Vitamins : Part 2

How and When To Be Your Own Doctor
by Dr. Isabelle A. Mose, Steve Solomon

(Page 8 of 14)

I am also saddened that people are so willing to take supplements, because I can usually do a lot more to genuinely help their bodies heal with dietary modification and detoxification. Of all the tools at my disposal that help people heal, last in the race comes supplements.

One of the best aspects of using vitamins as though they were healing agents is that food supplements almost never have harmful side effects, even when they are taken in what might seem enormous overdoses. If someone with a health condition reads or hears about some vitamin being curative, goes out and buys some and takes it, they will at very least have followed the basic principle of good medicine: first of all do no harm. At worst, if the supplements did nothing for them at all, they are practicing the same kind of benevolent medicine that Dr. Jennings did almost two centuries ago. Not only that, but having done something to treat their symptoms, they have become patients facilitating their own patience, giving their body a chance to correct its problem. They well may get better, but not because of the action of the particular vitamin they took. Or, luckily, the vitamin or vitamins they take may have been just what was needed, raising their body's vital force and accelerating the body's ability to solve its problem.

One reason vitamin therapies frequently do not work as well as they might is that, having been intimidated by AMA propaganda that has created largely false fears in the public mind about harmful effects of vitamin overdoses, the person may not take enough of the right vitamin. The minimum daily requirements of vitamins and minerals as outlined in nutrition texts are only sufficient to prevent the most obvious forms of deficiency diseases. If a person takes supplements at or near the minimum daily requirement (the dose recommended by the FDA as being 'generally recognized as safe') they should not expect to see any therapeutic effect unless they have scurvy, beri beri, rickets, goiter, or pellagra.

In these days of vitamin-fortified bread and iodized salt, and even vitamin C fortified soft drinks, you almost never see the kind of life-threatening deficiency states people first learned to recognize, such as scurvy. Sailors on long sea voyages used to develop a debilitating form of vitamin C deficiency that could kill. Scurvy could be quickly cured by as little as one lime a day. For this reason the British Government legislated the carrying of limes on long voyages and today that is why British sailors are still called limeys. A lime has less than 30 milligrams of vitamin C. But to make a cold clear up faster with vitamin C a mere 30 mg does absolutely nothing! To begin to dent an infection with vitamin C takes 10,000 milligrams a day, and to make a life threatening infection like pneumonia go away faster might require 25,000 to 150,000 milligrams of vitamin C daily, administered intravenously. In terms of supplying that much C with limes, that's 300 to 750 of them daily - clearly impossible.

Similarly, pellagra can be cured with a few milligrams of vitamin B 3, but schizophrenia can sometimes be cured with 3,000 milligrams, roughly a thousand times as much as the MDR.

There are many many common diseases that the medical profession does not see as being caused by vitamin deficiencies. Senility and many mental disorders fall in this category. Many old people live on extremely deficient diets comprised largely of devitalized starches, sugars, and fats, partly because many do not have good enough teeth to chew vegetables and other high roughage foods, and they do not have the energy it takes to prepare more nourishing foods. Virtually all old people have deficiency diseases. As vital force inevitably declines with age, the quantity and quality of digestive enzymes decreases, then the ability to breakdown and extract soluble nutrients from food is diminished, frequently leading to serious deficiencies. These deficiencies are inevitably misdiagnosed as disease and as aging.

Suppose a body needs 30 milligrams a day of niacin to not develop pellagra, but to be fully healthy, needs 500 milligrams daily. If that body receives 50 milligrams per day from a vitamin pill, to the medical doctor it could not possibly be deficient in this vitamin. However, over time, the insidious sub-clinical deficiency may degrade some other system and produce a different disease, such as colitis. But the medical doctor sees no relationship. Let me give you an actual example. Medical researchers studying vitamin B 5 or pantothenic acid noticed that it could, in what seemed to be megadoses (compared to the minimum daily requirement) largely reverse certain degenerative effects of aging. These researchers were measuring endurance in rats as it decreased through the aging process. How they made this measurement may appear to some readers to be heartless, but the best way to gauge the endurance of a rat is to toss it into a five gallon bucket of cold water and see how long it swims before it drowns. Under these conditions, the researcher can be absolutely confident that the rat does its very best to stay alive.

Young healthy rats can swim for 45 minutes in 50° Fahrenheit water before drowning. Old rats can only last about 15 minutes. And old rats swim differently, less efficiently, with their lower bodies more or less vertical, sort of dog paddling. But when old rats were fed pantothenic acid at a very high dose for a few weeks before the test, they swam 45 minutes too. And swam more efficiently, like the young rats did. More interestingly, their coats changed color (the gray went away) and improved in texture; they began to appear like young rats. And the rats on megadoses of B 5 lived lot longer - 25 to 33 percent longer than rats not on large doses of B 5. Does that mean 'megadoses' of B 5 have an unknown drug-like effect? Or does that mean the real nutritional requirement for B 5 is a lot higher than most people think? I believe the second choice is correct. To give you an idea of how much B 5 the old rats were given in human terms, the FDA says the minimum daily requirement for B 5 is about 10 milligrams but if humans took as much B 5 as the rats, they would take about 750 milligrams per day. Incidentally, I figure I am as worthy as any lab rat and take over 500 milligrams daily.