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Immune Response |
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Immune Response |
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"Some physicians would stand by and see their patients die rather than use ascorbic acid. Vitamin C should be given to the patient while the doctors ponder the diagnosis."
(Frederick R.
Klenner, M.D.) Like a country
veterinarian, I drove my red '78 Ford pickup along a vacant road to a
client's rural home out near I pulled up the
long driveway to the cedar-shingled house where my appointment was
scheduled. Going to the side door, I met the father and mother, who
showed me into the dining area, where I met a perfectly normal looking
nine-year-old boy. He was blond, fair-skinned and a bit skinny.
His name was Charles. Charles had
practically no immune system to speak of. His mother told the tale: "He's been in
and out of Children's Hospital, again and again. He's home, he gets a
sniffle, then he clogs up and can't breathe, then it's pneumonia, then he's
back to the hospital. This happens every few weeks, over and over again,
and has been going on for years. The doctors said there is nothing they
can do except give him antibiotics. They said
his immune system isn't working. They do not know why. They are out
of ideas, and we are at our wits end over this." She really did look
wrung out. "What can you
do?" asked the father, politely but just barely so. He looked like
his nerves were frayed, too. I paused for a moment to collect a
thought. "Does he take
vitamins?" I asked "A multiple
vitamin, nearly every day," the mother answered. "Sometimes I
give him some vitamin C, but it hasn't helped." "Maybe his
body needs more of it," I said, taking the plunge. "There are
50 years of scientific literature on successful vitamin C megadose
therapy. Much of it comes from the two dozen or so published papers of
Frederick Robert Klenner, MD, of "How much did
he use?" the father said. "A whole lot;
more than you'd ever imagine giving to a nine-year-old. Klenner used
somewhere between 350 and 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C per kilogram
body-weight per day." "We've given
Charlie 500 milligrams sometimes," said his mother. "Dr. Klenner
gave that amount or more per kilogram patient body weight per day," I
explained. "A kilogram is 2.2 pounds. What do you weigh,
Charlie?" "75 pounds, I
think," Charlie said. "Maybe a little less." "All right,
that's about, oh, 33 kilograms or so. Dr. Klenner would have given you
somewhere between 11,000 and 30,000 milligrams." "A day?"
said his mother. "Yes." "That seems
like an awful lot of vitamin C," said his father. "How safe
is it?" "Klenner was a
very competent doctor, who practiced for some 35 years. He wrote that
'Vitamin C is the safest and most effective substance available to the
physician.' Robert F. Cathcart, MD, out in "A day?"
repeated the mother. "Yes," I
said. "Well, nothing
else has done him any good," said the father. All the doctors do
is tell us to stick him in a steamy shower when he can't breathe, and we have
to keep him there all night sometimes. Then he gets bronchitis. Last
time, it went to meningitis." "What do you
think we should do, then, exactly?" asked his mother. She posed the
question, all right, but didn't sound very optimistic. It would be hard
to blame her. "Since the
doctors have tried all they know, maybe it is time to try something else. "How
high?" asked the father. "If he gets
sick? At least 11,000 milligrams a day, maybe twice that. Enough so his
symptoms stop." If John Dillinger had told J. Edgar Hoover that he'd never even
been in a bank, you could not have gotten a more skeptical look than the one
I got then. "All right,
thank you," said the father. I left with my fee
and without much confidence in this one.
It was only days
later that I got a call at about 10 AM. It was Charlie's mother, and she
was not happy. "It's started
again," she said. "It's started again. Charlie is
sneezing and he's coughing and he's gasping and we've just put him in the
shower. What am I supposed to do again?" I went over the
protocol once more: give Charlie as much vitamin C as he could hold, at least
11,000 milligrams before the day was over.
"OK," she
said. "This had better work." That's what I was
thinking, too. At about 6 PM I got
another call. "I can't
believe it," came the voice of Charlie's
mother. "I cannot believe it. He's actually getting
better. He's getting better!"
She told me that
Charlie's symptoms had gone away during the afternoon. He'd had around
12,000 to 14,000 milligrams of vitamin C that day. No medicines. No more
showers. No hospital visit. "No
kidding!" I said. "That's really great." "Now
what?" said the mother. "As a
preventive, continue to keep his vitamin C level high each day, maybe 4,000
milligrams or even more. Dr. Klenner said that children can take their
age in grams (thousands of milligrams) of C each day, as a maintenance
dose. My own kids seemed to do fine with around half that. The
exact amount will be the amount that keeps Charlie well. Remember that
we don't take the amount of C that we think we should take; we take the
amount of C that does the job. My corny little jingle is, 'Take enough C
to be symptom free, whatever that amount might be."' "So when he's
sick, give him enough to get him well, and when he's well, give him enough to
keep him that way?" "Right,"
I replied. "That seems
too simple to be the answer," said his mother. "The hospital
tried everything else, true?" I reminded her. "Yes." "And what
worked?" "The vitamin C
is the only thing that's worked," she said. "Normally he'd be
in the hospital by now. There must be something to this." There is. And
for such a good idea, the spread of this knowledge has been exceptionally
slow. Furthermore, for such a useful therapy, medical-political
hindrance has been unbelievably high. Nowhere is this more apparent than
in the case of Dr. Linus Pauling. Linus Pauling, PhD is one of history's great
chemists, and his textbooks and huge output of scientific papers continue to
foreshadow generations of research. Pauling is the only person, ever, to win
two unshared Nobel prizes. The first, normally enough, was for
pioneering work into the detailed nature of chemical bonds. The second
was for peace, after it was eventually appreciated that Pauling's position
against atmospheric nuclear weapons testing was the correct one.
Neither of these awards prepared the world for what was to follow: Pauling
suggested that vitamin C might be effective against the common cold. It
would be difficult to imagine that the practical medical applications of
ascorbic acid would cause more of a ruckus than Pauling's complete overhaul
of our knowledge of chemistry, or the vicious blacklisting that Pauling got
from the
These authors were
simply wrong: science repeatedly demonstrates vitamin C is indeed an
effective anti-viral. You can, if you like, confirm this with a trip to
the library. In addition to Pauling and Klenner, you might investigate the
work of Robert F. Cathcart III, MD; William J. McCormick, MD; Dr. Irwin
Stone; and Okay: Do not rely
on a computer search into a medical or nutritional data base. It
probably will not uncover the authors I cite. Why? Because what gets
indexed is what is selected to be indexed. Who controls such selection?
Whoever generates the index, that's who, and editors generally include what
conventional medical doctrine approves of and what they agree with. In
the same way that you will not find too many versions of The Complete
Works of William Shakespeare in a dirty book store, you are unlikely to
easily locate favorable megavitamin research papers at your library. Sad, but
true: too many of my students have come back to me, whining that they can't
find my references. Look folks, if I can, you can. You will need to
shun the "assistance" of the American Medical Association, the Food
and Drug Administration, the American Dietetic Association, and other
incumbent power groups with highly politicized agendas. Do your own
search the old fashioned way: by author, and by hand. Possibly you can
interest a librarian in helping you. I provide several good reference lists in this website. A number of the
sources I provide are "old" (that is, often dating from the 1950s,
and 60s and 70s) and are sometimes from smaller, lesser known, or regional
journals. Nevertheless, the truth is out there. If it is, then why
is it so obscured? Why don't we know and see and hear more of it?
Simple: it is vastly easier to get an anti-vitamin study published than a
pro-vitamin study. Not only that, when you expose an anti-vitamin study
as flawed, strong forces are at work to keep your criticism from ever being
published.
. Let me show
you. Countless news shows, newspapers, and textbooks have proclaimed
that vitamin C in megadoses does no good, and in fact does harm. Here
are two of the most widely known, but completely false, "facts"
about vitamin C. Vitamin Myth #1: "Your body
doesn't absorb extra vitamin C. All you get from taking vitamin
supplements is expensive urine." Urine is what is
left over after your kidneys purify your blood. If your urine contains
extra vitamin C, that vitamin C was in your blood. If the vitamin was in
your blood, you absorbed it just fine. Think about that. You can swallow a
marble (but please don't) and find it in the toilet bowl a couple of days
later. That is because your food tube, or alimentary canal, is
essentially just a hollow 25-foot hose connecting your mouth to your
anus. That swallowed marble is "in" your body geographically,
but it is not in your body the way your blood is. If you stick your
finger through the hole of a donut, you might say your finger is
"inside" the donut, but it is not in the donut the way the flour
and sugar are, right? We can turn you upside down and shake you, and
you'll probably barf up your most recent meal, maybe even that marble.
Your blood won't come out of you, though. If something is in your blood,
it is really in you, fully and utterly absorbed. Standing at the
base of the Hoover Dam looking up, you cannot tell how much water is behind
it. However, by observing the overflow spillway, you can tell: if the
spillway is dry and dusty, full of tumbleweeds, and foxes are making their
dens their, there has been a drought for some time, and the water level in
the dam must be low. If enough water is pouring down the spillway for
white-water rafting, the dam must be full. Wasting indicates fullness,
just as a cup overflowing is truly a full cup. Urine spillage of vitamin
C indicates that you have some to waste, then and there. It does not
indicate bodily saturation; bowel tolerance (loose stool) indicates
saturation. One takes just enough C to stay just below that level. It is the absence
of water-soluble vitamins such as vitamin C in urine that indicates vitamin
deficiency. If your body excretes vitamins in your urine, that is a
sign that you are well nourished and have nutrients to spare. It is
easier to put a twenty in the Salvation Army pot at Christmas time if you
have a few grand to spend shopping. So many Americans are credit-card
shoppers and deficit spenders. We are also deficit eaters, trying to
obtain a ridiculously low US RDA of vitamins from a selection of
nutritionally wimpy foods that cannot really meet any of our vitamin or mineral
needs abundantly. Vitamin supplements are a solution, not a
problem. Vitamin Myth #2:
"Vitamin C causes kidney stones." First of all, I
have never seen any scientific evidence to back up that statement. I've
had literally hundreds of students and health practitioners looking for years
for any controlled study demonstrating a vitamin C caused kidney stone and so
far I have received... nearly one... submission. That's a jocular way
of saying "none." I bet if I show you
a picture of a unicorn, you will easily recognize it. Everybody has
heard about unicorns. You can describe one in detail. You could
probably draw a unicorn. You can see one in your mind right now. Yet
unicorns do not exist. They are imaginary, without substance or proof. Just
like a vitamin C kidney stone. The vitamin C-kidney-stone myth is the
best known non-fact in non-existence. Every medical doctor has heard of
one, and none of them has ever seen one. If you
haven't been on the inside, it is hard to believe that a vitamin can start a
scientific civil war. Pauling has been there, and what you uncover when
you join him is that it's more real than any other conspiracy theory that
you've ever heard about. (So where is Oliver Stone when we need
him?) Pauling speaks from much experience as he discusses this in his
exceptionally interesting book, How to Live Longer and Feel Better. This work, and Lendon Smith's Clinical Guide to the Use of
Vitamin C (which is about that Dr. Klenner fellow, mentioned earlier) are
surely the twentieth century's ultimate treatises on megavitamin-C therapy
"quackery." The problem remains
that a highly distinguished I read both Klenner
and Pauling. And then I needed them myself, badly. Because I seem
to have this little problem with pneumonia. The first time I
had viral pneumonia, I was sick as a dog. My wife had bronchitis at the
same time. We looked so awful that my father took us both to the
doctor. The doctor saw her first, and prescribed Erythromycin, an
antibiotic. Then it was my turn. He gave me Erythromycin, too. "But isn't
that useless against a virus?" I asked him. "Yes. It's
for the secondary bacterial infection that often follows the viral
infection," he told me. "There's not much we can do about the
virus except have you rest in bed."
So I did, knocked
silly by codeine cough medicine. For two, perhaps three days, I was in
La-la Land, not knowing or caring if I ate or not, or if it was day of
night. I could barely tell if I was asleep or awake. Nice vacation
though it was, neither the codeine nor the erythromycin really cured the
pneumonia. The body did, and it took something less than two weeks for
me to recover. The next time I got
pneumonia, I did it my way (well, their way) and followed the Klenner/Pauling
protocol: take enough vitamin C to get well, no matter how much it may
be. This initially makes a lot more sense if you are really, really
sick. Pneumonia sets that part up effectively enough. So there I was,
coughing without a pause with a fever of nearly 104, playing Scrabble. I
literally emptied a bottle of 1 gram (1,000 mg) tablets onto the table, lined
them up two by two, and took 2,000 milligrams of vitamin C every six
minutes. In three hours, that amounts to 60,000 milligrams. And
three hours is what it took to lower my fever three degrees and stop my cough
completely. YOU CAN READ TWO OF THE BEST BOOKS ON VITAMIN C THERAPY FOR FREE. Dr.
Klenner's Clinical Guide to the Use of Vitamin C is now posted in its
entirety at http://www.seanet.com/~alexs/ascorbate/198x/smith-lh-clinical_guide_1988.htm
Copyright C 2003 and
prior years Andrew W. Saul. Revisions copyright 2018. Andrew Saul is the author
of the books FIRE YOUR DOCTOR! How to be
Independently Healthy (reader reviews at http://www.doctoryourself.com/review.html
) and DOCTOR YOURSELF: Natural Healing that Works. (reviewed at http://www.doctoryourself.com/saulbooks.html
)
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AN IMPORTANT NOTE: This page is not in any way offered as prescription, diagnosis nor treatment for any disease, illness, infirmity or physical condition. Any form of self-treatment or alternative health program necessarily must involve an individual's acceptance of some risk, and no one should assume otherwise. Persons needing medical care should obtain it from a physician. Consult your doctor before making any health decision. Neither the author nor the webmaster has authorized the use of their names or the use of any material contained within in connection with the sale, promotion or advertising of any product or apparatus. Single-copy reproduction for individual, non-commercial use is permitted providing no alterations of content are made, and credit is given. |
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