The Healing Power of Nutritional Supplements

Long a champion of complementary medicine and nutritional therapy, Dr. Robert Atkins, author of the #1 best-seller Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution, presents the scientific basis for the use of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, herbs, and hormones in the treatment and prevention of many of the chronic illnesses that plague us today. These vita-nutrients harness the body's ability to heal itself, rather than resorting to conventional drugs and invasive procedures, and address the true causes of disease instead of temporarily alleviating symptoms, promoting longer-lasting and more effective healing.

In this comprehensive guide, Dr. Atkins shares vital information on more than 120 supplements, including:

• The specific restorative powers of each nutrient

• How to determine the optimal dosage schedule

• How to obtain supplements that are new to the market or are available only in limited supply

• The formula for a basic foundation of vita-nutrients that almost everyone needs every day

Best of all, Dr. Atkins shows you how to create a personalized program to help improve or regain your health by using combinations of nutritional supplements specifically designed to help cure or prevent more than fifty common medical conditions, including arthritis, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, or infections. Backed by cutting-edge scientific research, his recommendations are both safe and effective.

Chapter 1

Have you ever read or received advertisements proclaiming "Breakthrough!!! Natural treatments your doctor won't tell you about! Safer revolutionary treatment for heart disease, cancer, fatigue or what-have-you"? Perhaps you wondered if the words heralded something important; or perhaps you remained skeptical.

While the details of such ads may or may not be true, there is one thing I can assure you: There are breakthroughs that can restore your health from debilitating illness or, if you are healthy, make you even healthier. They are natural, safe, and nutritious — and they have not been adopted by mainstream medicine.

The Gratifications of Nutritional Weapons

For the past quarter century I have devoted my medical career to developing and teaching others about complementary medicine, a somewhat revolutionary school of thought in which the doctor tries, whenever possible, to replace risky medical and surgical interventions with safe, gentle, and nourishing efforts to restore the patient's health. The focal point of this activity is the Atkins Center for Complementary Medicine, where I and my staff of health professionals treat thousands of patients with a wide spectrum of health problems that range from the life-threatening to simple prevention. In that time span, I have witnessed the ability of vita-nutrient therapy to overcome illnesses of just about every kind. This kind of treatment is growing so exponentially that even now I am constantly amazed at its impressive successes.

To give you the flavor of the exhilarating satisfaction I get from practicing this new kind of medicine; listen to the story of my patient Marie Speller. An eleven-year-old who had been recently diagnosed with juvenile diabetes, she had been prescribed two varieties of insulin. Doctors are traditionally taught that juvenile diabetes carries with it a life sentence requiring insulin. However, I had learned from treating other diabetic patients that if one of the lesser-known vita-nutrients, calcium AEP, is given during the first year of this illness, the illness can be reversed. I put Marie on a vita-nutrient program, and we were able to lower her insulin dose, week by week, until six months later she stopped taking the drug completely. Her blood sugar levels were virtually normal and have remained so for the past two years, at which time her pancreas responded to a carbohydrate meal with a normal output of insulin.

When I first saw Ron Barlow, he could not pass his high school exams and had to be put in a special tutorial class. Why? Because the radiation therapy he received to remove a cancerous growth in his brain had damaged that organ. Records showed that dozens of other youngsters treated as Ron had been had never gone to college.

I gave Ron every vita-nutrient I knew that helped brain function. A few weeks later, the young man, who had never gotten as much as a "D" on an exam since his radiation, received an "A" on his midterm. His teachers were astounded. Ron was later accepted at a good college, where he is now doing very well.

Case Histories Provide Scientific Data

While these stories are certainly dramatic, others may be more illustrative because they are typical of 80-90 percent of patients with similar problems. For example, Jack Spanfield came to the Atkins Center at age forty-three with an eleven-year history of ulcerative colitis. Its painful symptoms include frequent bloody diarrhea, mucus, and cramps. Jack had failed to benefit from the strongest of medications and required two painkilling enemas every day when I first examined him. After two weeks of targeted vita-nutrient therapy and a sugarless diet, he began to improve. Within six weeks his bowel function was completely normal, and within three months he was off all medications.

Marian Longstaff, a seventy-four-year-old woman, had had psoriasis for seventeen years. Even with considerable doses of prednisone, she was suffering from itchy, scaly patches on her scalp, knees, elbows, and arms. She improved within six weeks on a vita-nutrient program, and in seven months the scales, the itching, and the prednisone were all gone.

Isabel Palmer, a forty-one-year-old woman, had diabetes, asthma, migraine headaches, and high blood pressure. After a few months on vita-nutrients targeted specifically to all of these conditions, every problem was gone or virtually gone.

Karen Wickman, a forty-eight-year-old woman with a complete absence of hair (alopecia areata), complained of fatigue, memory loss, and high cholesterol, for which she took a statin drug. After a few months of taking vita-nutrients she could buy in a health food store, her cholesterol dropped sixty points, even without the medications. Her memory and alertness improved, and best of all, her hair started growing in!

Ronald Dawson, age thirty-six, had migraines so severe that he had been on disability for four years. Within a month of starting vita-nutrients, he was off three different kinds of strong medications and his migraines had stopped.

The great majority of patients I see at the Atkins Center could also tell you stories of how they benefited by upgrading their nutritional intake. Yet most had been told by well-trained specialists that nothing else — besides drugs — could help them. Don't believe anyone who tells you that! It simply means that nothing can be done within medicine's officially sanctioned surgical and pharmaceutical boundaries. Beyond these narrow confines, however, is a universe of scientifically validated treatments — vitamins, minerals, fatty acids, amino acids, enzymes, and other biochemical substances that exist naturally in our bodies or diet — which the medical establishment chooses not to recognize.

Taking nutritional supplements is not new. But what is new now is that medical science itself, through research and experiment, is beginning to legitimize the nonpharmaceutical prescriptions used for so long by progressive health practitioners. Together, published studies and real-world clinical evidence prove that a wide range of these nourishing compounds can overcome illness as well as (and usually better than) the best drugs and invasive surgeries that money can buy.

The patients I have described refused the conventional wisdom of the medical establishment. In so doing, they recovered far beyond anyone's expectations, simply by eating properly and taking nutrient supplements. From headache to hypertension, diarrhea to diabetes, most modern-day illnesses are diet-related disorders. They result from eating incorrectly and not ingesting enough of the nourishing, naturally present biochemicals that optimize vital bodily functions. Successful treatment of illness results from replenishing the supply of these substances through diet and nutritional supplements.

Treatment of Choice Defined

The vita-nutrient solution isn't just a supporting actor for successful therapy; in most instances the vita-nutrients themselves should be the treatment of choice. This concept is so important that I should define it here. The phrase refers to the first option that a doctor selects to treat the condition in question. It is the "gold standard" against which other treatments must be compared.

In medical school I was taught that "treatment of choice" status should be given to therapies that have the highest benefit-to-risk ratio. Medical educators recognized that the number one choice should both favorably affect the illness (the benefit) and should have relative freedom from side effects (the risk). It's easy to understand why the benefit-to-risk ratio is the hallmark for choosing one therapy over others. But what many fail to recognize is that when this same criterion is applied, virtually all patients would be far better off with nutritional treatments.

In an ideal world, the medical profession would select treatments of choice strictly on these sensible criteria. Nutrients, however, are rarely given the consideration they deserve — even as a second line of defense. As a result, we are all victims of a tragic double standard that favors prescription drugs, along with their high cost and risk of unwanted (but not unexpected) side effects.

I would match a vita-nutrient solution against a combination of pharmaceuticals any day. Take the need to fight water retention, something many women would like to do every month and, more seriously, a major goal when treating high blood pressure or congestive heart failure. My treatment of choice would be taurine, an amino acid that promotes fluid excretion by restoring a natural balance between potassium and sodium, the minerals that govern how much fluid our tissues retain. As a bonus, it contributes to maintaining a regular heart rhythm and the heart's ability to contract, among many other physiological functions. In its required therapeutic dosage, taurine has absolutely no undesirable side effects.

Copyright © 1998 by Robert C. Atkins, M.D.

Tags: Vitamins

About the Author

Dr. Robert Coleman Atkins, M.D. (October 17, 1930 - April 17, 2003) was an American doctor and cardiologist, best known for the Atkins Nutritional Approach (or "Atkins Diet"), a popular but controversial way of dieting that entails eating low-carbohydrate, high-fat and high-protein foods.