Sequel Thread To Holistic Doctors, and medicine

I am getting very weary of these lists of clinical studies. Tell me. Did you read the abstracts of any of them before you cut and pasted them here? Do you know why any of these studies were conducted? Why these particular doses of these substances would be given to anyone, what the circumstances would be? What were the amounts of the vitamins and minerals used, and in what form? Do you know? Do you care? This is all important information. When you show an interest in actually looking in detail at one of these studies, I will be willing to engage in a more detailed discussion.I am tired of going to Pubmed to refute link for link with you. It is clear that your agenda is to mine the site for as many links that sound like they're a condemnation of orthomolecular medicine as possible. I have no doubt that if I spent more of my time searching, I could find positive studies, but I'm beginning to think that this is a waste of time. I've done enough of it. My family is pissed off at me for spending so much time on the computer as it is. Go to Orthomolecular.org. Evaluate what is being said there. Educate yourself.To address your list again, I don't know why these substances would be given in large amounts, apart from the niacin. Anyone who gives iron in large amounts, if there in no anaemia present, is an idiot. There might be good clinical reasons for giving some of these other things but that is knowledge my ND has, not me. Vitamin A has a known toxicity limit, and a lot can depend on the form in which it is taken. The vitamins that are most commonly taken in large amounts are C, E, and the B vitamins. I don't see anything here regarding those apart from your niacin citation. And again, I have no idea of the methodology of that study. Why don't you go to PubMed and find other studies there that use niacin and see what they were about? Try to honestly evaluate what's going on without trying to use one study as proof that the whole idea is wrong. Do the same for vitamin C. If the positive studies are there to be found, I think you need to be aware of them before you criticise.Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.

A condition involving psychosis is consistent with the indications for prescribing Zyprexa. Technically you are correct then, Zyprexa is indicated for use in depression if it involves psychosis.I would prefer not to see any psychotropic drugs prescribed at all. My position here has been that there are healthier non-drug alternatives. I have a particular concern about neuroleptics because incidences of serious side effects are so high with those, and they are still so widely prescribed. Instead of looking for alternatives, doctors tend to prescribe new medications in an attempt to ameliorate the side effects of the first medication. It is not uncommon for a person to experience the first manic episode of their lives on an antidepressant and for the doctor to decide, not that the episode was possibly an effect of the drug, but that the mania is a sign of an "emerging" bipolar condition. And so new drugs are added to the mix. I've seen new medications prescribed for tardive dyskinesia when what the patient needs is to be taken off the drug that is causing it. You are correct. But a doctor is also allowed to prescribe off-label when no studies have been done, and they don't have to tell the patient that this is the case. Maybe I haven't made myself very clear in this regard. My own GP is a hard-working person who genuinely seems to want to help people. That's the case with most GPs I've met. I would never accuse them of the motivations you listed above. And I'm sure that many people who work for pharmaceutical companies are convinced that what they are doing is helping people. The ones I would suspect of being callous and greedy are the ones in the top echelons who make all the decisions and produce the marketing strategies. They are the ones who are behind decisions to conceal clinical trial results indicating that a drug like Zyprexa has adverse side effects (i.e. type II diabetes). They are the ones who develop a drug and then decide how best to market it -- in essence, what to do with it that will profit them, as was the case with Prozac. But the majority of people, though they may collude with these practices and believe wholeheartedly that drugs are the only cures for anything, no doubt do not have ulterior motives. They are simply ignorant of nutritional medicine, or are not interested in it. I find this sad, but I don't believe it's a sign of evil or corruption in and of itself. AltMed is a huge umbrella term. I do not defend it as a body, and I am sure there are many charlatans who take advantage of people's gullibility. I have no doubt of that at all. I've explained in other posts here what I do believe to be best practice: diet and nutrition. My own ND, the one who runs the internet list to which I belong, doesn't get money from us and doesn't sell anything. I am more wary of people who do because I know they have a profit motive. Having said that, if your career is in alternative medicine, then you've got to have a way of earning a living. Not everyone getting a profit from some kind of AltMed practice has got bogus reasons for doing so, though this is what Stephen Barrett would like you to believe. It's Hoffer, and he's the one whose work was claimed to be "ancient," though it was only his published work in mainstream journals that was being referred to. That aside, then what you're saying is clear. I'm trying to sharpen up my methods, as I've said before, and I'm learning the ropes here. You want me to back up what I am saying with studies published in mainstream peer-reviewed journals. I am now attempting to do this, though I see this as no reason to dismiss everything else out of hand. Peter Breggin, Abram Hoffer and others have much of value to say. You would be logically correct in saying they are not worth listening to because they are not currently published in the prestigious journals, but that doesn't necessarily mean you have arrived at the truth. I see your point of view Percy. But I, and most everyone else on the lists I belong to, tried the modern medicine approach. It didn't work, and in many cases it did a lot of damage. I have not shared any individual stories here apart from mine because I know they would be dismissed as anecdotes, but as groups of people they do not deserve to be ignored. Your definition of the scientific approach seems to be to take the drugs your doctor prescribed you because they have been tested. If you get side effects then it's bad luck. There are alternatives though. These alternatives can prevent disease from occurring in the first place, and they can help when it does occur, often without the need for drugs. I've said this before but if you feel there is not enough evidence for this in the mainstream, that's fine. It can take a long time for a new idea to be accepted. I'm glad I wasn't so skeptical myself because I would probably either be dead or in a psychiatric ward by now if I hadn't looked for other ways of addressing my illness.

Thanks for doing this work, Purpledawn. It shows again that it is important to look into what the full study is saying.I agree that synergy is very, very important. People looking for the magic bullet often decide, "OK, I'll try fish oil" or "vitamin C is supposed to be good." But they don't always work that way in isolation, unless the person has a marked deficiency to begin with. This is key to my ND's approach to healing and it's gratifying seeing it reflected in a study like this.Nice to know I'm not alone here

I'm gullible because I eat a whole foods diet and take vitamins? That's a pretty harsh accusation. Maybe what was gullible of me was to put my trust in the SSRI that didn't help me, and ended up damaging me. You keep telling me I ought to have faith in this system but mine has been utterly shattered. You cannot expect me to go to my doctor for more drugs of this kind when I and many others I know have learned what those drugs can do. I don't give a damn how many double-blind clinical trials show that the drug is supposed to help. This philosophy of treating mental illness is fundamentally flawed. There are cures, and they don't involve drugs.Remember also what I said about someone who feels great on an SSRI. This person has taken a pill to ease the pain of depression. It is now forgotten -- and with it, the root cause of the depression. How are people going to learn to take responsibility for their health if they are taught to pop a pill when they don't feel so good? The depression could have been caused by physical or phsychological factors, or both. It might have signalled a thyroid problem or a nutrient deficiency. While the person is feeling great on an SSRI, these issues go unaddressed. Often the only option offered to a person with depression is a pill. No counselling is available on the NHS where I live, only drugs. I saw several psychiatrists but all they did was Hamilton Test me and tell me to take my drug. They were utterly useless. I am not against regulation or testing, as long as access to vital nutrients such as vitamin C isn't restricted or made more expensive for people. The supplements I take are not advertised to me. I don't go out and buy things like that because they've been hawked at me. I take what appears to be the supplement of the highest quality, and the proof of that is in the ingredients.I am certainly not against clinical tests of any so-called natural substance. I welcome them. Whatever nefarious practices might exist in AltMed companies deserve to be brought to light. But what evils do you expect to find in vitamins, exactly? The biggest problem I've seen there is price-fixing. As long as it's a good quality supplement, I don't see how it can cause such a huge concern. Drugs can be dangerous and no sensible person gets them without a prescription and experiments with them. You can often do this with vitamins, however, because by and large they are harmless even in large amounts. I would say it's always wise, though to consult an ND who can prescribe the amount and combination that would likely be most effective for you individually. Until I learned more on my own, I took the advice of my ND. She is a neurologist and a naturopath. She reads the studies, she knows the literature that's out there.I know what the consensus of the scientific community is. They would tell me to take a drug. And so far from the vitamin C research I've been doing and the studies I've looked at, I think there's ample evidence that it is safe and effective. Are you suggesting I wait 50 years or more until it is generally accepted by mainstream medicine? I could be dead of cancer by then LOL.I can see your point about mainstream medicine Percy, but I do not share it. A pill for every ill is not the way to health. I haven't claimed anything of the kind. I've said several times that there are charlatans in AltMed and I support their exposure and removal. My ND is trustworthy and desires to help people, but I am not extrapolating from that to say that this is true of all AltMed practitioners. Also, in my previous post I explained that I do not have the attitude toward GPs that you describe above. And I said that the people helping to develop drugs probably do, for the most part, beieve they are doing something good to help people. You keep creating these straw men. What I'm saying is that the philosophy behind the current diagnose-and-prescribe practice is flawed. I'm not saying people are necessarily being unscientific, or doing their jobs wrong. It's that they're looking in the wrong places for ways to help people. Why didn't someone test Pauling's mother for a B12 deficiency? Today she would probably be put on drugs; or, if they didn't work, be offered psychosurgery, mentioned by MBG. For god's sake, all someone needed to do to cure her was inject her with B12. You are grouping all AltMed practitioners into the same homogenized group. Many of them are trained and experienced MDs who had personal experiences themselves, or with family or friends or even patients, that convinced them that allopathic medicine does not have all the answers. My ND is one. So these MDs that practice medicine with naturopathic knowledge are unscientific? As I've been discovering, there are clinical studies on vitamins out there. These aren't real-world evidence? Is it not real-world evidence when my ND draws on her experience of 20 years in assisting people to get off and stay off psychotropic drugs? If you limit yourself to accepting only the evidence from prestigious mainstream journals, you risk missing out on other ideas that have merit but which are not currently in vogue with the mainstream. At the moment that appears to include any treatment not involving drugs.By the way, who has convinced you that naturopaths are so very dangerous? (As opposed to, say, doctors prescribing drugs with risks of side effects that can include death.) Stephen Barrett? Then it's up to individuals to decide whether or not they want to listen. It's clear that you and MBG are people who would not. There are some physicians and scientists who are a little more open-minded to non-mainstream opinions.We're pretty entrenched in our views here I think Percy. What do you think either of us can gain by continuing this discussion?

I may not be a doctor or a scientist, but I can at least check through a study and see how much of the substance was administered, and in what form. I would probably ask for my ND's help with technical info.It isn't "just" a laundry list because if a study claims to have found no effect on the common cold from vitamin C use, it is important to check how much of the vitamin was used, and in what form.My personal feeling? It is keeping my daughter and me healthy. I don't honestly care if every person here disagrees with me. You are free to make your choices and I to make mine. Then I suggest you look at how much vitamin C was administered, and in what form. It also is best when used preventatively. At the onset of a cold, Pauling recommends that you take 1,000mg every hour until the symptoms go away. My naturopath suggests 2,000mg. I've done it and it works. No, I've spent enough time here. I was up until midnight last night doing vitamin C research. I am tired. I want to talk on other threads here but have been spending all my time in this one. I'm spending too much time on the computer as well. I would be inclined to carry on in this thread if I thought that all the time and effort were worthwhile for someone. However, as stimulating as this debate has been, I'm well aware that I'm not going to persuade anyone.I intend for this to be my last post in this thread.For anyone who is reading this and is interested in naturopathic medicine, then I recommend checking out the following sites. I do not recommend them to the people with whom I have been debating here, who no doubt would find plenty of disparaging remarks for them. Orthomolecular.orgDoctor YourselfMercola.comNews Target Health News

Percy, thank you for your painstaking responses here. I don't want you to think that your time is unappreciated. However, I do think that I need to call it a day on this thread. It's taking a huge amount of time and energy on my part, and the penny finally dropped today that there isn't a lot of point to it because we all seem to be very firm in our views on this issue.Since I wrote my last post, I've been browsing the Doctor Yourself site, which I hadn't visited in a while. I've read an article by Dr. Saul on cancer. This is what speaks to me. I have little faith left in mainstream medicine unless I need a broken leg fixing, or a transplant, or something similar. You're welcome to pity the poor illogical fool that I am I'll see you elsewhere on the forum."If we doctors threw all our medicines into the sea, it would be that much better for our patients and that much worse for the fishes." Oliver Wendell Holmes, M.D.

Nator I've said in 3 posts here at least, that I am not "against" allopathic medicine. I think the diagnose-and-prescribe philosophy is wrong, when "prescribe" almost always means drugs. Sometimes drugs and surgery are necessary, I've never denied that here.I think I've made my case, whatever you may think of it; and it seems people are still keen to engage me on this, but I want to move on to something else now.

I would respectfully ask you to take a moment to read my other posts here PS. Most recently, I said I wanted to finish with this topic and go talk in others, because I was spending hours on this one.I just wanted to address a few of your points though. People pick up on my enthusiasm for CAM and like to caricature me as a crusader who advocates potentially dangerous practices regardless of risk factors. Let me clarify my position a bit more. What I am interested in is people not suffering, and getting well. That is what I care about. Not, "CAM at all costs." If you choose to take a completely drug-centered approach to your illness, I am not going to belittle you and I truly hope you find the help you are looking for. But I also want to inform people that there are other choices they can make. I am aware of the opinions held by most people here, but not everyone shares those.Look at Buzsaw's regime. It is a sensible regime for anyone wanting to prevent themselves from developing disease. Prevent. It is not a prescription for how to cure any specific disease. I do know a number of things that a person can look into to find the root cause of their depression. I do not know as much about other illnesses. In all cases I would advise a person to see a naturopath. I wouldn't trust one who wasn't also an MD. There are many MDs who have expertise in nutritional and environmental medicine. No one with an MD to their name should be telling someone to take a supplement that will interfere with other drugs, or to cease antipsychotics for a handful of omega-3s. The cures are much more complicated than that. Linus Pauling himself was using vitamin C as an adjunct to traditional cancer treatments, not as a stand-alone treatment, though there are naturopathic treatments one can choose to follow to eliminate cancer. Again, these should be overseen by a suitably qualified ND if this is the route the patient chooses. I'm guessing that you don't know what vitamins or supplements are capable of doing, correctly used. You are assuming that they're going to be prescribed inappropriately. When it's something as serious as cancer, then like I said I would tell someone to see a naturopathic MD. It's not something you want to be experimenting with yourself. If it's something like the common cold, or a skin rash, or feeling tired all the time, I can't see any reason why someone shouldn't clean up their diet, take some good nutritional supplements, and monitor what happens. You and most others here might choose not to do that and that of course is up to you. You think my approach is illogical and unscientific. I'm not going to change your minds. However I did want to clarify my position here. I would not advocate a procedure that is likely to cause harm to someone.Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.

I can get acupuncture from my GP on the NHS here if I want. She offered it to me once but I declined at the time.

I'd like to pick up the towel again for a little while myself here. There are a few things I'd like to add.First MBG, your info about Christian Science's attitude toward allopathic medicine. It appears to me that these people believe in avoiding it completely, and in things like faith healing. I think you'd have a hard time finding someone who prefers to use AltMed but who won't go to the hospital to get a broken leg fixed. Also, the 20-year-old anecdote didn't specifically say what kind of alternative cancer treatment was applied. As far as "nutrition" goes, he might have been told to eat nothing but brussels sprouts, and take some fish oil or a herb. There are non-drug approaches to cancer treatment that one can follow, but it's impossible to tell what happened in this case.AltMed is a blanket term for basically any practice that isn't traditionally part of modern Western medicine. It is criticised and ridiculed here as if casting doubt on homeopathy or a herb also casts doubt on every other AltMed practice. I personally have been saying that I wouldn't trust someone who wasn't an MD. And the most powerful healing tools I'd expect him/her to apply would be diet and nutrition. There are clinical studies that have been done on vitamins. It is important to read the whole study though. An abstract can claim one thing, though the actual data might be interpreted differently by someone else. Or, as is often the case with vitamin C, the study might use very little of the vitamin, or a less bioavailable form. Finally, I would argue that some studies are probably set up to fail, in order to feed the already-skeptical mainstream belief that vitamin therapy is pseudoscience.I read an article recently that said that most of the vitamin E studies that have been done in the past few decades have used too little of the vitamin to show any significant effect compared to placebo. The Shute brothers were as known for their work on vitamin E as Pauling was on vitamin C. All of these people were subsequently largely ignored or ridiculed, mainly due to studies done by others that were flawed. Fortunately today, with the growing interest in naturopathy, there seems to be some renewed interest in orthomolecular treatments.Vitamin C restores the contractile response to dobutamine and improves myocardial efficiency in patients with heart failure after anterior myocardial infarction.
Am Heart J. 2007 Oct;154(4):645.e1-8.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...Changes of terminal cancer patients' health-related quality of life after high dose vitamin C administration.
J Korean Med Sci. 2007 Feb;22(1):7-11.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...Effects of high dose ascorbate administration on L-10 tumor growth in guinea pigs.
P R Health Sci J. 2005 Jun;24(2):145-50.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...There are pages and pages of vitamin C research on PubMed.Why was it difficult for Pauling to gain acceptance? Or the others before him, with their vitamin C research? I believe that the Mayo Clinic studies, which used oral instead of intravenous vitamin C, irreparably damaged his reputation and any credence he might have had. He talks in his book about a colleague who had trouble publishing his research in the top journals. In one case, the reason for his rejection was given as the fact that the journal's sponsors would not have approved, since many of them were manufacturers of cold remedies.Journals can be biased, and studies can be flawed. I'll say more about this in my post to Percy.Edited by AdminAsgara, : changed long URLs to fix page width...PLEASE use peek to see how this was done and do it for yourself in the future.Edited by LindaLou, : Thanks for fixing the URLs.

As I said in my post, studies will need to start using larger amounts of vitamin E, as the Shute brothers did.But the problem here, Percy, is this. The establishment is very much biased towards a drug-based approach to illness. When I have suggested here before that pharmaceuticals have a lot of influence over what gets studied and the results of those studies, people scoffed. I would like to discuss this again. What truly frightens me is the degree of trust some people here place in the clinical studies published by prestigious journals. You could make a beautifully-reasoned, eloquent argument against anything, based on these studies. If these studies are the gold standard, what else can logically compare?What happens when the gold standard is flawed? How trustworthy is it, really? How many people here have seriously questioned it? Is it assumed that bias does not exist, and that there are enough safeguards in the system to be able to root out poor practice and fraud?Marcia Angell, ex-editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, wrote a book in 2004 titled The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It. In it she says drug companies are "involved intimately in every detail of the research" for new drugs, and "they design the research so that their drugs look better than they really are."This was followed in 2005 by more criticisms of the pharmaceutical companies from another editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, Jeffrey Drazen. In an article from the Wall Street Journal titled Medical Editor Turns Activist on Drug Trials, Drazen is reported to have accused three big pharmaceutical companies of "making a mockery" of a government database designed to provide accessible information about drug trials. He has also recently written, and his journal has published, pieces critical of companies suppressing negative information about drug trials. From the article: They are not the only high-profile figures to criticise how the system is currently operating. Richard Smith, ex-editor of the BMJ, had this to say in an article titled "Opening Up BMJ Peer Review: A Beginning that Should Lead to Complete Transparency": His solution is to allow studies to be reviewed online by a much larger audience which is less prone to bias. The BMJ continues to support his position.Surely this lends credence to people like Dr. Hoffer and Dr. Breggin, who knew they would be ostracised by the medical community for publishing in their own journals. The pharmaceuticals have enoromous control in every aspect, from the development of the drugs through the clinical trials, to the approval process by the FDA. It is a process that has little room for any alternative, non-drugs based approach to treatment. I suggest that if you base all of your arguments on the gold standard of prestigious peer-reviewd journals, you risk overlooking and even reinforcing the flaws in that system; and also being closed-minded to other approaches which are possibly more efficacious than the current paradigm would seem to allow.Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.

It's good news to see cough medicines going out of favour like this. I also believe they provide no benefit. However, this is one cog in a very big wheel.If the editors of prestigious medical journals are standing up and saying that there are flaws in the system that need changing, shouldn't people be taking notice? I'm not saying that their criticisms mean that the whole establishment should be torn down. As I've said elsewhere here, clinical trials need to be conducted independently rather than by the companies that sponsor the drugs. There's a clear conflict of interest that ought to be of concern. What's more, a wider spectrum of possible treatments needs to be tested. Older drugs as well as new -- let the new ones be proved to be better than the old; and if they aren't, let doctors prescribe the older (usually much cheaper) drugs. Try vitamins, herbs, acupuncture, whatever. I'm very much in favour of letting these things stand the rigorous gold-standard tests, as long as those tests are well designed, conducted, unbiased, and fair.There is a lot of information out there about the biased and sometimes fraudulent nature of clinical trials, if you look. It doesn't just appear in AltMed journals. As we've seen, the BMJ and the New England Journal of Medicine have been amongst the leaders in calling for reform. I found an article from the Center for Medical Consumers titled Why Do We Need a Publicly Funded, Publicly Accessible Database of Clinical Trials?. It talks about the way drugs gain FDA approval through clinical trials, and about how studies sponsored by pharmaceutical companies are more likely to have outcomes favouring the sponsor than are studies with other sponsors. Here is another article from the Wall Street Journal about the suppression of negative trial results. It reports that a 1999 analysis found that the percentage of positive studies in some fields tops 90%. As a result, "what we read in the journals may bear only the slightest resemblance to reality."You may argue, as others here do, that a flawed system is better than no system at all. In a way I agree, the system needs fixing not trashing. However, it's important to be aware of the distorted picture coming across to the public as a result of these particular flaws. It means that major antidepressant drugs are touted as being effective when there have been a number of clinical studies showing otherwise; those aren't mentioned. We're here debating about clinical trials of vitamin C. There are some negative ones. Strange how you hear so much about these negative vitamin trial results in the media; they pounce on them. Where are the negative drug trial studies, why aren't they so widely reported? As I've said over and over, the system favours drugs, and the pharmaceuticals have a hand in the whole process from development to approval. What chance does AltMed stand in gaining popular approval as long as this is how things work? You can focus on individual studies as MBG has been doing here, but in doing so you risk losing sight of the bigger picture.

Percy you mentioned St. John's wort. A study was done several years ago on this herb. There are over 1000 studies showing its usefulness in mild to moderate depression. Now, remove the words "mild to moderate" and replace them with "severe" and you get this headline: ST. JOHN'S WORT NOT EFFECTIVE IN TREATING DEPRESSION.I tried it myself before I took the prescription ADs. I only took it for a day because I got awful stomach cramps (a common side effect) and felt . . . well, "weird" is the only way to describe it, though I experienced many varieties of that word while I was trying to find a drug to help me. I don't recommend SJW to anyone. It's actually a mild antidepressant. I'm not interested in defending it. But my anecdote doesn't matter anyway, right? The point I'm making is that you get one clinical study that interprets results in a certain way, and all the headlines can make people think that the substance in the trial has been thoroughly debunked. The latest study always seems to have a way of erasing all the studies that have gone before it, at least in the eyes of the media and the public. I agree. Which is why I hope with my diet and supplement regime to avoid having to take any of these things. Food and vitamins are native to the body and will cause few, if any, side effects. Vitamin C is a harmless substance. What have you got to lose by giving terminally ill cancer patients, let's say, some of it intravenously? It will not hurt and there's good evidence that it will help. Vitamins are not drugs, it's important to remember this. They are not equally as dangerous.I suggest you read my recent post to Nator, regarding your remaining comments about big pharma. You talk about human failings in these companies and compare them to car manufacturers. The thing is, though, doctors prescribe medications and people take them based on the trust they've developed in the system. These are matters of health, and of life and death. Some people are indeed trying to address the problem. What do you suggest in the meantime? Do you think the logical thing for me would have been to continue to trust my doctors and take one drug after another, hoping to find one that "worked," until the system was fixed? Do you have any idea what I went through, putting that poison in my body? What thousands of others on my internet lists went through? If I thought you'd listen I'd give you examples that would make your hair stand on end. Try telling them they should have just patiently trusted the system until changes could be made and I have a fair idea of what they'd say in reply, most of it unmentionable in polite company.I have a question for you. Do you think that taking a pill is the best way to treat something like depression? Depression is not a natural condition of the brain and body, and its causes can be myriad. I'll list a few possible ones. Divorce. Stress at work. Poor diet. Food or environmental allergies. Heavy metal toxicity. Illness. Doesn't it make sense to find the root cause and treat it, instead of using an antidepressant as a sticking-plaster? Even for those who feel great taking an AD, and there are some, the very real danger is that the cause of the depression will be ignored as long as the drug works. This is one of the problems with the whole philosophy of allopathic medicine: it treats the symptoms, not the root causes of illness. How do you expect clinical trials to address any of these concerns without a significant paradigm shift in the way medicine is viewed and administered in the Western world? Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.

Because I know that's what you want to see. However, I'm quite happy to stop playing the click-and-link war centred on PubMed. There are some inherent problems with this as it is. I do not have access to the actual studies, as you do. Yes I would like to read a study before commenting on it, because as I said abstracts aren't always an accurate reflection of the studies they describe. They don't always give important information. But I make no pretense at having the training and expertise to read these papers, so it's difficult for me to make my case in this way on an equal footing to you. I can of course ask my ND, as I have done at times, but I don't like having to be piggy-in-the-middle. If you two got together I'm sure sparks would fly and many studies would be bandied around like ping-pong balls LOL. I think it would be important to ask whether this approach is arriving at the actual truth. In my eyes, there are problems with the system that cause drugs to be promoted as safe and effective, while other approaches are more or less ignored by comparison. I've discussed this in more detail in my posts here to Percy and Nator. I said "bioavailable."I would be interested in seeing the actual Pauling-Cameron study though, seeing as how Pauling has been a point of contention here. Do you have a link?If we are going to talk about vitamin C studies, let's keep it to human studies where the vitamin C was given intravenously. Vitamin C is not exactly the premier substance being researched however, so I'm not sure if there are many double-blind placebo-controlled studies to be found. But I'll have a go.I at least have some info now to cover a couple of your study citations, neither of which was based on humans, which is why I think we ought to restrict it to that.Suppression of squamous cell carcinoma in hairless mice by dietary nutrient variation.
Robinson AB, Hunsberger A, Westall FC.
Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, Cave Junction, OR 97523.(This is Pauling's ex-protege who was asked to resign from the institute, and went on to sue.) If this was valid, you would have hospitals starving people, not giving them nutrient IV protocols as they do. Have there been any follow-up studies on humans?Secondly, you cited:Degradation of encephalitogenic protein in aerobic ascorbic acid solutions. Westall FC, Thompson M, Robinson AB. Experientia. 1976;32(7):848-9.This was done in a petri dish. You told me yourself that in vitro experiments can show just about anything.I wouldn't have known any of these details about the studies because I don't have access, as I said. My ND looked this up for me. If you want to discuss other studies with me I'd like some links to the full papers please. And keep in mind that while it's easy to debate studies like this, I feel it's important to keep an eye on the big picture. As long as people are willing to take drugs to get better, and they are told that they are safe and effective, then little headway will be made in the use of alternatives such as vitamins.

Pauling wrote a whole book about this. It isn't the one I own; I've got How to Live Longer and Feel Better. I've been looking through the chapter on cancer and it sheds some more light on the background and the details of the Pauling-Cameron study. It would be helpful if you could just read the chapter; but as that's presumably not possible, I'll give some of the relevant points.Before Cameron collaborated with Pauling, he carried out operations on hundreds of patients with cancer in his surgery in Scotland. He was looking for a fresh approach, particularly one that strengthened the natural defense mechanisms of the human body. He and Pauling were independently researching the application of the property of vitamin C of increasing the rate of synthesis of collagen, to strengthen the intercellular cement in large doses by the increased synthesis of collagen fibrils. Cameron started to cautiously prescribe vitamin C to dying cancer patients under his care. When he became aware of Pauling's work, the two began a long association in 1971.During the next 10 years, Cameron gave vitamin C in large doses to several hundred patients with advanced cancer, almost all of them being patients for whom the conventional methods of treatment had been tried and found to be of no further benefit. He published several papers on the results of vitamin C on various aspects of these patients' care, including one about a patient who seemed to recover completely from cancer when treated with vitamin C, in whom, however, the cancer returned when the intake of vitamin C was stopped, and who again recovered completely when the treatment with vitamin C was resumed. (Cameron, Campbell, and Jack, 1975.) In 1986 (the time when this book was published), the patient was continuing to take 12.5g of vitamin C per day, and after 12 years was in excellent health.By 1973, Cameron and Pauling were wanting to carry out a controlled trial. Cameron refused to do the trial with his own patients because by then he was so convinced of the value of vitamin C to them that he was unwilling for ethical reasons to withhold it from any patient to whom he had the power to give it. Pauling asked the National Cancer Institute to carry out such a trial, while he and Cameron carried out a controlled trial at Cameron's hospital, the Vale of Leven. The patients were all receiving the same treatment apart from vitamin C, which was only given in large doses to Cameron's patients. Another study was done in 1978, again at the Vale of Leven, with 100 vitamin C treated patients and 1000 controls. The 100 vitamin C treated patients and their matched controls were divided into 9 groups, based on the primary type of tumor; e.g. 17 vitamin C treated patients and 170 controls with cancer of the colon. Survival times were measured from the date when the patient was determined to be "untreatable"; that is, when the conventional therapies were deemed to be no longer effective -- at this date or a few days later vitamin C treatment was begun. In 1978 the mean survival times for the 9 groups were between 114 and 435 days greater for the vitamin C groups than for the corresponding control groups, an average of 255 days for all groups, and were continuing to increase because 8% of the vitamin C patients were still alive, and none of the controls were.A similar study was carried out in the Fukuoka Torikai Hospital in Japan during the five years beginning 1 January 1973 (Morishige and Murata, 1979), with results similar to those obtained in the Vale of Leven Hospital.Pauling then mentions the Mayo studies, and explains that they did not follow the protocols of the other studies. He explains: We spoke here about the fact that Pauling and Cameron gave the vitamin intravenously, while the Mayo Clinic studies gave it orally. None of us were aware of these other factors though, were we? The facts were here in my book, which I read about a year and a half ago, at a time when I was not too interested in specifics of clinical studies. Can you also see, though, that Stephen Barrett was not interested in this information either? You are not getting all the facts at Quackwatch. He does not mention the facts that don't help his case.I believe Pauling and Cameron were humanitarians who were genuinely interested in helping people. As I said before, the Mayo Clinic studies were wrongfully devastating to Pauling's reputation in vitamin C research. I believe these ideas are being picked up again however; or at least, I hope they are. I saw at least one study of vitamin C and cancer on PubMed which is ongoing.