Newsletter v3n24

"Vitamins characteristically prevent what they relieve." (Evan Shute, M.D.)

The DOCTOR YOURSELF NEWSLETTER (Vol. 3, No 24) November 5, 2003 "Free of charge, free of advertising, and free of the A.M.A."

Written and copyright 2003 by Andrew Saul, PhD, of http://www.doctoryourself.com, an online library of over 350 natural healing articles with nearly 4,000 scientific references. Commercial use of the website or the contents of this Newsletter is strictly prohibited.

AT LAST: YOU CAN NOW ORDER MY NEW BOOK, "DOCTOR YOURSELF: Natural Healing that Works"

And getting your copy directly from me means you also get it autographed. I am pleased to add that this large book costs only $19.95, plus shipping. Please go to http://www.doctoryourself.com/order.html for information.

CAN SUPPLEMENTS TAKE THE PLACE OF A BAD DIET?

They'd better.

In spite of decades of intense and well-funded mass education, "70 percent of all adults and children in the U.S. do not eat the recommended five to nine servings of fruits and vegetables a day for good health," according to an April 25, 2002 press release by the National Cancer Institute. (1) And when a "serving" of fruit may be a 6-ounce glass of juice and a "serving" of a vegetable is a mere half-cup of beans, it really makes you think.

Since at least half of all Americans take vitamin supplements every day, one might be tempted to say that, to a considerable degree, the people have already answered this article's title's question. The public now, finally, has the support of orthodox medicine. After years of disparaging supplements, the Journal of the American Medical Association has recently published the recommendation that every person take a multivitamin daily (2,3), saying that "(S)uboptimal intake of some vitamins, above levels causing classic vitamin deficiency, is a risk factor for chronic diseases and common in the general population, especially the elderly." Therefore, JAMA's intent goes beyond routine nutritional insurance for widespread bad-to-borderline diets. The goal is stated in the article's title: Vitamins for chronic disease prevention in adults. It is a sensible idea whose time should have come generations ago.

Supplementation's harshest critics have traditionally railed against vitamins (especially in large doses) as being outright "dangerous" and at the very least "a waste of money." Even as late as this year, the New York Times (4) expanded the attack to question folic acid supplementation and even the practice of taking a daily multivitamin, saying, "vitamin supplements cannot correct for a poor diet (and that) multivitamins have not been shown to prevent any disease."

The NY Times may have neglected to emphasize the real story: people eat terribly.

Though eating less fat, more Westerners are more obese than ever before, and in the United States, an astounding 80% of persons over the age of 25 are overweight. Nearly two-thirds of all Americans (more than 120 million people) are overweight or obese, according to the 1999-2000 National Health and Nutrition Examination. (5) Protein and sugar intake is still astronomically high and fruit and vegetable consumption is still ridiculously low.

While vitamin supplements do not produce weight loss, persons trying to lose weight face a nutritional adequacy problem of their own. Approximately 50 million Americans admit to being "on a diet" at any given time. Virtually all popular unsupplemented weight loss plans are nutrient deficient. For many, eating less food means eating fewer food-source vitamins. Taking supplements can be seen as especially important for all people that are dieting.

Dieticians have set themselves the heroic but probably unattainable goal of getting every person to eat well every day. Even if obtained, such vitamin intake as good diet provides is inadequate to maintain optimum health for everyday people in real-life situations. Tens of millions of women have a special concern. Oral contraceptives lower serum levels of B-vitamins, especially B-6, plus niacin (B-3), thiamin (B-1), riboflavin (B-2), folic acid, vitamin C and B-12. (6). Ladies, when is the last time your physician instructed you to be sure to take supplemental vitamin C and B-complex vitamins as long as you are on the Pill?

Furthermore, government vitamin recommendations are so low as to resemble a test so easy, a standard so minimal, that you would think no one can possibly fail. For example, the US Reference Daily Intake (RDI) for vitamin E is 30 International Units. It is widely appreciated that at least 100 IU of vitamin E (and probably 400 IU or more) daily is required to prevent a great deal of cardiovascular and other disease. Yet it is literally impossible to obtain 100 IU of vitamin E from even the most perfectly planned diet.

To demonstrate this, I've challenged my nutrition students to create a few days of "balanced" meals, using the food composition tables in any nutrition textbook, to achieve 100 IU of vitamin E per day. They could attempt their objective with any combination of foods and any plausible number of portions of each food. The only limitation was that they had to design meals that a person would actually be willing to eat. As this ruled out prescribing whole grains by the pound and vegetable oils by the cup, they could not do it. Nor can the general public. Most people do not even get 30 IU of vitamin E a day. In fact, most get only 17 IU. (7)

"Supplements" by definition are designed to fill nutritional gaps in a bad diet. They fill in what may be surprisingly large gaps in a good diet as well. In the case of vitamin E, doing so is likely to save millions of lives. The New England Journal of Medicine had two articles in the May 20, 1993 issue (8,9) showing that persons taking vitamin E supplements had an approximately 40% reduction in cardiovascular disease. Nearly 40,000 men and 87,000 women took part in the studies. The more vitamin E they took, and the longer they took it, the less cardiovascular disease they experienced.

A 1996 double-blind, placebo-controlled study of 2,002 patients with clogged arteries demonstrated a 77% decreased risk of heart attack in those taking 400 to 800 IU of vitamin E. (10) Again, such effective quantities of vitamin E positively cannot be obtained from diet alone. 800 IU is 2,667% of the US RDI for vitamin E. Is that a lot, or is the government recommendation too low?

Even a modest quantity of vitamin C prevents disease and saves lives. Just 500 mg daily results in a 42 percent lower risk of death from heart disease and a 35 percent lower risk of death from any cause. (11) Since two-thirds of the population is not eating sufficient fruits and vegetables, the only way to close the gap is with vitamin supplements.

To illustrate how extraordinarily important supplements are to persons with a questionable diet, consider this: Children who eat hot dogs once a week double their risk of a brain tumor. Kids eating more than twelve hot dogs a month (that's barely three hot dogs a week) have nearly ten times the risk of leukemia as children who ate none. (12) However, hot-dog eating children taking supplemental vitamins were shown to have a reduced risk of cancer. (13) It is curious that, while theorizing many "potential" dangers of vitamins, the media often choose to ignore the very real cancer-prevention benefits of supplementation.

Critics also fail to point out how economical supplements are. For low-income households, taking a two-cent vitamin C tablet and a three-cent multivitamin, readily obtainable from any Wal-Mart or discount store, is vastly cheaper than getting those vitamins by eating right. The uncomfortable truth is that it is often less expensive to supplement than to buy nutritious food, especially out-of-season fresh produce. And those who wish to follow Linus Pauling's perennially wise recommendation to take daily multi-gram doses of vitamin C can do so easily and cheaply. Few people can afford to eat several dozen oranges a day.

Since the ancient Egyptians, through the time of Hippocrates, and right up to the present, poor diet has been described and decried by physicians. Little has changed for the better, and much has changed for the worse. Though nutritionists place a nearly Puritanical emphasis on food selection as our vitamin source, everyone else eats because they are hungry, because it makes them feel better, and because it gives such hedonistic pleasure. No one likes the "food police." Telling people what they should do is rarely an unqualified success, and with something as intensely personal as food, well, good luck. We could, of course, legislate Good Food Laws and make it against the law to make, sell, or eat junk. That is as likely to work as Prohibition. It presents me with novel images of seven-year-olds bootlegging Kool-Aid and their parents running Twinkies across state lines.

Our somewhat less draconian choice of "noble experiment" has been to educate, to implore, and to exhort the citizenry to be "choosy chewers," to "eat a balanced diet" and follow the food groups charts. The result? Obesity is more prevalent and cancer is no less prevalent. Cardiovascular disease is still the number one killer of men and women. "Health is the fastest growing failing business in western civilization," writes Emanuel Cheraskin, M.D., in Human Health and Homeostasis. (14) "We can say with reasonable certainty that only about six percent of the adult population can qualify as 'clinically' healthy." (p 9) We can try to sort out each of the many negative behavior variables (such as smoking) which certainly must be factored in. When we have done so, we are left with the completely unavoidable conclusion that our dinner tables are killing us.

The good diet vs. supplement controversy may be reduced to four logical choices:

a) Shall we eat right and take supplements and be healthy?

b) Or, shall we can eat eight and take no supplements, be vitamin E and C deficient for our entire lifespan, and greatly increase our risk of sickness and death at any age?

c) Or, shall we can eat wrong and take no supplements, and be even worse off?

d) Or, shall we can eat wrong, but take daily vitamin supplements, and be a lot less sickly than if we did not take supplements?

While each of these four options constitutes a popular choice, there is one best health-promoting conclusion: Supplements make any dietary lifestyle, whether good or bad, significantly better. Supplements are an easy, practical entry-level better- nutrition solution for the public. A television-educated populace is more likely to take some tablets than to eat organ meats, wheat germ, bean sprouts and ample vegetables. Media supplement-scare-stories notwithstanding, taking supplements is not the problem; it is a solution. Malnutrition is the problem.

In 1998, the American Association of Poison Control Centers' Toxic Exposure Surveillance System reported the following fatalities from vitamin supplements: Adult multiple vitamins: 0 Pediatric multiple vitamins: 0 (And, incidentally, there were no deaths from vitamin C, vitamin E, folic acid, nor from any other vitamin whatsoever.) (15)

On the other hand, according to David DeRose, M.D., M.P.H., "300,000 Americans die annually from poor nutrition choices." (16)

As it has been for thousands of years of human history, so the malnutrition problem remains with us today. Only in the last century have supplements even been available. Their continued use represents a true public health breakthrough on a par with clean drinking water and sanitary sewers, and can be expected to save as many lives. But as long as USDA Food Stamps may be used to buy a box of doughnuts, but are not allowed by law to be used to buy multivitamins, there is a task in front of us. Vitamin supplements, like air bags, can save lives. We should advocate them without ceasing.

(Reprinted with permission from the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, 2003; Vol. 18, Numbers 3 and 4, p. 213-216. All 16 references for this article are posted at http://www.doctoryourself.com/replace.htm.)

TAKE THIS MESSAGE TO YOUR DOCTOR AND THE NEWS MEDIA The effectiveness and especially the safety of vitamin supplements has been set out once and for all in a special issue of the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine. The combined Third/Fourth Quarter issue (Vol 18, Numbers 3&4) contains a dozen, highly detailed and thoroughly referenced papers which show the exceptional safety and therapeutic power of vitamins A, niacin, B-6, B-12, folic acid, vitamin C, vitamin D, and vitamin E. This special Journal issue, which is over 100 pages in length, will solidly refute any person's "vitamins may be harmful" pitch. I urge readers to obtain a copy, entitled "The Safety and Efficacy of Vitamins." It is available from JOM for US $25, postage included to the USA ($US 35.00 overseas). It is money very well spent.

The address to order from is: Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine 16 Florence Ave. Toronto, Ontario CANADA M2N 1E9

(A reminder for USA readers: your order letter to Canada will need a stamp for 60 cents.)

The Journal's email is centre@orthomed.org and their website is http://www.orthomed.org.

"BREAST CANCER Victims More Likely to Die if They Smoke: Women who smoke are 2.5 times more likely to die from their breast cancer," says a press release by the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology, Oct. 2, 2003. I do not doubt that for a minute. And probably one of the key reasons that smokers die sooner is that smoking steals vitamin C from the body. (http://www.doctoryourself.com/mccormick.html) (http://www.doctoryourself.com/mccormick1951.html)

HOW TO STOP SMOKING Vitamin C sprayed into the mouth during cigarette smoking gradually reduces the craving to smoke. Food consumption also declines, as do hunger cravings. By the end of one study, smoking behavior was either reduced or stopped completely. This unusual example of vitamin C's versatility was published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 1993:337, p 211-213.

Isn't it a wonder that we have never been told about THIS particular bit of research?

YOUR NEXT QUESTION: "Where can I buy vitamin C spray?"

Beats me. Plus, I think you are better off making your own, fresh, every day. Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) powder is cheap. You can probably find a sprayer at the dollar store. Mix as much of the crystalline vitamin C as will dissolve in a couple of ounces of water and spray the back of your throat every time you want a cigarette. This not only helps you stop smoking; it also helps control hunger cravings and reduce that old nicotine-withdrawal weight gain syndrome. (That reference once again: Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 1993:337, p 211- 213)

PROPOSED ANTI-SUPPLEMENT LAW IS WRONG by attorney Robert K. Baker RKB@andso.com

Senate Bill 722 is bad law. It gives those who would prescribe dietary supplements a choice: Do you want to be destroyed by unnecessarily burdensome regulatory requirements; or destroyed by arbitrary enforcement proceedings. Either way, the net effect will be to cripple the most promising trends in modern medicine and deprive tens of millions of Americans of the right to choose a demonstrably beneficial treatment.

As S 722 is written (full text at http://www.doctoryourself.com/limitUSA.htm), if a patient is prescribed a combination of vitamin B supplements or antioxidants, and shortly thereafter develops a hangnail, the physician, compounding pharmacy, and hospital are each required to make a written record of the incident, investigate it further, and then file a report with the FDA.

Note well, there is no requirement that there be any evidence the "Adverse Dietary Supplement Experience" is related to the supplement. Equally oppressive, there is no requirement that the "Adverse Dietary Supplement Experience" be of any consequence. The choice of the term "Adverse Dietary Supplement Experience" to describe an event that has no necessary relationship to supplements, and has no requirement the consequences of the experience be significantly harmful, speaks volumes about the agenda of the drafters of this legislation.

Patients often see doctors because they are not well. Supplements are prescribed for some patients. In life, patients sometimes get worse before they get better. As defined in the statute, every such patient has had an "Adverse Dietary Supplement Experience." A file must be opened, an investigation conducted, and a report must be filed each time this happens.

On the other hand, a careful reading of the Bill informs that some of its objectives will appeal to legislators. "Consumer protection" is a positive in the minds of most politicians. In politics, appearances count. The co-sponsors are not generally considered to be pals with the patent medicine companies: Senators Durbin, Clinton, Schumer, and Feinstein.

It might be beneficial to require manufacturers to report information that comes to their attention, regardless of how reliable, that one of their products may have resulted in death, created a life threatening condition, caused a significant disability, or may have a potential for harm to pregnant women. Standing alone, it is difficult to oppose such a reporting requirement. Similarly, increased reporting on effects of stimulants may merit careful consideration. Certainly recent experience has created some legitimate concern about the relatively greater potential of stimulants for abuse.

S. 722 goes far beyond these arguably reasonable goals, and it is for these reasons that the motives of its supporters should be inherently suspect. If there is no legitimate purpose for laws that facilitate abuse by a known abuser, then the proponents should be required to defend the proposed law in a public forum.

Mobilizing opposition to defeat the legislation may be useful. Having a Plan B, however, is worthy of consideration. Plan B might be to force comprehensive hearings. Hearings would provide an informed basis for eliminating those ambiguities and limiting the scope of the Bill to what is necessary to protect the public interest. (Editor's note: Or, make the Senate pass S. 1538 instead, introduced by Senators Tom Harkin and Orrin Hatch, which is an excellent alternative to the draconian S. 722. More on this at http://www.doctoryourself.com/limitUSA.htm.)

FDA'S ANTI-SUPPLEMENT BIAS If the FDA were in fact an independent regulatory agency whose enforcement practices were guided by Neutral Principals, the legislation might not be as dangerous to the publics' health. The FDA has repeatedly demonstrated it is not such an agency.

Guided by "Neutral Principles" means that the FDA would not arbitrarily use its enforcement discretion to favor one approach over another. It would not exploit ambiguities in the legislation to snare unwary health care providers of whom it disapproves. It would not promote legislation clearly designed to create an atmosphere of fear. More bluntly, Neutral Principles would bar the FDA from seeking to undermine Natural Medicine for the benefit of the patent drug companies. ("Natural Medicine" as used here to refers to any practice of medicine that includes the use of supplements in combination with or separately from patented drugs).

What are the differences in approach? The FDA, along with the AMA, the APA and a majority of "traditional" physicians, favor the use of patented substances - alien molecules - over those molecules that are identical to those naturally found in the human body. For traditionalists, the only proper "medicine" is that which treats symptoms of conditions resulting from identifiable pathologies with patented medicines. Often without regard to their day to day functioning, relatively symptom free patients are pronounced "cured." This view, in its common form, devalues a comprehensive individual diagnosis and treatment approach that focuses on minimizing the likelihood pathogens or imbalances will take hold and cause harm. If the pathology has already taken hold, Natural Medicine, often in combination with traditional medicine, seeks to improve the body's natural defenses to the illness.

"FDA Medicine" means if it is in the Physicians Desk Reference (PDR), it is good medicine, and if it is not in the PDR, it is bad medicine. Some believers in FDA Medicine, including politicians, honestly believe in the correctness of their view. No opportunity to educate them in a public forum should be ignored. This may be such an opportunity.

Hearings are a necessity because it is important the legislators have a clear understanding of the reality to which these new FDA powers will be applied. Only with such an understanding can their probable effects on the public's health be fairly assessed. It is the Senate's obligation to make an informed assessment. (And our obligation to compel them to do so. Ed.)

The FDA has, over time, viciously demonstrated its uncritical embrace of FDA Medicine by the use of Gestapo-like tactics that impair or destroy those whose science supports different conclusions. This history of hostility is one appropriate subject of the hearings. Given the agency's history, how much enforcement discretion is appropriate?

S. 722: EXPENSIVE FOR THE CONSUMER Broadly speaking the FDA has two requirements for a patented medicine: First that it does no harm, and second that it is efficacious. There are a handful of labs that have the FDA's blessing to conduct the "does no harm" tests. Unless we have hearings, what will be missing from the debate is the fact that most of these labs are beholden to the patent drug companies. Substantial sums are paid for testing patent medicines. Because of their alien nature, the patent drug testing revenues are much greater -- by a factor of ten or more -- than any supplement testing fees are ever likely to be. It is important for the Senate to investigate reported instances where these labs were unwilling, at any price, to conduct the "does no harm" tests for manufacturers of products not created by the patent medicine brotherhood. If such tests are difficult to obtain, then by ordering such tests, the FDA effectively bans use of the supplement.

Second, these tests are expensive. Because most supplements cannot be patented - the same reason they are affordable for ordinary people - the profit margins will not support the kind of testing and surveillance costs paid by the patent medicine giants. This combination of lower costs and greater cost effectiveness for some treatments, considered against the fact supplements have a dramatically lower risk of any genuinely adverse consequences, requires consideration of whether such costs might properly and most efficiently be born by the government, not individual doctors, compounding pharmacies, and hospitals.

Whether the quality of Americans' health care has been impaired because there is more money to be made treating patients with alien molecules than treating them with bio- identical molecules is another proper subject for these hearings. Profitability of a drug has no necessary relationship to its efficacy. It has a high correlation, however, to whether the drug will receive the FDA's blessing, whether it will be broadly advertised, and whether it will widely be prescribed. By restricting the use of supplements, it is a fair inference the profitability of the patent drug business will benefit.

S. 722 TRIES TO STOP ORTHOMOLECULAR PHYSICIANS Perhaps most significant, for Natural Medicine health care providers, there is no exception in S. 722 for supplements dispensed by or at the direction of a physician. Ordinarily a doctor can prescribe any drug [but may not ship it in interstate commerce] he chooses for the treatment of a disease or condition unless that drug is expressly prohibited by positive law. Thus, Viagra has been used to treat certain circulatory disorders even absent symptoms that prompt its more popular use.

The procedures the government must follow to prohibit a doctor from prescribing a patented drug for a particular use, are far more rigorous than those the FDA would be required to follow to completely ban a supplement. Making it easier to remove supplements from the market than it is to remove patented drugs from the market is discriminatory. It is also an indefensible interference with the doctor's judgment of what is in the best interest of the patient. The substantially greater incidence of serious adverse side effects associated with patented medicines makes it clear that good public policy would make it easier to bar patented drugs, than to bar supplements. In the context of this legislation, the relative risk of the two treatment approaches would be an appropriate subject for Senate hearings.

Is each doctor, each compounding pharmacy, or each administering hospital required to have a written policy for ongoing surveillance of the literature on each "Dietary Supplement" prescribed? The burden of literature surveys should be on the FDA, not on individual physicians, pharmacies, or hospitals. If one thousand doctors have their name on prescriptions for the same supplement dispensed to one thousand different patients, the requirement for one thousand literature surveys is not regulatory, it is punitive. Its only purpose can be to destroy entire category of health care providers. It is a de facto attempt to regulate them out of existence. There is no parallel requirement for traditional doctors or pharmacists who dispense patent medicines.

Similarly, the word "associated" is an unfortunate choice. As noted, if a patient is prescribed a vitamin, and a few days later has a stroke, such an event would be "associated" with the taking of the vitamin. Broad language may make the FDA's information gathering program more comprehensive, but the burden is far out of proportion to any conceivable public benefit. Could the FDA choose not to proceed in such a case? Yes. Would it? Depends! Whether the FDA commences an enforcement proceeding may well turn on whether the health care provider has gotten crossways with the FDA. Has the Target been annoying? Is it good public policy to place health care providers in this legal no man's land? Does it engender respect for law? Does it serve the public interest? Does it make any contribution to a healthier America? The answer to each of these questions is "of course not." They need to be asked.

Perhaps most serious, placing the bar for supplements above that for patented drugs is likely to inhibit physicians from prescribing any treatment that could be claimed by the FDA to involve a "Dietary Supplement." The result is likely to be greater riches for the patented drug businesses, longer recovery periods, longer hospital stays, more pathology, more rapid progression of degenerative conditions.

There is a trauma center in a major city that administers mega doses of anti-oxidants to severely injured patients. It shall remain unnamed because such a practice, it is feared, might create dysfunctional turmoil among the more conventional staff. A substantial number of its trauma patients have a longer than usual stay in the hospital as a result of the anti- oxidant mega-doses. The reason the stay is longer is because they did not die of massive organ failure -- a common risk in such cases. The increased stay in the hospital is as a "result of" the administration of life-saving mega-doses of antioxidants. As such it is expressly classified by S. 722 as a "Serious Adverse Dietary Supplemental Experience" resulting from the ingestion of supplements. Can the hospital be required to perform extensive and expensive studies of the anti-oxidants for the next three years? Yes. Can it be required to have a lab perform expensive tests that demonstrate the antioxidants do no harm, even though such doses have been given millions of times to millions of patients with no adverse effect? Yes. Do the requirements of the statute serve any lawful purpose in the circumstances described? No. Might the enormous and unnecessary burden resulting from practicing effective medicine be an incentive for the hospital to stop such life saving procedures? Yes. If it does stop such procedures, will more trauma patients die of organ failure? Yes. Proponents of the legislation should be required to explain why these results are in the public interest.

S. 722 GOES THE WRONG WAY The focus of 21st century medicine is shifting away from treating only the symptoms of existing disease and degenerative conditions and toward maintaining homeostasis by improving bodily functions and processes with molecules biologically identical to those found in a healthy body. By so doing, the objective is to improve resistance to disease and slow the aging process - the essence of preventive medicine. There is overwhelming scientific evidence and experience that this approach benefits patients.

This legislation would deny scores of Americans the benefit of the best medical judgment of their doctors. It would take away the patient's right to choose Natural Medicine, either as part of a comprehensive treatment plan, or as a separate treatment. Tens of millions have, in varying degrees, already embraced this approach. The Senate Committee needs to hear from them. Passage of this legislation in its present form will surely retard if not destroy what may be the last best hope for genuine health care reform and improving the public's health at a reasonable cost.

(About the author: Robert Baker devoted thirty years to dealing with the pathology of American business and public policy issues, first as Special Assistant to then Deputy Attorney General Warren Christopher, and later in private practice as a business litigator. Currently he is on sabbatical.)

WRITE TO YOUR SENATORS TODAY, AND TELL THEM TO OPPOSE SENATE BILL 722! Here's how: Get both your Senators' addresses (easy to do) at http://www.congress.org (or http://congress.org/congressorg/home). You can send an email letter to them directly from that website, but remember this: A HANDWRITTEN, PLAIN-OLD U.S. POSTAL SERVICE 37-CENT LETTER DIRECTLY FROM YOU **ALWAYS** HAS MORE IMPACT. When you write, be sure to **ask for a response** from your senators. . . and please share those responses with me at doctoryourself.com/contact.html.

How about we start with a look at this one?

SENATOR JOHN EDWARDS IS ANTI-VITAMIN Senator John Edwards (North Carolina, mail@edwards.senate.gov) sent this reply on October 17 to a Newsletter reader:

"I understand your concerns about limiting patients' access to alternative and complementary medical therapies. Alternative medicine has worked very well for many people, and I believe that everyone has the right to choose their own medical treatment. However, I also think that therapies that have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use may pose some risk, and it is important that patients try these therapies under proper supervision."

Senator John Edwards United States Senate 225 Dirksen Office Bldg. Washington, DC 20510

Newsletter reader and letter-writer Ray Ellis' comments:

"Mr. Edwards seems to be talking out of both sides of his mouth. First he says, "I believe that everyone has the right to choose their own medical treatment." Then he says just the opposite by writing, "However, I also think that therapies that have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use may pose some risk, and it is important that patients try these therapies under proper supervision." If we are to take Mr. Edwards' second quote at face value, he believes that no one should have access to any therapy (nutritional, alternative, complementary or otherwise) unless and until the FDA says it's okay, and even then only "under proper supervision.""

Thank you for taking action. You make good points, Mr. Ellis. I hope your Senator is listening.

WATER YOU'ALL THINK ABOUT THIS?

Found on the front label of a one-gallon jug of "Upstate Farms Distilled Water":

"See back panel for nutrition information."

Didn't ANYBODY pay attention during high school chemistry?

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