Before I got sidetracked with a certain topic that’s consumed the blog, another topic that had popped up (albeit nowhere near as frequently) was the latest Ebola virus disease outbreak in Africa, the largest in history thus far. Indeed, as horrific as this outbreak is and as terrible a disease as Ebola is, with close to a 60% mortality even with the best treatment, it did produce one amusing bit of clownishness, and that’s that it revealed that there really is something too quacky even for Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com to tolerate.
I’m referring to an incident four weeks ago where a truly deluded Norwegian homeopath named Kjetill Oftedal posted on NaturalNews.com a recipe for a homeopathic remedy for Ebola that actually took the precepts of homeopathy seriously. What do I mean by that? Whereas previously discussed homeopathic remedies for Ebola used various snake venom that caused bleeding (you know, using something that causes one Ebola symptom in the healthy) as its starting material, Oftedal went one step farther and actually recommended getting blood or other bodily fluid from an Ebola victim as the starting material and then homeopathically diluting it away to nothing. He then recommended using it to prevent and treat Ebola virus disease. So quacky was this that Mike Adams, in an unprecedented bit of seeming responsibility, took it down. Still, it’s not too quacky for Oftedal, who promptly republished the post on his own blog. So it ever was with the unsinkable rubber duck of quackery that is homeopathy.
Although news about Ebola had faded to a dull roar in the background, the quackery for Ebola continues unabated, including colloidal silver, herbal remedies, and lots more. One feels for those poor leaders of west African nations who, in addition to having an outbreak of a highly lethal infectious disease within their borders to contend with, no doubt also have to contend with well-meaning quacks sending them letters about the glories of some nonsense or other that is touted as being able to save their people.
Take high dose vitamin C (please).
I don’t know how I missed this particularly irresponsible bit of quackery promotion, given that it’s in a blog in the Windsor Star, which is just across the river, but I did. About a week ago, there appeared a blog post entitled Dr. Gifford-Jones: Are West Africans needlessly dying from the Ebola virus? I don’t know if it also appeared in the Star print edition, but sincerely hope that it did not, although I do know that it apparently first appeared on Dr. W. Gifford-Jones’ website a couple of weeks before, a site that, not unexpectedly, contains a quack Miranda warning in Gifford-Jones’ bio page. One wonders what docs across the Detroit River are thinking, but I know a few and bet that they think this post is every bit as irresponsible as I think it is. For shame, Windsor Star!
I mean, get a load of what Dr. W. Gifford-Jones has to say:
But the great tragedy is that by failing to read history, researchers and doctors have, in the past, condemned millions to die from viral disease. Now it is happening again in West Africa. So what will happen if a case of Ebola disease occurs in this country?
Currently, Canada and other nations are scrambling to send untested drugs and vaccines to West Africa. Yet, in all the headlines and media stories surrounding this epidemic, not one word is spoken of the proven intravenous use of vitamin C as a cure.
One wonders why “not one word” is spoken of the “proven” intravenous use of vitamin C as a cure for Ebola. Could it be because it’s neither “proven” nor a “cure”? Nahhh. Couldn’t possibly be, could it? It couldn’t be because doctors generally don’t speak of quack cures in anything other than dismissive tones; that is, when they bother to mention them at all. It must be because physicians are ignorant or in the pocket of big pharma or both, right? Send those untested drugs over to Africa because the biotech company wants to make money. Oh, wait. There was a great deal of consternation among the CDC and the biotech company that makes the drug about using ZMapp, an experimental drug that was tried last month on two Americans who contracted Ebola, was reluctant to use it because it’s hard to make and because it had not even passed phase I trials yet.
But Dr. Gifford-Jones is just getting warmed up:
Medical history shows that ignorance, or arrogance, a better word, has been a common human trait of the medical community. One of the most flagrant examples is how Dr. Frederick R. Klenner was treated by his colleagues after saving polio patients from paralysis.
Klenner was a virtually unknown family doctor, in a small North Carolina town. He had no training in virology, no research grants and no experimental laboratory. But he had an open mind to new ideas.
In 1942 his wife suffered from bleeding gums and the local dentist suggested removing all of her teeth. Klenner justifiably considered this a Draconian solution. He recalled research that vitamin C had cured this problem in chimpanzees. Klenner gave his wife several injections of vitamin C. Her bleeding stopped.
Lovely. So apparently a dentist misdiagnosed scurvy. Or something. But this was only the start. Like all quacks with delusions of grandeur, for Klenner curing something as prosaic as bleeding gums wasn’t enough (although I must admit that removing all the teeth seems a rather radical treatment for bleeding gums). Too boring. Too…unimportant. Klenner moved on to viral pneumonia, allegedly curing a patient who was “near death” from the disease. But even that wasn’t enough. Oh, no. Klenner then went on to cure…polio! Of course! here’s the account:
During the polio epidemic of 1948, Dr. Klenner was placed in charge of 60 polio patients. He decided to prescribe large injections of vitamin C. None of his patients developed paralysis.
In 1949, Klenner related his findings at the Annual Meeting of the American Medical Association, and asked doctors to comment. One authority on polio ignored his monumental finding, instead promoting the need for tracheotomy in polio patients. Other polio specialists commented, but none referred to the use of vitamin C. It is almost unbelievable that this happened.
Has anyone ever noticed how quack claims are so difficult to track down. Many of them tend to involve events that happened many decades ago that have, over the many retellings, evolved into legends. Think Max Gerson and his “50 cases.” Think Cantron/Entelev/Procell. The list goes on.
A search for Klenner and his polio “cure” yields hits that nearly all come from pro-quackery sites, such as Whale.to and Orthomolecular.org. There’s also a chapter in a free book in which he describes his beliefs and evidence that vitamin C can cure polio. It is basically identical to this publication, represented as his actual presentation to the AMA in 1949. One aspect of his treatment that amazed me was that this was some truly high dose vitamin C. I mean, seriously. Klenner administered 2,000 mg (that’s 2 g, people) of ascorbate every six hours (8 g/day) supplemented with 1,000 to 2,000 mg by mouth every two hours (that’s 12 to 24 g). So basically, Klenner treated polio with 20 to 32 g per day of ascorbate. for the prototypical 70 kg man used in medical school as a teaching reference for drug doses, that’s nearly half a gram per kg body weight. In the Wikipedia entry on Klenner, which is remarkably skepticism-free, he is described as having administered up to 300,000 mg (300 g!) of ascorbate per day. For those who aren’t scientists in the US and therefore might be metric system-challenged, that’s 0.66 lb of ascorbate.
A search of Pubmed on F. R. Klenner reveals five publications, ranging from 1948 to 1952, all of them in the same journal, which doesn’t appear to be a particularly prominent journal, and unfortunately no abstracts available for any of them. (Whatever his other publications, I’m guessing, they must not be indexed in PubMed.) A review of the titles of the articles match the titles of chapters in a book, Injectable Vitamin C: Effective Treatment for Viral and Other Diseases. It includes titles such as: The Vitamin and Massage Treatment for Acute Poliomyelitis and Massive Doses of Vitamin C and the Virus Diseases, among others, all with the same theme, namely that massive doses of vitamin C will cure pretty much any viral disease that ails you. The other theme running through this is that there are no clinical trials. All there are are case reports and case series, all uncontrolled.
The biggest of these is the 60 patients with polio whom Klenner allegedly cured with his massive doses of vitamin C. Given how long ago this is and how little detail was given, coupled with the lack of any control group, we have no way of knowing whether his combined intravenous/oral vitamin C regimen did anything whatsoever. In any case, it’s not hard to figure out the reason why we don’t use megadose vitamin C for polio or other viral diseases now. In the case of polio, publications about vitamin C and polio petered out over the next couple of decades, at least as far as a search of PubMed indicates. In any case, in a review article about the use of megadose vitamin C in “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), it is noted:
Soon after its discovery and synthesis in 1932, parenteral vitamin C was shown to significantly decrease polio virus infections in primates [31], [32]. Although these findings were not repeatable [33], [34], one practitioner treated thousands of patients with parenteral vitamin C, primarily for infections, and popularized its use [2], [3], [5]. Such reports probably were a basis for continued use of parenteral vitamin C by other CAM practitioners [6], [7], [35].
The abstract of one of these early positive papers is particularly amusing to read:
The experimental evidence presented in this paper shows that multiple paralytic doses of poliomyelitis virus, when mixed with very small amounts of crystalline vitamin C (ascorbic acid), are rendered non-infectious as determined by intracerebral injection of such mixtures into rhesus monkeys.
In other words, crystalline ascorbic acid rendered viruses noninfectious? Who knew? Actually, what was done in this paper was to mix 0.1 ml of the supernatant of a 10 per cent poliomyelitis cord suspension (basically, they ground up spinal cords of monkeys with polio, centrifuged the, and used the supernatant containing the virus) with varying amounts of ascorbate neutralized to pH 6.6 to 6.8. This mixture was then injected intracerebrally. This mixture, with varying amounts of ascorbate, was then injected intracerebrally into rhesus monkey brains and the results checked. My guess here is that the virus was inactivated because the concentration of vitamin C in the actual mixture injected was very high (up to 100 mg/ml), and the virus/vitamin C mixtures were incubated overnight at 37° C. In other words, this study really didn’t tell us much.
It should also be noted that, contrary to Klenner’s claims, high dose vitamin C can indeed cause complications, such as oxalate nephropathy. In any case, Klenner became one of the “originators” of the quackery known as orthomolecular medicine, which has been discussed here many times and was popularized in the 1970s by Linus Pauling with his use of high dose vitamin C to treat the common cold and cancer. The central dogma of orthomolecular medicine seems to be that if some nutrient is good, megadoses of that nutrient are much better and can cure anything. Orthomolecular medicine has also been “integrated” into the quackery known as functional medicine.
That’s why it’s so depressing to see Dr. Gifford-Jones conclude:
What is appalling is that researchers and doctors should know that vitamin C has cured viral diseases like Yellow Fever, Crimean Congo Hemorrhagic Fever Dengue Fever and other viral diseases. But no expert has mentioned the possibility of using large doses of vitamin C to cure Ebola infection.
Klenner and Dr. Robert F Cathcart, an expert in viral diseases, have stressed that it’s the proper dosage that cures all viral diseases. This means giving massive doses of both oral and intravenous vitamin C. Cathcart estimates it would take 240,000 milligrams every 24 hours to beat the Ebola virus.
No. Cathcart was not an expert in infectious disease. He was an orthopedic surgeon who turned to the dark side of orthomolecular medicine and who now has his own page of praise on Whale.to. Vitamin C does not “cure all viral diseases” if only you give a dose high enough. And the Windsor Star should be ashamed for publishing this tripe, even on its blog.
@ORAC
Re: Colloidal silver
should probably read nano silver.
The FDA recognizes ‘colloidal silver’ as a supplement. The beef EPA has been given over nano silver is the particle size and if it will self replicate and consume the planet.
A distinction without a real difference, as far as I’m concerned. It’s all silver in a suspension, the only difference being size, and it’s all quackery. Silver’s antimicrobial properties are only evident on topical application because the concentrations needed are too high to be demonstrated when taken internally. Not that that stops the Nanosilver quacks from saying:
(From: http://www.nano-silver.com)
Let’s just put it this way. “Nano-silver” is the latest quack rebranding of colloidal silver. Same old wine in a new skin, as they say.
But, hey, if you want to be pedantic, go right ahead. Just realize what Orac thinks of pedants. (Just ask around.)
Then, if it’s already FDA approved as a supplement why was it blocked (quackery, or not) and an <untested ZMapp used on a couple of Americans. Is it just that the US is so liberal in allowing the use of an untested treatment on/in humans??
Aug 18, 2014
Ebola: FG withdraws approval of Nano Silva for treatment
This post is not primarily about silver, nano or colloidal. It is about high dose vitamin C. Got it? I get very irritated when pedants try to hijack a thread right out of the box.
Got it. Sorry.
———————————-
vitamin C has cured viral diseases like Yellow Fever, Crimean Congo Hemorrhagic Fever Dengue Fever and other viral diseases
[citation needed]
Dr. Gifford-Jones, or Clifford-Jones, or whatever (s)he is calling him(her)self, needs to get a clue. Before doctors will recommend a treatment of this sort for Ebola, they will want some assurance that it actually works. Expansive claims that vitamin C will actually do something about generic viral infections do not constitute assurance, no matter how widespread those claims are. Show us some refereed papers that supposedly support these claims, and we might take the claims seriously enough to check whether the papers actually do support the claims.
The folks running the Windsor Star are laymen, so they may not know better. Are medical licensing authorities in Ontario, or Canada generally, any better about disciplining quacks than their US counterparts? Because those are the people who should be policing their ranks.
Tim — because the FDA doesn’t really have much power to regulate supplements, that’s why. You can thank legislators in the 90s, though there is a grand old tradition of quackery in the US that goes way back.
Vitamin C megadosing is another good example of this. It’s quackery. It’s nonsense. But the FDA can’t really do anything about it. It’s not like Vitamin C is *bad* for you; the worst side effect is generally a lightening of the wallet, since the body is very good at dumping surplus vitamin C, and certainly there are valid indications for using it. Scurvy is a terrible disease that is very easily treated with vitamin C, so it certainly must remain on the market. Though rare, scurvy does occur from time to time in our modern society, generally in people with a lousy diet. I mean *really* lousy, like nothing but ramen noodles or rice. Vitamin C is ridiculously easy to get via the diet, which is of course precisely why it took so long for the problem to be identified. The fact that vitamin studies were being done primarily on pigeons, which don’t suffer scurvy, didn’t help.
I’m sure when they found when the specific chemical was isolated and shown to not only prevent but even reverse scurvy, it must have seemed almost magical. I can excuse doctors in those early days for getting over-enthusiastic about its properties. But it’s been a long time since then. More than enough time for the other possibilities to play out and reveal themselves to be just pipe dreams. It amazes me that it still grabs even some professionals today.
Ebola attacks the vascular endothelium, which causes the blood vessels to leak, which in turn causes the problems characteristic of this disease. Vitamin C has been shown to reverse endothelial dysfunction in several in vivo studies. Even though endothelial dysfunction and having your endothelium attacked by Ebola are two different things, it seems reasonable to try vitamin C against Ebola. Certainly, the risk is very low (unless you’re using the insanely high doses Klenner did). 5-methyltetrahydrofolate (the form of folate in vegetables) also has been demonstrated to reverse endothelial dysfunction in vivo, so that also seems like something worth trying which has very low risk. They’re just vitamins, and there is at least some basis for suggesting they might be useful. About half of the people who get Ebola survive, and these vitamins may have something to do with that.
“Currently, Canada and other nations are scrambling to send untested drugs and vaccines to West Africa” Smart move if it should leave it’s confines. Serious science, but also a human laboratory
Aren’t guinea pigs something like the only non-primate animal to suffer from scurvy due to inability to create their own vitamin C? Most animals manage to create their own vitamin C just fine.
*checks Wikipedia*
Okay, guinea pigs and capybaras (and possibly all other Cavis); bats; only one of the two major suborders of primates; and apparently some freshwater ray-finned fishes. Interestingly, they’ve found the non-functioning gene that would otherwise normally produce vitamin C in humans.
Of course, part of the problem with scurvy and made it so difficult to track down is that humans are very good at recycling vitamin C in the body, with the result that you don’t start seeing symptoms until weeks after intake of vitamin C stops. Which is another reason why megadoses are not necessarily useful: the only reason you would need more is because the body is dumping all the excess at that point.
Although much you’ve said rings true, and I’m no advocate of untested treatments, there is a danger of mistakenly discarding a useful therapeutic measure through “guilt by association” rather than review of the facts.
It has recently been established that high dose parenteral ascorbate does enhance chemosensitivity of ovarian cancer and reduce toxicity of chemotherapy (Ma et al Sci Transl Med 5 February 2014: 6: 222, 222ra18; stm.sciencemag.org).
The mechanism is thought to be due to increasing tissue concentrations of ascorbate to the millimolar range, with consequent production of hydrogen peroxide, the ultimate agent that kills tumor cells.
These authors point out that the improper comingling of results from oral and parenteral administration of ascorbate seem largely responsible for the rejection of the “vitamin C hypothesis”.
Could local H2O2 from parentaral ascorbate also prove antiviral? Given the size of the threat from ebola, the general safety of parenteral ascorbate, and the large number of infected patients, it would seem imprudent not to test it and make the results available to all. Even a smalll effect might prove beneficial, even life saving, in supportive care of infected patients.
Thanks for your ongoing efforts in seperating truth from truthiness.
An aquaintance who takes C vitamin supplements recently remarked on the oddity that they contain 1250% of RDI per pill – shouldn’t it be more like 100%? I remarked that he doubtlessly gets 100+% of RDI before any supplements, but I rather doubt he’ll quit.
I note incidentally that the FDA recommended maximum daily intake is 2000 mg, or 3333% percent of RDI.
@jotter:
Not quite. That study does not show what you think it shows.
http://respectfulinsolence.com/2014/02/10/vitamin-c-for-cancer-trying-to-rise-from-the-grave-once-again/
Seriously, any study you can throw at me, there’s at least an 80% chance I’ve looked at it in detail before. Maybe a 90% chance.
But no expert has mentioned the possibility of using large doses of vitamin C to cure Ebola infection.
I think there’s an important clue in the third word.
You can’t absorb more than about half a gram of vitamin C into the bloodstream via the oral route. See:
http://www.pnas.org/content/93/8/3704.full.pdf
The rest gets metabolized to oxalate, which raises the risk of developing a kidney stone. If you want a higher level of vitamin C in the bloodstream, you have to get it intravenously.
Please pardon me for a moment.
It’s not.
“The beef EPA has been given over nano silver is the particle size and if it will self replicate and consume the planet.”
The element silver can self-replicate?
” Though rare, scurvy does occur from time to time in our modern society, generally in people with a lousy diet. I mean *really* lousy, like nothing but ramen noodles or rice.”
Oh it doesn’t have to be quite that lousy, but does need to scrupulously avoid all fruits and veggies. If you are willing to limit your diet to a very small portion of the McDonald’s menu you can cause scurvy in about 6 months even if some people consider ketchup a vegetable.
We had a kid do that his freshman year of college. Took the student services a fair while to figure out what was wrong with him as even the most ardent of ramen noodle only eaters you expect at an institution of higher learning usually slip up and drink a glass of OJ often enough to prevent scurvy.
@Narad
Colloidal silver can cause serious side effects. The most common is argyria, a bluish-gray discoloration of the skin, which is usually not treatable or reversible.
I always knew Intel (blue man group) was sick–
That’s a lot of ramen KayMarie. I really wish these people would stop with the nonsense. Please. You are only causing suffering to people who live in suffering. To have the arrogance to say you know a cure for Ebola (which isn’t) and berate people for not using it is totally shamless.
Someone needs to create and fund a corollary to the Randi prize, where we call quacks on their bluff.
It would be great to call Dr Gifford-Jones up and offer a roundtrip airline ticket to Sierra Leone with a couple of 5 gallon buckets of vitamin C and let her have at it. An all expense paid trip where they would have a free platform to wow the world with their proprietary knowledge.
Willing to bet many excuses would be given and Dr Gifford-Jones would remain firmly planted on the North American continent.
Lets just assume this dude’s fairy god-mother granted his wish and he was somehow allowed total control of an ebola victim’s medication and treatment. Seriously; what would he do when, despite practically force feeding the the Vitamin C his erstwhile patient still died. In that moment of corrupted silence, when all the arrogance of ignorance and misplaced self-belief fell away – what would he do?
Would he accept he was wrong? Somehow I doubt it.
Somehow I doubt even if some billionaire totally funded his mission to bring the ascorbate gospel to the suffering in Africa he would even go. Not until a suspiciously NON-Vitamin C vaccination become available.
I *think*, Mark Thorson, that this effect may be mitigated somewhat by ingesting roughly a tblspoon of sodium bicarbonate a day…
Though, in the interest of full disclosure, I also thought Jannis Joplin was female.
@Gemman Aster #21
This topic was addressed in a Dr. House episode, S04 ep06: “Whatever it takes” where a guy faked polio with thallium and treated with vita C after removing the thallium — for research funding, or some such shit…
Has anyone suspected that “Tim” is out former Cannabis Troll?
Lawrence,
Quite. You got it. Dead on. Bingo. go fuck yourself.
@Tim – I seem to have that effect on a lot of nasty trolls…..glad I’ve managed to get under your skin with such a simple post.
You know, I hand you something on a silver platter and you still manage to completely screw it up.
It’s all good, Lawrence. *grins*
Meanwhile, I’m left feeling the WHO is throwing scientific caution to the wind when it says to now use the blood of Ebola survivors to treat those with Ebola. http://tucson.com/news/science/health-med-fit/who-use-ebola-survivors-blood-to-treat-patients/article_2a93ae48-40a9-5d78-9015-ceb3a769600b.html
@LW #17:
The element silver can self-replicate?
In some circumstances, yes.
So you don’t believe that survivors have antibodies to Ebola?
Using the antibodies of survivors isn’t a new never done before idea.
“Mark Thorson
September 5, 2014
You can’t absorb more than about half a gram of vitamin C into the bloodstream via the oral route. See:
http://www.pnas.org/content/93/8/3704.full.pdf
The rest gets metabolized to oxalate, which raises the risk of developing a kidney stone. If you want a higher level of vitamin C in the bloodstream, you have to get it intravenously.”
Read these 4 items: http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/hemila/safety/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8126804
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9429689
https://www.academia.edu/1274864/Pharmacokinetics_of_vitamin_C_insights_into_the_oral_and_intravenous_administration_of_ascorbate
Regarding the other typical safety objections, not directly related to this (a safety objection would be interference with chemotherapy – purportedly it is unsafe for cancer patients in that regard, but that claim is refutable), see the following three items in succession:
http://m.cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/69/22/8830.1.long
then see particularly this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21402145
And see this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22021693
The cure claims may be overblown based on current evidence, but the concerns about safety are based on fantasy. The review quoted in this blog stated that in general, “high dose intravenous vitamin C appears to be remarkably safe.”: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0011414#pone-0011414-g002
I have no desire to get into a debate on this, and will not be returning to this discussion. I see no reason why anybody would object to anything I presented, or see it as anything other than positive news.
Riddle me this, Orac man…nothing to do with ebola, but PBS special on vaccines supposedly says only one in one million kids are harmed by vaccines. That’s a bullshit sundae with cat crap cream on top! Beings as 3,000+ has successfully sued the gov’t through NVICP, that means we have 3 billion kids in America.
Aw, swweeeet Jesus, the stupid we are expected to swallow burns,burns.
@ Kaymarie #32–Agreed, it’s not a new idea, and it’s been done before. However, as noted in the article cited
“Blood transfusions are done in many African countries so this should really not be a problem,” said Oyewale Tomori, a professor of virology at Redeemer’s University in Nigeria, who participated in the meeting. He noted that survivor’s blood was first used to treat Ebola patients in a 1995 outbreak in rural conditions.
“Conceptually, this makes sense,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, from Washington. “Can it be pulled off? We don’t know.”
He said the blood from survivors would have to be screened for HIV, malaria and other diseases before being used as a treatment.
That’s something we can take for granted here, but not so easy to be sure of in many parts of Africa.
The number HAS to come from the qualified or “compensible” awards paid through VAERS. If one takes the number of babies born per year (~4,000,000) and multiplies them by the number of years the program has been in effect–26, and then I just multiplied the present number of vaccines per child over 18 years, which I heard was sum total 55…and you divide it by the 3535 kids who have been compensated by VAERS or NVICP or whatever it is, you get 1 in 1,618,104. Because I used the present total # of vaccines (55) this has to be high. I can’t find the sums by year. At first I think the lifetime was like 25 o so. I had never even heard, as most people, of the Vaccine Injury program until my son was 7 years old, 4 years too late to sue! That’s just a mess, if you ask me. No wonder it’s the “ejukated” people who call B.S. They are the only ones who’ve even heard of the NVICP. I think they need to change their emphasis….instead of cynically depending on ignorance and putting out false memes….”One in a million…” why in the hell don’t they just say you are taking a much greater chance by not vaccinating. That just tics me off. (Sorry, cynical…)
It’s like the BS I heard here (or somewhere) that Offit didn’t say 10 000 vaccines (“…then each infant would have the theoretical capacity to
respond to about 10 000 vaccines at any one time” https://www2.aap.org/immunization/families/overwhelm.pdf
I’m dumber than shinola, and I can figure it out. But there is a knee jerk reaction, and it has always been so, even 40 years ago, that only crazy people blamed vaccines. I don’t think that is true. And I think the CDC is being deceptive, for good reason…but still, being deceptive. We can’t handle the truth that some children are hurt for the greater good. So instead, some belittle and distance from people whose children are hurt, using their superior ability to baffle them. But they don’t go away like they should, because they don’t think they are crazy. As the person here who pretty much implied they were probably victims of shadow syndromes of autism…yeah..good science….
Why do I post here? Because I know you are good people, and have a greater good in mind. But you need something beside your minion’s bobble headed reasoning and superfluous conflagrations (…if those words mean what I think they mean, otherwise, ignore that comment.)
My ignorance is my secret power. It makes me aware I don’t know everything, and that I am seldom the smartest person in the room….but my Dad, a bartender, had an expression. You can’t bullshit a bullshitter. Maybe that applies.
If both statements are true (and I cannot attest to that or deny it) then that says that they are measuring different things even though they appear related. Speculating, the NVICP may compensate for reactions that fall below the threshold used by (the supposed) PBS documentary statement about injury.
usethebrainsgodgiveyou,
I suggest you take your comments about vaccines this to ann on-topic thread, instead of one about vitamin C and ebola. I have a reply, but I don’t want to swamp this thread with it (it’s long).
“Why do I post here? Because I know you are good people, and have a greater good in mind.”
Actually I (and others who post here) have both individual and greater good in mind, which is why we support immunization as an important part of quality evidence-based health care.
Crimean Congo Hemorrhagic Fever
I cannot find the Crimean Congo on Google Map.
Klenner was a virtually unknown family doctor, in a small North Carolina town. He had no training in virology, no research grants and no experimental laboratory. […]
During the polio epidemic of 1948, Dr. Klenner was placed in charge of 60 polio patients.
“Basic plausibility” was not an issue for Cathcart when he was making this story up.
@herr doktor bimler
It should be hyphenated: Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever. Despite the weird name, it is a real thing.
@Narad #28
Gaww. Sorry. Was it because of the spoiler I dropped??
http://politedissent.com/archives/1800
Ohh. There is a main episode about Polio, isn’t there? I keep getting my ass handed to me here… But it is a nice ass, if I do say so myself. 🙂
Thanks, Grouchybeast. I have learned something new today.
I unknowingly yet stupidly conflated. I feel so like that wouldn’t have happened if I had my cannabis.
@herr doktor bimler
Let’s hope it never becomes critical information for you 🙂 Although if you do ever get bitten by an infected tick, just have some lemonade and sour candies and I’m sure that hemorrhaging will clear right up.
usethebrainsgodgiveyou: “The number HAS to come from the qualified or “compensible” awards paid through VAERS.”
While you are looking for a more appropriate thread to post this on, just click on this table. Then go to the bottom, and take the total number of vaccines given since 2006 and divide it by the total number of claims since 2006. Also, read the definitions below the table.
Okay, Chris…you win that one.
Of those that went through legal channels, one in 1,500,000 were purported to be harmed. I have no proof, but I’d bet most people, with the exception of skeptics and anti-vaccinationists have never even heard of VAERS.
VAERS & the NVICP are mentioned, specifically, on every single vaccine information sheet that doctors are required to give to parents and go over them (if they have any questions) before any vaccines are given.
To claim ignorance is foolish.
Who reads those things? We trust our doctors to do what’s right. Most of us just accept shit happens and move on, and aren’t out to sue anyone. Do you know doctors who are regarded as kind by their patients are unlikely to sue, even if they have been wronged. To call people fools is not kind.
I meant to say, doctors whose patients see them as kind are unlikely to be sued. Not everyone has a litigious mind.
VAERS & the NVICP are there specifically to handle issues of vaccine reaction…it has nothing to do about being sued (since the Doctors cannot be for a serious vaccine reaction).
usethebrains…
What, no apology for the accusations of “bullshit sundae with cat crap cream on top”, “burning stupidity” and “bobbleheaded reasoning”? It looks like your ignorance isn’t such a great secret power after all. I think you need another secret power, perhaps the power to understand and assess evidence before making foolish accusations and spreading misinformation that threatens public health.
Since the Vaccine Court table injuries can undoubtedly have causes other than vaccination, it is certain that some of the injuries compensated by the Vaccine Court were not caused by vaccination. A Table Injury within the timescale is presumed to be caused by vaccination, as I understand it (unless there is some other obvious cause). That means that these numbers are not a good way of estimating the frequency of vaccine injuries. The CDC says:
Bear in mind that anaphylactic shock is included in those figures, and there is no way of preventing some people from having allergic reactions to vaccine components.
I don’t understand your accusations that skeptics and the CDC deny vaccine injuries and ridicule those that suffer them. Yet in the same breath you talk about the Vaccine Court which has compensated thousands of people, and which I and other skeptics wholeheartedly support.
The Vaccine Court compensates for vaccine injuries that there is good (or even moderate) evidence for. Autism (ADHD, MS, allergies, asthma etc etc) is not included because the evidence tells us it isn’t caused by vaccines. Those who persist in spreading,lies about vaccines after their errors have been pointed out deserve ridicule and scorn, in my opinion. They are threatening public health – do you want to see hundreds of children hospitalized with measles, with encephalitis, pneumonia and SSPE as we have had in Europe? That is what will happen if MMR uptake falls. There will be deaths, as there have been in Europe, yet there hasn’t been a single confirmed death caused by vaccines for several decades, to my knowledge.
Also IMO, parents of disabled children deserve support from society, whatever the cause of that disability.
Because I say some kids are harmed….thousands are going to die. Wow….I am more powerful than I thought.
One in a million is still bullshit. It’s a cynical meme that has no basis in reality.
@UseBrains – you really aren’t “using the brains god gave you” are you?
As Chris pointed over, over 2 Billion (probably closer to 3 Billion now) doses of vaccines have been given in the United States – less than 4000 individuals have been compensated for vaccine injury & the way the system is set up, it is likely that a number of these people did not actually have a reaction to a vaccine – but still qualified under the established table injuries.
Vaccines are one of the most heavily regulated, tested and tracked medical treatments on the planet – so unless you buy into the Global Conspiracy Theory, your suppositions are not logical or rational.
I dare say it is more a case of one ‘injury’ per one million administrations of vaccine, not per child who has had vaccines. As opposed to three hundred thousand DEATHS per million cases of smallpox major… I’ll buy that for a dollar (pound) ANY day of the week!
But seriously – posting this after Orac has very harshly slapped down one dude for going off topic just a few posts above… You’re not using your deity’s granted brains either you know!
usethebrainsgodgaveyou,
Not just you, but if you carry on spreading lies about vaccines, some people will believe you, and if enough people stop vaccinating the diseases they could have protected against will come back. As I have related here before my son spent weeks in the hospital fighting for breath as a direct result of people believing antivaccine lies.
Don’t you care about the children that will suffer and die if your lies are believed?
BTW, where did I say thousands will die? Hopefully people in the US will come to their sense as soon as the first hospitalizations and serious sequelae start appearing, as they did in Europe.
Yet you have no evidence at all to support this claim. You just don’t want to believe it because you have already made up your mind. You can’t assume the cases compensated by the Vaccine Court are real cases of vaccine damage and work your way back from that. That’s as ridiculous as claiming the fact thimerosal was removed from most vaccines is evidence thimerosal is dangerous.
You might find this paper interesting/ It presents compelling evidence that vaccine encephalopathy, a Vaccine Court table injury, is a myth, and that genetic mutation in a sodium channel or mitochondrial disorders are the cause of the seizures and regression seen in some children. Vaccination is recommended in such children, by the way.
Here are the actual risks attributed to each vaccine on the childhood schedule by the CDC based on solid evidence. Please explain which of these risks estimates are wrong, and provide evidence to support your claim.
Comment in moderation giving actual risks of several vaccines according to the CDC. Severe reactions with permanent sequelae are rarer than 1 in a million, or, “so rare it is hard to tell if they are caused by the vaccine”. I would say “impossible” rather than “hard”, as the sample size required to demonstrate causality is too large to be practical in most cases.
To be accurate, I should probably say “the sample size required to demonstrate an association is too large to be practical in most cases”.
Kreb, stop with the lack of evidence. Evidence in a court of law, yes….deductive evidence…that is the evidence the 1 in a million person uses. “We only have proof of 4000 people harmed”. In a court of law, that is sufficient, but in the real world, where most of us common people live…nothing is so cynically cut and dried. I’m sorry for you son’s harm. But it may be attributed to many things, not just AV parents. The AMA spanked the members in California who contributed to the Pertussis outbreak for their insistence on making a buck and refusal to lose money on vaccinations. It’s in writing, so litigenously, it’s true.
I gave you evidence and you called bullshit on it. I pretty much determined, by using my own tiny little brain, that the numbers were taken from successful litigation on VAERS. If you believe those are the only numbers who were harmed….I don’t know what to say.
usethebrainsgodgaveyou,
Can you please provide us the PubMed indexed studies showing the DTaP causes more harm than diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis. Again I ask this because my oldest had a seizure due to an actual disease before its vaccine was available.
Also, can you explain what the NVICP statistics have to do with Ebola and vitamin C?
use thebrains….
Stop complaining you haven’t provided any evidence for the beliefs you have pulled out of thin air?
I don’t understand what you mean by this either. Those risk estimates are each derived from good quality evidence. For example, when 67 million doses of HPV vaccines are administered in the US alone,and the VSD finds the frequency of serious illnesses is the same in people who did or did not receive the vaccine, how can anyone conclude that it is dangerous? But they still do.
So how do you decide the truth? By gut feeling?
What else could it be attributed to? My son was born with spina bifida and hydrocephalus, so his doctors advised against vaccinating him (probably wrongly, in retrospect). There were hardly any cases of whooping cough in the UK until a study was published linking the pertussis vaccine to neurological complications:
Perhaps my son might have contracted pertussis anyway, but it is very likely it was because of the epidemics that were in turn undoubtedly due to the fall in vaccination uptake (though some nuts argue otherwise, of course).
I have no idea what you are referring to here.
What evidence? The successful Vaccine Court cases? Say someone claimed that Fruit Loops caused short stature, and the manufacturers admitted liability, and offered compensation to any child below average height who had eaten Fruit Loops. Would that mean that every child of below average height had been damaged by Fruit Loops? Obviously not.
You really think the CDC used your bassackwards method of risk assessment? Oh dear.
That’s because you have no rational basis for your arguments. You are railing against the 1 in a million figure purely because of your own prejudices.
Dammit, I forgot to bowdlerize usethebrains’ quoted comments again.
Something weird is going on, apologies if this appears twice.
use thebrains….
Stop complaining you haven’t provided any evidence for the beliefs you have pulled out of thin air? Why?
I don’t understand what you mean by this either. Those risk estimates are each derived from good quality evidence. For example, when 67 million doses of HPV vaccines are administered in the US alone,and the VSD finds the frequency of serious illnesses is the same in people who did or did not receive the vaccine, how can anyone conclude that it is dangerous? But they still do.
So how do you decide the truth? By gut feeling?
What else could it be attributed to? My son was born with spina bifida and hydrocephalus, so his doctors advised against vaccinating him (probably wrongly, in retrospect). There were hardly any cases of whooping cough in the UK until a study was published linking the pertussis vaccine to neurological complications:
Perhaps my son might have contracted pertussis anyway, but it is very likely it was because of the epidemics that were in turn undoubtedly due to the fall in vaccination uptake (though some nuts argue otherwise, of course).
I have no idea what you are referring to here.
What evidence? The successful Vaccine Court cases? Say someone claimed that Fruit Loops caused short stature, and the manufacturers admitted liability, and offered compensation to any child below average height who had eaten Fruit Loops. Would that mean that every child of below average height had been damaged by Fruit Loops? Obviously not.
You really think the CDC used your bassackwards method of risk assessment? Oh dear.
That’s because you have no rational basis for your arguments. You are railing against the 1 in a million figure purely because of your own prejudices.
Krebiozen: “What evidence? The successful Vaccine Court cases?”
There is some interesting information in the NVICP statistics tables. If you look at the “Claims Filed and Compensated or Dismissed by Vaccine 1 March 5, 2014” table, you will see that there have been a total of 1,269 claims compensated just for DTP, out of a total of 3,540 since 1988.
One that same table it shows a total 170 for DTaP and 69 for DTaP, plus a few smatterings of other variations.
Now if you go down to the table showing the totals from 2006 on, you will see out of 68,113,573 DTaP doses, there were just 95 compensated claims. (by the way, it is still about one out of 716985 doses, not quite one in a million, but that is why they have three separate compensation columns and definitions under the table)
There seems to have been a drop in pertussis vaccine claims overall since then. Perhaps it is the change from DTwP to DTaP, or recent research on other genetic reasons for the seizures, etc.
Chris,
Thanks, there’s some interesting information there. Do you think claims of vaccine injury due to DTaP are going out of fashion? As I recall, recent evidence doesn’t seem to show a huge difference in safety between the wP and the aP.
Do you know if the Vaccine Court changes its criteria based on current science? Do table injuries get reviewed? I see vaccine encephalopathy remains, but the scientific consensus seems to be heading towards thinking it doesn’t exist.
I bet Narad knows. I could probably Google it, but I haven’t the energy right now.
My understanding is that the table injury list has been modified due to recent scientific findings, like Dravet syndrome. As mentioned at SBM on the Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, inc. Supreme Court case:
http://www.amednews.com/article/20100726/profession/307269956/1/ payment issues.and pertussis
Now what is wrong with that?
Boosting California’s immunization rates is one goal of proposed state legislation that would require health insurers to pay physicians for the full cost of purchasing, storing and administering immunizations. Proponents say it would enable doctors, particularly those in small practices, to afford the expenses associated with vaccinating patients.
A similar measure was introduced in 2009 but died in committee due to financial reasons, said Tom Riley, director of government relations for the California Academy of Family Physicians, which co-sponsored the bill. It was crafted before the latest outbreak.
Some health insurers have spoken out against the legislation. Susan Pisano, a spokeswoman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, said studies indicate that the private sector already provides a fair return for doctor’s vaccine costs.
But Sumana Reddy, MD, a family physician in a four-doctor practice in Salinas, Calif., disagreed. “We’re trying to do what’s right regardless. … But in addition to not being reimbursed for the time we spend educating parents [and patients] about vaccines, we’re putting money out for the cost of vaccines that isn’t fully reimbursed. … It’s a hopeless proposition.”
Do you really think the only children who have severe reactions have been reimbursed by the VAERS. Do you really believe that?
Let’s see a show of hands.
VAERS doesn’t reimburse anybody. It’s a passive reporting system.
VAERS and the NVICP are two separate things, which is explained on every Vaccine Information Sheet. In order to get reaction claims compensated you must actually apply to the NVICP.
And the payments are to clinics to provide the vaccines, they are being shortchanged by the insurance companies. It has nothing to do with vaccine safety or the NVICP. It does point out that there needs to be more coverage of the Vaccines for Children Program.
And again: what does this have to do with Ebola and vitamin C?
Come on usethebrains! Think clearly about what you are saying. Forget the vaccine court digression for a moment. You are saying that the supposed pitfalls of vaccination as illustrated there outweigh ALL the potential – and undeniable reality – for good… And that is categorically untrue. Even going from your table; a number in the low single thousands against how many MILLIONS, no, how many BILLIONS of people who will absolutely NOT catch smallpox?
We are all here only words on the internet and I know nothing about you. However I myself HAVE lived in a world where smallpox existed AND polio and had to endure the constant threat they posed to each and every one of us. Maybe you have as well and can follow me through your own memories. If so then just think. When I was a youngster I could have been playing down the docks with my pals – like I did what felt like every day I was a child – and caught smallpox brought in from some far-off country. Easily. I could have suffered the genuine nightmare of confluent pox of septicemia. It terrified me then even as a dim, relayed and unspeakable fear from the adults around me and the memory, clarified and informed through education terrifies me now even more. Surely it must you as well – even if we disagree on matters I can tell from your posts you are an intelligent and thinking person.
Yet here we stand. We are already 14 years into the 21st century… Just that fact astonishes me and neither you nor I can possibly catch smallpox. It simply does not exist anymore in the wild. Why? Because of vaccines. We are all safe – all seven billion of us simply and PURELY because of vaccination. All that truly inconceivable, unbearable pain; a lifetime of disfigurement and a better than 1 in 3 chance of not coming out the other side to bear those disfigurements at all.
Smallpox is a perfect case study because in that one case we have won the war, but other diseases are close to similar eradication. Yet, despite all his sound and pompous fury Wakefield was wrong. He has done nothing good for this world. Nothing. Jenner on the other hand has saved us all from at least one unbearable nightmare and will inevitably go on to do so again and again in the future. THAT is true goodness, true hope, true positivity for the future of mankind.
Yes, we can quibble on the minutiae of interpreting the vanishingly small number of corner cases, but that misplaced skepticism and suspicion simply cannot weight against, cancel away the fact vaccines have helped us all. Each and every one of us. It is quite possible we are both here, able to type our opinions on to an obscure medicine board in the dusty corners of the internet purely and directly because of vaccines. THAT is the reality and everything else, all the banal arguments and pedantic picking over sometimes willfully misunderstood statistics is nothing in comparison.
usethebrainsgodgiveyou: “payment issues.and pertussis
Now what is wrong with that?”
Now that I am not rushed trying to deal with chicken on the barbecue, I go back and notice the date on that article: “Posted July 26, 2010”
Much could have changed since then. Rose, please use a different username.
Chris,
you mean like this?
http://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/immunize/Documents/PertussisSummaryReport20100630.pdf
Two months later we had hit 2492 cases and 7 deaths, and by the count for the full year 2010 was 9477 and 10 deaths.
http://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/immunize/Documents/PertussisReport2011-03-09.pdf
This year we’re up to 7,980 cases, but only one death
By the way, my kid got the TDap recently without any repeat of previous issues (and with the pedi’s office on high alert).
Anyone interested in the CA summary reports on pertussis for the past 5 or so years can find them here:
http://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/immunize/Pages/PertussisSummaryReports.aspx
@ usethebrains: Please stay on topic and post your comments about vaccines on one of the open vaccine threads.
I left a comment for you, here:
http://respectfulinsolence.com/2014/09/01/the-cdc-whistleblower-william-w-thompson-one-last-word/#comment-352131
Q: what do you get when you spend $100.00 on vitamin supplements ?
A: Really expensive urine.
utbggy,
I have replied to your questions on the thread lilady linked to.
KayMarie:
Considering that you can actually get vitamin C from their most popular offerings it’d be tough. A medium serving of french fries at McDonald’s gets you 14% of your daily vitamin C. (Potatoes are *awesome*.) I perused their nutritional facts (McDonald’s is one of the few restaurants that offers a full nutritional analysis of all of their menu items), and you’d pretty much have to be eating very small meals favoring items from the dollar menu, and skipping fries consistently, to get scurvy off of it. I did find a few items with no vitamin C:
BBQ Ranch Burger
Filet-o-Fish
all of the crispy snack wraps
Mac Snack Wrap
all but one of the McMuffins (Steak & Egg was the exception, with 2% RDA)
both of the Sausage Biscuit options
both of the Sausage McGriddle options
Cinnamon Melts
Hotcakes
Sausage & Hotcakes
Strawberry Go-gurt
most of the desserts (exceptions: apple pie, strawberry sundae, Fruit & Yogurt Parfait)
most of the sauces
all of the beverages that aren’t smoothies, milk, juice, PowerAde or Hi-C
So breakfast appears to be the worst offender in terms of not getting enough vitamin C. Surprisingly, the best source of Vitamin C there is not the smoothies or the orange juice. The best source is the Hi-C Orange Lavaburst. A medium serving gets you 290% of your RDA, so if you can tolerate the insane sweetness, just having that as your beverage will easily prevent any scurvy. 😉
Did anyone raise their hand? Have the sum total of all children in the U.S who have been harmed by vaccines been compensated?
usethebraingodgiveyou,
I’ve replied to you here:
http://respectfulinsolence.com/2014/09/01/the-cdc-whistleblower-william-w-thompson-one-last-word/
A more topical discussion where others have tried to direct you as well.
Yep, that is why they were so surprised. But this kid was avoiding all the veggies his Mom made him eat (including the potato).
My guess was the only bit of vitamin C was the ketchup on the quarterpounders.
German Aster @73
That was a truly beautiful response.
He wasn’t even eating the fries? Wow. I’ve always thought those things were damn-near an addictive substance. I know I can’t get enough of them. 😀
But with a picky eater in my family, I can see how it might happen, especially with a college kid on his own for the first time trying to stretch his dollar.
I had a friend who managed to get scurvy (lab confirmed); if I recall he mostly ate baked beans on toast, neither of which contain any vitamin C. This may seem odd to some Americans, but it’s a popular British snack.
usethebrains… I have also replied on the other thread. Please take the discussion about vaccines there.
Some background on Dr. Gifford-Jones:
http://ethicalnag.org/2014/02/14/w-gifford-jones-vitamin-c-lysine/
He’s a retired ObGyn i.e. no special knowledge or training in Tropical Medicine or Infectious Disease.
He markets his own brand and formulas of supplements, including (surprise, surprise) high-dose Vitamin C.
He’s 90 years old!
Somewhat related, and maybe even more relevant. The BBC broke a story on a potential ebola vaccine (No, not vitamin C, sorry) having success on 4 Macaques, surviving windows of 5 weeks compared to control of 6 days, with two surviving to 10 months (booster). Human safety trials to begin in multiple locations, hoping the vaccine can be ready for general use by (I believe) November this year. Link to the study:
http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nm.3702.html
Thread successiffully hijacked by idiot who has trouble with tenses. GAVE.
The truly daunting and immense problem of this Ebola epidemic in West Africa is the extent of the poverty and ignorance of the victim population. I spent a lot of time probably on the order of ten years over a span of thirty years working in all three of the most affected countries. In the major cities, Conakry, Freetown and Monrovia conditions are desperate. Medical care is virtually non-existent even for common disease like malaria or dystentary. Superstition is rampant. Those who do not adherre to animist beliefs are either muslim or christian and devoted in a child like way to the fiction that their god will save them from their poverty, hunger, disease and the ubiquitous threat of war and violence promted by greed. Witnessing the effects of this disease upon its victims is terrifying to any of us. How do you think these impoverished and isolated people must feel? Terror does not describe it.
Moreover they are all just barely obtaining a degree of stability after nearly two decades of the most brutal and savage kind of civil war ever visite upon the world.
The simple fact is that because they are so utterly destitute and ignorant, it is easy for use to ignore them. And so we do. But what we cannot ignore is that their population is an enormous incubator for the evolution of this deadly virus.
What, evolution? It’s a lie, it doesn’t happen. We all know this because it is the absolute word of god that (he,she,it) created everything just as it is. We can safely ignore the enormous threat because we know the absolute truth, the good god is just punishing those heathen africans because they have the mark of Ham, they are obviously blech. Just look, the good god saved the life of the white christian doctor who was brought back to the US and given the best supportive care and experimental treatment available at a cost of what, hundreds of thousands of dollars perhaps? And still, it was the god’s miracle that saved him. Too bad for all thouse tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of blechs who have to suffer and ultimately bleed out like bags of blood soup because they don’t work for Samaritans Purse. God’s will be done. 800 million africans is way too many anyway.
I know I am being inflamatory writing this way. Frankly I don’t care. I don’t think Orac will censor me because he values what is true and it is true that our (meaning mostly american and european) attitudes towards the crisis in Africa are not just racist and bigoted but callous and bordering on the sadistic.
Most of you know nothing about Africans except some fictional hollywood depcition designed to make money. With a white S. African as the “hero” no less. I refer of course to the film I think was named Blood Diamond.
Well, we can safely say there is plenty of blood and very little diamond.
It is easy to accept tidy lies.
How do you all think you will feel if at some future time there are an estimated 20,000 cases of Ebola in NYC?
II may well be be banned for being to blunt but my perception of the sitiutation is this: Let the niggers die just fence them off so they can’t infect us.
I don’t by any means attribute that attitude to Orac. But the very idea of hijacking this thread to talk about vaccine consipiracy theories speaks volumes. Let me hear a vaccine denialist argue that a 0.01% injury rate is a good reason to avoid preventing 60% fatalities from infection.
I shut up in despair. There are no words….
Please be aware that antivaxxers have one-track minds. They see “CDC” and, like Pavlov’s dogs, they instantly start slobbering about vaccines. And then the good people on this site respond because, well, Something Is Wrong On The Internet. But you’ll notice that the good people did try to redirect the antivaxxer to a more appropriate thread.
Krubozumo Nyankoye,
I entirely agree with you. Worse, a lot of the problems in Africa are the legacy of colonialism, or post-colonial meddling; financing dictators, pouring money into useless development programs or causing environmental devastation to extract oil or minerals. The attention the media pays to horrors abroad seem to me to be inversely proportional to the darkness of their skin. What I have read about the ebola crisis seems more geared to fears of what might happen in the developed world rather than what is actually happening right now in Africa.
The truth as I see it is that we cannot sustain the current situation, with a small number of people in the developed world living a lifestyle far better than the majority in the developing world. The planet has grown too small. Sooner or later things have to change radically, hopefully without too much more bloodshed.
LW- I am aware and yes I did notice the reaction here to that hijacking attempt.. Never the less it did put a blip in the thread of converstation which is a sad commentary in itself. We should not become distracted from the issues at hand if we can at all avoid it.
Krebiozen
Yes there is a deep history behind the indifference and ignorance. I cannot comprehend it personally but then I have a far too intimate knowledge of what these ‘africans’ are. I lived with them in the bush, I worked along side them. They bestowed upon me the name I use here and never disclosed whether it had a meaning or was just an affection. In all the time I spent there, not one person was ever dishonest in dealing with me. When the horror of war engulfed us we universally resisted becoming brutal in response to brutality. Nothing I have experienced is so sad as the fact that all of my friends were put in such danger. Life is cruel.
Thanks Orac for not censoring me. I know I am bitter . I notice today that others have picked up on the idea that letting this epidemic ‘burn itself out’ is a bad idea.
When I was a child, I thought of childish things, now that I am a man I am amazed at the childishness of my peers.
Me thinks it is a weasle.
Nothing more need be said.
I wish that all retire to sweet dreams knowing that it will not be so.
Ciao,
@ Krubozumo Nyankoye: Perhaps I shouldn’t be discussing what was on Orac’s mind when he posted this article, but I suspect that he wanted to draw his readership into a discussion about mega-vitamin quackery…for every disease and disorder known to mankind.
Orac, and other science bloggers which Orac has linked to, have discussed the blatant race baiting (the infamous Tuskegee study), that Wakefield and Hooker engaged in, on their videotape.
I cannot speak for Orac or any of the Respectful Insolence commenters, but I worked as a public health nurse clinician-epidemiologist and most of my patients in the public health clinics were non-white, indigent and in need of a medical home for preventive health care, for treatment of chronic conditions…and for treatment of STDs including HIV infections, for tuberculosis and for diseases contracted in their home countries. I have also worked with staff from the CDC and found them to be extremely competent and extremely dedicated to public health for all the inhabitants of the United States (citizens and undocumented aliens).
I am also (an amateur) student of history and your observations and the comments made by other posters about colonialism and xenophobia are correct.
@KN thank you for your thoughtful and insightful comments. I often think about what I would do in such a chaotic situation and thank my stars I live in a part of the world where we can quibble about soccer vs lacrosse for our kids.
Do you have any suggestions or thoughts on how best to help? Not just with the ebola (although that is critical) but with the underlying problems.
This particularly egregious example of misinformation popped up in a quackery group this morning. I’d never heard of Ingri Cassel, and thought this was worth sharing.
Also interesting is that the Hooker-Thompson-Wakefield affair is bundled with the idea that Ebola is a fake pandemic.
TALK SHOW tonight, Sept 17!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
724-444-7444 pin120481
http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/talkCast.jsp?masterId=120481&cmd=tc
9 PM EST; 8 PM CST; 7 PM MST; 6 PM PST.
We are talking about the creation of a fake
pandemic with the attempt to force vaccinate the populace.
We need to move beyond the space of “protecting
me and my own family”. Please join us for
tomorrow’s Talkshow call so we can strategize on
how to effectively wake people up in our own community and state.
Their pandemic plan has been in the works for a
LONG time (over 10 years ago they put the missing
pieces in place which includes all 50 states having MSEHPA laws.)
We suggest that you and everyone on this list
follow Jon Rappoport’s excellent reporting on
both EbolaScare2014 and the CDC Whistleblower at
http://www.nomorefakenews.com/
Received this on an email from a contact. I
cannot verify this information, but it certainly
is interesting and worthy of consideration about the ‘alleged’ Ebola virus.
“There have been a number of articles recently
about the Ebola outbreak but none of them have
looked into one obvious cause. What was happening
in West Africa before Ebola erupted? As well as
conflict and social dislocation, there were three
vaccine programs – Live oral Polio, a Meningitis
vaccine specificallly for Africans (MenAfrVac),
and a fairly new cholera vaccine with booster (2
dose plan). The live oral polio may be given as
often as monthly. Ebola is a viral hemorrhagic
fever with widely-variable effects – death in
some, no symptoms in othhers. A weakened or
over-challenged immune system opens the way for
the worst of the disease. Is it coincidence that
the vaccine programs, whatever their hoped-for
benefit, might have exceeded the limits for many?
“It is certainly true that the vaccine programs
take resources away from primary health care.
Doctors and nurses are offered much higher wages
by programs like these, the GAVI Alliance and
others. This has compounded the response to Ebola
as well as reducing access to local health care when it was most needed.
“As for the new vaccines (“Two Ebola vaccines
on the way†7.9.2014), gene technology used in
the production of one of them means people are
injected with chimpanzee cells along with one of
the Ebola viruses. The chimpanzee cells are used
as vectors to deliver the virus. The effects,
short-term and long-term of these vector vaccines
is still not known. The last people who should be
selected for the new experimental vaccines are
the desperately-needed health-care workers. They
should not be given anything that is not 100%
safe. Nor should anyone else! And the
“coincidence†of Ebola erupting after three
concerted vaccine programs needs proper independent investigation. “
In the Spirit of Truth,
Ingri Cassel, director
Vaccination Liberation
P.O. Box 457
Spirit Lake, Idaho 83869
(208) 255-2307
VacLib.org
VaccineTruth.com
NVICAdvocacy.org
Isn’t Ingri way overdue for her own entry in the Encyclopedia of American Loons?
@ Orac – before this post got hijacked by the vaccine trolls on both sides, I believe you were slamming the idea of high dose IVC for Ebola. As a poster mentioned very early on, IVC reverses endothelial dysfunction. There are numerous animal studies to prove this.
Look at the work by Tyml and Wilson, in sepsis it is thought that a high free radical load uncouples nitric oxide production by inhibiting the enzyme nitric oxide synthetase, the end result of which is organ failure among other things. High dose IVC has been shown by the above researchers and Dr Fowler from a reputable university in Richmond VA. (Look him up, he is a real person and a highly respected doctor).
The exciting thing is that Dr Fowler published in January 2014, the first trial of high dose IVC in human sepsis. Unfortunately it was only a phase 1 study over 4 days but both doses of IVC (50mg/kg/ day and 200mg/kg/day) improved measures of organ failure and ultimately mortality ( although the study was not adequately powered to detect this and as treatment with IVC was halted after 4 days, there was still mortality in the active groups).
This group now has NIH funding to conduct a multi centre follow up phase 2 trial to further this research.
Without understanding at a microscopic level the pathogenesis of Ebola virus it is highly plausible that IVC may prevent endothelial damage and hopefully someone will have the courage to test this.
There are other studies in ICU patients which have showed reduced mortality and pulmonary complications and the Japanese have administered as high as 66mg/kg/hour without reported toxicity.
Just look a little further into it Orac before you open your mouth and you will see that the science behind this has been proven in the published medical literature even if the phase 2/3 studies are still yet to come.
You are nothing but a shill for the fraudulent cabal that is trying to create a genocidal virus, you shi*head.
Go back into your stinking hole and don’t pollute the public discussion of this topicl
You are nothing but a shill for the the murderous cabal that has created what they hope is a genocidal virus. They would never create a genocidal disease that was not easy to cure. They are evil but NOT stupid.
Please go back into the stinking hole you hide in and stop polluting the public discussion of this topic.
In the unlikely event I get infected with Ebola I’ll be trying the high dose vitamin C plan. By high dose I mean 500g per day, diluted and split over 24 doses. There is a sound hypothesis behind the proposed treatment.
Am I convinced it would work? Of course not. However when faced with an incurable virus with an 80% probability of death it seems to be the only proposed treatment that has any merit. I’m willing to spend 50 bucks on a couple kilos of cheap vitamin C powder on this basis.
Got a better idea? I’m all ears.
Didn’t take you long to delete my comment. Well done on being douche bags.
Uh, no. It’s known as you posting a comment that got hung up in moderation while I was asleep. Oh, and pot, kettle, black.
Everybody just relax and rest assured – I got the cure and prevention of Ebola and any other viruses – All of them [Ebola, West Nile, HIV-AIDS, Colds, Flues (no more Flu seasons, etc.), Malaria, Dengue, etc.] can be made absolutely none-existent for everyone – Once everybody starts doing for a minute a day the exercise Personal Virus and Cancer Killer, nobody will give a damn what sort of viruses stalk out there, for everybody will be absolutely untouchable for them and will stay absolutely healthy all the time, all life long – The Virus/Cancer Killer is the deadly Ebola virus (of any strains and mutants) devastating destroyer by which the virus is killed the moment it touches us – Its protein decoy cannot protect it from being destroyed instantly, regardless of the way of its transmission – My Personal Virus and Cancer Killer can eliminate the deadly Ebola disease pandemic crisis for just a few days – Once I am paid the corresponding funds for that.
Ikenstein: “Got a better idea? I’m all ears.”
Stay out of Africa. You are very unlikely to encounter ebola unless you are in the African areas that it has spread to, or are a part of the medical personnel helping an aid worker who has been transported to Emory University.
Virus and Cancer Killer: Go away you greedy little crazy troll.
“Everybody just relax and rest assured – I got the cure and prevention of Ebola and any other viruses ”
Citations needed. Desparately.
Dr. Fowler’s clinical trial publication is found on Pubmed at PMID:24484547. I don’t see anything in the publicationt that suggests high dose vitamin C would be an effective treatment for hemorraghic viruses such as Ebola.
Dr. Fowler hismelf concludes only that
Fruit bats are suspected to be the source of Ebola.
There are only a handful of mammalian species that cannot produce their own Vitamin C, humans and fruit bats among them.
Vitamin C is directly involved in the function of red blood cells.
Fruit bats do not die from Ebola, but humans do.
If fruit bats have a higher amount of vitamin C than humans (by body weight), then high doses of vitamin C should be attempted as a therapeutic or maybe even a cure.
All three patients in America have survived, the last one saying he never even felt like he was dieing. Both patients in Spain have died. It could have been something as simple as vitamin C dosage.
There is more than enough reason to investigate this possibility.
Klenner does sound like a kook but faulty reasoning can sometimes lead to the correct conclusion. It may not be true, but disputing it before it’s been explicitly disproven is just as unscientific as claiming it’s a cure without proof.
“If fruit bats have a higher amount of vitamin C than humans (by body weight), then high doses of vitamin C should be attempted as a therapeutic or maybe even a cure.”
IF
You lost all credibility at the first use of the word “Quack”, and subsequently at the repeated abuse of its derivatives.
Your vitriol does not make you a scientist.
You’re actually right. My vitriol doesn’t make me a scientist. My PhD and published record in the peer-reviewed scientific literature make me a scientist.
LW, I need to stop trying to read the computer screen with my specs off. For a moment I thought you were quoting a recommendation on fruit bats as a therapeutic or even a cure for Ebola.
@Shay, high doses of fruit bats? At least it would be a new and different form of quackery.
@shay – I prefer my fruit bats to be dosed homeopathically.
So many issues to comment on. Vitamin C, Megavitamins, vaccines, silver treatment.
I am currently in my late 70s and in fine health. When I was 15, my 45 year old mother had her varicose veins removed after 7 years of open ankle ulcers. At 30 when I had my first child, I had to lie down at 8 pm to avoid leg pain and veins were starting to spread. Discovered Adelle Davis, tried C, E and other things. In 3 weeks could stand up until midnight, no pain, veins shrank, legs are still fine. Have used supplement ever since.
Regarding C, it is estimated animals produce 2 to 4 grams per day relative to human weight. I am allergic and take 3 to 6 grams/day (30 years). With a cold or flu have taken as much as 20 or 25 grams in a day. An overdose produces burning urine or acid farts at which point one cuts back.
Twenty five years ago I was in the wilderness camping. Came upon an emergency where people were trying to help a woman stung several times in her neck and forgot her allergy kit. Her body was swollen, eyes swollen shut, and was choking and panicked. I gave her 10 grams of C and in 15 minutes the swelling was reduced, she could see and had stopped choking. I stayed with her 8 hours giving 5 g of C every hour. She walked out the next day. I had remembered reading that Dr. Klenner used 50 grams of C to treat rattlesnake bite.
When a child sick with flu, my woman doctor would dip Q tips in Argerole and put them up my nose for 10 minutes. I never got strep throat when she did this, did get it other times.
Regarding vaccinations, I recommend never getting them when feeling sick, and never giving a child more than 3 at one time, also make sure they are well rested and fed.
High vitamin C doses are so unharmful, that it certainly would make sense to use it either orally or intravenously, for a serious viral illness like Ebola, Marburg, Hanta. As I said before, burning urine or acid farts indicate saturation. Your body normally excretes Vitamin C every 5 or 6 hours, so I take mine 3 or 4 times a day.
Hey, you lost all credibility of the first use of “you lost all credibility at the first use of,” so there’s that.
Is no-one concerned about the risk of dementia and parkinsonism from fruit-bat consumption?!
I was curious about this subject because of the recent ebola case in Dallas. It would be hard to think of it as a cure however I wonder if its useful in prevention. I haven’t been sick with cold or flu for a few years. I periodically down a batch of homemade liposomal vitamin C. Before that I would catch everybody’s colds and flu.
And why would it be preventative Greg?
Got any real evidence?
HDB: Considering that the amount of fruitbat consumption is pretty low in the US and Europe, I’d say no. Though wouldn’t the world consumption of fruitbat be pretty low? Seems like they’d be hard to catch, unless you’re an owl. (Even then, the actual consumption of bats by owls is low. Mice are easier and require less calories to catch.)
Of which, as already noted, most simply cannot be absorbed.
^ The declining bioavailability with dose (Fig. 3) is interesting.
Ummm. Apparently, bats are for sale in similar Indonesian markets as well.
To tell the truth, Guam was the only place where fruit-bats were eating cycad seeds and (arguably) accumulating toxins, so they’re probably safe to eat everywhere else. And they’re no longer a problem in Guam because people ate all the fruit-bats.
Krebiozen,blaming others for your kids medical problems?? sounds like a cop out. you sound like a great father
Not at all, PGP. The trick is to rythmically toss bits of gravel up into the air when they start coming out… They’ll concentrate in your general area, sometimes chasing a rock down a little. They usually don’t stay obviously perceptible for long though, but they are there — sometimes, people can here a click click which is the envelope of the wavepackets they send out.
Now that they are in the neighborhood, one must only tie a stone onto the end of a fishing line and let it dangle about the 3/4 the lenght of the fishing pole.
Oscillate the pole in such a manner that the rock swings around in a circle (fast enough so it’s parallel with the ground, naturally) — Bops ’em out of the sky every time. *grins*
Wow! how much money are you receiving from the huge pharmas?
So, can we finally see one single study with high doses of vitamin C against viral diseases, where it doesn’t work?
No?
So you are as stupid with your assumptions as dr. Gifford-Jones is with his.
Uh, and when we are at this, two studies pointing to the POSSIBILITY
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3111558/
http://injectablevitaminc.com/images/Ch23.pdf
even 1% higher survival chance is alot and could save 75 lives so far, so I see no single reason to NOT try treatment that cost few bucks at most
It seems you’ve never learned about the burden of proof.
Just because someone speculates that something is so doesn’t mean that the speculation gets taken to be “true”, “probably true”, or even “somewhat likely to be true” until studies are done to prove it untrue.
This is only more true when the speculation, if it were true, would represent an extraordinary advance for science/technology. It would be extraordinary if we discovered a new substance that was an effective and well-tolerated treatment for viral diseases. Even more extraordinary if the substance was a cheap and plentiful vitamin.
Do you really think that the reasonable position in that situation is “Well, then, because someone speculated that we’ve made this extraordinary advance, anyone who thinks we haven’t is stupid”?
@Antaeus,
That seems to be tomtom’s position.
I also wonder how, given the (relatively) small number of victims for a possible test treatment, we would get enough data to identify a 1% increase in survival with any confidence.
Regarding the capture of fruitbats . . . note that fruitbats have very different behaviors than insect-eating bats, and they are likely much easier to catch, since all you’d need is a trap baited with a few slices of banana.
You’d be hard pressed to find a study that shows that any number of things don’t cure viral diseases, and more specifically don’t cure Ebola. Examples of things not yet proven to not cure Ebola include:
– AZT (and various other anti-retrovirus drugs)
– Aspirin
– antibiotics
– wet, sloppy dog kisses
– pistachios
– bacon
– a positive mental attitude and shared bodily warmth
– selenium
Mephisto — I’d go with bacon.
Bacon and a coffee chaser.
“It seems you’ve never learned about the burden of proof.”
Maybe you should learn about it as well. I can’t say “vitamin C cure ebola”, you can’t say “vitamin C doesn’t cure it”. We both don’t know.
@tomtom – I can say there’s not sufficient evidence to show that vitamin C can cure Ebola nor to show that it’s plausible think it does.
Do you have evidence that it’s sufficiently likely that vitamin C can cure Ebola to make it worth investigating rather than studying the effects of, say, wet slobbery dog kisses?
Sure, and you have two links just above. In one of these studies, IV vitamin C increased survivability from 30% up to 60%. MIlwaukee protocol (one of the very few cases when someone survived rabies) used IV vitamin C as well. Wouldn’t surprise me if they used IV vitamin C in all other cases of successfull rabies treatment.
There’s study where they found extremely high immune response to rabies vaccine, when they combined it with high doses of vitamin C
Then there’s common sense, vitamin C is virtually only and one antioxidant and harmless particle with antiviral properties we can use in megadoses (i.e. 200 grams daily IV).
And then there’s price. How much does this treatment cost, $3?
See how stupid this article looks right now?
Oh, finally someone tested this theory, I’ve been talking about it for years:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2507&dat=19880502&id=1zpAAAAAIBAJ&sjid=U1kMAAAAIBAJ&pg=2418,82500
“but vitamin C is a fraud, don’t test it!!1”
“Oh, finally…”
If by “finally” you mean according to a report from 26 years ago. And replicated how many times since?
Oh, finally someone tested this theory
Ah. A claim in a Glasgow newspaper, from 26 years ago, that an Indian doctor was claiming to cure rabies using vitamin C. This being 16 years earlier than the first generally-accepted report of someone surviving clinical rabies. But the Glasgow Herald described him as “a prominent Indian doctor” so it must be true! Sadly, his breakthrough went unrecognised in any other newspaper or scientific journal and he is otherwise unknown to the Google.
take responsibility,
My son was born with severe spina bifida and hydrocephalus, and his doctors advised against vaccinating him. In the UK at that time there was <a href="a scare about the pertussis vaccine, which resulted in a fall in vaccine uptake below the herd immunity threshold, which led directly to several large outbreaks of whooping cough:
My son was caught up in one of these outbreaks; he was probably infected during one of his many hospital visits for medical problems associated with his spina bifida and hydrocephalus. He was in the hospital for several weeks coughing until he turned blue. It was a horrible experience, not least for him. It is possible that he would have been infected anyway, but it is very much more likely that his whooping cough was caused by the vaccine scare, which proved to be groundless.
Please explain how my poor parenting skills were responsible for any of this, and what I could have done differently to prevent it.
MIlwaukee protocol (one of the very few cases when someone survived rabies) used IV vitamin C as well.
<A href="http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa050382"Bullsh1t.
Let’s try a non-borked description of the Milwaukee Protocol (100% vitamin-C free!):
http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa050382
And then there’s price. How much does this treatment cost, $3?
Something that’s cheap but doesn’t work isn’t a bargain.
In one of these studies, IV vitamin C increased survivability from 30% up to 60%
If you mean the 1975 guinea-pig study, Tomtom, you might want to read it. No IV vitamin C.
@Calli Arcale
Yes. And please don’t go out and bop the bats people. They’re having enough of a time with the nose fungus.
I’d did it once out on the edge of a dock to demonstrate the feasability of it to a friend who was… skeptical. Poor little thing — It was probably 3-4 minutes before it regathered its’ wits and flew off.
I don’t remember, it was ~early 2000s or so, but Canada had a rabies scare and slaughtered millions of bats. I *think* they found maybe two with rabies. I remember thinking that if you slaughtered that many americans you’d find six. At any rate, the only cases of ‘inhalation rabies’ I can recall hearing about were in labs where they were trying to weaponize it.
http://whyfiles.org/2013/stopping-the-slaughter-of-the-bats/
@ TomTom
Did you actually read the two “studies” you cited in your post? The first one has nothing at all to do with the efficacy of Vitman C in the treatment of viruses.
The second one seems very strange and obscure and doesn’t really prove anything.
If you really take the time read the article written by ORAC you will see that he isn’t stating definitively that Vitamin C has no effect in treatments. He is stating that these quacks should refrain from making unproven claims that megadoses of Vitmin C can effectively treat this deadly virus.
It would be simple enough to try an Vitamin C intravenous drip on any Ebola patient. But in fact this is not talked about. If Vitamin C treatment sounds like quackery (it doesn’t to me), then put the ‘cure’ to the test. Lots of tests! If it is quackery, (I don’t think so), then there’s a huge internet conspiracy you need to look into, spreading lies about vitamin C’s efficacy at killing viruses. If Ebola escapes into the general populations of the world, does anyone think that vitamin C will remain on the shelves? People should learn how to make their own liposomal vitamin C. No, the disaster could be that vitamin C therapy works. Gee, but what happens to the big pharmaceutical companies if vitamin C therapy actually works? This is a no brainer. What I don’t get is the author’s seething hatred over a treatment that a Nobel Prize winning chemist (Pauling) would suggest as possibly useful.
http://www.doctorsresearch.com/articles4.html
It sounds to me like it’d be a bit like stating “I want a vitamin B.”
In a similar vein, the proliferation of LOLcat images across the Intertubes prove that cats can speak (albeit with poor spelling and grammar), because the only alternative is “a huge internet conspiracy”.
@Thomas,
I, for one, have no objection to having a randomized double blind test of the effectiveness of vitamin C to cure Ebola. Come up with a protocol, get an IRB to sign off, get funding, and convince some agencies to conduct the test on the ground. I’m hoping for good results.
Note: if you’re just going to say we should give everyone vitamin C because, like chicken soup, it couldn’t hurt – that’s not particularly useful for settling the question of whether it works or not.
It’s more than a little worrying that state-of-the-art medical care was unable to save the first ebola victim shipped back to the US.
I believe any patient on an intensive treatment unit gets plenty of vitamin C in IV infusions, by the way, based on conversations with an ITU nurse a while ago.
It is quite amusing to go down the “liposomal” vitamin C trail. The DIY types think they are making liposomes by mixing some ascorbic acid with lecithin in an ultrasonic cleaner, and perhaps they actually are. But then what happens to the lecithin when ingested? Has it somehow become resistant to digestion so that the liposomes don’t spill their guts in the gut? The Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State U. says “data regarding the bioavailability of liposomal-encapsulated vitamin C are not currently available.” The DIYers claim 93% absorption vs. 19% for regular ascorbic acid, but other sources say 70-90% absorption of ascorbic acid at up to 180mg/day, falling to 50% at 1g/day. One DIY site recommends making 100 daily doses from a tablespoon of ascorbic acid, which would be about 8 grams based on bulk density numbers I could find. So one dose is 80 milligrams of vitamin C. That would put it in the 70%+ absorption category, or the equivalent of a small cheap tab of ready-to-use vitamin C. I’ll have to look next time I’m at the vendor’s, but I suspect it is difficult to buy C tables of less than 100 milligrams. I know it is easy to find 0.5g and 1g sizes.
I even ran across one site claiming greater availability from DIY liposomal C than intravenous C. It’s magic!
I’m not a prolific blogger!
But, after taking some time to write up a reply to Carol Hoernlein (http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/blog/ebola-on-my-mind/#comment-1622088627), I decided to post it on my blog and share it here.
http://johnrharstine.wordpress.com/2014/10/09/my-thoughts-about-ebola/
Please keep bashing supplements and natural cures. In the meantime I keep on curing people in my environment so they don’t actually have to take drugs anymore.
I cured a friend of hypothyroidism (fully dropped his synthroid and feels much better), my brother of severe asthma and hay fever (had 3 different types of medication, now none and no, no
symptoms), my mom from menopause flashes and myself from chronic fatigue.
Did you guys once thought about the fact that patents skew research towards patentable stuff? So that natural remedies never get the attention they deserve? Natural remedies can not be patented? Medicine seldomly actually cure? A docters education mainly is about medicine and symptom management? That docters know shit about nutrition?
Please keep on bashing natural remedies, I hope we can remove some ignorant, arrogant-know-it-all people from the gene pool.
People are dying of Ebola without effective treatment, and vitamin C is cheap and harmless, and Dr Fred Klenner was a very reputable graduate of Duke University Medical School, so why not try intravenous or liposomal vitamin C against Ebola? It seems both immoral and irrational not to try it.
I suppose that if one considered EBOV patients to exist solely for the purpose of validating the magic powers of vitamin C, you’d have a point.
Hoping that people who think your random cure testimonials amount to exactly nothing will die childless or, should they have managed this task, that their progeny will die childless so that a new naturopathic race can, Lo, be born upon A Cleansed Earth – which would seem to have to be mostly populated by paying customers – is an impressive extension of the “I hope you get cancer” routine.
Did you ever consider that your alleged techniques are 100% patentable?
Or are you just kind of winging it but coming up aces every time? Like a psychic? Do tell.
Yeah, that’s why natural substances are at the origin of a lot of mainstream drugs. Aspirin, digitaline, opiates, taxol…
Yeah, there is no profit in vitamins and suchlike. No incentive at all.
*walking down the health&nutrition shelves in the local supermarket*
Err, wait, reality doesn’t seem to abide to your beliefs…
It’s a pity that there is no way for the pharmaceutical companies to profit from the sales of all that Vitamin C they manufacture! Fortunately they continue to produce it, presumably out of the goodness of their hearts.
Every animal on this planet except guinea pigs and a fruit bat produce vitamin C in the body. Humans do not. When animals get sick from viral or bacterial infections they produce Vit C to fight off sickness. We need to get it from food but we do not and we get sick.I researched vitamin C reading volumes of books on the subject and started taking it with my wife and many family members and we DO NOT GET SICK for past 5 years.I have seen the flu cured in 24 hrs using vitamin C. Dr Cathcart treated over 12,000 patients with vit C. I go with 2 Nobel prize winner Dr Linus Pauling who has like 56 doctorates, considered the father of modern chemistry, (Science magazine saying that he and Einstien were the two smartest scientists of last century )before this hack piece. Vitamin C cured my acid reflux, back problems,skin problems, lowered my cholesterol from 240 to 170 and in right ratios, and eliminated all my allergies, besides not getting sick. Dr Klenner was one of the top of his class at Duke University and St Vincents college, not some country hick. How much did big pharma pay you?
Jack – I don’t take vitamin C and I haven’t been sick to speak of for 5 years either.
And please learn how to write and use paragraphs. I don’t say this very often, but dude! – your stream of text looks like you’re deranged or on speed.
Jin at #108 offered the same fruitbat-related observation as Jack at #164, albeit with more paragraph breaks. It seems to be enjoy wide currency among Vitamin-C enthusiasts in lieu of evidence.
Jack #164 how much is Big Supplement paying you?
I’m pretty sure that most mammals “produce” vitamin C as part of standard operating procedure. Do you have anything to demonstrate that this is upregulated in the face of infection?
Wait, you’ve contradicted yourself in the space of two sentences. Do animals that synthesize their own ascorbate get sick or not?
@jack
Ah, the old pharma shill gambit, a sure sign that your assertions are without merit and that you are a quack.
The vitamin C thing is not without precedent. On 60 minutes, there was a segment on a man from new zealand who had H1N1 and leukemia. He was in coma and was about to be taken off life support but the family went to court for IV Vitamin C. It cured him of both the virus and the cancer and he is well today. I have been treated by an integrated MD in Reno who specializes in using IV vitamin C as adjunctive therapy in cancer. At his office, I actually met 2 patients who were given a a very short time to live, but had survived several years with mega IV vitamin C. There are several case studies on PubMed echoing this. Yes, it is negligent to say that it can cure Ebola, but it might be worth investigating.
I guess I did not differentiate between oral and IV Vitamin C. Oral will not work and high doses will cause diarrhea. Liposomal, I am not sure.
@orac – Please let me just say this about that:
You, sir, are a discredit to the universe of scientists AND bloggers.
Why would you go to such effort to discredit a treatment that has, to your own assessment, been neither proven NOR disproven?
You use words based on ‘quack’ no less than eight times, once you begin talking about vitamin C. Where is YOUR proof?
Can you show ANY in-depth studies of truly mega-doses of vitamin C that showed a significant lack of efficacy?
I can only offer my own, personal testimony as to the POTENTIAL benefits I MAY have received from vitamin C. I will do so here:
I contracted West Nile Virus, most likely on Labor Day 2012. I was asymptomatic for the first week. I then developed a macular rash that did not itch, but was present over my entire body.
Around day 13, I began to experience double-vision. Everything was clearly focused, but I couldn’t resolve the images from both eyes into a single image. It was at this point I presented to my local ER on the advice of a Dial-A-RN service my healthcare insurer provided.
To condense the next bit, I was admitted that night, spent 4 days on an IV with Vicodin for pain & fever. The fluid samples came back positive for WNV, including the spinal fluid they drew the first night in the ER. The hospital sent me home to ‘get rest and plenty of fluids’ with no other suggestion for treatment. I was febrile at 102.7
I was unable to concentrate on even a video game for 7 days further. I could only wake up enough to maybe eat, take pain meds, almost crawl to the bathroom and then back to bed. It was unthinkable life would ever return to normal.
At this point (after 7 days at home in bed,) I could barely manage to focus long enough to pull my laptop in front of me and do a google search for ‘west nile virus treatment,’ shortly finding that the AMA offers no such treatment suggestions.
On further searching, google, at one point, suggested ‘west nile vitamin c’ as an offer to autocomplete, based on other popular searches. I thought ‘why not?’
After another several minutes, I found many resources about vitamin C in general, and what exactly ‘megadosing’ might have meant. When I finally learned that the only potential downside to ingesting too much vitamin C would likely be loose bowels, I had my friend bring me a bottle of 1000mg vitamin C tablets from Walgreen’s and took 12 (12,000mg) immediately.
I proceeded to take 12,000mg per hour for the next 4 hours and crashed for the night. I never experienced ‘bowel saturation’ during this time.
When I woke up the next day, I actually felt clear-headed. The cloud had lifted and I could focus on my computer again. I continued my research online and ultimately ordered the book: “Vitamin C: The Real Story” from Amazon. I also ordered several bottles of 1000mg vitamin C as well.
I continued taking 10-12g of vitamin C every hour throughout the day. I consumed 130g by the end of the day and never experienced bowel saturation.
I awoke feeling even better. I could get out of bed and sit upright in the living room again. I continued with the 10g/hr rate of consumption and then determined what was meant by ‘bowel saturation’ that evening. I had consumed 90g that third day and was feeling so much better, it became difficult to remember to TAKE the vitamin C regularly. I reduced my dosage and also became sporadic in my consumption to 5g/hr and likely had an average of 25g/day for the next week or two.
That was my experience. Today, I still take vitamin C at a rate of unto 2g / hr, whenever I think about it. I have a big bottle on my desk and realistically get around 6-10g/day.
I would LOVE to see some of the government research dollars we typically WASTE go to a university to study the true ‘mega-dose’ treatments talked about by Klenner, et al. I can’t imagine why no one, to date, has ever tried to replicate the results as described.
But to completely dismiss it, out of hand and without supporting research proving it is NOT efficacious is disingenuous, at best, and potentially criminally negligent at worst.
If you’d like to discuss this, I’d be open to a phone call… Reply here with an alternate direct email & I’ll send you my #.
Thanks,
Jim
Jim T: Interestingly, your experience with West Nile Virus is almost identical to what my grandmother experienced, but with one key difference: she didn’t take Vitamin C supplements. So since both she and you had the same results but only you took the supplement, I’m a wee bit skeptical that the vitamin C actually made you better. Honestly, dude, you’re not giving your own body enough credit.
@Calli Arcale: No kidding?!?
I had never heard anyone else’s story regarding WNV… there aren’t that many cases, thank goodness.
That is why I suggested the positive results MAY have been due to the vitamin C consumption.
One of the things that still puzzles me is the very-high rates of oral ingestions that were tolerated during the illness. If I took 5g right now, I’d be in the bathroom within 30 minutes. If my body wasn’t using the vitamin C for anything, why did it accept so much?
Regardless, thanks for the quick reply and additional information!
I just think that SOMEONE should actually DO the double blind study. I would like to know the truth as much as anyone. 😉
As an afterthought, next time you talk with your grandmother, ask her if she recalls any distinctive odor being released in her sweat while she was ill. I swear I could actually smell the results of the virus on my skin… anywhere — the back of my hands, my arms, etc. My wife could not perceive it, but she does not possess a very sensitive sense of smell.
Thanks again!
FWIW I think I have related here before that I took 5 grams of vitamin C three times a day for several years (the idea is to keep a steady state blood level by frequent dosing). I also played around with making ‘liposomal’ ascorbate using lecithin and an ultrasonic cleaner, but didn’t notice any miraculous (or any other) effects from it, disappointingly.
Each time I experimentally stopped taking vitamin C I got a cold not long after, and no colds while taking it, and I convinced myself that the vitamin C was preventing colds. My annual hay fever also disappeared at this time, which I also assumed was due to the vitamin C. The I got a bad cold while still taking the vitamin C that didn’t respond to diarrhea-inducing doses.
That shook my belief in the stuff, and I stopped taking it, about 5 years ago now, and I haven’t noticed any difference at all in my health at all since I stopped taking it. I very rarely get colds, my chronic sinus problems didn’t change one iota, and my hay fever didn’t return.
I conclude that I had fooled myself into believing the vitamin C was helping, but it wasn’t. The colds I got when I stopped taking it were either coincidental, or perhaps due to mild scurvy which has been reported when people stop taking large doses of ascorbate which might have knocked my immune system off balance.
I just looooooooooove it when some moron who can’t even be bothered to read the existing comments and realize that their objection has already been presented and demolished comes waltzing in hurling personal insults.
You, Jim T., are a discredit to everyone who reached the end of their teen years and clued in that maybe they didn’t know everything.
Orac, you are such a snake. How much are the drug companies paying you????
I’m pretty sure this is a garbled version of “leukocytosis,” as even this credulous account suggests:
“Chest Xrays showed the lungs were completely filled with fluid with an ‘opaque’ appearance called ‘white out’.”
Nope, no going to court, neither.
Yawn!
Michele Wright, can’t you come up with something more original the old tired and boring Pharma Shill Gambit? Have you ever considered using evidence and data instead of random insults?
How much are you drawing from the teat of Big Suppla, Michele?
@Michelle – please don’t act like the Supplement Industry isn’t a Multi-Billion dollar profit-making machine…..how much money do they spend on “research?” – here’s a hint (it isn’t much)….
On 60 minutes, there was a segment on a man from new zealand who had H1N1 and leukemia.
I can’t find a transcript for that episode, and I am certainly not wasting time and braincells *watching* it, so I have no idea whether the “leukemia” contribution to the failcake was Melanie Reid’s own incomprehension (a journamalist garble a clinical symptom? Unpossible!) or was added as “corroborative fiddlesticks” later within the human centipede of Alt-Health blogging.
There seem to be two versions circulating, with Alan Smith being *misdiagnosed* with leukemia in one version (because ha ha doctors are incompetent), while in the other one he *did* have leukemia but Vitamin C cured it as well as curing the H1N1. Talk about burying the lede.
the lungs were completely filled with fluid with an ‘opaque’ appearance called ‘white out’.
If your lungs are full of Wite-Out it’s time to stop sniffing the Tipp-ex.
Orac, you are such a snake.
If this were coming from Lord Draconis Zeneca, I would interpret it as a compliment.
Interesting how Ebola is now being successfully treated by the blood transfusions of an Ebola patient who is also a doctor. Time has proven that the only “quack” is the one who wrote this article. I do do thank him for the loads of info on vitamin C cures, though. LOL
Except that no one knows if those transfusions are actually working, Paul. They may be a contributing factor or they might not…it is too early to tell.
Paul, no one knows if those transfusions actually contributed to the recovery. It’s too early to tell.
Crap. Double post ,
Ebola is now being successfully treated by the blood transfusions of an Ebola patient who is also a doctor. Time has proven that the only “quack” is the one who wrote this article.
Say what? The original post said nothing about blood transfusions or “second-hand antibodies”, being devoted to a different topic; therefore the purported success of blood transfusion proves that the author of the original post was wrong?
Perhaps I am missing something here.
Paul – I agree with you, because antibodies gained from the plasma of someone who has survived Ebola (or were grown in a tobacco plant) are just exactly like vitamin C. Except for not being ascorbate. Or being a vitamin. Hmmm, wait…
Basically all animals that lack L-gulonolactone oxidase are severely affected by Ebola. Dogs have this enzyme. Humans, primates, bats, and guinea pigs do not. What does this enzyme do? It makes vitamin C. The mechanism is there for vitamin c being a treatment for Ebola.
You’re an idiot. I wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for IV vitamin C and bear testimony to it’s effectiveness. All other drugs and “treatments” failed epically, yet the lowly intravenous ascorbate molecule at which you scoff came to the rescue. That’s embarrassing for you. This is exactly the problem with so-called “medical science” – there is actually very little science going on. You’re not interested in the pursuit of truth regardless of how offensive it may be to your presuppositions. You are only concerned with clinging to the religious dogma of “medicine”. (How’s that working for you, by the way? Everyone getting better? No? Shit.) The annals of history will bear scathing witness your shortsightedness, arrogance, and stupidity.
Herr Doktor Bimler- Second paragraph,third sentence: “Oftedal went one step farther and actually recommended getting blood or other bodily fluid from an Ebola victim as the starting material and then homeopathically diluting it away to nothing. He then recommended using it to prevent and treat Ebola virus disease.”. Buy some reading glasses, Herr Bimler!!!
@Gibran,
Guineapigs get Ebola? No animals other than primates, bats, and guineapigs are severely affected by Ebola? You know this how?
What good would blood or other bodily fluids do in creating a homeopathic remedy for Ebola?
Homeopathy says ‘like cures like’, not ‘same cures same’. You would need something that causes the same symptoms, not the thing causing the symptoms.
If it’s the Ebola virus you are after in the sample, it won’t work, because it’s the same as what you are trying to get rid of. If it’s the Ebola antibodies your after, they won’t work either, because they don’t cause any symptoms that I know of. You might have a cure for diarrhea (but probably not), but you won’t have a cure for Ebola.
Would you scammers please develop a little consistency?
@paul
And where was this said exactly? Also, how is this supported by actual science?
Get some elementary school science education, paul, you really do need it.
@LW Guinea Pigs are used to study ebola. “Pathogenesis of Experimental Ebola Virus Infection in Guinea Pigs” http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/179/Supplement_1/S203.full
novalox: “Also, how is this supported by actual science?”
The antibodies from the plasma of someone who survived Ebola could help someone who has the infection. This is apparently what they did in the late 1970s (heard on an early “This Week in Virology podcast, a nurse came back from Africa with it, survived and they used her plasma to help someone who got in the lab). It is a real thing, and has nothing to do with homeopathy:
http://news.sciencemag.org/africa/2014/08/who-ponders-treating-ebola-infected-people-blood-survivors
@LW Bats are reservoirs of Ebola. http://www.wired.com/2014/10/bats-ebola-disease-reservoir-hosts/
And Bat soup is most likely implicated in the latest spread of Ebola.
http://www.livescience.com/44402-bat-soup-ebola-virus-outbreak.html
“Oftedal went one step farther and actually recommended getting blood or other bodily fluid from an Ebola victim as the starting material and then homeopathically diluting it away to nothing“
I.e. no transfusion of actual blood; no connection with the transfusions reported by Paul #184.
@Chris
Thanks for the link. My issue with paul is the statement that homeopathy was responsible for helping the patient.
It has nothing to do with homeopathy or Vitamin C and everything to do with immunology and lab work.
Novalox, exactly. He was warping reality to fit his fantasy.
Buy some reading glasses, Herr Bimler!!!
I will have you know that these eyes are of finest Tleilaxu manufacture.
Testimony is next to worthless for evaluating the effectiveness of a treatment.
Testimony is completely worthless when you don’t even mention the diagnosis.
[ObPossDup]
If you insist.
If Bats are truly the “primary” reservoir for Ebola, then they wouldn’t be “severely affected” by it…..any good disease knows not the kill the host.
“these eyes are of finest Tleilaxu manufacture”
I’m envious. I gotta have a tear down and rebuild soon, and all I’m likely to get are some bits of acrylic.
Paul Verse 192 is a total non-sequitur to Verse 184.
I’d thank Gibran for the six-month-old heads-up about “LiveScience” apparently being completely brain-dead, but given that I’ve never heard of it, I suppose it’s more of a wash.
Hint: Heating destroys the pathogen.
I’d refresh my memory about certain key events, but that would only serve to obscure one rather serious issue with the whole “basically all animals that lack L-gulonolactone oxidase are severely affected [sic] by Ebola” routine:
What’s the deal with the duikers, Gibran?
@Gibran, all you’ve shown is that “basically all animals that lack L-gulonolactone oxidase” *get* Ebola. As Lawrence points out, bats can’t be severely affected if they are indeed the reservoir host. But you could equally well say that “basically all animals that lack L-gulonolactone oxidase” get rabies. It’s true (as long as we restrict “animal” to “mammal” as you appear to be doing) but it doesn’t prove anything about the connection between L-gulonolactone oxidase and rabies. Likewise you need to show that no other animals are severely affected by Ebola and you have not done that.
@Paul, the homeopath wanted to use blood etc from Ebola *patients*; the real doctor used blood from Ebola *survivors*. There is a meaningful difference that makes the homeopath a quack and the real doctor not a quack. Besides everything else about homeopathy that makes the homeopath a quack.
[…] too, such as homeopaths seriously claiming that they can treat Ebola and quacks advocating high dose vitamin C to “cure” Ebola. The über-quack Mike Adams is selling a “natural biopreparedness” kit to combat Ebola and […]
“Has anyone ever noticed how quack claims are so difficult to track down.”
@ORAC
I would suggest you review the literature. Here is a good place to start:
http://seanet.com/~alexs/ascorbate/
Maybe after you get done with this you can provide me with a reference showing that high dose oral vitamin C (the protocol described by Dr. Cathcart) or high dose IV Vitamin C is ineffective in treating any viral disease? If not maybe you can explain why these studies have never been done? Surely with the billions of dollars that gets wasted on medical research every year someone could spare a little to study the claims of a man who was considered one most important scientists of the 20th century, Linus Pauling.
Also 60 Minutes has covered a story of a man who cured of Swine Flu by Vitamin C after he was left for dead by his doctors who wanted to turn off his life support.
Is this still at least enough evidence to conduct a trial?
What is with these vitamin C quacks? Where do they get so many people who have no concept of how science actually works? Did they grow up in Topsy-Turvy-Land, where an absolute absence of snow on the ground is the sign to start shoveling, dying of starvation is the indication to stop eating so much food, and science is about accepting every cockamamie idea until studies are done to prove the null hypothesis??
Science is not an aristocracy, where a hypothesis is presumed to inherit the title of “scientific” because its Papa was Linus Pauling.
“The central dogma of orthomolecular medicine seems to be that if some nutrient is good, megadoses of that nutrient are much better and can cure anything. ”
No, this is not the premise of orthomolecular medicine. From orthomed.org: “Orthomolecular medicine, as conceptualized by double-Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, aims to restore the optimum environment of the body by correcting imbalances or deficiencies based on individual biochemistry, using substances natural to the body such as vitamins, minerals, amino acids, trace elements and fatty acids.”
You criticize the qualifications of doctors supporting orthomolecular medicine in this post. What are your qualifications that justify allowing you to criticize one of the most important scientists of the 20th century?
Antaeus, read all the research articles in the link I posted. If this isn’t enough to justify further research, could you please explain what is? Also watch the video I posted.
For your knowledge, I have worked in academic research labs. The best method to validate a theory is by designing experiments which attempt to disprove it. If these experiments fail, the theory has validity. Medical trials seem to always take the opposite approach and design trials attempting to prove the latest drug is effective.
In practice, it is, regardless of what the Orthomolecular website says. I can give many examples. Basically, orthomolecular medicine involves vitamins, minerals, supplements, etc., and, quite often, megadoses of these things.
A suggestion Matt, which would actually advance the shared dialogue.
Rather than challenge everyone else to prove a negative–i.e., provide evidence demonstrating that that high dose oral vitamin C rt) or high dose IV Vitamin C is ineffective in treating any viral disease–simply share with us what you personally consider to be the single most credible, most compelling piece of evidence demonstrating high dose vitamin C is safe and effective at treating viral diseases and we’ll discuss it.
Matt, you just hit my pet peeve with
Question the first – What qualifications should a person have to be allowed to criticize Linus Pauling? Or Bob Hoskins? Or Confucius? Or Orac?
Question the second – Is there a test I should take if I intend to criticize you for setting up imaginary restrictions on discourse?
Question the third – How do we know you are qualified enough to criticize Orac’s criticizing of somebody else?
JGC the protocol described by Dr Cathcart is what you should read first: http://vitamincfoundation.org/www.orthomed.com/titrate.htm
The 60 minutes video I posted is a good watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTXSTGGRvKY
The Ascorbate Historical Reference
http://seanet.com/~alexs/ascorbate/
Dr. Thomas Levy’s Book “Curing the Incurable: Vitamin C, Infectious Diseases, and Toxins” is very good and cites over 1,200 scientific references.
http://www.amazon.com/Curing-Incurable-Vitamin-Infectious-Diseases/dp/1401069630
Gaist, I did not open the qualification door and start the discussion down that path. Orac did by questioning Dr. Cathcart’s qualifications.
JGC, also have a look at this study:
“The effectiveness of vitamin C in preventing and relieving the symptoms of virus-induced respiratory infections.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10543583
I saw it more as pointing out errors in Dr. Gifford-Jones’s writing, rather than making a blanket statement about Dr. Cathcart’s qualifications. With insolence,
thoughnaturally.And also should remember to not post anything right after coming home from an annoying workday…
Also
“Vitamin C Is an Essential Factor on the Anti-viral Immune Responses through the Production of Interferon-α/β at the Initial Stage of Influenza A Virus (H3N2) Infection”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3659258/
Or how about
“Vitamin C deficiency increases the lung pathology of influenza virus-infected gulo-/- mice.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16988135
JGC, for some reason my original reply to you was not approved and posted. You should read Dr. Cathcart’s hypothesis first:
“Vitamin C, Titrating to Tolerance”
http://vitamincfoundation.org/www.orthomed.com/titrate.htm
It’s so cute when people who pop by with Very Serious Objections don’t bother to read what has gone before.
Is there some reason that nobody ever bothers to clarify that this was the New Zealand “60 Minutes”?
So, having scurvy makes it harder to fight influenza? Gee. Who’d’ve thunk it. Next you’ll be telling me that it’s harder to fight influenza if you’re dying of dehydration!
Seriously, that mice with a vitamin C deficiency suffer more from lung infections than well-fed mice is not exactly evidence that vitamin C megadoses will cure influenza. A car factory needs to put four tires on every car for them to work properly, but giving them fifty tires for every car is not going to increase production — four per car is the maximum they can make use of. So the fact that vitamin C is necessary for production of immune system cells doesn’t mean there’s any value to giving you more than your body can actually use.
Narad it was posted that this was New Zealand 60 Minutes already. The video had not been posted so I posted the link.
An example of what I like to call “the haystack gambit”. “I hereby assert that the evidence proving me to be absolutely right is to be found somewhere here in this haystack. Now, simply by virtue of me asserting that, suddenly the burden of proof is on you to examine every single thing in that haystack which I might be considering to be my evidence, and refute each and every bit individually.”
Provably, it didn’t do you any good.
Even if it were true that medical trials do not follow the “attempt to disprove the null hypothesis” model, and frankly your word has no weight whatsoever in establishing that proposition, it would be irrelevant to what you are trying to assert, that mainstream science has the burden of disproving what you want to be true.
I was wondering what this entry was doing in the Journal of Manipulative & Physiological Therapeutics until I looked at the genuine item, which informs the reader that it was conducted by two chiropractors.
“Conclusion: Vitamin C in megadoses administered before or after the appearance of cold and flu symptoms relieved and prevented the symptoms in the test population compared with the control group.”
Let’s compare with something a bit higher in the evidence hierarchy:
“The failure of vitamin C supplementation to reduce the incidence of colds in the normal population indicates that routine mega-dose prophylaxis is not rationally justified for community use. But evidence shows that it could be justified in persons exposed to brief periods of severe physical exercise and/or cold environments. Also, the consistent and statistically significant small benefits on duration and severity for those using regular vitamin C prophylaxis indicates that vitamin C plays some role in respiratory defence mechanisms. The trials in which vitamin C was introduced at the onset of colds as therapy did not show any benefit in doses up to 4 grams daily, but one large trial reported equivocal benefit from an 8 gram therapeutic dose at onset of symptoms.”
Calli,
Mice naturally produce their own Vitamin C unlike humans so Gulo (-/-) mice must be studied.
“Who’d’ve thunk it. Next you’ll be telling me that it’s harder to fight influenza if you’re dying of dehydration!”
Exactly Calli, this is the whole premise of Orthomolecular medicine. Patients with influenza have very low blood levels of Vitamin C. Large doses must be given to restore blood levels to a normal range when a person is very sick.
Matt, clearly you’ve misunderstood my request.
I’m not asking for the statement of a hypothesis, or a proposed protocol for treating viral infections with high dose vitamin C, or for an archived 60 Minutes video, or the title of a popular press book which includes a list of multiple scientific references.
I’m not asking for a historic review of ascobate references. That whole Gish-gallop approach to teh issue is a large part of what I’m trying to avoid to advance the discussion in a meaningful way.
What I have asked you to identify is whatever you personally consider to be the single most credible and compelling piece of scientific evidence (presumably in the form of a peer-reviewed journal publication) demonstrating that high dose vitamin C is effective as a treatment for viral infection.
I note you do directly cited an individual study, “Vitamin C deficiency increases the lung pathology of influenza virus-infected gulo-/- mice”, but I sincerely hope you don’t consider this to be that one best piece of evidence since it makes no attempt to evaluate the efficacy of high dose vitamin C in treating viral infection at all.
I’m asking you to identify
No, it was not: “On 60 minutes, there was a segment on a man from new zealand who had H1N1 and leukemia.”
Strange that you made no mention of addressing a lacuna when you trotted it out (or when you plugged it the second time):
“The trials in which vitamin C was introduced at the onset of colds as therapy did not show any benefit in doses up to 4 grams daily”
4 grams daily is not enough to produce any benefits when a person has a cold. Like I said, you need to read Dr. Cathcart’s paper first.
Sorry Narad, I didn’t realize human physiology was different in New Zealand.
Anyone have access (and the stomach for reading) the paper from the chiropractic journal?
For openers, what is a “virus-induced respiratory infection?” Why “induced?” It gives me the impression of an infection where the original pathogen is no longer involved.
The abstract is just full of fail. The “control” group appears to be from one year, the test group from another (’cause we all know cold viruses are the same every year.) All evaluation seems to be by self-reporting. Not a single mention of “placebo” is made. The language of the abstract is sloppy, e.g. “Overall, reported flu and cold symptoms in the test group decreased 85% compared with the control group after the administration of megadose Vitamin C.” Do they mean that the Vitamin C was only 85% as effective as the other treatment?
JGC I don’t think you can establish credibility from just one study or one source. This is the premise of how science works. Repeatable results from different sources establishes credibility. This is why I provided you with many different references from different sources.
Would you care to demonstrate this?
I’m not asking you to do that, however–I’m simply asking you to begin by identifying what you consider to be the best single study (not source, BTW, best study).
If you can’t at the least identify a single study that’s documents credible and compelling evidence that high dose vitamin is an effective treatment, I don’t see what value offering multiple studies that fail to document such evidence would be.
Then why did you cite a study that used 3 g daily after a single 6 g “induction”?
Sorry, but I do not need to satisfy your imaginary prerequisites to point out that a systematic review trumps two chiropractors.
“Would you care to demonstrate this?”
Narad start here:
http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/hemila/metabolism/
“I’m simply asking you to begin by identifying what you consider to be the best single study”
The problem is that governments and health organizations refuse to conduct the proper studies that need to be done.
There are many good sources of clinical evidence which I have already posted links to.
@Narad #204,
That fucking lamed. Are you a Hypnotist??
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-9mCAA1YYY
{sublimaxions indeed …. go ask your {X} tomorrow… that ^^ shit breaks it for sure, though}
Jim T:
I apologize; I didn’t see your response from 10/13 until now.
I know exactly two people who have had it. Well, “know” might be a bit of a stretch, as one is a colleague of a relative that I met briefly at a party once. He did not fare well with it. He survived, but had long-lasting problems. My grandmother . . . we often joke that death must be scared of her, because she’s survived so many illnesses. I mean, she has really poor health with her lousy diet (she’s a picky eater), severe asthma, major problems due to heavy cortisone use . . . . Yet she came out of the WNV pretty much okay. We were all getting ready to say goodbye (again) and she survived. More on that in a moment….
I don’t recall any strange smells when visiting her in the hospital. Mind you, if you were the only one smelling it, the sensation might not have been due to an actual odor — WNV affects the brain, after all, so it would be plausible it could temporarily derange your senses. (Or permanently, if you are less fortunate; there are people who came out of it with significant brain damage, like the other guy I know who had it.)
Unfortunately, I can’t ask her. She won’t remember. She’s still alive (death is scared of her, I swear!) but a couple of years ago suffered a stroke. We all got ready to say goodbye then, and visited her one at a time in the ICU. She did a lot better than doctors expected, but she never regained the use of her legs or the ability to swallow most foods. She was released to a nursing home, and has been bouncing around from home to home; now, after a couple of escape attempts she’s in a memory care unit. She’s been gradually declining. Two years ago, she still recognized everybody. Last year, she was a bit more hit-or-miss, and often mixed up people’s identities (she drifts in a time a bit, so she’d often think I was her daughter, while she’d think my mom was *her* mom). This year, she usually doesn’t even try to guess who we are. We’re just people who visit. She likes it when we visit; she’s s social butterfly and has always loved meeting people. That’s the good part; she loves meeting people, so thanks to her memory problems she gets to do it all the time. 😉 But it’s hard to watch. And between her picky eating and her serious difficulties in swallowing, she’s lost a tremendous amount of weight. Before she lost her marbles, she worked out a living will saying she did not want a feeding tube placed for any significant length of time, so it seems likely she’ll ultimately starve to death, when she stops eating altogether.
One cool bit, though: they usually say that if someone is like this, you shouldn’t stress them by taking them to parties. Well, she’s the opposite. She’s a massive extrovert, so taking her to parties is the best thing for her — and it never really bothered her to go to a party where she didn’t know anybody, so having forgotten people was no problem for her. My cousin’s wedding last summer, she didn’t really recognize very many people, but she did recognize a few! First time I’d seen her do that in a long time; the party atmosphere had energized her. And she clearly was having a grand time. They didn’t bring her to the reception; just the ceremony. She really doesn’t have the stamina for anything longer than that. But she felt like the queen of the ball all the same. My grandfather’s funeral the previous summer was like that too, though she was remembering people better, and was actually able to remember that it was her husband’s funeral for the whole time. (She handled it very well. But she didn’t have to go through much grief. This silver lining of memory loss is that within a week, she’d forgotten that he had passed, and instead was convinced he was on a business trip. These days, I’m not sure she even remembers him at all, which is very sad; they had an amazing love, those two.)
Matt:
You’re being disingenuous. I’m calling you out on using a trivially obvious finding (that your body doesn’t work as well when you’ve got a vitamin deficiency) as evidence that you can cure diseases other than vitamin deficiency with vitamin megadoses. But it doesn’t follow. The genetically engineered mice, who need vitamin C in their diets, suffer from scurvy; they demonstrated how this makes them more vulnerable to influenza, but this isn’t a feature unique to scurvy. Asthma also makes people more vulnerable to influenza. So does a history of smoking or occupational exposure to fine particles. This is useful information from a scientific standpoint, but it doesn’t mean there is a value to orthomolecular medicine — which does NOT say merely that having a vitamin deficiency is bad for you. You are misrepresenting it here, probably to give it a veneer of respectability.
Orthomolecular medicine claims that most disease is caused by nutritional imbalance, and can be treated by correcting the imbalance with vitamin megadoses (far beyond what is actually needed in the diet). But it’s obviously not true that all disease is caused by deficiencies. In fact, very few diseases are caused by nutritional deficiencies, and consequently very few can be remedied by supplementation — and even in those cases, megadosing is not generally helpful.
The average American does not have scurvy, and isn’t even anywhere near having scurvy. If they get influenza, giving them lots of vitamin C is not going to do any good. It’s a waste of time and money. If you want to give them vitamin C, give them an orange. At least it tastes good.
Are you now saying that you can’t provide a citation to a creadible and compelling study demonstrating high doses of vitamin C safely and effectively treats viral infections, because no studiesdemonstrating this have been done?
Why not go to one of those good sources, then and select a representative report documenting clinical evidence that high dose vitamin C is effective?
Sorry Narad, I didn’t realize human physiology was different in New Zealand.
Certainly the phenomenon of ignorant, credulous headline-chasing journamalists — willing to present only one side in their eagerness to create a Miracle Cure story — is not restricted to New Zealand.
The 60 Minutes story was widely ridiculed at the time by media critics as sensationalist, opportunistic tripe, free advertising for the supplement industry.
You do realize that Hemilä is one of the authors on the Cochrane review, right?
Keep in mind the original assertion:
Influenza isn’t mentioned. But let’s assume the obvious: infection leads to elevated mobilization of neutrophils from the bone marrow, and they’re going to need to accumulate ascorbate. Naturally, one is going to see a fall in plasma levels. This doesn’t get you to “very low levels.”
If one were to look instead at the common cold, the citations seem to be PMIDs 222262 (with a broken PDF link) and 4355208. In PMID 1547201, Hemilä’s take on the latter is “a common cold episode significantly decreases the vitamin C concentration in leucocytes (Hume & Weyers, 1973; Wilson, 1975), and may also decrease it in plasma (Schwartz et al. 1973).”
Next time you’re asked to defend an assertion, I suggest that – rather than tossing out a random Web page and expecting other people to do your homework for you (and find that the defense isn’t even there) – you get off your ass and pony up an actual reply.
I will take this as a concession of my original point.
@Calli Arcale #242.
I’ve heard tell that coconut milk and hemp oil can temporarily renew cognitive function (+nicotinamide riboside for the mitochondria????) — GLAs and other good stuff which is supposed to be able to cross BBB and be converted to energy directly there…
“Why not go to one of those good sources, then and select a representative report documenting clinical evidence that high dose vitamin C is effective?”
JGC I will post these again for you. Here are the two best:
http://vitamincfoundation.org/www.orthomed.com/titrate.htm
http://seanet.com/~alexs/ascorbate/198x/smith-lh-clinical_guide_1988.htm
Matt,
I don’t have a reference, but I have had the personal experience of getting a very nasty cold after I had been experimentally* taking 5 grams of vitamin C three times a day for several months. Not only did I get the cold despite the vitamin C, but taking enough vitamin C to cause diarrhea and painful gas had no effect on my symptoms at all, but did make me even more miserable. An infection is supposed to dramatically increase ‘gut tolerance’, but didn’t in my case. That effectively destroyed my faith in vitamin C, and taught me a useful, though humbling, lesson about confirmation bias.
It’s anecdotal I know, but if vitamin C couldn’t get rid of that cold, I doubt very much it would cure ebola.
* I had an intractable sinus problem that led me to resort to increasingly desperate and implausible measures to get rid of it.
“Orthomolecular medicine claims that most disease is caused by nutritional imbalance”
Calli this is not true at all. Orthomolecular medicine claims that disease causes addition demand for nutrients. Many of which can only be restored through supplementation.
An analog to this would be a hurricane causes additional demand for nails in a city. The hurricane was not caused by a lack of nails, rather more nails are required in the city after the hurricane to repair the damage.
Matt does not understand what orthomolecular medicine advocates themselves are claiming.
“Orthomolecular medicine describes the practice of preventing and treating disease by providing the body with optimal amounts of substances which are natural to the body. ”
http://www.orthomolecular.org/
Orthies* believe that massive amounts of supplements are needed to prevent or treat cancer, psychiatric disorders, Parkinson’s disease, bowel complaints, pneumonia and a host of other common ailments.
http://www.cancer.org/ssLINK/orthomolecular-medicine
*just in case I invented the term “orthies”, I now should get royalties whenever anyone else uses it.
@Calli Arcale,
It’s tough when the mind gradually goes, but it sounds like she’s coping reasonably well. I remember the last few years I would visit my grandmother. She knew who I was, but would often call me by my uncle’s name (her son). The last few months, though, my mother told me not to bother seeing her because she didn’t even recognize my mother (her daughter).
Some people don’t die easily. A friend of ours just visited a mutual friend in Colorado whose mother fell and broke her neck, but is still alive and well and staying in a nursing home. They tried to put a neck brace on, but she wouldn’t let them make it tight enough to be useful and it just irritated the skin, so they finally gave up and took it off.
Her favorite saying seems to be, “you can’t make me do that. I’m a hundred and six!” I guess she has a point.
“Next time you’re asked to defend an assertion, I suggest that – rather than tossing out a random Web page and expecting other people to do your homework for you (and find that the defense isn’t even there) – you get off your ass and pony up an actual reply.”
See if this will satisfy you Narad.
Abstract
Plasma concentrations of the antioxidant vitamin ascorbic acid were measured by high-performance liquid chromatography in critically ill patients in whom the excessive generation of reactive oxygen species could compromise antioxidant defense mechanisms. Median concentrations of both total vitamin C (ascorbic acid and dehydroascorbic acid) and ascorbic acid in these patients were < 25% (P < 0.001) of the values found in healthy control subjects and in subjects in two other disease groups (diabetes, gastritis) in which reactive oxygen species are reported to be increased. The low values could not be explained by age, sex, intake, or treatment differences, but were associated with the severity of the illness and were not prevented by the use of parenteral nutrition containing ascorbic acid. In addition, the vitamin was less stable in blood samples taken from critically ill patients than in similar samples from subjects in the other groups. The findings indicate that antioxidant defenses could be considerably compromised in these very sick patients. If this reduces the patient’s capacity to scavenge reactive species, then the potential of these species to damage DNA and lipid membranes could be increased and compromise recovery.
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/reprint/63/5/760.pdf
Ascorbic acid dynamics in the seriously ill and injured
Conclusion. We confirmed extremely low plasma levels of ascorbic acid following trauma and infection. Maximal early repletion of this vitamin requires rapid pool filling early in the post-injury period using supraphysiologic doses for 3 or more days.
http://www.journalofsurgicalresearch.com/article/S0022-4804%2802%2900083-5/abstract
High-dose antioxidant administration is associated with a reduction in post-injury complications in critically ill trauma patients.
CONCLUSIONS:
Implementation of a high-dose AO protocol was associated with a reduction in respiratory failure and ventilator-dependence. In addition, AO were associated with a marked decrease in abdominal wall complications, including ACS and surgical site infections.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20149369
The beneficial effects of antioxidant supplementation in enteral feeding in critically ill patients: a prospective, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial.
There was a significantly reduced 28-day mortality after antioxidant intervention (45.7% in the antioxidant group and 67.5% in the regular-feeding group; P < 0.05).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15333422
You should tip off the folks at orthomolecular.org to the embarrassing errors in their Hall of Fame,* then. E.g.,
“Moerman, a passionate pigeon-fancier, observed that healthy birds did not develop cancer, whereas the weak and malnourished ones did. He argued, based on his own experiments with his pigeons, that cancer was a derangement of metabolism, a deficiency of iodine, citric acid, B-vitamins, iron, sulphur, and the vitamins A, D, E and later C.”
It’s surprisingly absent of notions of disease causing much of anything, except for the basis of “genetotropic disease,” in which an in-built error causes some sort of nutritional disability which then causes disease.
No, I’m taking away “an ‘imbalance’ of the hardware microenvironment causes hurricanes.”
* Getting on them about Gerson, would help, too.
So I provide the references to the scientific studies you guys requested and the response is to attempt to change the subject to what the definition of Orthomolecular medicine is now?
Indeed, doctoryourself-dot-com is Andrew Saul, who can hardly be considered anything but a true Scotsman (PDF). I see no hesitation on his part in setting forth this: “Malnutrition causes muscular dystrophy? The short answer is, Yes.”
So I provide the references to the scientific studies you guys requested
Matt, the papers you provided in comments #255-258 make a good case for vit-C depletion in critically-ill patients (trauma, multiple organ failure, etc.), but you present them to support the claim that “Patients with influenza have very low blood levels of Vitamin C.”
What will “satisfy” me is your defending your original claim, rather than throwing unrelated abstracts against the wall in the hope that they will somehow stick well enough to obscure it. Let me remind you:
Did you get past the abstract?
“[The patients] were in need of intensive treatment for a variety of reasons, including accidental injury, recovery from surgery, sepsis, and major-organ failure. The only common feature of the patients was that they needed the critical care provided by the ICU to sustain life and were all therefore critically ill.”
Do not try to backtrack to New Zealand.
Jesus Fυcking Christ, you’re having a tantrum about not receiving replies in your desired order?
Very sick people do have low ascorbate levels; they have low albumin and cholesterol too. It doesn’t mean that giving them either will cure their primary illness. I think it’s a bit like adidosis, which is a symptom, not a cause, of disease. Restoring normal values is beneficial, but more than that not so much.
This discussion reminded me of something I read about about Linus Pauling some years back. According to this article one of Pauling’s collaborator’s, Art Robinson, did an experiment that found that mice given vitamin C developed more cancer than controls. Pauling’s response was to blackmail him with invented.”damaging personal information”, demanding that he kill the mice and cover up these unwanted results.
Art Robinson seems a bit eccentric, perhaps, but I see no motive to make up something like this, and no other signs that this is something he would do. It does, however, ring true as the actions of someone suffering from premature certainty with co-morbid Nobel Prize Syndrome.
What is one of the main symptoms of Ebola virus?…
Hemorrhaging
This is caused by the a severe vitamin C depletion. Just as scurvy causes hemorrhaging.
Thomas Levy MD does a great job of explaining this in this video: http://youtu.be/GpptUsJFCEY?t=9m15s at the 10:57 mark
I’m sorry there are not any studies that I am aware of looking at Vitamin C levels specifically in influenza patients.
“Very sick people do have low ascorbate levels… It doesn’t mean that giving them either will cure their primary illness. ”
Except for that it has been done thousands of times and it does improve their condition, often times curing them. Here is a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15333422
Wrong.
“Bleeding is not universally present but can manifest later in the course as petechiae, ecchymosis/bruising, or oozing from venipuncture sites and mucosal hemorrhage. Frank hemorrhage is less common; in the current outbreak unexplained bleeding has been reported from only 18% of patients, most often blood in the stool (about 6%). Patients may develop a diffuse erythematous maculopapular rash by day 5 to 7 (usually involving the neck, trunk, and arms) that can desquamate. Pregnant women may experience spontaneous miscarriages. The most common signs and symptoms reported from West Africa during the current outbreak from symptom-onset to the time the case was detected include: fever (87%), fatigue (76%), vomiting (68%), diarrhea (66%), and loss of appetite (65%).
“Patients with fatal disease usually develop more severe clinical signs early during infection and die typically between days 6 and 16 of complications including multi-organ failure and septic shock (mean of 7.5 days from symptom-onset to death during the current outbreak in West Africa).”
Wrong again.
“Hemorrhagic manifestations occur as a result of thrombocytopenia or severe platelet dysfunction along with endothelial dysfunction.”
See also, e.g., PMID 16982079.
Does EVD also cause corkscrew hairs? What kind of hemorrhaging does scurvy cause?
Matt:
You’re upset with us arguing over the definition of orthomolecular medicine? Well, I suggest you not use your own personal, private, and undeclared definition, then. Keep inventing your own definitions and you’re going to keep running into this problem.
You use studies that don’t support your argument; when this is pointed out to you, you point to them again as if somehow mentioning them again will fix the fact that they do not support your case. And your new claim, that ebola causes hemmorhaging by depleting vitamin C? That’s a pretty remarkable claim. I’d love to see if you have anything vaguely resembling evidence for it. Ideally something that actually involves ebola, rather than trauma or genetically engineered mice.
Tim:
That might be plausible if cognitive decline were due to a lack of energy in the brain, but as with other stroke victims, her problem is actual brain damage. No amount of dietary supplementation can stand in for the lost brain tissue, and if she was gonna regrow any, it would have happened by now. But thank you for the sentiment. 😉
squirrelelite:
Thank you for the kind words as well. Yeah, I’ve been saying for a while now that if I ever lose my marbles, I want to lose them the way she did. She’s genuinely happy, and that’s the silver lining to all of this. She doesn’t know anybody around her, and is often confused, and can no longer lecture about Hemingway — but she can still recite Annabel Lee. 😉 (She used to teach American Lit.)
Hah! I like her spirit. 😉 She does have a point. My grandfather, before he died, was on warfarin because of a history of blood clots, and he wasn’t supposed to drink alcohol because of that. He did anyway (not heavily, just occasional wine, martini, scotch, or aqavit), and we all figured that at this point, it was more important for him to be happy than compliant. He never did have any more bleeding problems, and what killed him was just a stupid random accident. Slipping in the shower.
Thrombocytopenia does not seem to be a promising angle (PDF) on the “just as scurvy” front:
“Vitamin C deficiency can also lead to platelet adhesion defects. This deficiency diminishes the synthesis of hydroxyproline and therefore of collagen, leading to defective platelet adhesion to the vessel wall. However, platelet in vitro function is normal.
But, wait! Commenter “Nacho.Libre” at ZeroHedge has taken care of this:
“The virus causes acute scurvy in a shorten time frame. Where regular scurvy might take months to appear, the oxidative load caused by the infection causes the depletion of vitamin C, the body looks to collagen for vitamin C and breaks down the collagen, hence the bleeding (the hemorrhagic fever) which is also what happens with regular scurvy. That is also why the virus infects only those animals that do not have the capacity to produce their own vitamin C.
That’s right, scurvy has nothing to do with collagen production; instead, Jell-O is a rich source of Vitamin C.
^ Two missing close quotes, one at the end of each paragraph that started with a quotation mark.
That is also why the virus infects only those animals that do not have the capacity to produce their own vitamin C.
Like pigs. And duikers. I hear they get their vitamin C from Big Pharma through some sort of grey-market channels.
Narad I think it is almost comical that you would try to debate that hemorrhaging is not major symptom of Ebola virus when Ebola virus is also called “Ebola hemorrhagic fever”.
The first line in http://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/ebola-fever-virus-infection
“Ebola is a rare but deadly virus that causes bleeding inside and outside the body.”
I think this discussion has turned to the point where it is appropriate to insert my favorite Max Planck quote:
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Leaving aside that (1) you failed to address the direct point presented to you and (2) the nonsensical “Ebola virus is also called ‘Ebola hemorrhagic fever” demonstrates exactly how much thought you’ve put into this, no, the ICD-10 didn’t come out of nowhere.
Sadly, it’s far too late to try to leaven your perfomance with a humorous aside featuring an ironic misinterpretation of Quang Duc.
Or: see above.
I wrote:
Stu replied:
You entirely miss my point. Restoring low ascorbate levels to normal will help reduce symptoms due to low ascorbate, of course, but it won’t cure whatever caused the low ascorbate (the primary illness). The study you cited shows a decrease in oxidative stress when ascorbate and vitamin E were added to the feeds of critically ill patients, and a barely statistically significant reduction in mortality. This is why antioxidants are routinely added to enteral and parenteral feeds in very sick patients.
I have little doubt that a serious illness like ebola will deplete ascorbate levels, and that restoring those levels will be beneficial. I also have little doubt that these patients are given plenty of IV ascorbate when they are on an ITU.
What I do doubt is that giving more than 200 mg/day ascorbate IV (the amount recommended in the Guidelines on Parenteral Nutrition I linked to), and/or elevating ascorbate levels above normal is beneficial.
you would try to debate that hemorrhaging is not major symptom of Ebola virus when Ebola virus is also called “Ebola hemorrhagic fever”.
By the same token, it follows from the name of the West Nile Virus that no-one ever catches it outside of Africa, so Jim T. upstream must have been misdiagnosed.
Krebiozen, please read:
http://seanet.com/~alexs/ascorbate/198x/smith-lh-clinical_guide_1988.htm
http://vitamincfoundation.org/www.orthomed.com/titrate.htm
200 mg/day of ascorbate will in no way come close to restoring ascorbate to normal level in someone very ill with influenza, 200 g/day is closer to the dose required.
If you and health organizations don’t agree, how hard is it to measure ascorbate levels in someone that is sick? This is all I am asking for. Once this is done you will see much larger doses are required.
Also you consider a 32% reduction in mortality rates to be barely statistically significant? Also I’m sure the results of this study would greatly improve if the doses recommended by Cathcart and Stone were given.
At the risk of incurring some vitriol for a (slightly) off topic comment, may I say how very disappointed I am that organisations like “Homeopaths without Borders” have not launched fullscale missions into Liberia or Sierra Leone to cure the menace of Ebola.
Matt,
coming into this discussion late (as always) it seems from the comment stream so far that your claim consists of the following:
– Critically ill people get low ascorbate levels
– Replacing ascorbate sometimes helps them get better
What you still haven’t done is generate any data/evidence that superdose Vitamin C cures diseases like influenza or Ebola.
It is sad to see you resort to fallacious arguments like “People with scurvy may haemorrhage, People with Ebola may haemorrhage…therefore Vitamin C will cure Ebola!”
That claim displays a dreadful misunderstanding of the pathogenesis of the diseases, and is about as useful as my saying “Lack of sunblock makes your skin burn, Radiation makes your skin burn….therefore sunblock will cure radiation sickness!”
Dingo, here is the evidence:
http://seanet.com/~alexs/ascorbate/198x/smith-lh-clinical_guide_1988.htm
http://vitamincfoundation.org/www.orthomed.com/titrate.htm
Matt,
I am very familiar with the literature on vitamin C, as I used to be a believer (more accurately a temporarily suspended disbeliever). These days I think the idea that because humans don’t make vitamin C we require vast doses is flawed. We, or rather a small furry mammal ancestor with little resemblance to humans, lost the ability to make ascorbate about 60 million years ago. That’s a long time to survive with a major inborn error of metabolism (as some describe the lack of L-gulonolactone oxidase), and a long time in which to develop ways of recycling ascorbate and alternative ways of carrying out its metabolic roles (uric acid, for example).
This was 200 mg/day IV, remember. This study used 500 mg/day in critically ill patients (far sicker, and older, than the average flu patient):
Perhaps 500 mg/day might be better than 200 mg/day, but it seems to be saturation of neutrophils, monocytes, and lymphocytes that is important, and in healthy people this can be established with just 100 mg orally. It may well be that 200 mg/day is quite enough to saturate WBC’s in even critically ill people, even if normal plasma levels are not restored.
Anyway, I do agree that restoring normal ascorbate levels is important and may require more than 200 mg/day to do so rapidly, but I don’t see much evidence that restoring levels rapidly has any benefits over restoring them slowly. Neither do I see much evidence that doses of hundreds of grams per day are useful.
Ascorbate levels have been measured many, many times in people with varying degrees of sickness, but they aren’t often done routinely (I spent several decades working in a biochemistry lab, but ascorbate requests were so rare we sent them to another specialist lab). There is lots of evidence for the amounts required to restore normal levels and the benefits of this, which is why the care of sick people includes supplying adequate nutrition.
Personally I don’t think enough attention is paid to ascorbate levels in very sick people, and I would like to see more vitamin C given to restore normal levels. However, I consider the claims for the benefits of doses over and above those that restore normal plasma levels to be hyperbolic and unsupported by good evidence.
Claims that high dose IV vitamin C can successfully treat cancer, for example were being tested in two clinical trials, but they haven’t been published, so I strongly suspect they found no benefits (I’ll try to dig out the details if you’re interested).
Statistical significance is not the same as effect size, which I make a 21.8% lower mortality in the supplemented group, not 32%.
It’s the p<0.05 that I consider to be barely statistically significant, especially given a relatively small sample (105 patients in the supplemented group).
Sure on what basis? I don’t have access to the full study, so I don’t know what dose Crimi et al used. I also note that they didn’t just use ascorbate, but “antioxidant vitamins C and E in enteral feeding”. For all I know they may have used 200 mg/day or less.
But that’s because nobody will do the study. If only someone would do the study, they’d find that massive doses of vitamin C provide benefits second only to healthy and diverse gut flora.
Anybody happen to have a condensed list of other compounds the vita C may be a cofactor for?? What else may be involved that vitamin C is gettng burned in the sick?
For me, some diverse conditions that were already going downhill absolutely seemed to have had been given a ‘fullon burn of an Atlas V Heavy’ { melatonin):
zinc
B6
magnesium
vitamin C
for instance.
Actually 30C homeopathic Vitamin C works best. But nobody will do the study because big pharma won’t fund it! Anyway, it needs to be individualized to everyone to work so I’m not sure you can actually study it with RCT. A ‘proving’ study will work better.
^^ Umm… apparently, one should not use ‘ <– ' anywhere inside ' { ' (now the inputs are sanitized, dammit … but still wrongly.)
The rest was supposed to read something like <– (the most phallic-looking rocket I can think of offhandedly… there is even one with 'balls'. The Koreans would have no trouble getting it up with that Type of Dong) …
I surmized zinc was missing. My reasoning was that it began the thrust halfway through a course of Cipro (zinc depleating) and went 'full on' after a second dose of 5-HTP which went from *this is really great* to *this is exactly opposite what the sales girl told be to expect* — It got real fucking fickle real bad real fast.
I surmized this because of
heavy alcohol intake
lack of zinc containing food
my other staple, milk (zinc depleting)
The 5-HTP goes to seratonin and requires the aforementioned cofactors. The seratonin goes to serum melatonin. I *think*.
It’s interesting that you can provide no quantitative estimate whatever of the effect, but a specific dose to correct it is no problem. By the way, just how many leukocytes do you think are involved? Here we find a value of 7639 ± 3476 mm
⁻³during acute influenza A infection (which seems high, but whatever). That’s about (4–11) × 10¹², viz., the normal reference range. At the low end, you want to throw 0.05 ng of ascorbate at each and every one, or 28 mmol per 10⁸cells. Ignoring the implausibility of 200 g being absorbed orally no matter the dosing schedule, that’s 3 orders of magnitude more than normal levels. Where do you think they’re going to put it?^ I guess <code> doesn’t do what I thought it would here.
Narad, the C is probably stored in the appendix and released/pumped as needed by some sort of medical Maxwell’s Demon … Those with appendectamies are, naturally,
doomed atypical outliersfucked.Vitamin C has been around for millions of years. Goats make 100 GRAMS in their liver when sick. Read more you fool. I wish you to eat only a processed food diet, no crazy supplements or antioxidants like that vitamin C, and be allowed only conventional allopathic non quackery methods of treatment when your disease will arise. Good luck God bless.
Mr. Calhoun: “Read more you fool.”
Strange words to come from someone who obviously did not read the article. Or if he did, he did not understand it.
Narad @ 271: Thanks for the link to that article. It provided a refresher course for me on bleeding disorders (Von Willebrand’s Disease which my sister has and the ITP and platelet adhesion and aggregation disorder my son had). My sister and my son never had Vitamin C deficiencies or scurvy.
Hey, given how well things have gone so far, there’s no reason not to hope for vastly more.
Do goats really eat tin cans?
Richard Calhoun, Health Coach grifter (ill-wisher and God-Blesser) appears to be a real person, and not a parody of the mannerisms of moronhood. I am disappointed.
There are only a handful of mammalian species that cannot produce their own Vitamin C, humans and fruit bats among them.
It occurred to me to check this statement, on the theory that if a claim is widely accepted among Alt-Healthers then it’s probably wrong.
Turns out that some species of fruit bats cannot produce Vitamin C; African fruit bat can.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3206078/#pone.0027114.s001
Goats make 100 GRAMS in their liver when sick.
The primary and indeed only source for this story seems to seems to be Chatterjee’s work in the 1970s — he measured a range of 2,280 – 13,300 milligrams.
Stone, the inventor of “universal subclinical scurvy”, ignored the whole “range” part and promoted a figure of 13 grams per day for a 70-kg goat (and more when stressed).
Naturally that figure was amplified over the years, depending how far you are down the human centipede, so one alt-health website tells us that
…but alternatively,
So now it’s up to 100 grams. OK, if I get scurvy I’ll eat a sick goat.
I suspect that Mr. Calhoun is as well, all things considered.
As I pointed out above, we (humans and our ancestors) have had about 60 million years to adapt to being unable to make vitamin C. We have developed very efficient ways of utilizing very small amounts, partly through mechanisms to concentrate ascorbate in tissues that require large amounts, up to 100 times higher than plasma levels. Uric acid, which most other animals metabolize to the more soluble allantoin, substitutes for many of ascorbate’s roles in humans.
Ignoring the exaggeration, that’s because they break down uric acid to allantoin, so they don’t have the benefit of its antioxidant properties and, I believe, they are unable to regenerate and concentrate ascorbate in specific tissues as efficiently as humans and some other primates.
Liver is a good source of vitamin C, by the way. Fried lamb liver contains more vitamin C, gram for gram, than many fruits (grapes, apricot, plums, watermelon, bananas, crabapples…).
And how does that work out for the goats? Are goats never sick? Do they recover more quickly than animals that don’t produce “100 GRAMS” (or more realistically, between 2 and 13 grams) of ascorbate a day? Are they immune to viral infections?
From Calhoun’s FB page:
You are what you eat. As your body digests food, it becomes the red blood cells that becomes the cells of your body.
Here endeth the lesson.
Now I am wondering how this Health Coaching business works for Richard Calhoun. No doubt there are some people willing to pay a retainer to receive dietary and supplement advice he’s scraped from Null and Mercola and Miley Adams’ websites, because that way it’s more authoritative then reading that advice *directly* for free… but how many?.
The implication is that they make extra ascorbate to combat their sickness, which seems plausible, since white blood cells (and other tissues and organs) require extra ascorbate when fighting infections.
However, I wonder if it is as simple as that. Maybe high ascorbate is a symptom of sickness, not an attempt to cure it. High blood glucose is a symptom of diabetes, but we don’t assume that a diabetic’s body is increasing glucose levels to combat the diabetes. In fact cells are starved of glucose because it can’t get into them without insulin; ‘starving in the midst of plenty’ as it is sometimes put. Restoring low glucose levels to normal is beneficial; hyperglycemia is damaging. Could something similar be happening in sick animals?
Is it possible that infection disrupts the normal feedback mechanisms that control ascorbate synthesis? Ascorbate is made from glucose, which sick goats presumably require plenty of; perhaps converting it to ascorbate most of which is promptly excreted in the urine is a bug, not a feature.
The hypothesis that we require similar amounts of ascorbate when we are sick depends on a number of assumptions, at least some of which are undoubtedly wrong.
I confess that my expertise in goat physiology is limited to Bengali-style curry.
Like a too high a fever in humans? Sounds plausible. I’d call it a *hypothesis*. Perhaps it could have started from some past and pathogen that also relied on glucose — ‘starve a cold’? Do any microbes also use glucose?
I don’t know goat biology but I’ve a friend who had a goat. A very friendly goat that grew up with a very friendly chow dog. While that thing would not eat tin cans, he would make off with my Copenhagen only to *sometimes* bring it back… He didn’t seem to like it. He’d eat a dollar bill though. The most unique thing I remember about *Lawrence* was how doglike and personable he’d become — They’re pretty smart when you get to know them. If one went to take a leak behind the woodpile then the goat was there beside you actually hiking his leg just like a dog and peeing; Always careful to hike opposite the humans and looking up and seeming to ‘grin’ as he did so.
The primary and indeed only source for this story seems to seems to be Chatterjee’s work in the 1970s — he measured a range of 2,280 – 13,300 milligrams.
Turns out that I got that wrong. Chatterjee published results of test-tube vitamin-C production from “incubat[ing] tissue homogenates with precursors of ascorbic acid”, for a number of mammals.
I don;t know whether it was Chatterjee’s idea to extrapolate from homogenised enzymes up to total production from a functioning goat liver in situ (Science hasn’t digitised its back issues as far back as 1973); or Stone’s idea in his 1979 paper (says “13,000 mg”); or if Patrick Holcroft (a familiar name) calculated his own extrapolations in 1997 (“2,280 – 13,300 mg”).
(that goat range is at the high end of the scale; cats, for instance, are about 1/10 as productive).
http://www.vitamincfoundation.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=10528&p=30978
Along the way someone decided that sick goats must generate more Vtamin C — no experiments were needed — and from then on, the main requirement for pulling an estimate out of the air has been that it must exceed previous estimates.
Like too high a fever in humans?? Sounds like a hypothesis. Perhaps some remaining response to a past pathogen that eats glucose — ‘starve a cold’? Do germs use glucose?
I had a warm and affectionate story about *Lawrence* the friendly goat that would actually hike his leg like a dog and pee next to one (never on him) when visiting behind the woodpile. He’d look up at you the whole time seeming to *grin*. He grew up with my friends’ friendly chow dog and would not eat tin cans. Though he would run off with my Copenhagen… sometimes bringing it back. He didn’t seem to like it. He’d eat dollar bills though. Other than that, I don’t know goats.
(I’d posted earlier but am truely heavily moderated or I had noscript blocking the site… so )
doug,
That’s pure Robert O. Young. I’m not sure anything can prepare you for this webpage, where Young claims, among other equally untrue things, that red blood cells are made in the intestine, and that having any enzymes in your GI tract is bad – your food should digest itself, apparently (he literally does claim this).
I had wondered in the past how Young reconciled his claim that our stomachs should be alkaline with the fact that gastric enzymes work at an optimum pH of about 3 (I had to find the optimum pH of pepsin for one of my practical biochemistry exams). Now I know, he neatly side-steps the problem by denying these enzymes exist.
Either Young is some sort of performance artist, a brilliant*, though utterly immoral, con man, or he is raving bonkers. What kind of person makes up their own ‘New Biology’ and makes up his own facts to fit his grand theory?
* Brilliant in terms of parting marks from their money, I mean, and apart from getting arrested, of course.
What kind of person makes up their own ‘New Biology’ and makes up his own facts to fit his grand theory?
ALL OF THEM.
Krebiozen,
Thanks. I had a suspicion the claim had come from someone other than Calhoun. I’ve seen bits and pieces of Young’s nonsense, but I didn’t know of his beliefs about digestive processes and cell generation. I’d never been to his web site before. Yeesh! I feel like I should be paying someone to run a plumber’s snake through the intertoobz.
I really do wonder how some of these people are “made.” Sometimes I think that a large fraction of them know that what they are pushing is nonsense, but they have come to realize that becoming rich and famous by gulling the rubes is far easier than doing it by being really good at “conventional” things. Toss in credulous fools like Oprah to promote them, and there is no turning back.
Calhoun, I fear, is probably one of gulled rubes.
And they still get viral infections. Fancy that… vitamin C doesn’t prevent viral infections after all. Hypothesis dead.
Calhoun, I fear, is probably one of gulled rubes.
Multi-level marketing of Stupid.
@Tim 304,
E coli normally feed on glucose and I suspect lots of other ones do as well. But, you can cause them to evolve to feed directly on citrate.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2012/09/19/the-birth-of-the-new-the-rewiring-of-the-old/#.VER-EPl4qXs
You should look into Klenner’s contemporary Irwin Stone, who’s 1972 book “Vitamin C: The Healing Factor” which has 50 pages of references from 1930 to the 1960’s. He’s the one who got Pauling interested in Vitamin C. The chapter on viruses is 7 pages with 3 pages of 37 references by 29 researchers. 4 papers by Klenner were in 3 different journals with names sounding as good as any journals of the time. His paper on viruses can be found in many places such as http://www.whale.to/v/c/klenner3.html and change the number “3” to “1” and “2” to see two other papers. As an example, Stone’s chapter on viruses mention 3 papers describing intramuscular vitamin C curing 100% of herpes shingles, one of which was 327 patients. Polio, measles, hepatitis, and flu (45 grams) are also discussed. Greer and McCormick were the only ones to replicate Klenner’s high doses in polio and they got similarly astonishing results. There is no data to the contrary to these author’s who can be found in pubmed. From 2010 paper on I.V. vitamin C averaging 28 grams in a single sitting: “Of 9,328 patients for whom data is available, 101 had side effects, mostly minor, including lethargy/fatigue in 59 patients, change in mental status in 21 patients and vein irritation/phlebitis in 6 patients. “
I appreciate objective scientific information on ascorbate, but I don’t think ad hominem attacks or reflexive assumptions that the nutrient is “quackery” further the discourse, nor its conviviality. Also, I’m not so sure that Linus Pauling – one of the ‘founders’ of quantum physics, one of the “most influential chemists of the 20th century, and a 2 time Nobel Prize winning scientist could rightly be called a “quack”. I’d like to see definitive studies that disprove his claims and the vitamin’s efficacy as an antiviral in the doses recommended by proponents. Meanwhile, I’ll go right on treating my own colds and the flu with successfully administered, high dose regimens of ascorbate as I’ve been doing for years – “best evidence” notwithstanding. My own personal results have been nothing short of amazing.
CORRECTION: I meant Pauling was *only* one of the founders of “quantum chemistry”, not physics. Sorry. My bad.
If John Jones were to bring peace to the Middle East, rescue every occupant of a burning skyscraper, and end famine in Africa, and then he went and stabbed a man through the heart, he would be a murderer. All those good things he did don’t make that last act non-existent, or unimportant.
Linus Pauling was a brilliant scientist and then towards the end of his life he turned to quackery. All his years of brilliance do not transform the quackery of his end years into science.
Just because someone is smart, doesn’t mean they can’t also be an idiot….
And, someone who wants to believe in Bigfoot would surely like to see definitive studies that disprove his existence. Crystal healers would surely challenge science to produce definitive studies showing that ruby quartz is NOT an effective healing tool.
But science doesn’t work that way, homeslice. The obligation is on those who believe an extraordinary claim to PROVE IT, before science has any obligation to produce “definititve studies” disproving it.
Several colds and the flu and you have survived? That is amazing!
A basic principle behind science is that you can’t prove a negative. What you can do is disprove or tentatively confirm a positive claim, such as that large doses of vitamin C can cure cancer.
And, many studies have been done testing those positive claims. The results are very underwhelming.
It takes huge doses to get even a modest effect in real patients. And, it doesn’t work very well in conjunction with other chemotherapy drugs, which have been proven to be more effective.
Similarly with colds and other viral illnesses.
So, there’s just not much basis to expect that it would work for Ebola either.
@zawy:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
I invoke Scopie’s Law. “In any argument involving science or medicine, citing whale.to as a credible source loses you the argument immediately, and gets you laughed out of the forum.”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Squirrelelite – sensible points you make. Let me add that, in my own reading, I haven’t seen an abundance of studies disproving ascorbate’s efficacy as an antiviral, or in cancer. The ‘definitive’ study that’s most often cited is that of Charles Moertel from 1985 who found ineffectiveness in advanced cancer. Pauling, however, issued a rebuttal and noted flaws in Moertel’s study, citing, for example, evidence of “test cheating” among control patients. But that’s water under the bridge. In a recent meta analyses from 2014, results are still “inconsistent” concerning supplemental (not therapeutic) use, but not *definitive* and a call for more research is recommended (seeL Int J Cancer. 2014 Oct 21. doi: 10.1002/ijc.29277. [Epub ahead of print]
Dietary supplement use and colorectal cancer risk: A systematic review and meta-analyses of prospective cohort studies). Investigators in a separate and very recent analysis recommend paraemters on the use of bolus ascorbate in cancer for the benefit of “future clinical trials” (Basic Clin Pharmacol Toxicol. 2014 Sep 12. doi: 10.1111/bcpt.12323. [Epub ahead of print]
Elimination of Ascorbic Acid After High-Dose Infusion in Prostate Cancer Patients: A Pharmacokinetic Evaluation.
Nielsen TK1, Højgaard M, Andersen JT, Poulsen HE, Lykkesfeldt J, Mikines KJ.). The above investigators remain open to future clinical trial, and research testing, and that certainly appears a sensible position.
@Ben – so where are all of the studies that show “effectiveness” for Vit. C for Cancer?
Since vitamin C and cancer has come up again, the clinical trials of high dose IV ascorbate in cancer patients I mentioned at #22 above, for anyone who is interested, are:
1. NCT00441207, a Phase I study which included patients with solid tumors, This has now been published (it was a couple of years ago I last looked), though ClinicalTrials.gov doesn’t seem to know, here. They managed to achieve very high plasma ascorbate levels; up to 49 mmol/L, which should satisfy the most enthusiastic orthomolecular enthusiast, but none of the patients responded with tumor regression:
2. This Phase II study which included patients with lymphoma, which is flagged as completed but has not been published. The primary author has since published this study looking at high dose vitamin C in combination with conventional chemotherapy, which also has less than spectacular results, and implies that the earlier study just using ascorbate was unsuccessful.
It seems that even high dose IV ascorbate does not achieve
the sort of results reported by Cameron and Pauling in their 1978 study (PMC336151 – another link will put my comment into moderation):
The IV ascorbate solid tumor study I cited above looked at tumor size, not survival, but since 13 out of 16 patients had progressive disease despite vast amounts of vitamin C I’m still unimpressed, and disappointed to be honest.
All three links in my comment work, despite my failure to close the first link tag. I thought I would get away with 3 links, but apparently not – it’s currently in moderation.
Lawrence – there aren’t a lot of studies either way – that’s my point. I don’t think I can yet say the vitamin is “definitive quackery”. I cite the recent peer-reviewed recommendations of science investigators (my last post) who recommend further testing and remain open to the chemical’s potential. In my view, that would ideally mean conducting multi-institutional, multi-phase double blind trials on large cohorts of patients in *varying* stages of cancer, not only “last resort” patients with large infusion doses well exceeding Paulings’ recommendation of 10gr oral. It would be fascinating if a vitamin – which is less toxic than antibiotics or cytotoxics – would tip the scales, therapeutically speaking.
Also treating the vitamin C question with a fair degree of openness and reporting some modestly good results in several studies is The National Cancer Institute; I’m not getting a definitive “no effectiveness, worthless quackery” vibe from the Institute: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/cam/highdosevitaminc/patient/page2
I was actually surprised to read this in NCI’s report since it is generally assumed, the NCI deems the vitamin ‘worthless’:
Laboratory studies
Many laboratory studies have been done to find out how high-dose vitamin C may cause the death of cancer cells. The anticancer effect of vitamin C in different types of cancer cells involves a chemical reaction that makes hydrogen peroxide, which may kill cancer cells.
Ben: “Many laboratory studies have been done to find out how high-dose vitamin C may cause the death of cancer cells.”
http://xkcd.com/1217/
@Ben – it is incredibly easy to kill Cancer cells in a petri dish, but much harder in the human body…..
May very well be true. My stance has never been ‘sold’ on vitamin C in cancer – only open. Though its use as an antiviral in high infused doses, I’m not sure clinically. Anecdotaly, it does work for me.
I’ll try this comment again, since it seems to have vanished. Since vitamin C and cancer has come up, the clinical trials of high dose IV ascorbate in cancer patients I mentioned above, for anyone who is interested, are:
1. NCT00441207, a Phase I study which included patients with solid tumors, This has now been published (it was a couple of years ago I last looked), though ClinicalTrials.gov doesn’t seem to know, here. They managed to achieve very high plasma ascorbate levels; up to 49 mmol/L, which should satisfy the most enthusiastic orthomolecular enthusiast, but none of the patients responded with tumor regression:
2. This Phase II study which included patients with lymphoma, which is flagged as completed but has not been published. The primary author has since published a study (PMID: 22272248) looking at high dose vitamin C in combination with conventional chemotherapy, which also has less than spectacular results, which implies the study using ascorbate alone was a failure.
It seems that even high dose IV ascorbate does not achieve the sort of results reported by Cameron and Pauling in their 1978 study (PMC336151):
The IV ascorbate solid tumor study I cited above looked at tumor size, not survival, but since 13 out of 16 patients had progressive disease, it seems fair to say survival would also have been disappointing.
Now my previous one had reappeared, but awaits moderation. Apologies for the duplication. Orac, if you happen to notice this, please feel free to delete the first at #324 which has a botched link.
http://www.scilogs.com/in_scientio_veritas/quack-ebola-cure-drinking-urine/
http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/570201/20141021/marijuana-cannabis-ebola-outbreak.htm
=============================
I *think* it’s getting down to the wire, doctor dudes. Please don’t give me “…no studies to show…”. No shit, Sherlocks (and idk why?).
^^ I don’t want 5000 words of that. I want to know what ya’ll *think*, if that were possible. Is reduction of that said ‘storm’ in any conventional treatments and is it really that plausible??
What I do *know* is that our mandatory exposure to the initial DARE program taught us that ‘marijuana suppresses the immune system’. Well, it ‘mediates’ it giving it a little time to ‘think it through’ and then concentrate on more pressing issues. I *think*.
@Ben,
You could start by reviewing all the links on this page:
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/cam/highdosevitaminc/patient/page2
Also, please note:
and also
Or, for a short answer, read this:
http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/cancer/expert-answers/alternative-cancer-treatment/faq-20057968
Before you assert that substance A cures condition/disease X, you need clear evidence that shows it does so.
The best we can say about Vitamin C and cancer at the moment seems to be that it may reduce some of the side-effects of chemotherapy.
Anything else is putting the cart before the horse, or in the case of Ebola, the cart is so far in front of the horse that the horse is no longer even hitched to the cart.
thanks squirrelelite. I will read your links – and am a little familiar with the studies of high dose C that weren’t so hot. It’s important to pursue the truth about anything as per the Socratic tradition.
Krebiozen – thanks for the phase I trial link. It notes no objective responses in a very small trial of treatment-refractory patients for whom no therapy was beneficial. I also note the investigators in this trial concluding:
They’re recommending ‘further evaluation’.
On the other hand, I have also read that oxidative pathways of ascorbate might interfere with some cytotoxics etc. Clearly, more research is needed.
My citation of above-mentioned phase I didn’t post above. Sorry – please see here:
“Further support for a potential role of i.v. ascorbic acid is provided by the work of Verrax and Calderon [33] who demonstrated that ascorbic acid completely kills a variety of tumor cells, T24 (bladder), DU145 (prostate), HepG2 (liver), MCF7 (breast), and Ishikawa (cervix), with EC50 values of 3–7 mM. They also showed that 1 g/kg/d i.p. ascorbic acid significantly inhibited TLT tumor growth in mice without any obvious toxicity. Notably, orally dosed ascorbic acid had no effect on tumor growth. In addition, this group demonstrated that ascorbic acid significantly potentiated the antitumor activity of several chemotherapeutic agents including etoposide, cisplatin, 5-fluorouracil, doxorubicin, and paclitaxel and in all three tumor lines tested (MCF7, DU145, and T24).
The use of i.v. ascorbic acid in combination with cytotoxic chemotherapy is further encouraged by a recent report showing that ascorbic acid potentiated the antitumor activity of gemcitabine against seven human and one murine pancreatic cancer cell lines [35]. The observation is of particular interest as two of the human lines were resistant to gemcitabine. Synergistic antitumor activity occurred in tissue culture and in vivo studies with implanted tumors in mice. This and other reported preclinical investigations provide encouragement for additional exploration of i.v. ascorbic acid to improve therapeutic outcomes [36]. A recently published phase I clinical trial by Monti et al. evaluated i.v. ascorbate combined with gemcitabine and erlotinib in nine patients with stage IV metastatic pancreatic cancer. Potentially biologically and clinically active ascorbic acid concentrations were achievable in all treated individuals, and primary tumor size decreased in eight out of nine patients [21]. The findings of the current study coupled with the collective evidence from the available literature suggest that the combination of i.v. ascorbic acid with gemcitabine to treat pancreatic cancer is an attractive approach that deserves further evaluation.”
Linus Pauling was a brilliant scientist and then towards the end of his life he turned to quackery. All his years of brilliance do not transform the quackery of his end years into science.
John Wheeler used to point out that if you are an aging scientist, successful in your field, garlanded with honours, it is your professional obligation to espouse really out-there ideas. Someone’s got to do it, because science needs contrarian theories — if only to keep the right theories on their toes — and it can’t be younger scientists with careers to sacrifice.
So kudos to Pauling, even if he turns out to be wrong.
Ben,
I still see the Pauling/Cameron clinical trials held up as examples of what could be achieved in terminal (i.e. intractable) cancer cases if only those ignorant allopathic doctors would use very high doses of IV ascorbate. They complain that the Mayo Clinic study that attempted to replicate Pauling and Cameron#s results didn’t use high enough doses. This trial certainly used high enough doses, but not a single patient showed signs of remission.
There may be some benefits of high dose ascorbate in very sick patients over and above the benefits of restoring normal levels, though I don’t see much compelling evidence, but I don’t think the miraculous results that some people claim in cancer are panning out, sadly.
Krebiozen – I’d like to see what the as yet, unpublished phase II result shows. But let me add, the phase I trial I reference above (as per your link) wasn’t exploring the therapeutic potential of C – it was testing safety and pharmacokinetics. The conclusion “no objective response” doesn’t tell me much one way or another, since no other chemical agent would have proved effective (i.e. the patients were end-stage and “refractory”. That’s why they were in this trial in the first place). Yes, I agree with your view on ‘miracles’ not being achieved and for myself, find it a turn off when conspiracy theorists float grandiose and unscientific accusations. If anything, high dose ascorbate might – and I emphasize MIGHT – help in some patients when used as an adjuvant with conventional therapies, but I’d like to see more research done, one way or another. I don’t see this as case closed yet. Just my two cents.
Ben,
I agree. I’m not ready to close the door on high-dose ascorbate either, especially in very sick people whose requirements may (or may not) be very high. In cancer patients it may not lead to regression but it may alleviate some of the problems in late-stage cancer, such as sepsis. I think this may be an area where cranks have muddied the waters somewhat (like research into gut problems in autistic individuals). It would be nice to see some more research to settle it once and for all.
That said, I do think we can safely conclude that the miracles that many people have claimed for high dose ascorbate are hyperbolic. That nasty cold I got despite being saturated with ascorbate that I mentioned above convinced me (viscerally, literally) of that.
Oh good grief. Maybe it’s time to quit HTML.
I am not against or for allopathic medicine but what really irritates me about badly written blogs like this is that you quote these people and offer NO scientific reason why they’re wrong. It’s just constant bashing, the way a scared bully would act.
I don’t know what the answer is, but the “dark side” presents a more compelling idea than you.
The other thing is the word “quackery”. How can anyone possibly take you seriously if you talk like a 3rd grader?
Vitamin C or any of the other “cures” are inexpensive. So, don’t make a case that someone writing a free blog is suggesting you go to vitamin shop and buy some vitamin c. The pharma companies are the real ones that need to defend themselves as to why use their product since it costs $1000’s.
intravenous vitamin c would work on Ebola in part by protecting the endothelium…endothelial damage is a major cause of the hemorrhagic fever…intravenous vitamin c protects from endothelial damage http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3061919/pdf/1479-5876-9-25.pdf
[…] Science blogs have felt compelled to combat the misinformation, describing one effort to pump up sales of the vitamin as a “particularly irresponsible bit of quackery promotion.” In a Los Angeles Times story about purported Ebola “cures,” Gerald Weissmann, editor-in-chief of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology and professor of medicine at New York University, said that while Vitamin C is part of a healthy diet and helps build up one’s immune system, “there’s no evidence it has any effect on infectious disease” when taken in higher doses. What’s more, “all this quack stuff takes money and effort away” from legitimate research devoted to coping with Ebola and other health dangers. […]
In most cases, we don’t know if they are wrong. But we don’t have evidence they are right, so why should we believe their fantastic claims? Talk is easy.
I know human babies have a tendency to put anything and everything in their mouth, but I would prefer grow-ups to use a more cautious approach when considering taking a medical treatment.
In some cases, we do have scientific reasons to believe they are wrong. Name a specific treatment, we will see.
Well, see below for one.
But not free. Some people, (including pharma companies – it’s a small world) still make good profits from vitamin sales. Why do you think supermarkets dedicate a few meters of shelves for nutritional supplements?
You are missing the point, anyway.
We don’t care if it’s inexpensive. We want something which works.
Especially with an infection like Ebola. Patients don’t really have the time for a trial-and-error process.
You forget the part where the Ebola virus is the cause of the endothelial damage in the first place.
During a virus infection, cells don’t die because they are lacking vit C, they die because there is an alien which is busy proliferating inside them and will emerge by busting through the cell. Unless a white cell comes by and kill the infected cell – it helps that the infected cell is broadcasting “kill me” signals.
But you will notice that, no matter what, an infected cell dies.
Also, from the abstract of the article you linked to:
The article is about preventing sepsis by providing vit. C to patients which are lacking it. It’s a medium- to long-term strategy.
Vitamin C is needed both for the building of strong epithelial tissue and for the working of the immune system. If you are missing some, it increases your risk of infection.
The context is a bit different with an active infection from Ebola virus.
Sure, if you are low in vitamin C, it’s a good idea to take some.
But if the Ebola virus is already here, invading and busting your epithelial cells by 1000’s at a time, AFAIK high doses of vitamin C won’t do much to stop the damage.
<blockquote.endothelial damage is a major cause of the hemorrhagic fever…intravenous vitamin c protects from endothelial dama
Ebola virus codes for a glycoprotein which activates endothelial cells, and that activation results in decreased barrier function (PMID:16051836). While ascorbic acid does seem effective at suppressing some activation pathways in endothelial cells (for example, activation mediated by TNF-alpha) there’s no evidence I’m aware of that AA at any dose would block Ebola GP1,2 mediated activation.
Sigh–borked the blockquote again…
I’m a software engineer, not a doctor, but it seems to me that if vitamin C deficiency made it easier to get infected, then giving vitamin C after one is desperately ill is a bit like closing the barn door after the cows have left. Yes, it should be done, but there’s a much bigger problem now which the supplementation will not address.
Some people, (including pharma companies – it’s a small world) still make good profits from vitamin sales.
Whackyweedia informs me that Merck and BASF and other big Western pharmaceutical / chem-industry giants left the Vitamin-C business because Chinese industrial refineries (unrestricted by concerns of “environmental impact” or “making a profit”) were able to undercut them. Followed by the Chinese industrial refineries acting as a cartel to put the price up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C#Industrial_synthesis
what really irritates me about badly written blogs like this
I am disappointed that Alex offers no specific examples of the blog’s bad writing. Corrections to minor points of syntax or spelling always go down well.
Suppose some real research scientists were convinced that massive (or any) doses of vitamin C would improve the outcome for ebola patients. In a scenario such as that currently in western Africa, is is possible to ethically do trials?
If you are dealing with people who are already infected, is it even ethical to ask them to consent to being in a trial? It would seem to me that simply asking for consent is almost certainly going to get most people to say yes – asking the question is perhaps nudging toward being coercive. Maybe that’s OK. Maybe it isn’t. I would want people far wiser than I to consider the ramifications. I would want opinion sought from healthy people in the target community.
What happens to a placebo-controlled trial of IV vitamin C if the supply of basic IV solutions (water, saline, Ringer’s, etc.) runs low? It’s not like you can easily get Purchasing to lean on the B. Braun rep to toss a few cases in his BMW SUV and pop over with them first thing in the morning.
There are also questions about the impact on the researchers. Can you maintain sufficient detachment to be objective in an environment where there is great suffering and a lot of death around you, especially where ordinary supplies and skilled people are in short supply? Can you cope with lounging around collecting data when so many around you are running themselves ragged caring for the sick? Can you jump in and help with care without messing up the trial? Can you live with it if you can’t?
doug asks, “In a scenario such as that currently in western Africa, is is possible to ethically do trials?”
I am not a medical ethicist, nor do I play one on TV. But I’d have to think that the short answer would be “of course it’s possible.”
This is, after all, the search for a cure. If you’re going to cure someone, that person needs to be sick. Asking healthy people to participate in your trial is great if you’re testing a vaccine; it’s useless if you’re testing a cure.
Admittedly, a diagnosis of Ebola is a coin flip away from a death sentence. You would need to be extremely careful for how you worded your request for consent to avoid giving the appearance of coercion. And of course, you run the risk of being accused of opportunism or downright ghoulishness – which is another reason to be very careful and very public in how you conduct your research.
As to the concerns about the toll on the people conducting the trial – how is that different from any other trial or any other medical situation?
Sure. If your drug supply or distribution ability is limited anyway, it’s amenable to a cluster-randomized/stepped-wedge design.
^ (See, e.g., here for the stepped wedge.)
@doug (354).
In effect, this is exactly what has been done with Zmapp.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/04/health/experimental-ebola-serum/
This, and other drugs, were already under development and had passed some initial safety testing, so it was felt worthwhile to try it, especially in patients who were not responding to the standard treatment.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-28663217
It will still take proper trials and testing to learn whether these drugs in fact work. But, at least Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol responded well and are alive.
One aspect of [Klenner’s] treatment that amazed me was that this was some truly high dose vitamin C. I mean, seriously. Klenner administered … 2 g, people) of ascorbate every six hours (8 g/day) supplemented with 1,000 to 2,000 mg by mouth every two hours (that’s 12 to 24 g).
That’s from his early work in the 40s, still relatively “low dose”. For speed and reliability his IV vitamin C recommendations got higher. For serious infection situations before Ebola, people were talking about IV treatment of 700-1100 mg C per kg body mass, several times a day, tapering off.
Heavy doses of IV vitamin C seem to whack a lot of the virus and symptoms even on the first infusion, like massive pustules drying up, turning brown and crunchy over the next 6-12 hours. The virus infections likely recur if you don’t do several IVs to clean out all the compartments in the first 24 hours.
As for scientific comprehensiveness, mainstream medicine has managed to avoid addressing the 400 mg – 1250 mg C per kg range per infusion for human infections, since 1937 with Sabin’s careless dismissal.
Some modern caveats about G6PD, electrolyte balances (especially potassium, magnesium), iron and high oxalate kidney patients apply but most people can do it.
The lethality of Ebola and production of C reactive products (histamine, ROS) should be separated from the cidal requirements of the virus itself. One question about Ebola virus itself is whether it is a comparative wimp analogous with syphilis to penicillin, “average”, or a resistant freak like TB to almost everything.
As for JGC on Ebola’s lethal proteins, that would suggest better to kill the virus sooner than later. Intuitively, starting at first fever would be better, or perhaps even on exposures.
Squirrelelite, of the seven Ebola victims who were treated with zMapp, the survivors were two Americans and a nurse from the UK. The four who died were three Liberians (gawd’elp me, I almost typed “three librarians”) and a 75 year old Spanish priest.
Given that the average American/European’s baseline standard of health is higher than the average west Africans, I would be concerned that this drug only works when there’s something there to work with…if I’m making any sense.
“African’s.”
*plonk*
@ prn
Before wondering if a virus is resistant to molecules with viricidal properties, maybe one should ascertain that these molecules have viricidal properties.
Also, it looks like you are mixing up resistance and insensitivity. In the former case, the bug has evolved and acquired defenses against the drug – like MRSA. Fighting the bug has become an evolution marathon, but you can try modifying the existing drugs.
In the latter case, the drug isn’t effective to start with on this specific bug because the bug is lacking the usual target (e.g., mycoplasms aren’t affected by penicillin, as they are lacking the typical bacterial wall). In this case, better switch to another drug class altogether.
Tuberculosis bacteria belong to the both cases, thanks to their atypical cell membrane, and having sometimes developed resistances to the few molecules working on them.
It’s splitting hairs, but it’s not the same concern, or the same strategy to address it. Let’s cross this bridge once we are there.
Any other pearl of deep wisdom you care of sharing? Like, I don’t know, if it’s raining and you carry an umbrella, better open it?
“This patient has a virus which is deadly half the time when under care, and up to 90% of the time if untreated. Let’s let the virus multiply a bit before doing anything.”
Apart for the screw-up in Dallas, I wasn’t under the impression that the medical teams fighting the outbreak were delaying care when confronted with a potential new case.
If anything, delays in treatment have more to do with logistic issues (i.e. limited human and material resources) and patients typically coming when already feverish and sick, than with the health workers being too dumb to tie their shoes themselves, as you seem to imply.
[email protected]: …Like, I don’t know, if it’s raining and you carry an umbrella, better open it?
Well, most medicos seem to have mistaken the umbrella for a broken cane these past ~75 years and seem to like splashing around in the rain and mud…
Still waiting to see one actually figure out how to open the umbrella.
It’s a good thing there are real smart people like prn around to set straight those arrogant doctors with their decades of education, training, and experience.
prn,
You mean this study? How was it careless? He was trying to replicate a previous study by Jungeblut that found vitamin C prevented paralysis from polio, and used similar and higher doses, but found no effects of vitamin C on monkeys with polio, even if they had scurvy to begin with.
The author of the paper he was trying to replicate was unable to replicate his own findings in this study which found small and inconsistent results, again with monkeys infected with polio. The author concluded, “Certainly, the therapeutic or preventive action of this substance is too limited, irregular, and complex to permit one to regard it in any sense as a true chemotherapeutic agent in experimental poliomyelitis.” It seems it wasn’t Sabin’s “careless dismissal” that ended this line of enquiry, but Jungeblut’s failure to replicate his own results.
Much of the evidence for the beneficial effects of vitamin C in infections is from one maverick doctor (Klenner), and we don’t really know how accurate his reports are, or if he omitted to report failures. He reported spectacular results, but I’m not aware of anyone successfully replicating them. I also wonder about some of his case histories, such as his successful treatment of 60 polio patients. Since only 1% of polio victims develop paralysis, uneventful recovery of all 60 after high dose ascorbate isn’t particularly convincing.
As I mentioned above, I experienced a very nasty cold, despite having taken large oral doses of sodium ascorbate for months, which didn’t respond to oral doses above gut tolerance. Maybe IV ascorbate would have worked, but it wasn’t as if I was in a deficient state to start with. That experience seriously damaged my hopes for high dose ascorbate and antioxidants supplementation in general.
I still wonder a bit about high dose ascorbate and infections, as I used to about high dose ascorbate and cancer, but I suspect that if anyone ever does a study that uses high IV doses to treat infectious diseases, the results will be as disappointing as those in cancer. This is certainly very thin gruel to support giving high dose IV ascorbate to Ebola patients.
BTW, a bit OT, but here’s another Phase I RCT, this time using continuous high dose IV ascorbate of up to 710 mg/kg/day for 8 weeks in terminal cancer patients. They found this was safe (except in one patient who developed renal calculi that may have been pre-existing), but none of the patients responded with regression. One patient’s tumors stopped progressing, but the other 23 showed progression. If ascorbate does have any promise in treating cancer, it certainly isn’t as miraculous as some have claimed, even in heroic* doses that surely even prn cannot claim are too low.
* I can’t resist using this term, which always amuses me; what else would a brave maverick doctor use?
@ prn
Well, if it looks like a cane, walk like a cane and quack like a cane…
Maybe the “medicos” have good reasons to believe they don’t have an umbrella.
Do you have any evidence that your stuff is working?
Actually, belay that, because you completely missed my point.
I was not criticizing you for daring to propose some odd treatment (although I will really be convinced when some evidence is produced to sustain your opinion).
That I was reacting too is your whole “better start treating people when they show the first symptoms, or even better treat them proactively on suspicion of contamination”.
Do you really think people on the field need to be told this?
Every microbiologist, and I hope most physicians know this, if they paid any attention during their training.
And the fact that African countries are starting to get the epidemic under control seems to indicate to me that, indeed, a critical number of medical workers know how to handle infectious diseases.
If you show that your miracle cure work, competent health care workers won’t need you to tell them how to use it.
But you have to give them a good reason to use the stuff first.
Thanks for the info, Shay.
I wasn’t aware of the 3 Liberians or the Spanish priest.
As for the early treatment issue, you can’t just treat anyone whether they have symptoms or not. When we have an Ebola vaccine, that will change somewhat.
And sometimes symptoms can be difficult to recognize.
My mother is in the hospital with a UTI that is resistant to antibiotics, so she is on IV antibiotics for 10 days or so. She’ll also be doing some therapy to build up her strength.
My sister, who is an endocrinologist, had visited her a couple weeks before and reported she was getting weaker. But, the infection wasn’t diagnosed until the start of this week. But, she’s older than the priest Shay mentioned and is staying in an assisted living facility, so weakness per se is not necessarily a reason to seek a doctor.
Helianthus
That I was reacting too is your whole “better start treating people when they show the first symptoms, or even better treat them proactively on suspicion of contamination”.
Do you really think people on the field need to be told this?
Of course it would be a no brainer for the in-country medical personnel but the field decision about the population, on possible/probable exposure vs initial febrile (many non-Ebola false uses) vs normal (late) Ebola presentation, would be a major strategic decision and commitment, using major resources for every step earlier.
Advertising, door-to-door campaigners, more on-site actvities. Such a decision could be changed either way dependent on choke points of supplies, like infusion supplies or injectable vitamin C, too.
Healthy 83, 52 years, on vitamin ‘C’and supplements. No colds, flu, diseases, health issues, no drugs and no doctor. Make a joke out of that! My house is filthy. Go in a hospital no and hell no. No vitamin ‘C’ is allowed in hospitals making them death traps. …dez…
OK.
Okay.
Did you hear the one about the nut named Desmond Throatwarbler-Mangrove who thought an anecdote with an N of 1 was meaningful and pointed the way towards future practice?
He tried to get everyone to change their names to “Desmond Throatwarbler-Mangrove”, since there was such a clear association between having that name and living to be 83.
@Antaeus Feldspar – its pronounced “Desmond Throatwarbler-Mangrove” but it’s spelled “Raymond Luxury-Yacht”.
That’s a flat lie. All patients are given a diet with more than sufficient vitamin C, including those fed by NG tube or IV.
But Kreb, their definition of ‘sufficient vitamin C’ and that of SBM (reality) are several orders of magnitude apart.
Des, you forgot to include the part where you also smoked a pack of unfiltered Camels and drank a pint of whiskey every day since you were 12 and the bit where you tell us how many doctors you’ve outlived.
Denice,
But dez specifically wrote “No vitamin ‘C’ is allowed in hospitals”. I had visions of a special machine at the entrance to each hospital that sucks vitamin C out of food, TPN solution, patients, visitors etc.. That would, indeed, make them death traps.
I’m reminded of the joke about the wrinkled bald, bent-over old man telling someone he smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, drank a quart of bourbon etc., and when asked his age replies, “35”.
It worked for Richard Overton.
Why won’t it work for me?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2014/11/11/meet-americas-oldest-living-vet-he-smokes-cigars-does-yard-work-drives-and-drinks-whisky-and-hes-108/
@Mark Thorsen #8
Well. That is interesting. Of course, it’s hard to just stumble across accurate info on the difference between ‘folic acid’ and ‘folate’ .
A G-search takes one to the ‘folic acid’ Wiki page and the ‘Folate deficiency’ page has been edited to remove the words “(not to be confused with the related synthetic compound, folic acid)”
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Folate_deficiency&direction=prev&oldid=631899311
The layperson, such as myself, would have to luck into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levomefolic_acid to find out about (6S)-5-methyltetrahydrofolate.