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Andrew W. Saul Interviewed by Nancy Desjardins |
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Andrew W. Saul: How Vitamins Fight
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Click
here to watch a video of Andrew Saul discussing vitamin C therapy for
cancer on Youtube in an excerpt from the movie FOODMATTERS. Andrew W. Saul Interviewed by Nancy Desjardins Thursday,
March 18, 2010 “I’m really
excited because I have the privilege to have on the call Dr. Andrew Saul. We’re going to talk about what you can do to get well using vitamins, not drugs. We’re going to talk about supplementation to optimize the body’s
immune defenses. Dr. Andrew Saul has 34 years’ experience in natural
health education with an amazing website with lots of information, www.DoctorYourself.com. Dr. Saul is
the author of the popular books, Doctor
Yourself and Fire Your Doctor!,
and also co-author of The Vitamin Cure
for Alcoholism, Orthomolecular
Medicine for Everyone; Vitamin C:
The Real Story, and I Have Cancer:
What Should I Do? Dr. Saul has been awarded the Citizens for Health
Outstanding Health Freedom Activist Award, was named one of seven natural
health pioneers by Psychology Today, and is featured in the movie “Food
Matters.”” Nancy
Desjardins: Dr. Saul, what first
attracted you to natural healing and inspired you to write Doctor Yourself and Fire Your Doctor!, and especially, I Have Cancer: What Should I Do?
Andrew Saul: Probably the thing that made the
biggest impact on me was when my first child was born. I was the old age of
22. They put the baby in my care and said, “Here, Dad.” Looking
at that child and then watching the hospital mishandle him for the next day
or so convinced me that I had to do something. In fact, I took my wife and
son out of the hospital after just a day—which at the time was
short—in a raging blizzard against the nurses’ and the
doctors’ orders because they were making my child sick; and my wife,
too. I knew
something was wrong. I could see that. They were feverish. They were
fretting. They weren’t eating. They were getting ill. I took them home,
and then I was faced with the question, “Now what?” You
can’t just say no to medical care. You have to say yes to an
alternative. The alternative has to be at least as effective, and certainly
had better be a lot safer. My
reading and my experience over the last 34 years has taught me that
orthomolecular medicine, or nutritional medicine, is the safest and most
effective way to prevent and treat illness. Most people would agree that
nutrition is good. Most doctors agree that vitamins are good, but what they
don’t tell you is that very high doses of vitamins are curative. You
mentioned cancer. The biggest motivators behind the cancer book, which is
called I Have Cancer: What Should I Do?
are my co-authors. My co-authors are Michael
Gonzalez and Jorge Miranda-Massari. They’re
both professors at the Dr. Hugh
Riordan was also a colleague of mine on the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine. We all got together and were
taking a very close look at what Dr. Riordan had been doing. He’d been
treating cancer patients with extremely high doses of vitamin C orally and
intravenously. Dr. Riordan started doing this in the late 1960s. That is
quite a long time ago. Dr.
Riordan found that up to 100,000 milligrams of vitamin C a day, given
intravenously to guarantee absorption, is selectively toxic to cancer cells.
Jorge and Michael have confirmed this. This is the kind of news that I think
people need to know. If there’s somebody in your family with cancer, or
if you’re fighting this dread disease, you need to know that very high
doses of vitamin C kills cancer cells, just like chemotherapy. You can
imagine that it is much safer, and you’re right. Vitamin C does not
harm good healthy cells. It only kills cancer cells. This is tremendously
important, and that’s why the book was written. Nancy
Desjardins: How much vitamin C is
needed to achieve the results?
Andrew Saul: More than you ever thought. I mentioned
Dr. Riordan used as much as 100,000 milligrams a day. Dr. Ian Brighthope in That’s
a problem. One good thing we do in the cancer book, I Have Cancer: What Should I Do?, is to outline how you also can
take very high oral doses. Absorption is not as good orally. The fact is that
intravenously it’s guaranteed that 100% of the vitamin C goes into the
bloodstream. It can fight the cancer. It can build the body’s immune
system. Then you excrete it over time, and then you add more. With oral
doses of vitamin C you have to get the vitamin C into the body. The body is
very good at absorbing vitamin C. The sicker you are, the more you hold.
People are always asking, “Exactly how much?” and that’s a
good question. The answer is that it depends from person to person on your
age, your weight and, especially, if you’re sick or not. The way
you can tell with oral doses is that you look at what Dr. Robert Cathcart
called ‘bowel tolerance’. That’s exactly what you think it
is. Bowel tolerance means you take as much C as you possibly can until you
get loose stools. This is an indicator of saturation. It’s a very
important point. If you want to know how much C you should take, you can read
about it, you can think about it, or you can do what works. You can
take the amount of C that gets the job done. How do you know you’re
taking enough C? You feel better. People who are in pain will have less pain.
People who have nausea will have less nausea. People who have radiation burns
or chemo side effects will have fewer of them. People who have had surgery
will find they have quicker wound healing. People who have lost their
appetite will find that their appetite is normalized. How do
you know if you took too much C? You’ll have loose stools. The jingle I
tell people is, “Take enough C to be symptom-free, whatever the amount
might be.” It’s corny, but it works. There are two ways you can
do this. You can either do the IV, which is ideal, or you can do oral doses
to bowel tolerance. Nancy
Desjardins: Is there any specific
vitamin C that you recommend, Dr. Saul?
Andrew Saul: Nope. You just need a lot of it.
This gets me in trouble. A lot of people think you should use a certain
brand, you should use a natural C, or you should get your vitamin C entirely
from foods. Those are not bad ideas, but they dodge the point. The point is
the cancer research that shows that vitamin C works has all used ascorbic
acid; the cheapest form there is. It’s
the same stuff that Grandma would use when she canned peaches. You can buy
ascorbic acid for around $25 a pound on the Internet; it’s
non-prescription. A pound is 454 grams, and a gram is a quarter teaspoon. You
get 454 quarter-teaspoon doses of 1,000 milligrams each for $25, which
explains right away why the pharmaceutical industry is not promoting this. It
explains also why you don’t hear about it on television, in newspapers
or magazines. There is no money in a $25-a-pound therapy. Good health makes
sense, but good health doesn’t make a lot of dollars. Nancy
Desjardins: That’s why we
are responsible for our health. Going back to the orthomolecular medicine,
not everyone understands the term. Can you explain this field of study?
Andrew Saul: Yes. Orthomolecular is a big word,
but it basically means ‘the right molecule’. The right molecule
means the nutrients and substances that the body is made up of.
Orthomolecular medicine is giving more of what your body needs,
things that your body knows what to use and knows what to do with. We have
millions of years of practice using them. The other
type of medicine—allopathic, toximolecular, or modern
medicine—gives drugs. Many of these drugs, unfortunately, have side
effects. Sometimes the side effects are serious. Every year, according to the
Journal of the American Medical
Association, over 100,000 people die of drug side effects. These are
people just in hospitals who took the drug as directed. The drug was
correctly prescribed. This does not include mistakes. If
we’re killing over 100,000 people a year with drugs taken as directed
and correctly prescribed, the next question everybody has is, “What
about vitamins? Are they safe?” Orthomolecular medicine uses mega-doses
of vitamins, and people think, “There has to be a catch here
somewhere.” Let’s take a look. If we look at the recent report of
the American Association of Poison Control Centers, we find that all across
the In 2008, the
most recent year for which there is reporting, not one person died from a
vitamin. Not one person died from an herb. Not one person died from an amino
acid. Not one person died from a dietary mineral supplement, not one.
Whenever someone says to you—and it might even be your
doctor—“Vitamins are good, but those high doses could be
toxic,” you have to answer this question: “Where are the
bodies?” Nobody
dies from these substances. It doesn’t mean that you should use them
carelessly, because if you take too much of certain vitamins you can have a
side effect. Of course, but the margin for error with vitamins is enormous.
With vitamin C the side effect is loose stools. For some people another side
effect of taking too much vitamin C orally might be stomach upset. This is
partly because vitamin C is ascorbic acid, and ascorbic acid is a weak acid.
It’s not as bad as you think. If you can eat three oranges, if you can
drink a glass of Coca-Cola, or if you can add vinegar on your fish fry or on
your salad, you can handle ascorbic acid because ascorbic acid is a very weak
acid. In fact, your normal natural stomach acid is over 50 times stronger
than vitamin C. Your
stomach is designed to handle acid. Have you ever noticed when someone throws
up? It’s a gross thought, but what can I say? When someone vomits they
can feel the burn in their throat, can’t they? That’s stomach
acid. People who have a lot of problems with hiatal hernias or reflux can
actually regurgitate enough acid over a period of months where they damage
and scar the throat. Vitamin C
could not do that on a bet. It’s impossible. It’s the same way
that you couldn’t put vinegar in your automobile’s battery and
work your car. Your car battery requires sulfuric acid. It’s a very
strong acid. Your stomach acid is only slightly weaker than car-battery acid.
Vitamin C is about the same as a cola soft drink. There’s a huge
difference. Nevertheless, some people are sensitive to vitamin C because of
the acidity. The good
news is they can take a buffered form of vitamin C. I’m going to assume
your listeners would like to know about that. Here are the different ways you
buffer vitamin C. One way you can buffer vitamin C is to take it with food or
with liquid. When you take ibuprofen, for instance, you know that you have to
take ibuprofen with food and water; one or the other, but preferably both. If you
don’t, it can sit funny and can even cause some damage to your stomach.
You’re advised to take many drugs with food or water to relieve the
side effects of that particular medicine. One way to buffer is by taking
vitamin C with food, water, juice, a snack, or with a meal. Another way to
buffer vitamin C is to take it along with a calcium supplement, any calcium
supplement. I would
recommend using a calcium magnesium supplement because Americans tend to be
low on magnesium, especially teenaged and young women. A little extra
magnesium can help relieve cramping, and that’s a very common problem
that women have who are in the child-bearing years. Another way you can
buffer vitamin C is to buy buffered vitamin C. There are several forms. One form,
which is not common, is called ascorbyl palmitate. That’s neutral and
is actually a precursor of C. That’s kind of expensive. Another way is
to buy calcium ascorbate. That’s a non-acidic vitamin C that’s
linked chemically with calcium. Calcium ascorbate is more expensive than
ascorbic acid, but it’s still cheaper than a lot of other forms. Another
way you can buffer vitamin C would be to do what Linus Pauling used to suggest.
When you take your vitamin C, take about a quarter teaspoon of sodium
bicarbonate. That’s just plain old baking soda in the orange box that
you might use as an antacid. Any of these will work as buffers. If you
receive intravenous vitamin C, the doctor will not be putting ascorbic acid
in you. Don’t worry about that. They
don’t use ascorbic acid for an IV because, obviously, it would be an
irritant. Instead, when you have an IV they use sodium ascorbate. The sodium
salt of ascorbate is non-acidic. Can you buy sodium ascorbate? The answer is
yes. Is it buffered? The answer is yes. It has a slightly salty taste because
of the sodium. Most people try to avoid excess sodium. That’s
why I recommend calcium ascorbate for those with very sensitive stomachs,
because most people are a little low on calcium; again, women in particular.
This all sounds a little complicated but actually it’s not. I’ve
given you enough information right now such that if you were to read more
about this in my book, I Have Cancer: What
Should I Do?, it’s all going to start coming together. The striking
thing about this is how well-tested it is. Vitamin C
for cancer has been tested for 40 years. We don’t think; we know
it’s helpful. There have been a lot of studies and they all show that
high doses—I’m not talking about 150 milligrams; I’m not
talking about a glass of orange juice; I’m not talking about 500
milligrams or a ‘mega-dose’ of 1,000—I’m talking
about 10,000 or more intravenously, 100,000 perhaps orally, or perhaps
intravenously for a seriously ill person. This has
been tested and here’s what we know: very high doses of vitamin C
intravenously have been used by Dr. Riordan. I have information about him at
my website at www.DoctorYourself.com.
It’s also in the book, of course. Dr. Riordans’s
people out in Indeed, most
of the times when people have these cancers doctors are unable to say that
chemotherapy is really going to help them. While we’re at it,
chemotherapy does have some value. Radiation has some value. Surgery has some
value. Drugs, to relieve pain and to provide other benefits, have some value.
When we talk about nutrition we’re not saying you don’t use your
doctor, you don’t use technology, you
don’t use modern science or drugs, or these techniques. What
we’re saying is to use them in a fair and balanced way. We use the
whole-team approach. We don’t say no to anything. If you’re going
into the ring and you’re fighting the world champion, you do not want
one hand tied behind your back. Here’s what we have to say about
chemotherapy: although it has some value in some cancers, it is disappointing
in most cancers. There was
a study that reviewed chemotherapy’s effectiveness as recorded by
doctors using their own scale of whether it was helping or not. It was found
that in the However,
when we hear that vitamin C is better than chemo because it selectively kills
cancer cells without causing toxic side effects, then we’re happy. High
doses of vitamin C will not cause you to lose your hair. It will not cause
you to lose your appetite. There’s a tremendous amount of good news
here. This is the big reason why we wrote that book and why doctors Miranda-Massari and Gonzalez have my admiration. These are very
bright gentlemen. They have had a lot of experience. We put
our own experience in there. We even talk about our own experiences with
cancer. We’re not know-it-alls. We don’t have the sure answer,
but I think we’ve got a piece of it. It’s a very important part
of the puzzle. If you haven’t gotten high-dose vitamin C therapy,
you’re missing out on something that could really make a difference. Quality
of life and length of life; this is what we want. To do that, you need good
nutrition. Bad nutrition never cured anything. Nancy
Desjardins: Exactly. Going back to
the chemotherapy, doctors advise that nutritional supplements should not be
taken along with chemotherapy. You’re saying the opposite.
Andrew Saul: Yes, I am. The funny thing is, if
the doctors take a close look, they’ll find that some of the drugs they
give actually function as antioxidants, and they give those antioxidants
right along with chemo with no problem. Then they’ll say that vitamin E
or vitamin C should not be given because they’re antioxidants. That
just doesn’t make any sense. If a
doctor says you are not to take vitamins while you’re under chemo, that
doctor is poorly informed. Ask for proof. Ask for evidence. Don’t take
anyone’s word for anything, and that includes me. Check and see for
yourself. You can’t afford to get half the story. This is too
important. This is one of the reasons why in I Have Cancer: What Should I Do? we
provide all of our scientific references. If you
want to, you can check and see for yourself the research that’s been
done. Vitamins do not interfere with chemotherapy. One of my colleagues, Dr.
Abram Hoffer, who recently died at the age of 91, was in practice for 55
years. Dr. Hoffer was an MD, a PhD, and a very famous psychiatrist, who
started getting referrals for nutritional therapy for people with psychiatric
problems. Dr.
Hoffer, in fact, was the first physician to ever run double-blind,
placebo-controlled studies on vitamin and nutritional treatment for
psychiatric problems. He was getting referrals for people who needed
psychiatric help and some of them also happened to be fighting cancer. Dr.
Hoffer found that when he gave them nutrients and vitamins in high doses, not
only did their mental outlook improve but their physical body improved. He
started seeing that people were getting better from cancer. Of course, word
got around and he started getting more referrals for people with cancer. In
his lifetime Dr. Hoffer treated well over 1,500 patients who had cancer. He
gave them high doses of nutrients, including vitamin C and other vitamins and
minerals such as selenium. Dr. Hoffer absolutely and emphatically stated that
these nutrients did not interfere with chemo. In fact,
if anything, they reduced the side effects. I had a lady as a client many
years ago. In fact, it’s close to 25 years ago. This woman had cancer.
By the way, she’s still alive. She decided that she would have chemo
and radiation and nutrition. I said, “That makes sense to me. Do
everything you can.” She said, “You got that right!” She
started taking massive doses of vitamins and chemo and radiation, and she did
not lose her hair. She did
not get nauseous. She did not lose her appetite. If you’ve ever been
with folks who are undergoing chemo, they are not happy campers. They
don’t like the appearance change when they have the hair loss. They
don’t like how they can’t eat. They feel rotten all the time.
Here’s another side benefit: doctors who give chemo and have patients
with side effects, they have to cut the dose. They have
to reduce the dose to reduce the nausea. Think about that. If chemo is going
to work at all, obviously, a lower dose won’t work as well. If people
take more nutrients and they don’t have nausea, the doctors can give
the full amount of chemo. It’s a win-win. There’s no wrong way to
have good nutrition. The only thing that’s wrong is to walk away and
not look into it. Any doctor who will not give this a fair trial is doing
their patients a disservice. Nancy
Desjardins: You mentioned
there’s a 3% success with chemotherapy. That’s something to think
about. If you just joined the call, we have Dr. Andrew Saul with us this
evening. We’re talking about cancer and also supplementation to
optimize the body’s immune defense. This is very interesting, Dr. Saul.
It’s good information. Again, you can visit his website at www.DoctorYourself.com. You’ve
talked about specific vitamins that target cancer cells, which are high doses
of vitamin C. You did mention selenium and calcium supplements with
magnesium. What else would you recommend as far as supplementation?
Andrew Saul: Those are definitely good ones to
start with. In addition to that, Dr. Hoffer mentioned that niacin seems to
help reduce cancer. In fact, Dr. Hoffer was giving niacin as his primary
psychiatric therapy. Dr. Hoffer and I co-authored two books, by the way. One,
which has a lot of information in it, is called Orthomolecular Medicine for Everyone. This is
about 385 pages of lots of details on how mega-doses of vitamins cure
disease. Dr. Hoffer’s studies are in there. Dr. Hoffer gave a lot of
niacin. He would give about 3,000 milligrams a day. He found that in all of
his time in practice he treated thousands and thousands of patients. Of them,
I think only five died of cancer, which is much lower than normal. Dr.
Hoffer thought that niacin had something to do with it. In addition to that,
vitamin A, particularly as carotene, seems to help fight cancer. The best way
to get vitamin A, and the safest way, is through green leafy vegetables,
orange vegetables, and especially, vegetable juices. You cannot overdose on
vitamin A if you take it as carotene, because carotene is harmless. The worst
thing that can happen if you drink a gallon or two of carrot juice a
day—and I’ve done it—is that you’ll turn orange. You
will. This happened when my son was about two-and-a-half. He really liked
orange, cooked squash, winter squash like butternut squash and hubbard squash. He really liked squash a lot. He also
liked sweet potatoes. When you have a two-and-a-half-year-old toddler who
likes vegetables, you kind of want to go with that! You
don’t want to discourage them. My son would eat a considerably larger
amount of these foods than most people. When you consider how little he was, he was getting an awful lot of squash and sweet
potatoes. We even gave him canned pumpkin. He loved it. As a
result, one day, my father-in-law, his grandfather, said to me, “Your
boy is orange.” I said, “No, he’s not.” I was used to
it; it looked normal to me. My
father-in-law said, “No, he’s orange. Look. Come over here and
look at him under the light.” I did, and he was. I had an orange
two-and-a-half-year-old child. He was never sick. You have to understand
this. This was a healthy little kid, but he was orange. I thought,
“I’m back to the drawing board.” This really happened. I
called up a professor I knew, a professor of biology, and I said to him,
“I have an orange child here.” He said,
“That’s perfectly harmless. That’s called
hyper-carotenosis.” It’s just an excess of the orange carotene,
the pigment, in the skin. It’s just like sticking your finger in beet
juice or spilling tomato juice on a white shirt. It’s just the
coloring, a natural coloring. Indeed, carotene is actually used as a coloring
in industry. If you want a natural orange color for food, you sometimes use
that type of coloring. He said,
“All you have to do is not feed him any of the orange vegetables for a
couple of weeks, and it will go away.” It did. I looked into that to
see if I’d done any harm, because as a normal parent you don’t
want to hurt your own kids. You do the best you can, and you’re
learning all the time. I was a young man. I looked it up in the Merck Manual, which is the
authoritative summary of medical school. Just
about every doctor has a Merck Manual
in their office. It’s sort of the Cliffs Notes of medical school.
It’s everything doctors learn in medical school condensed to about
3,000 pages. I looked up hyper-carotenosis, and The Merck Manual said—and still says; you can check online
and see—that it is harmless. USA
Today once described it as an artificial suntan. I thought that was
rather charming. Carotene
is harmless. If you take the vitamin A as fish oil and you’re possibly
pregnant or thinking of becoming pregnant, that could be a problem. You
don’t want to take too much vitamin A as fish oil, especially the
ladies who might be having a child, whether they know it or not. The way to
avoid it is to use the carotenes. That’s a safe way to go. Once in a
while, a doctor will say, “No, you can’t take carotenes because
there was a study in Let’s
settle this one. Dr. Abram Hoffer, the world expert on nutrition, did a nice
summary explaining this. It’s at my website at www.DoctorYourself.com. Just do a search
there, which is the quick way, for “Hoffer carotene.”
You’ll find that in that study, they were using people who were heavy
smokers. When we have a confounding factor like that, we can hardly blame the
carrots for something I think cigarettes do. If you’re wondering what
causes cancer, is it carrots or Camels? I’m
pretty sure the cigarettes are the cancer risk and the carrots are not.
Don’t let anybody put you off carotene. Carotene is good for you.
It’s a very strong antioxidant. Grandma said to eat your vegetables.
I’m saying to eat your vegetables, except I suggest you put them
through a juicer. By the way, I have no financial connection with anyone who
sells or manufactures juicers. I also have
no connection with anyone in the natural products or food supplement
industries, and I have no connection with any vitamin company. This is
information that I’d like to keep as unbiased and clear-cut as I can. Nancy
Desjardins: For our listeners,
I’m so big into juicing. This is something that I’ve been
promoting for several years for everyone. Again, if you just joined in our
call tonight, we have Dr. Andrew Saul. This is interesting. Like with
juicing, it’s such a part of my daily routine because I’ve been
juicing for many years now first thing in the morning. This is my breakfast.
I juice my vegetables. It’s
green, leafy vegetables, and I add some carrots, apple, ginger, kale, and
Swiss chard, and I feel amazing. It’s great. Also, this is going to be
a protocol that I’ll be using in my seven-day detox
program. I was very happy to see, Dr. Saul, that you
have an article on juicing as well.
Andrew Saul: There are several of them,
absolutely. I’m a big juicing fan. At www.DoctorYourself.com, do a search
for ‘juicing’, and there are several articles. It tells you what
to juice and how to juice it. It sets out a way that you can encourage your
family to do juicing. You’ve seen those infomercials on TV. They
don’t really do much for me, but the fact is that they’re
basically right. Fresh, raw vegetables are good for you. Is this
news? When you juice them, you have to understand what you’re actually
doing. When you juice vegetables, you’re only doing two things: first
of all, you’re taking that vegetable and grinding it up so that,
without cooking it, you’re able to get all the nutrients out of the
cells. Pick up a carrot sometime. If you were to get hit by a carrot, it
would hurt. It’s woody and hard. It has cellulose walls in there. These
things are very strong. It’s
the same with a parsnip, beet, or whatever. When you juice, you’re
breaking down all the cell walls and releasing all the nutrients, and
you’re doing that without cooking. Juicing gets you better absorption.
You could eat five pounds of carrots, I suppose, if you took long enough.
You’d be doing nothing else. You could run five pounds of carrots
through a juicer in about 15 minutes and get a quart and a half of juice. Then you
could drink it, which is what I do. You get better absorption because
it’s been liquefied. The second thing you get with juicing is you get
quantity. I don’t think I would eat five pounds of carrots, quite
frankly. I just don’t think I would do it. I think I’d get tired.
My teeth would get tired. I’d get bored, and the taste buds would say,
“Come on. Let’s have something else.” When you
juice, you can drink that quart and a half of juice down in no time. Juicing
gives you more absorption, and you tend to have higher quantity. This means
you get better results. Better absorption and higher quantity means better
results, whether it’s vitamin C or carrot juice. Don’t let
anybody dissuade you from juicing. Vegetable juicing is a tremendous help. In
fact, the Gerson Cancer Therapy is based on juicing. Dr. Max
Gerson was a German physician who fled Nazi Germany right before the
Holocaust. By the way, all of his brothers and sisters died in the Holocaust.
Gerson came over to the Being a
doctor, of course, he would have access to them. Nothing helped. Finally, Dr.
Gerson decided to try nutrition. Nutrition was the last thing he tried
because, quite frankly, it’s the last thing they teach in medical
school. More correctly, they usually don’t even bother to teach it in
medical school. Most doctors have never had a proper course in nutrition.
Only a few have had even one course. I used to
teach nutrition at a chiropractic college, and a chiropractic college
requires two courses. I wouldn’t say that two courses makes you an expert either, but most doctors haven’t
even had one course in nutrition. Dr. Gerson had to find something that would
deal with his migraines. He tried everything else, so nutrition was the only
thing he hadn’t tried. By golly, when he started eating organic, fresh,
unprocessed, natural, good foods from the garden, he found his migraines were
relieved a great deal. When he
started putting these vegetables through a juicer and increasing absorption
and quantity, he got rid of his migraines. People started coming to see Dr. Gerson
to get rid of their migraines, and he became rather popular. Gerson noticed
that his patients were not only getting over their migraines, but they were
getting over other illnesses as well, including tuberculosis and several
other very serious illnesses that he writes about in his books. If you go
to www.DoctorYourself.com and
search for ‘Gerson’, you’ll have all kinds of information
to look at there. There were people who came to Dr. Gerson and said, “Dr.
Gerson, would you please treat my sister? She has cancer.” Gerson said,
“No, I will not. I am not going to get in trouble with the authorities.
I’m not going to be known as one of those quacks who treats
cancer. I’m sorry. I can’t do that.” They pleaded with him,
and somehow they got into his heart. Gerson
realized that it was wrong not to do what you know might help. In fact,
it’s an axiom of medicine that you’re supposed to do all that you
can for the benefit of your patient. If a doctor does not do all they can,
they’re really not living up to their oath. Gerson decided to take the
chance, and he started having cancer patients eat a whole-, organic-,
unprocessed-foods diet with no salt, virtually no sugar, reduced protein, and
up to 12 glasses of vegetable juice a day. If a
glass is eight ounces, what is that? That’s a lot of juice. It’s
a glass every hour. What he found was that the juices detoxified the body and
helped the liver to recover. He believed the liver was the key organ to fight
cancer in the body. Gerson was getting a very good cure rate. In fact, using
juices and nutrients, Gerson’s cure rate for terminal cancer was around
50%, which is extremely high. For
malignant melanoma, his cure rate was spectacular. Dr. Gerson went before the
US Congress in 1946. They were talking about fighting cancer and what should
be employed. Gerson said, “In addition to the other things, you want to
consider nutrition.” Gerson, unfortunately, was disregarded. Surgery,
chemotherapy, and radiation were accepted and, more importantly, funded,
whereas nutrition was put on the back burner. We’ve
been suffering ever since. We have to change that right away. We have to get
everybody juicing and eating right because this is what the body wants, and
this is what brings you health.
Nancy Desjardins: Going back to how many ounces, it’s 96 ounces per day. That might sound crazy to
drink 96 ounces of vegetable juice, but it’s really doable.
Andrew Saul: I’ve done it!
Nancy Desjardins: Absolutely. I’ve done it
too, and I know for many of my clients and participants, that’s what
they do when they do a juice fast or a juice cleanse, especially if
you’re going to do a seven-day or 14-day juice cleanse. By the second
day you just feel amazing. On the third day, you have a lot of energy.
Actually, with Dr. Gerson, it’s Dr.
Gerson’s daughter,
Andrew Saul:
Nancy Desjardins: I was very impressed with the
interview, as well. That’s amazing. Going back, you mentioned sugar and
vitamins. Would you say vitamin C would help with any addiction?
Andrew Saul: Yes. In another book that Dr.
Abram Hoffer and I wrote, called The
Vitamin Cure for Alcoholism, we discussed addictions in addition to
alcoholism, including addiction to street drugs, to cigarettes and, believe
it or not, even addiction to a stimulant as common as caffeine. What we find
is that addiction, to use Dr. Hoffer’s work and words, is malnutrition.
Dr. Hoffer said well-nourished people do not become addicted. That’s
a very, very powerful statement, and you can prove it. I’ve taught in
two state prisons in They had
lung problems because of crack. There were all kinds of problems. What we
found is that if we could improve their nutrition even a little, the odds of
them stopping smoking, doing cocaine, or drinking alcohol were higher.
Alcoholics Anonymous has done a wonderful job encouraging people to get off
alcohol and to do it through a 12-step program, support of others, reliance
on higher power, and a lot of very, very good methods. AA has
been conspicuously silent on nutrition. Are you ready for this one? The
founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill W, was a patient of my colleague, Dr.
Abram Hoffer. Bill W, who had gotten off of alcohol, still had a problem with
depression. He came to see Dr. Hoffer, and Dr. Hoffer had him take niacin.
Bill W’s depression that he suffered with for many, many years
vanished. Bill W
then got his friends to take niacin, and he found that it helped them. Then
Bill W wrote two formal papers, which he circulated to the Alcoholics
Anonymous membership, advising them to take vitamins, specifically niacin.
Bill W was in favor of mega-doses of vitamins for alcoholics. Unfortunately,
AA International has a different view, and they, to the best of my knowledge,
still do not recommend it. I think
AA is good. I think AA with nutrition is far better. What about other drugs?
There was a study done out in LA where they took people who were on heroin.
They gave them high doses of vitamin C, and they came off heroin.
Here’s a very interesting story. When cancer research was being done in
Back in
the ‘70s in When they
got intravenous vitamin C, they stopped asking for pain relievers in about a
week. Somehow, vitamin C was relieving their pain. More interesting, perhaps,
is that they had no withdrawal symptoms at all. They came off of narcotics,
including heroin, without any withdrawal symptoms. What this suggests to me
is that Dr. Hoffer knows what he’s talking about. Healthy people do not
become addicts. Addiction
is a sign of malnutrition. Orthomolecular medicine says when in doubt, use
nutrition first. We don’t have a sure cure for cancer. Obviously, we
don’t have a sure cure for alcoholism. Obviously, there are other
problems that are still plaguing us. One of the reasons these problems are as
bad as they are is that doctors are using everything but high doses of vitamins.
What we
need to do is fix that. High doses of vitamins are safe and effective, and
there are decades of research showing that they are. That research is posted
on my website at www.DoctorYourself.com.
Doctors today are using this and getting good results, and we talk about that
in the I Have Cancer: What Should I Do? book. It pretty much makes it clear what we need to do
next.
Nancy Desjardins: Kristy, I hope you are on the
call tonight because Dr. Saul did answer your question, “What would you
recommend for chronic depression?” This is great. Did you want to add
something?
Andrew Saul: I just wanted to add that in
addition to niacin for chronic depression, I have other suggestions posted at
the website. In fact, depression is the number one reason people come to www.DoctorYourself.com. We know that
because we can check the search statistics, and that
is the most frequently searched for topic. If you go to www.DoctorYourself.com and search
for ‘depression’, it will bring up quickly and easily all that we
have to say on this important problem. Depression
is relieved by niacin, but it also is relieved by taking other nutrients,
including vitamin C and several other vitamins. Obviously, the best thing to
do is use the team approach. Don’t forget your juicing.
Nancy Desjardins: That’s right. Our next
question is from Joyce in
Andrew Saul: It’s a good question, and
the answer is no and yes. Are they all the same? No, otherwise oncologists
would always do the same thing for everybody and textbooks would only be
short pamphlets. Are they all the same? The answer is yes in that, according
to Dr. Max Gerson, they’re all a product of a toxic body that needs
more nutrition. We have undernourished, overfed bodies. In some cases,
there’s exposure to chemicals. In any
event, the Gerson approach, and in many ways mine, would be to say that
we’re not really treating cancer. We’re treating a person who has
cancer. We’re treating the person, and when we treat the person, we want
to basically do two things. We want to build up the person’s immune
system so their own body can fight the cancer. That’s ideal. The other
thing we can do with high doses of vitamin C is we can send the vitamin C in
and actually take out the cancer cells themselves. That’s
a good one-two approach. Unfortunately, modern medicine doesn’t do
that. Modern medicine tends to go in and remove the cancer surgically, which
isn’t a bad idea; it’s just incomplete. They also zap it with
radiation. That’s not a bad idea, but it’s just incomplete. They
could also give chemo drugs that are poisonous to cancer. That’s not a
bad idea, but it has terrible side effects, and it’s only 3% effective (Morgan, Ward and Barton. Clinical
Oncology, 2004. 16:549-560). What
modern medicine doesn’t do is use aggressive, high-dose nutritional therapy.
That’s what we need to do. All hospitals need to do this right away,
and I’m here to tell you they’re not going to. You have to fight
for this. Fortunately, you can because if you really push hard, you can get
your hospital and doctor to give an IV of vitamin C. I even have tactics on
how to do that posted at www.DoctorYourself.com.
We talk
about this in I Have Cancer: What Should I Do?
That’s what you’re thinking: what should I do? It’s a really
scary situation. The good news is that there’s more than you know.
There are more choices. It isn’t just cancer therapy with radiation,
chemo, or surgery. You have more options. You can use nutrition. I think, at
least in my 34 years, every cancer patient I’ve worked with has had
increased quality of life and increased length of life.
Nancy Desjardins: Absolutely. Our next question
is from Bridget: “My husband has prostate cancer. He had his prostate
out three years ago. Two years ago, he had 33 radiation treatments, and last
year he started on hormone shots. He has hot and cold flashes. I’m
looking for a natural cure without the ugly side effect.”
Andrew Saul: There are many things you can
do. One thing that sometimes isn’t mentioned is lycopene. Lycopene is
the red stuff in tomatoes. It’s basically what makes tomatoes or
watermelon red. Lycopene is a very strong antioxidant. It’s even
stronger than carotene. There have been a number of studies in There
have been other similar studies done. In I think
you need to understand that nutrition is probably the part of the therapy
that has not been looked into by your oncology team. It’s up to you to
read about it. Go to www.DoctorYourself.com
and type in ‘prostate’. Then you want to check the Internet. I
have sites that I recommend on my website’s links page. Many of these
address these different issues. We also
have access to free archives of articles that you can read. There’s no
shortage of information. You just have to get out there and take a look.
There’s a lot of good news. There are no easy answers, but there are
answers, I think.
Nancy Desjardins: That’s right. This is our
last question. It’s from Dennis. I had to share this one. “My
wife passed away four years ago after three years and eight months of
battling inflammatory breast cancer. She went through 16 different protocols
of chemo, 38 radiation treatments, and four surgeries. Why didn’t any
of many clinics and doctors say anything about diet and nutrition?” You
answered that question.
Andrew Saul: It’s very powerful. I
want to remind everyone listening that the wife of one of my coauthors died
of cancer. Another one of my coauthors had a couple of grandparents
die of cancer. I had two cousins, both younger than me, and one a lot
younger, die of cancer. We have all felt the pain of this disease.
That’s why we wrote the book. For you
and I and everyone listening, we have to get out
there and change this. We can’t wait anymore. People are suffering, and
it’s time to put an end to it. Nutrition does help. Is it the total,
100% answer? No. Is it a big part of the solution? I think it is. You have to
use enough, and you have to be sure it happens. You can’t just assume
that the hospital is going to provide vitamins. They
won’t. You can’t assume the hospital is going to provide good,
healthy food. They won’t. The hospital is not going to provide juices.
The hospital is not going to provide an IV of C unless you make it happen. If
I’ve done that much, if I’ve motivated you to get in there and
make sure that the nutrition is better, I would like to think we spent a good
hour together.
Nancy Desjardins: You’ve often said that we
need education, not medication. I have just one last question here. Why did
you decide to be involved in the “Food Matters” movie? Everyone
should have a copy at home.
Andrew Saul: It’s nice of you to say
that. I think the number one reason I decided to be in “Food
Matters” is because I have an ego the size of “Food
Matters” on DVD has sold 100,000 copies. It’s shown on airline
flights now, which is really neat. Teenagers see this movie. I have a nephew
who’s 14. Do you know how hard it is to get a 14-year-old to eat right?
He saw “Food Matters,” and this was a kid who just lived on junk
food. He saw “Food Matters,” and my brother, his father, told me
that he heard him out in the kitchen after the movie saying, “You are
what you eat. You are what you eat.” He started eating good food and
lots of salads. I think it’s wonderful. (Click here to see
Andrew Saul on Youtube in an excerpt from the movie
FOODMATTERS.)
Nancy Desjardins: This is amazing. Is there
anything else that you would like to add before we end this call, Dr. Saul?
Andrew Saul: What I’d like to say is
what Linus Pauling said many years ago. Linus Pauling, the only person in
history who has won two unshared Nobel Prizes, is the scientist who named
orthomolecular medicine back in 1968. Linus Pauling said, “Don’t
let anyone make up your mind for you. Check and see for yourself.”
Nancy Desjardins: You’ve been listening to
Dr. Andrew Saul. You can visit his website at www.DoctorYourself.com. Also, view
the “Food Matters” trailer on www.FoodMatters.tv.
Until next time, I’m Nancy Desjardins, and thanks for listening. 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
) Contact information will
be found at http://doctoryourself.com/contact.html
.
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