VITAMIN C CURES: Heart Disease

[ofonorow]

Medical doctors routinely tell their patients that there is no benefit from vitamin C for heart disease, and they are trained to say that taking vitamin C for this reason is "unproven" and may even be unsafe. The book is not proof, it merely provides counterexamples that are difficult to attribute to anything else. (Question for you: Why won't medicine study it and prove Pauling wrong? They have had more than 20 years...)

But if the "few" cases are not sufficient fodder to stimulate your thinking, you may begin to review our testimonials starting at http://www.practicingmedicinewithoutalicense.com/#TESTIMONY

The point is that medical advice against vitamin C is not based on science, and since vitamin C and lysine are extremely safe and there is no known harm from taking either substance, why wouldn't doctors hedge their bets and advise their patients to follow Pauling's advice?

By the way, there is excellent hard science to support the Pauling/Rath theory. The issue is that no studies have been run on the specific dosages recommended by Linus Pauling. (There was reportedly one, as we mention, but Kenton work was never published.)

[Miro]

Right. That makes a little bit more sense.

Then, I guess the right catchphrase is "testimonies with no other explanation". So you're claiming these testimonies have rhetorical power? I haven't read the book yet, but I would think that most testimonies can be easily explained through natural course of the disease, placebo and various biases (even if you're pointing out to objective measurements).

Why won't medicine study it and prove Pauling wrong? They have had more than 20 years.

That's a good question. From what I've read, it's the fact that Pauling wasn't quite scientific. That might be not true, but the story is that he wasn't quite consistent with his claims. This might be what led to 200g-2g trials, which according to Pauling Therapy as we know it today isn't Pauling Therapy. I do not dispute there is absence of trials involving more than 10g a day and, since Vitamin C trials aren't quite expensive to test, it's beyond me why nobody tested these claims properly yet.

why wouldn't doctors hedge their bets and advise their patients to follow Pauling's advice

Conventional doctors aren't quite comfortable practicing anything that is considered "alternative". Practicing alternative medicine would be exactly like practicing placebo medicine (regardless of the real effectiveness of the advised treatment).

[Dolev]

Conventional doctors aren't quite comfortable practicing anything that is considered "alternative". Practicing alternative medicine would be exactly like practicing placebo medicine

yeah, right. Conventional doctors don't want to waste their education which taught them to give drugs, run little cameras up arteries, blow up little balloons to expand the area, insert tubes to keep it open. Then if that doesn't work they can take a vein from a leg and paste it in place of a blocked artery, and if that doesn't work they can take the heart of someone killed in a car accident and replace the original.

So they're going to give up all that education and lucrative magic and give what Dolev can give for $25 a month. Hold your breath.

Being a cardiologist today is like being a gardener who plants in concrete and wonders why the plants are dying even though he pours water on them and sprays them with bug killer.

[ofonorow]

Why not test this assumption by reading at least some of the testimonials?

I would think that most testimonies can be easily explained through natural course of the disease,

Carol Smith is one of our prime examples. She could not walk across the room because of severe angina (chest) pain caused by her heart disease. Her doctor told her to get her affairs in order, because she didn't have long to live. This was in 1996.

She found us on the Internet and began Tower Heart Technology (high dosage vitamin C, lysine and proline) and felt cured in short order. A matter of weeks, and every time she would run out of the Heart Technology, the pain returned.

We've kept a running log of all her emails. (She is still with us and you can speak with her. She was also interviewed on the Jeff Rense radio show in Aug of 2008 (or 12 years after she started Pauling's therapy.) ,mms://rense.gsradio.net/rense/windows_media/WMHigh/Aug2008/r8r10x/rense_081408_hr2.wma

Her case is interesting because after several years, she felt "cured" and stopped the therapy (vitamin C/lysine). Six months later she had a heart attack and her EKGs became "bad." (It is my understanding that this shows heart damage.)

She called, restarted the therapy, and this time added Unique-E (natural vitamin E) from A. C. Grace because of its known effect of "normalizing" EKGs. Three months later, she had her EKGs taken - and they had become normal. We posted these on the Internet. http://www.internetwks.com/carolsmith/

Impressed by the power of Unique-E, she became friendly with a well meaning employee of A. C. Grace who began to advise her nutritionally. For some reason, this person suggested that she stop taking the high dose vitamin C/lysine. Six months later she had another heart attack. This time they inserted at least one stent, but it was of the wrong size and created great pain. She found that the only way to overcome the pain was to not only start, but increase her dosage of vitamin C and lysine. Her success after her third restart of the Pauling therapy is recounted down the page here: http://paulingtherapy.com/#CSMITH

The current situation is that she has again reduced her vitamin C/lysine after a bought with breast cancer on the advice of her Naturopath. (She does take LivonLabs Lypo-C daily, however.)

In summary, in Carol's case, as in many others, she felt cured and fine while on the therapy.

She stopped, had another heart attack in six months.

Started and felt cured and fine while on the therapy.

She stopped, had another heart attack in six months.

This time she had to increase the dosage (to overcome a painful stent placement) but felt cured and fine while on the therapy.

Time will tell what happens with only Lypo-C (and no additional lysine)

[Miro]

Fair enough. I checked the Carol Smith case and here is what I have to say:

1. It's not rare for doctors to make bad predictions. I have a friend whose father was diagnosed with brain tumor 20 years ago and who was told he will die in 6 months. He's still alive today. Now, what I want to say is that the fact that her doctor told her she will have to live with this severe angina pain for the rest of her life doesn't mean much. Obviously, her doctor was wrong, but that doesn't mean she made the difference herself, or that Vitamin C, in particular, was responsible for the change, since it might as well be just the nature of her disease.

2. She had three heart attacks since 1995, two of which happened since she started Vitamin C+lysine treatment. All of these heart attacks occurred when she was off the treatment. Now, this is sound, but one very important statistic is omitted - how long did she spend on the treatment and how long did she spend off the treatment? From what she said, it seems like her heart attacks only occur when she's off the treatment, and that in period of 16 years she spent only around 1 year off the treatment. Now, this is really an unusually high level of adherence, but disregarding that I can't understand why you haven't decided to get someone else write a detailed log of her treatment? It is well known that self-reports are seriously biased, which means she might have spent 8 years off-treatment without knowing it, which would easily negate the proposed effectiveness of Vitamin C.

3. No other factors are taken into consideration. Things such as physical activity, nutrition and stress. I'm not sure why?

[ofonorow]

First, this is one case, there are hundreds. In this case, there is a lot of communication over several years. The time periods are documented by the email timestamps.

We have posted a partial record of Carol's emails, and my memory was wrong - she began contacting us in 2001. She had at least 2 heart attacks before contacting us. Her emails start with:

Initlal Correspondence: Starting the Pauling Therapy/Tower Heart Technology
Mon Jul 23 11:43:50 CDT 2001

Dear Owen Fonorow

According to the Doctors my main coronary artery is very bad and they can not do a bypass. Two years ago The main artery closed and I had a 2nd heart attack with damage this time. My heart was in the process of doing a bypass on the blockage when the heart attack happened. The Doctors said that was what saved my life but I would have to learn to live with angina for the rest of my life. After taking the Heart Technology for 3 weeks, I have more energy and no chest pains. LIFE IS GREAT. I want that feeling back. I hate chest pains.

I am almost out and have cut down to a tablespoon a day (6 gm vitamin C and lysine) until my next order comes. ( I hope it is soon.) I am dealing with angina again since I cut back on the Tower Heart Technology. I know that it is helping and I was taking 1 heaping Tablespoon every 12 hours. Thank you and advice or suggestions are appreciated.

Carol Smith
lori@xxx.com

NEXT MESSAGE

Dear Owen,

I woke up this morning with tightness & angina pain in the chest (no fun) This product really does make a difference. Back to the Nitro patches & Nitro pills until I can get on the Heart Technology again.

This was the first correspondence! Once one accepts that these emails are accurate, (you can always speak with Carol), one must have their head pretty deep in the sand to ignore the effect of Linus Pauling's therapy on this woman, Carol Smith, a therapy backed by the unified theory.

You can find all her emails from the early years here: http://www.internetwks.com/carolsmith/CarolSmithCR.htm

[Miro]

I'll just quickly address two important points:

this is one case, there are hundreds

There are hundreds of testimonials for obvious sham treatments. The number of testimonials on its own means little. The emphasis should not be on quantity but on quality. And while testimonials are never enough, by making sure you're rigorous with your research you will catch medical attention with more ease.

Once one accepts that these emails are accurate

That IS the problem. There is no way to gauge the accuracy of the data where no effort to eliminate known biases is made.

Just to make it clear - I have no problem with alternative practices, I'm simply annoyed by conspiracy theorists and people disregarding what we've learned about natural human tendencies. The treatment might work; who knows. But expecting testimonials to mean exactly what you want them to mean is not serious enough.

-

I've checked other e-mails, by the way. Still thinking it might as well be natural course of the disease.

[ofonorow]

Some people cannot be convinced. Our testimonials are not meant to convince as much as they are people wanting to share what they experienced. I appreciate healthy skepticism and I wish you all the luck in the world with conventional medicine! May the force be with you. (They have such a fine track record w/r to heart disease. It is now, what, about the tenth or eleventh cause of death and disability... What is number one again?)

Our point is that Pauling's theory and specific therapy has not been studied!!!!???!!!

There have been well over a thousand studies of cholesterol lowering drugs! (With little evidence of efficacy in my opinion, other than they do in fact lower cholesterol.)

In the case of the Pauling therapy, a) both substances are completely non toxic, b) we have a complete unified theory proposed by a world class scientist, and c) there are hundreds of testimonials staring with Pauling's very first case report (ours are just a continuation), There have been failures, as we discuss at this forum. But in most cases, failure occurs from a low dosage or from stopping the therapy.

Somebody - somewhere besides us - should have studied this. If this is okay in your world, then we live in different worlds. By the way, most doctors still tell their patients that there is "no proof" for vitamin C in large dosages w/r heart disease. While technically this may be true, it implies to the patient that it has been studied, and found lacking. (It has not be rigorously studied! There have been "cover" studies - studies designed to provide cover for medical doctors to hide behind, but most have serious flaws w/r to vitamin C.)

Our point is that the Pauling therapy has not been studied and should have been long ago. So you cannot get what you seem to seek. It does not exist. Testimonials - people's experiences are all we have. Could we have done a better job collecting data. Sure, but no matter how well we did that job, I'm telling you it wouldn't matter. Statin drugs make enough money each year for Big Pharma to purchase something like 30 major league sports franchises. The only thing that might have mattered is if the NIH (office of alternative medicine) had run the studies we proposed... They refused for trivial reasons, but could have designed their own.

I've checked other e-mails, by the way. Still thinking it might as well be natural course of the disease.

Huh? Only if she or we are lying. How is it the natural course of disease to be in pain without high dosage vitamin C/lysine, then to stop and have a heart attack six months later, repeatedly? I don't follow your thinking.

The other point about our testimonials is that these people (most of them) were willing to provide their real names, etc. Because they were surprised by what happened to them, and they want to share their experiences.

But I agree with you that testimonials are far from convincing. It just happens to be all we have, mostly from people who want to let others know.

On the other hand, most medical studies are also biased and have very little meaning for the individual interested in a particular therapy.

[Dolev]

But I agree with you that testimonials are far from convincing.

Well, I don't agree that the testimonials are far from convincing. I was convinced already from Pauling's first case where he gave lysine to that chemist friend of his and he went from pain walking across the room to painting his house, or whatever it was, in a few days, or whatever it took. I was convinced more with each story I read.

When anecdotal evidence i repeated over and over, it certainly convinces me a lot more than some study with a few percentage points of absolute risk reduction, especially when some ignorant quack like me sees a half dozen possible statistical games while reading an abstract.

[Miro]

Huh? Only if she or we are lying. How is it the natural course of disease to be in pain without high dosage vitamin C/lysine, then to stop and have a heart attack six months later, repeatedly? I don't follow your thinking.

Right to the point! The problem with testimonials is that they are full of weird and strange biases that regular folks aren't aware of. For example, she might not be lying, but she might be a biased reporter; a reporter who's mostly reporting positive outcomes. So for example, she might have spent more time off-the-treatment than she actually remembers, and she might not be remembering not because she has bad memory but because of the high hopes that Vit C will help her. If that is the case, that would negate the probability that heart attacks are more likely to happen when off-treatment. Am I being clear?

As you can see I'm not even dealing with other factors that might have contributed to the pattern of her disease, I'm just starting out with basic research flaws - report, response and recall bias. With this in mind you could have produced a bit more convincing (but still not sufficient) testimonial simply by having someone keep her treatment log.

Anyways, yes, I understand that Vitamin C therapy hasn't been researched properly. That's a sad truth. I'm totally understanding the importance of anecdotal evidence, but I feel that there is other stuff alternative Vitamin C researchers can do to gather more mainstream attention. First one is to put the conspiracy theory on the back burner. The second one is to stop medical system-alternative comparisons and focus on being more rigorous and scientific with what you have.

There are, however, some of the Vitamin C media/research guys with their businesses who are probably capable of doing their own studies, but so far they did nothing and only served to look like quacks (I'm talking about Patrick Holford and Matthias Rath).

[ofonorow]

I think we are in agreement on testimonials, but have your read Linus Paulings very first case that he wrote up and published? (I transcribed the case in this forum topic on Lp(a) http://www.vitamincfoundation.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=9131)

So no one is holding up anecdotes as science. We are hilighting the fact that many people who have benefited from Pauling's work have wanted to share their experiences, and that is what we have done. And there are a lot of people, but if we have only helped a single person - it has been worth it.

While we do not claim these reports are scientific, there are many "experiments" where only one factor was changed. The pattern has been so consistent for 15 or so years, that I personally have little doubt that Pauling/Rath are correct. That the great problem of cardiovascular disease is only present in humans, primates and guinea pigs for the reason that these species cannot make their own vitamin C - as all the other species do. (For example, if there was nothing to this, one would expect a lot of people, if not the majority to complain that it didn't help them, but this has been rare over the years. Why would that be in your opinion?)

So if not a conspiracy, why is the development being ignored? (The answer of course is $$$$$)

but I feel that there is other stuff alternative Vitamin C researchers can do to gather more mainstream attention. First one is to put the conspiracy theory on the back burner. The second one is to stop medical system-alternative comparisons and focus on being more rigorous and scientific with what you have.

Without writing another book, this sounds reasonable and plausible, especially to the general public. That is, until you look under the covers and see what is really going on, since the late 1940s! There has been a sustained and deliberate attempt to discredit vitamin C, and it has worked, at least w/r to the medical profession. As I have written many times, I took (audited) a 300 level course at Benedictine University entitled THERAPEUTIC NUTRITION. (The college claims that something like 80% of its graduates who want to go on to medical school are accepted.). This may be the only class on nutrition an MD attends in school. VITAMIN C WAS NOT MENTIONED IN A SEMESTER LONG CLASS ON THERAPEUTIC NUTRITION. It was like the Twilight Zone.

It is not surprising that doctors are "biased" against vitamin C, because they assume that if there was really something there, they would have been taught about it, right? Well, it turns out that other than aspirin (prostagladins) more studies have been done on vitamin C than any other health subject!? Yet all this work is ignored today, (I would say hidden) by the fiction that the only thing vitamin C is good for is to prevent its deficiency disease scurvy.

By the way, the "natural course" of Carol Smith's disease in 2001 was a painful death. That is what usually happens to people in her condition, told that there are no medical options.

[Dolev]

So no one is holding up anecdotes as science.

I certainly am holding up anecdotes as science, and by saying otherwise you're giving support to the bias towards double-blind trials as the only thing which constitues science. As if the Cochrane Review is the only science available.

When the natural course of an untreated disease is well known and you give people something and clearly see a different response, they become a test group and all the other people become the control. This is the way science and medicine have progressed throughout history.

Hoffer, who ran the first controlled trials in psychiatry, became desenamoured with placebo trials and wrote about it on several occasions. He was one of the most unbiased and dedicated scientists I've ever read about.

[ofonorow]

I certainly am holding up anecdotes as science

Thanks Dolev, because you are right. These testimonials are important and I wish some journalist had done their job and interviewed these people - providing an independent verification of the basic facts in all these stories.

And it is a subtle point. Technically, these reports are not science, but they are important and the more there are, the more they make the subject matter worthy of scientific investigation.

I happen to agree with you that the weight of these testimonials are convincing. As Pauling himself said, with these kind of obvious results, he didn't think a "placebo controlled, double blind randomized trial" would be necessary before recommending vitamin C and lysine to heart patients. One of the greatest scientists of all time said this, and after only three such cases (in a row).

The now hundreds of such reports are probably more convincing than 80% of all medical studies run or sponsored by Big Pharma. In fact, I am always interested in anecdotes, especially contradictions, etc, because medicine does such a poor job with their "science" (which has Dr. Hickey explains in ACORBATE: The Science of VItamin C, is rarely real science; i.e., it is not repeatable ( the experiments are too large to be duplicated by other scientists), not run by independent or unbiased scientists, not subject to the normal rigorous criticism of other scientists, too many variables, real science that could harm pharmaceutical sales is never published, etc. etc.)

A rigorous scientific investigation would provide knowledge that we can only guess about from anecdotes.

[ofonorow]

At the risk of prolonging this debate, it occurred to me that there is proof that no matter how well we documented these cases, doing so would have a negligible effect on the practice of medicine.

That proof now exists in the form of a book ONE MAN ALONE by Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez. MD

http://www.amazon.com/One-Man-Alone-Investigation-Nutrition/dp/0982196512/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1308669579&sr=1-1

The book fully documents with 50 medical case histories the medical success of the 100-year-old cure for cancer.

Summary: Nick Gonzalez, while a medical student, at the direction of the head of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer center, studied the medical records of hundreds of cancer patients who claimed to be cured by the late William D. Kelley, DDS. Nick was told to select 50 such cases, on a wide range of different cancers, and if he found such evidence, the then-head of Sloan-Kettering felt that such documentation would be convincing.

These redacted medical records have been available for now more than 30 years. (And they probably got the then well respected head of Sloan-Kettering fired. Or put out to pasture...)

By the way, as in the case of Pauling/Rath, the 100-year-old John Beard cancer theory makes sense to a point of being almost irrefutable (as is documented in a companion book by Gonzalez TROPHOBLAST.)

So we seem to have what miro wants, i.e., well document treatment histories, in the form of medical records, for the number two cause of death in the USA. Yet, this work is completely ignored by medicine, for the same reason Pauling's work is ignored. (Dr. Gonzalez was able to get the NIH to fund a study, but it was attacked by oncologists at every stage, as Dr. Gonzalez describes in an article in the Townsend Letter.)

[Miro]

Untreated diseases tend to follow unpredictable patterns. Usually there is a common pattern, but there are lots of exceptions too. To assume otherwise is a naive approach, if you ask me. One has to really get into doctor's shoes and examine history of all of the patients with untreated disease for one to see that there are all kinds of "mysterious cures" in there. But more interesting than that are observations of people using different kinds of alternative therapies. For me, it is enough to see how many people swear that homeopathy works to be really skeptical of testimonials. There are many more homeopathic testimonials than there are Vitamin C ones, with homeopathy being ultra-popular, NHS-funded and whatnot. And that's one of those treatments that have been thoroughly tested and proven to be nothing more than placebo.

For example, if there was nothing to this, one would expect a lot of people, if not the majority to complain that it didn't help them, but this has been rare over the years. Why would that be in your opinion?

I'd say people generally don't notice when treatments aren't working. Unless they were skeptical of them in the first place, or were on a trial. But disregarding that, there is something Vitamin C has that gives lots of weight to the idea that it is a powerful placebo - Vitamin C does good. Basically, lots of people are malnourished. If these people started taking Vitamin C they would start feeling a lot better. This, combined with the hope, can create a positive reinforcement loop, in a way that active placebos do.

My question to you: if Vitamin C is such a powerful treatment, why isn't it spreading like a meme?

There has been a sustained and deliberate attempt to discredit vitamin C, and it has worked, at least w/r to the medical profession.

But aren't there funded, published, properly randomized and controlled, large-scale RCT's that showed positive results? Like effectiveness of Vitamin C in treating AIDS. I think there was one recently. I'd say if there was such a serious effort to discredit Vitamin C this would never have been published.