Much like Marie Sklodowska Curie’s lonely journey to her discovery of radium exactly 100 years ago, Rhea Extract was discovered by a woman working in isolation in her kitchen, teaching herself biochemistry and medicine as she tried to unlock the key to the worldwide epidemic killing the South American and African Ostrich chicks. Using principles of Darwinian medicine, where symptoms are actually attempts by the body to heal itself, she developed a method of treating the chicks that mimicked the symptoms. When they ran out of body fat, she treated them by injecting fat taken from healthy birds. The patent for Injection of Rhea and Ostrich Oils was issued by the US Patent Office in November, 1998.

However, this did not define the cause of the problem: the chicks were dying of accelerated autoimmune disorders in weeks instead of the decades it takes humans to succumb to one of the 82 autoimmune disorders such as fibromyalgia, allergies, lupus, MD, arthritis, etc. The fatal worldwide epidemic killing the chicks was simply environmental toxins inducing autoimmune disorders and death. These ancient animals are like canaries in a mine, incapable of surviving the artificial chemicals that pervade our environment.

She next addressed the muscle wasting disorder the same way. Yearlings were dying of muscle wasting, hatching chicks were born deformed or dead and low levels of herbicide were found in the well water. At the same time, rhea meat marketing produced an excess of rhea necks. Daily, the family ate soup made from these necks. She noticed her skin tone improved; her backaches and allergies disappeared. Her husband, who had been on allergy shot injections, noticed the same thing. Finally, he grew tired of soup and told her to put it into a pill. For two months their home reeked of her attempts.  Finally, she fed the original extract to the poisoned chicks and, for the first time, was able to stop the degenerative process in the baby rheas. This became the idea for the next patent, Ratite Extracts as Therapeutic Agents.

In an attempt to find out if the extract really did this for other people, she handed out home-prepared samples of the extract to friends and asked for feedback. Expecting to hear about allergies, she was stunned at the range of positive effects people were reporting. Filing a provisional patent in August of 1996, she began commercial preparation and selling Rhea Extract as a dietary supplement.

Over the course of the following months several things emerged:

Dose was important; people taking low dosages saw no difference.

People with autoimmune disorders like Crohn’s, fibromyalgia, lupus, myasthenia gravis, arthritis, and asthma began sending cards and letters thanking her for giving their lives back.

Quite bewildered over the response, she returned to her notes to try to understand how her extract could have such a profound effect on so many conditions. These people were from all over the country and most had tried everything, so they had no reason to give unearned praises to a simple dietary supplement.

She found her answer on a complicated, hand-scrawled flow chart of her own design. There is a chemical in the body that actually is the body’s energy source, ATP, or the mouthful, adenosine triphosphate. In her attempt to understand the complex nature of ATP in the body, she had drawn a flow chart showing how ATP is made, used, degraded, and affected by hormones, fats, other proteins, and enzymes. She had never seen the flow chart anywhere before and did not recognize its significance until pressed to explain the impact of rhea extract on such a wide range of disorders. It was just drawn as a learning aid.  This messy chart is destined to rest under glass in a museum. (The formal versions are on the site as the ATP Pathways.)

However, on the bottom right hand corner of the messy diagram was a group of body building blocks that depended on a steady and adequate supply of ATP. These building blocks were critical in repairing very specific parts of joints, skin, intestinal tract, eyes, kidneys, and connective tissue. Sequestered in a spot all their own, unnoticed until this very moment, she saw that this was the basis of all autoimmune disorders: an ATP deficiency brought on when there isn’t enough ATP to detoxify and rebuild. Autoimmune disorders in humans were not the body attacking itself but rather the body needing those parts to use in detoxification. The body was choosing pain over poison. After the initial "Aha!" faded, self-doubt and skepticism crept in. Repeating to herself over and over, "It can’t be this easy, why hasn’t someone else seen this?" she began to verify her initial hunch. The more she looked at the medical literature, the more she saw the similarity of these diseases and how ATP was a significant and unrecognized nutrient under assault by man made chemicals. Autoimmune disorders were similar to scurvy - just a nutritional deficiency disease.

In August of 1997, when she filed the final patent application for "Ratite Extracts as Therapeutic Agents" she was convinced that autoimmune disorders were simply a function of toxin exposure. In laboratory tests, environmental toxins are used to deplete ATP in the test tube. For example, a popular herbicide is the chemical of choice in assays when ATP must be destroyed for proper results. It is also known that detoxification competes with the body building blocks for ATP via PAPS, phosphoadenosine phosphosulfate. In other words, our chemically laden society is destroying the very vital energy we depend on to live, grow, and heal. This energy deficiency does not kill in weeks or months, but produces a crippling deficiency over several years.  And, it can be reversed!

Over 250,000 Rhea Extract capsules had been sold by word of mouth by this time and the customers were providing valuable feedback, especially those with fibromyalgia, an untreatable autoimmune disorder affecting mostly women 40+.

Using a machine borrowed from a sales representative to measure ATP, a luminometer, she discovered the ATP in Rhea Extract was sustained 64% longer than chicken, the nearest competitor, and 159% longer than beef or pork. Rhea muscle that had the ability to propel these large flightless birds at over 35 miles per hour had the ability to generate enormous amounts of SUSTAINED energy, sustainability never having been considered before.

This discovery is truly remarkable when one considers she was working under the hardships of academic isolation, ridicule, humiliation, and attempts of intellectual theft. A revolutionary shift challenging scientific basics historically incites ridicule, humiliation, and vigorous rejection by academics protecting the standard paradigm. Mrs. Fezler’s discovery was no exception.

What causes the symptoms in the first place?

Darwinian Medicine also goes one step farther to find the causative agent that would produce that specific set of symptoms, providing answers to the question: "What causes the symptoms in the first place?"