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Vitamin C


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#1 maineman

maineman

    maineman

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Posted 24 March 2006 - 12:12 AM

In How to Feel Better and Live Longer (1986), Linus Pauling stated that megadoses of vitamins "can improve your general health . . . to increase your enjoyment of life and can help in controlling heart disease, cancer, and other diseases and in slowing down the process of aging." Pauling himself reportedly took at least 12,000 mg daily and raised the amount to 40,000 mg if symptoms of a cold appear . In 1993, after undergoing radiation therapy for prostate cancer he died of the disease at the age of 93.

Over 16 large, well-designed, higly respected studies have been done on Vitamin C.
One important study was reported in 1975 by scientists at the National Institutes of Health who compared vitamin C pills with a placebo before and during colds. Although the experiment was supposed to be double-blind, half the subjects were able to guess which pill they were getting. When the results were tabulated with all subjects lumped together, the vitamin group reported fewer colds per person over a nine-month period. But among the half who hadn't guessed which pill they had been taking, no difference in the incidence or severity was found . This illustrates how people who think they are doing something effective (such as taking a vitamin) can report a favorable result even when none exists.



Pauling was so persuasive in his belief that C cured cancer in spite of the fact that several studies that HE was involved with failed to show benefit, that to test whether Pauling might be correct, the Mayo Clinic conducted three double-blind studies involving a total of 367 patients with advanced cancer. The studies, reported in 1979, 1983, and 1985, found that patients given 10,000 mg of vitamin C daily did no better than those given a placebo . Pauling criticized the first study, claiming that chemotherapeutic agents might have suppressed the patients' immune systems so that vitamin C couldn't work . But his 1976 report on his partner's earlier work stated clearly that: "All patients are treated initially in a perfectly conventional way, by operation, use of radiotherapy, and the administration of hormones and cytotoxic substances." And during a subsequent talk at the University of Arizona, he stated that vitamin C therapy could be used along with all conventional modalities . The participants in the 1983 study had not undergone conventional treatment, but Pauling dismissed its results anyway.


Science aside, it is clear that Pauling was politically aligned with the promoters of unscientific nutrition practices. He said his initial interest in vitamin C was aroused by a letter from biochemist Irwin Stone, with whom he subsequently maintained a close working relationship. Although Stone was often referred to as "Dr. Stone," his only credentials were a certificate showing completion of a two-year chemistry program, an honorary chiropractic degree from the Los Angeles College of Chiropractic, and a "Ph.D." from Donsbach University, a nonaccredited correspondence school.



The Linus Pauling Institute of Medicine, founded in 1973, is dedicated to "orthomolecular medicine." The institute's largest corporate donor has been Hoffmann-La Roche, the pharmaceutical giant that produces most of the world's vitamin C.

A dispute between Pauling and Arthur Robinson, Ph.D., gives additional evidence of Pauling's defense of vitamin C megadosage was less than honest. Robinson, a former student and long-time associate of Pauling, helped found the institute and became its first president. According to an investigative report by James Lowell, Ph.D., in Nutrition Forum newsletter, Robinson's own research led him to conclude in 1978 that the high doses (5-10 grams per day) of vitamin C being recommended by Pauling might actually promote some types of cancer in mice . Robinson told Lowell, for example, that animals fed quantities equivalent to Pauling's recommendations contracted skin cancer almost twice as frequently as the control group and that only doses of vitamin C that were nearly lethal had any protective effect. Shortly after reporting this to Pauling, Robinson was asked to resign from the institute, his experimental animals were killed, his scientific data were impounded, and some of the previous research results were destroyed. Pauling also declared publicly that Robinson's research was "amateurish" and inadequate. Robinson responded by suing the Institute and its trustees. In 1983, the suit was settled out of court for $575,000. In an interview quoted in Nature, Pauling said that the settlement "represented no more than compensation for loss of office and the cost of Robinson's legal fees." However, the court-approved agreement states that $425,000 of the settlement was for slander and libel.




In 1994, Robinson and two colleagues summarized the results of four mouse studies he had carried out while working at the Pauling Institute . Nearly all of the mice developed skin cancers (squamous cell carcinomas) following exposure to ultraviolet radiation. Altogether, 1,846 hairless mice received a total of 38 different diets. The researchers found that (a)
the rate of onset and severity of tumors could be varied as much as 20-fold by just modifying dietary balance; (B) diets with the worst balance of nutrients had the greatest inhibitory effect on cancer growth; and © no cures or remissions were observed (although the researchers were not looking for this). In 1999, Robinson commented:

The results of these experiments caused an argument between Linus and me, which ended our 16-year period of work together. He was not willing to accept the experimentally proved fact that vitamin C in ordinary doses accelerated the growth rate of squamous cell carcinoma in these mice.

At the time, Linus was promoting his claim that "75% of all cancer can be prevented and cured by vitamin C alone." This claim proved to be without experimental foundation and not true. . . . Vitamin C increased the rate of growth of cancer at human equivalents of 1 to 5 grams per day, but suppressed the cancer growth rate at doses on the order of 100 grams per day (near the lethal dose), as do other measures of malnutrition.


I was a resident in NYC at the outset of the AIDS epidemic. One of the many sad things I encountered was a large epidemic of premature death in the gay community after word got out that MEGA DOSE Vitamin C would "cure" AIDS. These already sick patients ended up dying from erosive, bloody diarrhea from tens of thousands of units of VItamin C. It took us weeks to get the word out in the street for this practice to stop. Meanwhile we buried a lot of guys.

Caveat Emptor......maineman





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