Dear Owen,
I am reading your book "Practicing Medicine..." and am impressed with such a
simple solution to CVD.
My wife had three bypasses in 1997. Presently her joints, specially her knees, are always in pain, which vary in intensity from mild to intense, and has difficulty in sleeping. Her cardiologist has prescribed Ambien which she takes in minimal doses (1/3 of a 10mg capsule) most nights. She also suffers from a very intense itching in her scalp and nothing prescribed by several dermathologists has helped, except temporarily. She also invariably gets exhausted in the evenings and has to lay down until it passes.
Her latest labs show total cholesterol 269, HDL 40, Triglycerides 349, LDL 158 and VLDL 70.
Her diet is reasonably healthy consisting mostly of vegetables, fish and ocassionally, meat.
Her usual medicines are Toprol 25mg and Aspirin 81mg.
Whay do you suggest she should do and what would it cost, we are both retired and living off social security?
Thank you for your prompt reply.
J.
Hello, Here is my free advice.
Go to Sams club and buy their 500 mg vitamin C tablets, and if they don't carry lysine, then purchase 500 mg lysine tablets somewhere else. These tablets should be pure, and the vitamin C should be pure ascorbic acid. (You might also check vitamincstore.com as I believe they offer the lowest prices anywhere.)
Start with 1 tablet of each supplement (500 mg) every 4 waking hours. Perhaps 2 of each before bed.
Each day, increase by one tablet every 4 hours until you reach 10 to 12 tablets of lysine total (5-6 grams daily). At least that much vitamin C, but your wife (and you) may need more vitamin C. We are individuals.
If you take the time to read Dr. Cathcart's paper
http://www.orthomed.com/titrate.htm
you will know how to determine the dosage of vitamin C that is right for you.
In about one month or less, you should have a good idea whether this simple regimen can help improve your wife's knees, scalp, and elevated cholesterol. If so, I recommend following Pauling's entire regimen, which is also a subset of my regimen in the book. This includes vitamins E, A and Super B complex.
At your ages, you would be wise to supplment Coenzyme Q10.
I don't know much about the specific drugs, but I know it is not wise to take aspirin without taking vitamin C. I would not stop aspirin cold turkey, but I would gradually diminish the aspirin while you are increasing the vitamin C/lysine.
Owen
p.s. rereading your message, you probably would find Linus Pauling's book HOW TO LIVE LONGER AND FEEL BETTER useful and enlightening. (Note the discussion of the adverse side effects of aspirin at the end of Pauling's book HOW TO LIVE LONGER AND FEEL BETTER.)
One should not be afraid of meat - it contains concentrations of important nutrients (e.g. CoQ10) that are not available in our plant foods.
The high triglyceride number is a hint that she is eating too many carbohydrates. Dr. Atkins was impressed by how rapidly these numbers go down on an atkins style diet.