There is a particular kind of result that the modern medical literature produces every so often and then quietly buries. Not an incremental improvement. Not a "statistically significant trend." A clean, total, almost embarrassing result -- the kind that, if a pharmaceutical company owned it, would be on every billboard in the country. In 2005, four researchers at Shiraz University of Medical Sciences published a small clinical study in the International Journal of Dermatology with a title so plain it almost dares you to overlook it: "Healing effect of garlic extract on warts and corns." What they reported was this: a fat-soluble extract of ordinary garlic, applied twice a day, produced complete recovery in 100% of patients with warts within one to two weeks -- and no recurrence over the three- to four-month follow-up. One hundred percent. From a bulb you can buy for pocket change at any market on earth. I want to sit with this result, because it is not really a story about warts. It is a story about what we have been taught to believe medicine is, and where healing actually comes from. What makes this result so much more than a folk curiosity is that the researchers could name why it worked -- and the mechanisms read like a summary of everything garlic has been documented to do across the scientific literature. - It is antiviral. Warts are linked to human papillomavirus. Garlic's antiviral activity is among the best-established in all of botanical medicine -- it directly interferes with viral replication (Dehghani et al., 2005). - It is antiproliferative. A wart is, in effect, a benign, virally driven growth. Garlic has been studied for activity against a wide range of abnormal and cancerous cell lines -- the same property, turned toward a humbler target (Garlic in dermatology, Dermatology Reports, 2011).

In 2010, Laura de Magistris and colleagues published a study in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition that compared intestinal permeability in children with autism, their first-degree relatives, and healthy controls. They found significantly elevated intestinal permeability in 36.7 percent of children with autism, compared to 4.8 percent of controls. This is the phenomenon often called “leaky gut”: tight junctions between intestinal epithelial cells become loose, allowing larger molecules (partially digested food proteins, bacterial endotoxins, microbial fragments) to pass through into the bloodstream where they trigger immune responses. When this happens, several cascades unfold. Lipopolysaccharide (LPS), an endotoxin shed by gram-negative bacteria, enters circulation and triggers systemic inflammatory cytokines that can cross the blood-brain barrier and activate microglia, the brain’s resident immune cells. Food peptides that should have been digested into amino acids reach the bloodstream and provoke immune memory and food sensitivities. Mast cells, distributed throughout the gut, lung, and brain, become primed and start releasing histamine, tryptase, and inflammatory mediators in response to ordinary stimuli. The gut-immune-brain axis is one continuous loop, and dysfunction at any node propagates throughout the system. Digestive Enzyme Insufficiency A separate but related problem has emerged from endoscopic biopsy studies in children with autism: many of them simply cannot digest sugars and carbohydrates properly. In 1999, Karoly Horvath and colleagues evaluated 90 children with autism undergoing endoscopy and found that 49 percent had at least one deficient disaccharidase enzyme (lactase, maltase, sucrase, palatinase, or glucoamylase), and 20 percent had deficiencies in two or more. Lactase deficiency was the most common. A 2011 study by Williams and colleagues, published in PLoS ONE, confirmed and extended these findings, also documenting altered intestinal microbiota associated with the carbohydrate digestion impairment.