A tick bite stirred more than Lyme disease in former Congressman Berkley Bedell.
It also prompted him to look into alternative medicine and create a foundation designed to promote nontraditional forms of treatment.
A new passion? You bet, he says with a hearty laugh. "I know I wouldn't have gotten involved with alternative medicine if I hadn't gotten Lyme disease. I think the Lord just led me into this."
While fishing in Quantico, Va., Bedell figures he was bitten and contracted the disease.
"I had this little inflatable boat and I was walking through the grass looking for a place to launch it. When I came home that night, I didn't check things, but the next evening I found ticks on me. Obviously, they had jumped off the grass onto my leg."
More troubling? Poison ivy. "I never had poison ivy, so I went to one of the doctors we have in Congress and asked him to look at my leg." The physician asked him to return in a week. A different doctor looked at him and said, "That doesn't look like poison ivy. It looks like you've been bitten by a tick."
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Pulling out a book on Lyme disease, he showed Bedell a picture of its effects. "My leg looked just like the picture in the book. It was like a bull's eye."
Called erythema migrans, the rash can occur anywhere from three days to a month after the bite, according to Cindy Lewin, a nurse practitioner with Siouxland Internal Medicine. "Lots of times you don't even know you've had it. You may go weeks or months before you even recall you were bitten by a tick."
The traditional treatment: antibiotics.
Bedell says he took the drugs but didn't seem to feel better. "I was achy and tired...really tired. Then we went to visit our son in Philadelphia and I was swimming in the pool when my heart started pounding like it never had pounded before."
Three doses of antibiotics didn't do the trick. "Each time I'd feel a little better and then I'd be right back where I was before."
In 1986, he decided to leave Congress, unable to keep up with the pace of politics. At the time, he told reporters, "I don't believe it would be fair for me to continue in a job unless I can give it 100 percent."
When his symptoms became worse, the congressman thought he needed to try something else. Interestingly, a constituent told him about a farmer on the Iowa/Minnesota border who was doing something unique. Borrowing a concept from veterinary medicine, Herb Sanders used colostrum - or first milk - from a cow to treat disease in humans.
Sanders became interested in the concept after losing a dairy herd to disease. According to "Tackling Giants," Bedell's biography, the medicine is made by injecting killed germs of a particular type - in this case, Lyme disease - into the udder of a pregnant cow. When the cow has its calf, the whey from the colostrum is used as medicine.
The farmer gave Bedell that whey and some instructions: "Take a tablespoon every hour and a half while I was awake. So I carried a timer in one pocket and a little bottle in the other. It wasn't very long before my symptoms disappeared. I haven't been troubled since."
Sanders, however, was. Even though others reported similar success for a number of diseases, he was arrested and charged with fraud, cruelty to animals and practicing medicine without a license, according to Bedell.
"The farmer didn't have any money so they had to appoint a public defender. The public defender was unhappy with the medical community because he didn't think they treated his late wife the way they should have." The state, however, was unhappy with the way he handled the case and pulled him off it. Undaunted, the attorney agreed to represent Sanders. To help, Bedell offered $20,000 for expenses. "When the (attorney) went out to interview these expert witnesses, the prosecuting attorney went with him. I think he got his eyes opened that this may make some sense."
Just days before the trial, all charges were dropped - except practicing medicine without a license. "I told the farmer to pay the small fine, which I would have helped him with, but the farmer wouldn't do it," Bedell says. The trial went on. "It was the longest trial in St. James, Minn., history. It lasted three weeks." A hung jury resulted. A second trial took place. It, too, resulted in a hung jury and, finally, the state gave up. Sanders died, but Bedell's interest in alternative medicine didn't.
He got help from Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, to establish an office of alternative medicine at the National Institutes of Health. The goal: "To go out and investigate these treatments and find if they really work."
Bedell says his group routinely passed resolutions to investigate the findings of folks like Herb Sanders but NIH officials insisted on working through research universities.
"I don't know who was behind it, but my wife (Elinor) and I decided if the government wouldn't do it, we would."
Enter: The National Foundation for Alternative Medicine. Founded in 1998, it sends teams of researchers to determine what kind of success alternative clinics and practitioners are having.
"We set up trials to see if we can confirm or refute the effectiveness of their treatment. We're having a really exciting time."
The research has merit, says Dr. Bertha Ayi, a specialist with Mercy Infectious Disease and Epidemiology Center. "Conventional medicine is just alternative medicine that has had good scientific testing. We got conventional antibiotics from unconventional means."
While Bedell isn't ready to divulge what his group has uncovered, he will say there are breakthroughs in electromagnetics. "The body is much more electrical than is generally accepted by pharmaceutical medicine. If you apply the proper frequency to the body, you can accomplish some pretty tremendous things."
So far, he says, no one else seems to be as interested as he and his Washington, D.C.-based group. "If anybody else is doing it, I don't know who it is. When I had my fishing tackle business (Berkley and Company), we were always looking at what other people were doing to see what we could learn. I can't imagine us not doing that in the field of medicine."
Russians, he says, are making great strides in diagnostic medicine.
So who's keeping the information from spreading? Ever the politician, Bedell says, "I've got an opinion, but I don't think I ought to voice it."
Instead, he points out the cooperation he's getting from other congressmen. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, "has helped me almost every time I have gone to him. He's supportive of almost everything I do. When we were in Congress, we were all good friends - Democrats and Republicans, working together for Iowa."
Today, he says, "we don't have much of that." With others' help, he also wants to enact laws to "take the money out of politics. Some states have passed laws for public funding of their legislative races. It's voluntary, but more than 80 percent of the legislators in Maine were elected without private interest money or using any of their own money. A state solved this problem...there's an opportunity to do the same thing in the federal government."
Both issues, Bedell says, consume much of his time.
At 86, the Spirit Lake, Iowa, native doesn't miss Congress. "I think I'm relieved not to be there. It was a great experience...but I'm glad I'm out."
Similarly, he has no beef with traditional medicine. "I think doctors are doing the best they can with the information they've been given. I have great respect for the medical profession. I have some real questions about the Food and Drug Administration and the pharmaceutical drug industry."
His foundation will continue to look for those maverick researchers who just may be onto something.
Meanwhile, Bedell says he feels great - "for an old man...I'm not like I was when I was 20" - and still loves to fish.
"I haven't seen a tick on me since that time," he says. "Of course, now, I make sure I keep my socks up over my pants if I'm out in the grass. I learned the hard way."
Details
Who: Berkley Bedell
Born: March 5, 1921, Spirit Lake, Iowa.
Founded: Berkley and Company, a fishing tackle business; National Foundation of Alternative Medicine.
Congress: From Jan. 3, 1975 to Jan. 3, 1987 representing Northwest Iowa.
Resides: Spirit Lake, Iowa, with wife Elinor.
For more information about alternative medicine, visit http://www.nfam.org
