WELLESLEY, MA—Wellesley engineer and attorney Kaplesh Kumar has been issued a patent, making the first claim on exercise as therapy.
“I believe this to be the first patent claiming exercise as a therapy for a debilitating, progressively fatal disease, namely non-specific interstitial pneumonitis (NSIP), which is a subset of the respiratory (lung) disease ‘idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis’,” said Kumar. “These diseases have no effective treatment.”
Kumar’s Patent No. 9,603,857 has two firsts: (1) first to claim exercise as therapy; and (2) first to claim reducing inflammation to treat the underlying disease.
“I am the patient on whom the effectiveness of the therapy was demonstrated. I became my own guinea pig,” Kumar told INDIA New England News in an email. “Recently, there have been a number of reports in the popular press and the medical literature finding that exercise as a therapy may be as effective or better than drugs.”
Kumar’s patent similar to his paper that was published in January 2013 in the online peer-reviewed Journal of Medical Research and Practice.
“The paper and patent describe an inflammatory disease model which I constructed based on fundamental chemistry and materials science principles. The treatment recommendations, which I adopted and demonstrated, flow from the disease model,” Kumar said.
The disease model is generic and applies to all diseases. Specifically, it describes the treatment method for all inflammatory diseases, which are diseases that are accompanied with systemic (entire body) inflammation, and more particularly NSIP, according to Kumar.
“Most old age diseases are inflammatory. Examples of other such inflammatory diseases include heart disease, diabetes, dementia, and several cancers among others. The basic conclusion is that controlling the inflammation below certain levels will prevent the underlying diseases from occurring, and where disease has already occurred, its reduction will arrest or slow down the underlying disease,” Kumar said. “For non-inflammatory diseases, the model would apply where biological markers that are progressive with the diseases can be identified; those underlying diseases can be controlled similarly if the biological markers can be controlled.”
