“He who lives by rule and wholesome diet is a physician to
himself.” Concise Directions on the
Nature of our Common Food so far as it tends to Promote or Injure Health.
(Published by Swords of London: 1790, p 7)
June 22, 2001 “Free of charge, free of advertising, and
free of the A.M.A.”
Written by Andrew Saul, PhD. of http://www.doctoryourself.com , a free online library
of more than 200 natural healing articles with over 3,000 scientific
references.
If you haven’t, you’ve been away visiting your relatives
on Neptune for too long. For nearly three decades, I have seen that, like all
other fashions, vitamin-bashing goes “in” and “out” of style. Lately it has (again)
been open season on Linus Pauling, the world’s most qualified, and most vocal,
critic of our scorbutic (vitamin C deficient) medical system. Pauling’s two unshared Nobel prizes (he is
the only person in history with that distinction) are no protection from
ignorant critics who slam vitamin C without considering some basic biochemistry
first.
May I offer the following C-boosting facts:
1. Medical and
nutritional authorities have always said that there is no difference whatsoever
between natural and synthetic vitamin C. But the recent junk-science reports study
panning vitamin C invariably include the comment that only vitamin C
supplements are the problem, not vitamin C from foods. You can’t have it both
ways.
2. Vitamin C is the
body’s most important water-soluble antioxidant.
It protects our cells from cancer-causing free-radical
damage. In our stress- and
pollution-filled environment, why are people being warned off the very
substance that they need most?
3. If vitamin C “harms”
DNA, why do most animals make (not eat, but MAKE) between 2,000 and 10,000
milligrams of vitamin C per human equivalent body weight per day? Evolution
would never so favor anything that harms vital genetic material. White blood
cells and male reproductive fluids contain unusually high quantities of
ascorbate. Living, reproducing systems
LOVE vitamin C.
4. Why all the flurry
of anti-vitamin reporting? Easy: 100 MILLION Americans take vitamin C every
day. This is therefore primarily a political issue, not a scientific issue.
What would happen if everybody took ample supplements of all the vitamins?
Doctors and hospital administrators and pharmaceutical salespeople would all be
lining up for their unemployment checks, that’s what.
I listed TEN WAYS TO SPOT ANTI-VITAMIN BIAS IN A SCIENTIFIC
STUDY in my
Doctor Yourself Newsletter EXTRA sent out on June 15 (if you
did not
see it, you can email me for a free copy). Linus Pauling’s
complete
vitamin and nutrition bibliography is posted at
http://doctoryourself.com/biblio_pauling/html
Our national disease-care system (for it is certainly not
a HEALTH care system) depends on sickness.
This is neither a new problem nor an uniquely American problem, for even
the ancient Vedas say that “the carpenter desires timber; the physician,
disease.” More recent critics come from
within the medical profession itself. One is Dr. Emanuel Cheraskin (formerly
Chairman of the Department of Oral Medicine, University of Alabama Medical
School). My favorite saying of his is, “Health is the biggest failing business
in America.” Dr. Cheraskin has a lot to say about the safety and effectiveness
of large doses of ascorbate in The Vitamin C Connection (reviewed in a previous
Newsletter) and now in Vitamin C: Who Needs It?, the most complete recent
summation of vitamin C’s role in
medicine that I have seen.
When a long-time professor, holding doctorates in both
dentistry and medicine, speaks up on the value of vitamin C megadoses, you know
that it is time to tell the world. Dr.
Cheraskin has been researching vitamin C for fifty years. He has hundreds of scientific publications to
his credit (the complete bibliography is posted at http://doctoryourself.com/biblio_cheraskin.html
) Dr. Cheraskin elegantly but insistently challenges not only our
altogether-inadequate US RDAs, but also our national obsession with the germ
theory. “It is time to lay to rest the notion that germs jump into people and
cause diseases,” he writes (p 71). Here is a physician who fully appreciates the
value of vitamins. Truly adequate nutrition prevents, and cures, real
illnesses.
One of his strengths as an author is that he can walk you
through study after study without boring you in the least. Dr. Cheraskin writes directly to you. It is
both his sense of humor and exemplary competence in the field of therapeutic
nutrition that make Dr. Cheraskin’s books so interesting, and important, to
readers.
How important?
Vitamin C: Who Needs It concisely reviews dozens of medical studies in
under 200 pages. 22 pages of references are provided. Vitamin C’s role on
diabetes, oral health, fertility, cancer, cardiovascular disease and life
extension receive special emphasis. I am
yet to meet a vitamin critic that shows any evidence of having read this
research. Well, they can start now.
Next time someone tries to tell you that you are “harming”
your body or “wasting” your money on extra vitamin C, tell them that Doctor Cheraskin
sent you.
Vitamin C: Who Needs It by Emanuel Cheraskin, M.D., D.M.D.
ISBN: 0-944353-04-5 (195 pages plus glossary, index, and
references)
“Is honey safe for little children? I am especially
concerned about bacterial contamination.”
I raised my kids on raw, unprocessed honey. I think the pasteurized, filtered,
see-right-through-them store varieties are not worth buying. Commercially processed honey sometimes has a
thin layer of water under the lid, on top of the product. This can support bacterial growth. I have never found this with raw honey,
though. It stays naturally fresh and pure, just the way the bees made it. Honey from the comb is better still. I am told that untouched comb honey found in
Egyptian tombs was still fresh and edible after over two thousand years.
The purpose of this newsletter is to help you towards
becoming your own doctor. This is
neither impossible nor illegal, and is more and more essential all the
time. It’s not impossible, for you can
go to any book or paper in print, read it, apply it, and draw practical conclusions
from it. What you will read is just
what any physician reads. In fact, you
may discover material that your doctor never saw, or did see and never
investigated. With a good bibliography,
an inquiring mind, and gradual experience, there is no reason why you cannot
become fully competent to treat yourself and your immediate family in the vast
majority of instances.
How can one say this?
Aren’t doctors the ones for this duty; isn’t it their special province
to be the formally educated authorities on health? Commonly, yes: but a doctor’s authority in America often exceeds
his or her knowledge. Whole bodies of
knowledge in healing are ignored because they are unorthodox and
non-medical. A doctor’s education
seems exhaustive, yet M.D.’s study so much of drugs and surgery, and so little
of nutrition, fasting, herbal remedies, spinal manipulation, massage, vitamin
and mineral therapy, homeopathic remedies and more that we realize their
qualifications are only partial. This
takes nothing away from their dedication as individuals, but being individuals
they are prone to following certain theories over other theories, particular
practices over other alternatives, and holding opinions as well as facts. This is true with any person, certainly, but
it is our responsibility to cover all possible ground in our efforts to cure
and prevent illness. If we learn more
than the doctor in areas of value to our health, it is our duty to apply this knowledge
to the betterment of ourselves and our family.
We need total health more than medically approved health. Our wellness should not be limited to our
doctor’s experience, but enhanced by our own experience.
Indeed, whose judgment is final for your health and
life? Why not have you decide? This seems an awesome responsibility, yet we
do it every day. Any mother or father,
adult or child constantly makes the most immediate health decisions as the
occasion arises. The cut, the cold, the
fever, the ache: all these and the serious emergencies too are in our hands
first.
This is the pivotal point: major traumatic injury aside, it
is not
generally necessary for us to turn over the responsibility
for our
wellness to another.
The pioneers in this country couldn’t, and
evidence is mounting that we, today, shouldn’t
“Over a million patients are injured in hospitals each
year, and approximately 280,000 die annually as a result of these injuries. Therefore, the iatrogenic (doctor-caused)
injury rate dwarfs the annual automobile accident mortality of 45,000 and
accounts for more deaths than all other accidents combined.” (JAMA, July 5,
1995, 274:29-34.)
You can picture this death rate: it is about equal to
three loaded jumbo jets crashing and killing everyone aboard every two days.
Can we do better?
Quite possibly. It is becoming
increasingly obvious that medical emergencies such as strokes and heart attacks
do not just happen, but are mostly the result of unhealthful, long-term
lifestyle choices. Almost all health
providers agree that good preventive care must start at home. The dispute arises over where to draw the
self-care line. It is a big jump from
eating less fat to, say, curing pneumonia with 20,000 milligrams of vitamin C
an hour, but both can be done.
Editor’s Addenda to Last Issue:
The correct spelling is Dr. Hans Nieper. I forgot the “I before E, except after C”
rule again. Send your donations of dictionaries and spell checkers to me at the
address at the bottom of this Newsletter.
And, that why-not-use-a-placebo reference from last issue
is:
“About 90% of the patients who visit doctors have
conditions that will either improve on their own or that are out of reach of
modern medicine’s ability to solve.” (New England Journal of Medicine, Feb 7, 1991)
Try overkill, or what in our house we call “the power of
wretched excess.” If your child wants to eat meat, prepare some… and overcook it. If family members want to eat hot dogs, buy
the cheapest ones you can find… and let them pig out to the point of nausea.
(Remember your first job in a bakery or ice cream parlor, and the owner said
you can have all you want?) Relentlessly serve nothing but meats for dinner, and
lunch, and snacks, and breakfast. Take your child shopping, and pick out tripe,
liver and tongue. Let them listen to a live lobster being steamed. Tour the
meat packing room at your local supermarket. You probably won’t be allowed to tour a slaughterhouse, but that
would be the consummate therapeutic trauma. These are coarse techniques to be sure,
but killing animals by the millions every day has got to stop. If our future is
our children, let’s tell them straight: meat means dead animals, and there is
nothing pretty about it.
The Doctor Yourself Award for STEALTH FOOD Manufacturer of
the Week goes to GENERAL MILLS, INC.
Good ol’ CHEERIOS.
I ate them when I was a kid, and you did too, I’ll bet. Today, regular Cheerios are even better, as
they are lower in sugar than in the old days.
Of course they contain a lot more salt, but pobody’s nerfect. And the other flavors of Cheerios (so-called
“Honey” Nut, and “Apple” Cinnamon) have lots of sugar. And precious little honey or apple. But FLEA POWDER CHEERIOS are the flavor you
probably have not heard about… even though you may have already tasted them
back in 1994.
Yes, FLEA POWDER.
The chemical chloro-pyrifos-ethyl (which also kills ticks and termites)
was sprayed on oats used to make no less than 16 different General Mills, Inc.
cereals. Not 16 boxes, but 16
varieties, amounting to 160 MILLION BOXES, including TRIX, BOOBERRY and LUCKY CHARMS
(“Ooh, now look at what they ‘ave in wit’ me Lucky Charms: pink dead fleas,
yellow dead ticks, and blue dead termites!”)
Of course there are precious few insects in General Mills’
cereals, because they check for them.
But in 1994 General Mills (with annual sales of about 9 BILLION dollars)
did NOT check for pesticide residues. L.
Robert Lake, director of policy and planning in the Food Safety division of the
FDA) said, “One of the things bothering us about the General Mills incident is
it went on for an extended period of time, and they didn’t know. It means they didn’t have a good system for checking
oats.” (The Washington Post, August 21, 1994)
The Post continues, “By the time the company found out
about the illegal spraying, 110 million boxes were on the shelves in grocery stores
and consumers’ homes.” “People had already fed it to their children,” said
FDA’s Mr. Lake.
So what happened next? A massive product recall? A series of
Saturday
morning cartoon-time TV announcements to not buy, and not
eat Cheerios
that you already bought?
No such luck. “We didn’t want to
raise an
alarm for no good reason and scare people, but we didn’t
want to fail
to warn them either.” said Dr. Lynn Goodman, assistant
administrator
for pesticides and toxic substances at the Environmental
Protection
Agency. Well, certainly no one was alarmed, for there was no
recall at
all. The Post continues, ”The two government agencies
decided not to
press the company to recall the cereal. ‘We were concerned
that a
recall would have been very disturbing to parents… We did
not want to
cause a public panic.’ ”
General Mills now checks for pesticides. Good.
But who checks General Mills? If
a company can sell 110 million boxes of contaminated cereal, and nothing at all
happens, what does this say about our government’s real interest in food
safety?
(The full text Washington Post article, expertly written
by Sharon Walsh, appeared August 21, 1994. Your public librarian can get you a photocopy
through interlibrary loan. Or, send me a self addressed, stamped envelope and I
will send you a copy myself. My address
is at the bottom of this newsletter.)
Okay! Okay! My New THYROID ARTICLE will be included, by
readers’ very insistent popular request.
(AND MORE, OF COURSE!)
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