Modern medicine likes to think it has evolved past parasites. It hasn’t. It has merely stopped looking.
Lee Merritt, a conventionally trained surgeon, argues that one of the great medical deletions of the last century is routine parasite treatment in humans. Animals are dewormed as a matter of course. Humans, somehow, are declared exempt; despite sharing the same food chains, environments, soil, water, pets and pathogens.
According to Merritt, this omission is not accidental. Parasites do not fit the modern medical model: they are messy, chronic, difficult to detect, and inconvenient to pharmaceutical economics. They don’t produce neat biomarkers. They don’t respond to single-course treatments. And they don’t generate lifelong patented prescriptions.
Parasites are not rare. They are not exotic. They are not confined to the “developing world”. They are everywhere. Many produce no dramatic symptoms at all; only slow, grinding inflammation that later gets rebranded as autoimmune disease, chronic fatigue, neurological degeneration, skin disorders, digestive dysfunction or “idiopathic” illness. The body doesn’t stop reacting. It just never wins.
A key problem, Merritt argues, is lifecycle blindness. Parasites don’t simply die and disappear. They reproduce relentlessly. Egg sacs embed throughout the body. Kill the adult parasite and the eggs hatch. Ignore the eggs and the cycle restarts. This is why short, one-off treatments fail and why inflammation persists for years.
In this framework, many chronic inflammatory diseases are not mysterious at all. They are unresolved biological conflicts. Modern medicine, meanwhile, prefers immune suppression. Shut the alarms off. Label the patient. Manage the condition. Move on.
Parasite elimination, by contrast, is old medicine. Unprofitable medicine. Medicine that assumes the body is responding intelligently to something real, not malfunctioning at random.
Merritt’s position is blunt: before suppressing the immune system, remove what the immune system is fighting. Before declaring lifelong disease, ask whether the body is hosting something it was never meant to tolerate.
Whether medicine likes the implication or not, parasites did not vanish when Rockefeller redefined healthcare. They simply became inconvenient.