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By
Linda Adams
Dead Rebel Of The Week
~ Tom Brown ~
“I’ll be fine. I did what I came for.”
– Thomas MacPherson Brown, MD
Few people recognize the name Dr. Thomas MacPherson Brown. Fewer people can say they owe their lives to him. I am one of those people. There isn’t a minute of any day that passes in which I don’t think of him and the rocky road he traveled for half a century. I think of him every morning when I get out of bed without needing to pull myself up without the assistance of willpower and the night stand. I think of him every time I glance in a mirror or easily open my mouth to brush my teeth. I think of him every time I pump gasoline into my car. I think of him every time I carry groceries into the house. I think of him every time I scrape ice off of the windshield of my car without pain or enjoy a walk outdoors on a beautiful day. I think of him every time I celebrate a birthday. And I am grateful to him beyond words that I now live such a normal and active life – and can expect to live for many years to come.
Over the past 60 years or so there have been thousands of people all over the world just as grateful to Dr. Brown as I.
In 1988, knowing that his life was nearing the end, this medical maverick set about to carve his history in stone. Medical writer, Henry Scammell, co-authored a book with Dr. Brown titled “The Road Back”. Dr. Brown was 82 years old. The same book, with updates on research and medical findings since Dr. Brown’s death in 1989, is now published under the title “The Arthritis Breakthrough.”
The premise of Dr. Brown’s assertion of the etiology and treatment of rheumatoid diseases is quite clear cut: each inflammatory form of arthritis begins with an infection that mutates and becomes systemic, but can be treated successfully with inexpensive and low risk antibiotics. It sounds simple, doesn’t it?
The medical establishment hated it.
To this day, mainstream physicians, as a general rule, are choosing to remain ignorant of the infectious etiology of rheumatoid diseases and, instead, continue to prescribe drugs for their patients that do more harm than good. The road to recognition and success has been a difficult one. Yet, 17 years after Dr. Brown’s passing, thousands of renegade medical practitioners and laymen alike continue to carry the torch. Success is slow but steady.
In the late 1930’s, a young Dr. Brown went to the Rockefeller Institute with the goal of finding the presence of some type of infectious organism – bacterial or viral – in rheumatoid diseases. Consequently, the work he did at the Rockefeller Institute between 1936 and 1939 laid the foundation for both his medical research and clinical careers. Over several months Tom Brown and his team attempted to isolate such an infectious agent using embryonated hen’s eggs. Finally, after hundreds of experiments and perseverance worthy of Job, Dr. Brown did it: he found in one embryo that had been inoculated with synovial fluid from an arthritic joint the presence of an “invisible” mutated bacteria called the L-form. Today, the L-form organism is called “mycoplasm”.
Dr. Brown published the findings of these successful experiments in the Science journal in 1939. At first the response from his medical peers was excellent. However, like a flash in a pan, the excitement soon died. Nobody else was able to duplicate his results. It had taken Dr. Brown several months and hundreds of attempts to isolate the L-form in that one egg; other medical researchers gave up only after a few attempts and denounced his claims as “unproven.”
But Tom Brown remained steadfast. He had long felt intuitively that the rheumatoid diseases, the fastest growing class of chronic diseases in our society as well as one of the most crippling, was caused by some type of infection. And now he had seen it with his own eyes. He knew he was right and refused to give up or give in.
When he left the Rockefeller Institute in 1939 to become chief resident in medicine at Johns Hopkins, the school gave him his own lab. He later moved on to become one of the big honchos at the National Hospital outside of Washington, D.C. It was there that Dr. Brown not only continued his meagerly funded research, but maintained a full-time clinical practice. Unlike every other physician in the world treating patients with progressively crippling and debilitating rheumatoid diseases, he never lost a patient due to the effects of their disease. This includes scleroderma and lupus, the two big “killers” in the rheumatoid family.
Through the years, his research taught him about mycoplasm - what makes it tick: that the individual organism releases a toxin when it is destroyed, how to break it open, and how the body creates “fixed tissue antibodies” that are ready to react to these toxins every time they appear in the body. Essentially, the theory is that the body doesn’t simply go haywire and develop an autoimmune disease out of nowhere. Dr. Brown asserted that, at some point in time, each person striken with a rheumatoid disease – rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, scleroderma, polymyositis, dermatomyositis, Reiter’s syndrome, etc. – had an infection that remained in the body and mutated into this mycoplasm organism. Over time, the mycoplasms attach to particular tissues, live there, replicate and eventually become the systemic disease. Since the etiology for all of these “diseases” is the same, the treatment is the same – low dose tetracycline antibiotics.
For over fifty years, Tom Brown was black-balled and denounced by the American mainstream medical consensus, including the American Medical Association, the American Rheumatism Association (which ironically Dr. Brown helped to found early in his career), and was denied research funding on a regular basis from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). To sum it up: he was screwed.
Or so you would think.
Slowly over the years of his practice word of Dr. Brown’s success with treating – and sometimes curing – these diseases spread. People traveled from all over the world to see him. And people all over the world got better.
It is with deep passion and unwavering loyalty to the cause that some of those very people continue today to help spread the word of the possibility of returned health to people suffering from rheumatoid disease. A sprinkling of open-minded physicians around the world made a point to seek out Dr. Brown’s counsel, many traveling to National Hospital to study with him and the colleague physicians he had trained. All of these people began talking to each other. They met others. They organized. And they lobbied.
In 1988, Tom Brown knew he didn’t have much longer to live and set about to write a book that could survive his life, continuing to help patients regain health and vitality even in the face of denial by mainstream medicine. He knew he had dedicated his entire professional career, heart and soul, to proving the infectious etiology of rheumatoid disease. In the 1940’s he turned his back on prednisone, the “Wonder Pill” of pre-WWII medicine, denouncing that it was nothing more than a band-aid. Time has proven Tom Brown to be correct. Today prednisone continues to be used, but cautiously due to the disastrous side effects. And there is no doubt that Dr. Brown, would he be alive today, would shake his head just as hard over the consensual and often exclusive use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medications. Again, a band-aid effect with disastrous consequences for the patient.
Just as time has proven the danger and inability to “cure” of any of these band-aid drugs, it has stepped up to the plate to vindicate Dr. Brown’s theories. In 1993, the first NIH-funded double-blind trial using oral minocycline, a tetracycline derivative, to treat rheumatoid arthritis published favorable results. Additional, although smaller, trials have followed. Today, more and more physicians are taking the time to learn the treatment protocols and use this therapy with their patients who have rheumatoid arthritis. Even the traditionally conservative American Arthritis Foundation now lists antibiotic therapy as a viable treatment option. Henry Scammell returned in 1998 to publish “Scleroderma: The Proven Therapy That Can Save Your Life.” The therapy is, of course, the same low-risk and inexpensive, yet amazingly effective low dose antibiotics. The “proof” is a small study funded by the Road Back Foundation, an educational organization begun by Dr. Brown’s patients with the mission to spread the word, which measured the effects of oral minocycline on patients with scleroderma. The results were amazingly positive.
Over the past several years, additional trials have been funded here and there, and slowly the treatment is becoming an open option for many people. However, for the most part, it remains up to the patient to seek out a physician – often different from their current doctor – who is versed in the treatment protocols and will agree to prescribe the antibiotics. Amazingly, many physicians remain skeptical of the efficacy of the treatment and, even when they have nothing else to offer patients who are constantly in pain and whose conditions are quickly deteriorating, they refuse to even give this low risk treatment a try. Doctors think nothing of handing out tetracycline like it’s candy to teenagers with acne, but many look the other way when the subject of prescribing the same or a smaller dose of tetracycline to an adult whose life is fading away from them comes up. Yet, for those few people who are successful in the search for a sympathetic and well-informed physician – now numbering in the thousands worldwide – the end result can be health, vitality, and joy.
Tom Brown has been vindicated to some degree. And his army marches on.
“I never thought of myself as turning the medical world upside down; if anything, I was trying to set it right side up. The way this is turning out, it looks like you’re the one who’ll learn whether I succeeded. But there’s one thing I know I managed to do for the medical world, just because I wouldn’t give up and go away: I’ve succeeded in giving it one terrific, fifty-year pain in the neck. That’s got to be worth something.”
– Thomas MacPherson Brown, MD
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For more information on Dr. Brown and the antibiotic treatment for rheumatoid disease, the following sources are highly recommended:
“The Arthritis Breakthrough: Revolutions in Research & Treatment, NIH Clinical Trials of the New Therapy” by Henry Scammell with Thomas MacPherson Brown, MD
“Scleroderma: The Proven Therapy That Can Save Your Life” by Henry Scammell
http://www.rheumatic.org – a web site dedicated to spreading the word and treatment information for antibiotic therapy, including on-line support group and physician referral list
http://www.roadback.org - The Road Back Foundation – an educational organization started by former patients of Dr. Brown
