by Steve Hickey
Vitamins were defined as micronutrients and this paradigm has been applied to ascorbate. However, the idea that ascorbate is different and people need massive intakes of vitamin C existed at the time ascorbic acid was first identified and isolated. Since then, the views have polarized and doctors who study our need for large intakes of vitamin C have been marginalized. For decades, pioneering doctors have investigated the clinical effects of massive doses of vitamin C. Their reports of remarkable clinical benefits have been replicated many times and their contributions have become part of the foundations of orthomolecular medicine.
Irwin Stone
Irwin Stone, Ph.D. (1907–1984), was one of the earliest scientists to realize vitamin C’s potential. Dr. Stone was an industrial chemist who began considering its use as a food preservative before the substance changed his life. Dr. Stone was educated as a biochemist and chemical engineer in New York. From 1924 to 1934, he worked at the Pease Laboratories, initially as an assistant bacteriologist before eventually being promoted to chief chemist.1 He followed this by setting up and directing an early biochemistry laboratory for the Wallerstein Company. Dr. Stone used vitamin C to prevent oxidation in food, a purpose for which it is still commonly employed. He gained the first patents on industrial applications of ascorbic acid as a food preservative and antioxidant, eventually publishing over 120 scientific articles and obtaining twenty-six U.S. patents.
He became convinced that high intakes of vitamin C would be greatly beneficial to health. In the 1930s, soon after it first became commercially available, Dr. Stone began supplementing his diet with large amounts of vitamin C. He proposed that humans had inherited a genetic trait to need, but not manufacture, ascorbic acid.2 This innate dependency may be satisfied from our diets, but not easily.3 According to Dr. Stone, the present recommendations for vitamin C are more than 100 times less than what we really need, based on the amount produced endogenously each day by other mammals.4 He repeatedly stated that ignoring this fact would prove fatal.5
A prime example of a disease attributed to vitamin C deficiency is Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Two Australian doctors, Archie Kalokerinos and Glen Dettman, showed that SIDS could be a manifestation of infantile scurvy. Mothers depend solely on their diet for vitamin C, so if they are deficient, children are born with chronic, subclinical scurvy. If they are correct, increasing the infant’s intake of vitamin C would prevent SIDS.6 Dr. Stone suggests that up to 10,000 babies a year die of SIDS unnecessarily. Unfortunately, the medical establishment, complacent with the idea that scurvy is a disease of the past, has not followed up on these clinical observations.
Dr. Stone’s work on vitamin C continued and by the late 1950s he had reached the conclusion that scurvy was far more widespread than realized. Furthermore, vitamin C did not have the expected properties of a micronutrient, as the body needs larger amounts.7 In his view, ascorbic acid was not a vitamin at all, but an essential dietary factor needed in much larger quantities than a micronutrient.8 Animals make large amounts of ascorbic acid in their livers or kidneys. Dr. Stone believed that people needed much larger amounts of vitamin C than the medical establishment recommended.9
In April 1966, Dr. Stone met Linus Pauling, Ph.D., and told him his ideas about vitamin C.10 Dr. Pauling, then in his mid-sixties, said that he wished he might live another twenty-five years, as science was advancing rapidly and he would like to be around to follow developments. Dr. Stone suggested he could achieve his goal by taking megadoses of vitamin C. Dr. Pauling, convinced by the arguments, embarked on a regimen of high-dose vitamin C and went on to live the claimed twenty-five years, and a few more.11
Dr. Stone had by that time assembled a large collection of vitamin C papers. Notably, he hated the term “vitamin C” and used its alternative chemical names, ascorbic acid or ascorbate. Dr. Stone appears to have originated the word megavitamin and used the word hypoascorbemia to describe a subclinical deficiency of vitamin C.12 He argued that scurvy was not a deficiency disease, but a metabolic error. In 1971, when he retired, he dedicated the rest of his life to studying and making people aware of the need for daily gram-level consumption of vitamin C.
In 1972, Dr. Stone published fifty years’ worth of research and observation in his book, The Healing Factor: Vitamin C Against Disease. This contained a summarized account of successful vitamin C treatments for infections (bacterial and viral), allergies, asthma, poisoning, ulcers, the effects of smoking, and eye diseases, including glaucoma. He also described the treatment of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, fractures, bladder and kidney diseases, tetanus, shock, wounds, and pregnancy complications. Despite a statement by the National Health Federation that the book may be “the most important book on health ever written,” conventional medicine largely ignored it.
Vitamin C Saved His Life
The high doses of vitamin C that Dr. Stone was taking may even have saved his life. Vitamin C and other antioxidants can reduce the stress associated with trauma,13 and for Dr. Stone, this action of vitamin C was critical in his recovery from a severe road accident. He tells the story himself:
Outside of Rapid City, South Dakota, we had a very serious automobile accident when a drunk driving on the wrong side of the road drove her car at 80 miles an hour into a head-on collision with ours. Both my wife and I were seriously injured and the only reason we survived was the fact that we had been regularly taking daily megadoses of ascorbate for decades. We never went into the deep shock that kills most accident victims and I was able to experimentally verify ascorbate’s great healing power and survival value by taking about 50 to 60 grams a day of ascorbate during our hospitalization.… I went through five serious operations without any surgical shock and my multiple bone injuries healed so fast that we were able to leave the hospital in less than three months, take a 2,000-mile train trip home, and I was back at work running my lab in two months more.… My larynx was damaged by part of the steering wheel inflicting a deep throat wound, and the doctors despaired that I would ever talk again. With the help of megascorbics, this problem slowly resolved and I was able to assume the public speaking duties.14
There is some understatement in Dr. Stone’s account. His son, Steve, a retired patent attorney, adds that his parents’ car was hit with such force that all of his father’s limbs, except his right arm, were broken and he had massive internal injuries. Dr. Stone needed an emergency tracheotomy, and by the time he reached the hospital he had lost a lot of blood, yet he never went into shock. They were both in the hospital from May until August. As soon as he could communicate, Dr. Stone insisted on having vitamin C supplements and convinced those caring for him that it was the reason he survived.15
A Megavitamin Pioneer
Linus Pauling was a staunch supporter of Dr. Stone’s work, as was Dr. Szent-Györgyi. In 1982, Dr. Stone wrote to Dr. Szent-Györgyi about a forty-four-year-old friend diagnosed with cancer of the prostate and treated with surgery and radiation.16 Unfortunately, the cancer spread to the pelvic bone and the friend was told he had only about a year to live. Luckily, Dr. Stone was one of the first researchers to appreciate that vitamin C may be beneficial in cancer, both for prevention and for treatment.17 His letter provides an anecdotal account of a patient’s use of oral doses of vitamin C in cancer:
Since he began taking 80 grams a day in 1979, his well-being has been excellent. He says he feels great most of the time, has also been able to continue working every day, and lives a fairly normal life [in] the years since November 1978 when orthodox medicine said he would be dead.
Visually, he looks more like an athlete than a terminal cancer patient.… In the last few weeks, he has been able to improve his well-being by increasing his ascorbate intake to 130 to 150 grams per day! He has been taking oral doses every hour of 5 to 10 grams of a mixture of nine parts sodium ascorbate plus one part ascorbic acid dissolved in water. [Doses at these short intervals would produce a sustained high level of ascorbate in the tissues as well as in the blood (dynamic flow).]
These doses are well tolerated and within bowel tolerance and he has had no trouble from diarrhea, except just lately when he had to reduce the 150 grams a day to 130 grams.
I believe his case is a classic and a good demonstration that if sufficient ascorbate is given to fully counteract all the incident stresses, then the cancer can be controlled. If given early enough in this disease, then cancer may no longer be a problem. Up to now, we just haven’t realized how big these daily controlling doses have to be.
Dr. Stone understood that high doses of vitamin C need to be given at short intervals. The massive doses described are typical of those reported to be successful in treating illness.18 He describes how the man’s doctor ran some ascorbate tests on the patient’s blood and came up with the highest blood levels he had ever seen—35 mg percent! The so-called normal population averages 1 mg percent or less and the kidney threshold is 1.4 mg percent. Dr. Stone stated that “I would like to see a crash ascorbate program started on terminal cancer patients using doses in the ranges found to keep his cancer under control. Since these ‘terminals’ have been abandoned by orthodox medicine, they have nothing to lose but their ill health.”
The blood level that Dr. Stone describes for the kidney threshold (1.4 mg percent) corresponds to a blood level of about 80 μM/L, which has since been confirmed by results from the National Institutes of Health.19 This is a minimum baseline level that the body retains to prevent acute scurvy.20 The level of 35 mg percent corresponds to an amount twenty-five times greater (1,980 μM/L), far larger than the maximum values normally reported in healthy people. Dr. Stone’s initial report of benefit to a cancer patient from oral doses of ascorbate at 80–150 grams a day is striking; his finding of such high measured blood levels of ascorbate from an oral dose is astounding.
In May 1984, Dr. Stone was to attend a meeting of the Orthomolecular Medical Society and the Academy of Orthomolecular Psychiatry in Los Angeles, where he was to receive the Linus Pauling Award in honor of his achievements. Unfortunately, he died the night before the meeting, most likely from a heart attack. In his immensely productive 77-year lifetime, Irwin Stone, building on the work of Dr. Szent-Györgyi, constructed the theoretical and practical foundations of orthomolecular medicine. As is often the case, such pioneers are overlooked, and Dr. Stone died only hours before he was to gain a little of the recognition he deserved.
Frederick R. Klenner
Frederick R. Klenner, M.D. (1907–1984), was born in Pennsylvania, and received his undergraduate and Masters degrees in biology from St. Vincent and St. Francis Colleges. He earned his doctorate in medicine from Duke University in 1936. Three years later, following his hospital residency, he entered private practice in Reidsville, North Carolina, where he lived for the rest of his life.
In 1946, Dr. Klenner delivered the Fultz quadruplets, the first quadruplets to survive in the southern states. Before the advent of fertility drugs, the birth was unusual enough for Universal Pictures to send a film crew. Annie Penn Hospital, where they were born, had few modern facilities and was ill equipped for multiple births. In place of an incubator, Dr. Klenner used cotton gauze blankets and placed the children together to share body heat. Notably, they were born under a high vitamin C regimen, which might have contributed to their survival. The mother, Anne Marie, was a deaf mute from a tenant farm without running water and already had six children.
Following the tradition of early medical scientists, Dr. Klenner often experimented on himself with large doses of vitamin C. His particular specialty was diseases of the chest, which led to his interest in vitamin C for viruses. By 1948, he had published his first paper on vitamin C and the treatment of viral disease. Just a year later, he presented a paper to the American Medical Association detailing the complete cure of sixty polio patients using intravenous sodium ascorbate and oral supplementation.
Dr. Klenner’s doses of ascorbate were massive, up to 300 grams (over half a pound) per day. He published a series of articles covering the use of vitamin C in treating more than thirty diseases. According to Dr. Klenner, the effects of vitamin C were so universal and striking that, whatever the disease, the doctor’s first response should be to give vitamin C. Dr. Klenner spent forty years using vitamin C to treat numerous serious illnesses, including pneumonia, herpes, mononucleosis, hepatitis, multiple sclerosis, childhood illnesses, fevers, and encephalitis. Patients and orthodox physicians are often amazed when they learn that Dr. Klenner employed over 1,000 mg of vitamin C per kilogram body weight per day.
One can only speculate on how much suffering might have been avoided if doctors in the 1950s had listened to him. However, Dr. Klenner did inspire Linus Pauling and Irwin Stone to expand the research on the wider benefits of vitamin C.
Dr. Klenner’s Legacy
Dr. Klenner’s medical papers, some dating from the 1940s, provide an outstanding contribution to our understanding of vitamin C as a medicine.21 Even now, the antibiotic and antiviral effects of massive doses of vitamin C are largely unappreciated and unexplored by the health professions. Much of our knowledge in this area originated with Dr. Klenner, whose life was as eventful as a Hollywood melodrama. Dr. Klenner’s work is astounding and its nature can be appreciated by the response of Tom Levy, M.D., in his book Vitamin C, Infectious Diseases, and Toxins: Curing the Incurable:
When I first came across Klenner’s work on polio patients, I was absolutely amazed and even a bit overwhelmed at what I read.… To know that polio had been easily cured and so many babies, children, and some adults still continued to die or survive to be permanently crippled by this virus was extremely difficult to accept.… Even more incredibly, Klenner briefly presented a summarization of his work on polio at the Annual Session of the American Medical Association on June 10, 1949 in Atlantic City, New Jersey: “It might be interesting to learn how poliomyelitis was treated in Reidsville, N.C., during the 1948 epidemic. In the past seven years, virus infections have been treated and cured in a period of seventy-two hours by the employment of massive frequent injections of ascorbic acid, or vitamin C. I believe that if vitamin C in these massive doses—6,000 to 20,000 mg in a 24-hour period—is given to these patients with poliomyelitis none will be paralyzed and there will be no further maiming or epidemics of poliomyelitis.”22
Dr. Klenner described a cure for what was then arguably the infectious disease most feared by parents in the industrialized world. There was, curiously, no response from the doctors attending the association meeting. While the medical community ignored him, his work did receive some recognition from the local media. Greensboro Daily News reporter Flontina Miller wrote:
Dr. Klenner remembers using [ascorbate] for a man who was lying near death from severe virus pneumonia, but refused to be hospitalized. “I went to his house and gave him one big shot with five grams or 5,000 milligrams of vitamin C,” he recalled. “When I went back later in the day, his temperature was down three degrees and he was sitting on the edge of the bed eating. I gave him another shot of C, 5,000 milligrams, and kept up that dosage for three days, four times a day. And he was well. I said then, well, my gosh! This is doing something.”23
Similar effects of vitamin C’s action in acute infections have been repeatedly reported. For example, the Australian doctor Archie Kalokerinos later made several independent observations replicating Dr. Klenner’s results.24
“We’ve used massive doses of vitamins on over 10,000 people over a period of thirty years,” said Dr. Klenner, “and we’ve never seen any ill effects from them. The only effects we’ve seen have been beneficial.” Dr. Klenner’s immensely valuable work is his legacy. Linus Pauling said that Dr. Klenner’s early papers “provide much information about the use of large doses of vitamin C in preventing and treating many diseases. These papers are still important.”25 Dr. Klenner is justly remembered as the doctor who was the first to boldly assert that “ascorbic acid is the safest and most valuable substance available to the physician” and that patients should be given “large doses of vit
amin C in all pathological conditions while the physician ponders the diagnosis.”
The media have been obsessively interested in the scandal that rocked Dr. Klenner’s family following the doctor’s death from heart disease in 1984. Fred Klenner, Jr., known as Fritz, was implicated in the murders of at least five people and died by his own hand in 1985. The tragedy was the subject of a best-selling 1988 book (in which Dr. Klenner is mentioned over fifty times) and a 1994 made-for-TV movie. It is instructive to note that the news media reported on the son’s crimes far more than it reported on the father’s cures.
Dr. Klenner’s work inspired later orthomolecular physicians such as Robert F. Cathcart III, who went on to deliver massive doses of vitamin C to thousands of his patients. Whether overshadowed by scandal or stubbornly ignored by the medical profession, high-dose ascorbate therapy is here to stay. “I have used Dr. Klenner’s methods on hundreds of patients,” said Lendon Smith, M.D. “He is right.”
Lendon H. Smith
If Dr. Klenner was one of the most innovative physicians, Lendon H. Smith, M.D. (1921–2001), was among the most courageous. Dr. Smith was one of the first doctors to unambiguously support high-dose vitamin regimens for children. Such a position did not endear him to fellow members of the American Academy of Pediatrics, so Dr. Smith took orthomolecular therapy directly to the people by way of his newsletter (The Facts) and his many popular books, articles, videos, and television appearances (he appeared on The Tonight Show sixty-two times and even won an Emmy award).
The man who would become nationally known as “The Children’s Doctor” received his M.D. in 1946 from the University of Oregon Medical School. He served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps from 1947 to 1949, then completed pediatric residencies at St. Louis Children’s Hospital and Portland’s Doernbecker Memorial Hospital. In 1955, Dr. Smith became Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Oregon Medical Hospital. He would practice pediatrics for thirty-five years before retiring in 1987 to lecture, write, and continue to help make megavitamin a household word.