enzymes break down and remove unusable tissue, and repair damaged tissue.
But, at times the repair process is inadequate; the inflammation becomes chronic; or the body's efforts become chaotic. Supplemental enzymes can help the body's enzymes to accomplish repair that is permanent and complete.
Enzyme supplements add more enzymes to the blood stream and improve the body's ability to create and bring the right enzymes to the damaged area. The supplements actually speed up the inflammatory process and prevent it from becoming chronic.
In contrast, anti-inflammatory drugs suppress inflammation and thereby suppress healing as well as suppressing the immune system.
Disordered Immune Function
What do conditions as seemingly different as autoimmune diseases, cancer, and shingles have in common? An immune system disordered bycirculating immune complexes.
An immune complex is formed after the body creates antibodies to some foreign substance (perhaps a virus, a toxin, or a cancerous cell); the foreign substance is called an antigen.
This antibody-antigen combination is an immune complex. It may circulate in the blood (as a circulating immune complex) or it may affix to tissue as a tissue-bound immune complex.
What is supposed to happen is that specialized predatory immune cells will destroy and remove the immune complexes. But if there are too many immune complexes, the immune system becomes overwhelmed; or if counter-productive mechanisms become triggered, then autoimmune tissue destruction becomes possible.
In rheumatoid arthritis, immune complexes themselves are read by the body as antigens. Then antibodies formed against the immune complexes are antibodies against cells, some of which are also the body itself, and are known as auto-antibodies. These auto-antibodies are called rheumatoid factors, a standard measure of rheumatoid arthritis.
Enzymes destroy the "fibrin" that the body creates around the immune complexes. Without the fibrin shell, immune complexes become prey to the immune system before they can cause additional damage to the body.
Enzymes The Fountain of Life discusses successful European clinical studies using enzymes, versus the typically unsatisfactory treatment of rheumatoid arthritis.
Immune complexes may play a major role in other autoimmune diseases; cancer (in which the immune system is overwhelmed by immune complexes); shingles (in which immune complexes attach to nerve cells); and likely many other conditions.
Uniquely Valuable
Enzymes The Fountain of Life is uniquely valuable, as it contains:
- Important information on treatment of diseases that otherwise generally resist treatment: rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, cancer, shingles
- Details of biological mechanisms of supplemental enzymes
- A history of enzyme supplement use
To use enzyme supplements at home see The Complete Book of Enzyme Therapy
See Enzymes: The Fountain of Life