by Steve Hickey
The early vitamin C pioneers treated respiratory and other infections with massive amounts of vitamin C, so this is not a new idea at all. Both Frederick R. Klenner, M.D., and William McCormick, M.D., used this approach successfully for decades beginning in the 1940s! Clinical reports have repeatedly confirmed the powerful antibiotic-antiviral effect of vitamin C when used in sufficient quantity.
Vitamin C can be used alone or along with conventional medications, if one so chooses. However, currently, prescription drugs and conventional treatment leave a lot to be desired, as each year 75,000 Americans die from pneumonia.5 Conventional medicine has never tried massive doses of vitamin C for this or other infections, and considering the positive clinical reports and the annual cost in lives, there is no excuse for excluding it.
AIDS and Other Viral Diseases
Vitamin C in sufficient doses has been claimed to be the most effective treatment of viral infections from the common cold to polio. An especially powerful example is provided by the early work on acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). As might be expected, Dr. Cathcart was the first physician to report that full-blown AIDS could largely be reversed with a sufficient intake of vitamin C.6 He reported on a group of approximately ninety AIDS patients who took high doses of vitamin C independently; an additional twelve of his AIDS patients were described, six of whom received intravenous ascorbate. Dr. Cathcart reported a response proportionate to the amount of vitamin C consumed. Only one patient had died, and he had previously received whole-body irradiation and chemotherapy (presumably for cancer), plus intravenous ascorbate could not be administered as the patient’s veins had been so damaged by prior therapy. Australian physician Professor Ian Brighthope replicated Dr. Cathcart’s work. In 1987, he published The AIDS Fighters, in which he reported, “We have to date not had a single death amongst our patients with full-blown AIDS who have continued on our vitamin C and nutrition program.”7
Vitamin C was not considered by conventional medicine as a treatment for AIDS even before anti-retroviral drugs were available. There were no clinical trials, and physician reports were ignored or sidelined. Twenty years later, the suggestion for the use of vitamin C has become politically controversial. In Africa, where the population cannot afford the conventional patented drug therapies, the use of vitamin C–based treatments is attacked without providing clinical evidence in support.8 “In an unprecedented action, the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations (UNICEF), and an AIDS activist group that promotes drug therapy in South Africa, joined forces in opposing vitamin therapy that exceeds the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA), and in particular vitamin C in doses they describe as being ‘far beyond safe levels’.”9
Dr. Cathcart proposed trying vitamin C therapy on emerging viral diseases such as the deadly Ebola virus, for which there is no effective treatment. Ebola hemorrhagic fever has a 60–80 percent mortality rate, so if you get the disease the odds are that you will die from it. Dr. Cathcart argued that Ebola and its relatives induce an acute scurvy and intravenous ascorbate should be tried in these patients. He noted that the first subject who recovered from another emerging disease—Lassa fever, another viral hemorrhagic fever—had been taking vitamins.10 Dr. Cathcart suggested that intravenous doses of perhaps 500 grams of sodium ascorbate would be required. Despite having no effective treatment, conventional medicine to date has not tried massive infusions of sodium ascorbate, which may provide the only effective treatment currently available.
Quantity, Frequency, and Duration
A therapeutic level of vitamin C supplementation used by Dr. Klenner is 350 mg of vitamin C per kilogram (1 kg = approximately 2.2 pounds) of body weight per day.11 The following table provides a working summary:
In orthomolecular medicine, these are moderate oral doses. Dr. Klenner actually used as much as four times this amount, typically by injection of sodium ascorbate. He recommended daily preventive doses for the healthy, which might be about a fifth of the above therapeutic amounts, divided into four doses daily.
At a sufficient intake, vitamin C has antihistamine, antitoxin, antibiotic, and antiviral properties. Its nature and safety does not change with the dose, but its power and effectiveness does. If it takes about fifty gallons of gas to drive from New York City to Albuquerque, you simply are not going to make it on ten gallons, no matter how you try. Likewise, if your body wants 35,000 mg of vitamin C to fight an infection, 7,000 mg won’t do. The key is to take enough C, take it often enough, and take it long enough.
Quantity, frequency, and duration are the keys to effective orthomolecular use of vitamin C in infections. Many people hold a philosophical viewpoint that “I shouldn’t have to take so much of a vitamin.” It’s certainly true that you do not have to—everyone has the right to be sick if they want to. However, if you want the possibility of a swift recovery, and if you want to use vitamin C, you should use it effectively: frequent doses up to bowel tolerance. Rather than take what we think the body should require, we should take the amount of C that the body says it wants.
It is important to remember that experienced physicians such as Dr. Cathcart have used daily doses of 200,000 mg with safety. The major side effect of vitamin C overload is an unmistakable diarrhea. This indicates absolute saturation, and the daily dose is then dropped to the highest amount that will not bring about diarrhea. That intake is often a therapeutic level.
Clinical Success
In 1975, Dr. Cathcart reported that, over a three-year period, he had treated more than 2,000 patients with massive doses of vitamin C.12 He noted considerable beneficial effects in acute viral disease and suggested that a clinical trial would substantiate his observations. Regrettably, clinical trials of these large doses have not been performed. In 1981, he documented a further 7,000 patients who had been given the treatment, which had markedly altered the expected course of a large number of diseases.13 Since that time, he has continued treating many thousands of patients, with similar positive results.
Dr. Cathcart reports surprisingly few problems with the massive doses he has tried, stating that the majority of patients have little difficulty with them. This is confirmed by the experience of other physicians giving high-dose ascorbate treatment.14 Minor complaints, such as gas, diarrhea, or stomach acid, reported by some healthy people taking large oral doses of vitamin C, are rare in sick patients.
Below bowel tolerance levels, vitamin C generally has little effect on a disease process, whereas doses that are close to the bowel tolerance level can greatly reduce symptoms. Dr. Cathcart describes the effect of vitamin C at these doses as being clinically dramatic, as if a threshold had been reached.15 His patients experienced a feeling of well-being at high dose levels and considered this an unexpected benefit. These feelings of well-being suggest no obvious detrimental side effect is present. Dr. Cathcart reports that in severe disease, such as viral pneumonia, the benefit is substantial; he describes a complete cessation of symptoms. Such a powerful effect is difficult to dismiss, either as a placebo response or as self-delusion on the part of the physician.
Importantly, in terms of relating the response to a dose of vitamin C, symptoms can be turned on or off by adjusting the dose. The sickness and acute symptoms of diseases such as pneumonia were found to return if the vitamin C levels were lowered. This process of switching symptoms on and off with the vitamin C dose is an important observation, since it means that the patients are acting as their own experimental controls. The authors have tried this experiment with the common cold and found that massive doses of ascorbate often bring substantial symptomatic relief and alleviate the “washed-out” feeling that accompanies a cold.
Titration to bowel tolerance levels is fine for people who can be persuaded to take huge amounts of vitamin C. However, if the disease is more severe, or the patient is unable to take large doses orally, then intravenous infusion of sodium ascorbate may be substituted. With intravenous ascorbate, the clinical effect is reported to be even more dramatic.
Throughout recent decades, doctors have independently been reporting astounding responses to the use of high doses of vitamin C in infectious disease. The doses employed have been about 100 times those used in conventional medicine and the medical establishment has never tested these claims scientifically.
CHAPTER 7
Cancer and Vitamin C
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
—EDWARD ABBEY
For most people, a diagnosis of cancer is a devastating experience, as it is one of the most feared diseases in the world. As average lifespan has increased, so has the incidence of this disease: one in three people will likely suffer from it, usually in their later years. It is therefore important to understand how and why cancer develops, and what we can do about it.
The fundamental role of vitamin C and other antioxidants in the prevention and control of this disease has only recently become clear. Reduction and oxidation (redox) chemicals signal cells to divide, to change their structure and behavior, or to die. One of the most critical controlling factors is the availability of vitamin C. High doses of vitamin C, in combination with related nutrients, may prevent or even cure cancer.
A Consequence of Evolution
In order to appreciate the role of vitamin C, we need to understand the mechanisms leading to cancer. Cancer is a disease of cells—a cancer forms when some cells stop cooperating with the rest of the body and begin acting as independent agents. Cells run amok in this way because of factors related to the way animals and plants have evolved over millions of years. For this reason, we can consider cancer, like aging, to be a consequence of evolution.
Biological evolution concerns changes in the inherited traits of living organisms over generations, resulting in the development of new species. In evolutionary terms, humans are extremely recent: they began to emerge about 3 million years ago. Most of life’s long history has been taken up with the evolution of single-celled microorganisms. Scientists have found traces of microbes in rocks that are 3.5 billion years old, whereas fossils of multicelled organisms are found only in rocks less than a billion years old.
Around 3 billion years ago, early cells developed the ability to photosynthesize, using energy from sunlight to create sugar from carbon dioxide and water, producing oxygen as a waste product. Directly or indirectly, nearly all life depends on this redox reaction. Redox reactions drive the chemistry of living organisms. In the early stages of evolution, vitamin C became the most abundant water-soluble antioxidant in plants, and animals also require vitamin C, often in large amounts. One reason for this need is that vitamin C is a central part of the controls that developed to prevent cancer in multicellular creatures such as humans.
Microorganisms and Multicellularity
For most of the history of life on Earth, living organisms consisted of single cells. Biologists classify these into groups that include bacteria, fungi, Archaea, and protists. Multicellular organisms took a long time to evolve, partly because of the increased levels of organization and cooperation they need. Keep in mind that single-celled organisms are not inferior to large, multicellular creatures; in many respects, they are biologically more successful. Single-celled organisms dominate the earth—they are the simplest, most diverse, and most widespread group of living organisms.
People are typically unaware of these microorganisms unless they are pathogenic. Pathogenic microbes are a leading cause of death and disease. Despite this harm, the continued existence of humans, plants, and animals on the Earth ultimately depends on the activities of numerous bacteria and other microorganisms. Surprisingly, many microorganisms are more effective chemical factories than animals and can exist on a few simple chemicals. These organisms have little need for exogenously supplied vitamin C.
Generally, single-celled organisms act independently, as their name suggests, although many produce colonies, which are not true multicellular organisms but a collection of single cells with minimal cooperation. Other primitive single-celled creatures, such as slime molds, band together when stressed, cooperating to produce a mobile fruiting body (“slug”) in order to disperse and invade other habitats. This is a higher level of cooperation and reflects the origins of multicellularity. Through evolution, single cells have managed to cooperate with others to make the transition to forming multicellular organisms. In each case, the final multicellular form provided a survival advantage. One of the reasons that single-celled organisms cooperate is to gain a greater information-processing capability, as cooperative cells often need to interact with a demanding environment.1
The formation of a multicellular structure involves control mechanisms, as even simple colonies have to be organized. For example, slime mold cells release chemicals into the environment that cause nearby cells to aggregate into the mobile slug.2 A similar release of chemicals causes some populations of bacteria to alter their gene expression.3 Once a colony has formed, it has to develop and maintain its internal structure. Multicelled organisms are complex: a human arm consists of bone, muscle, fat, blood vessels, and nerves, arranged in a three-dimensional anatomy. In order for the arm to move in a coordinated way, cells cooperate to generate movement based on electrochemical signals from the brain.
Large multicellular organisms depend on vitamin C and other antioxidants for control of their internal organization, a dependency that arose in part with the need to prevent cancer and associated disorders. To form a complicated multicellular organism, such as a mammal, individual cells need to be tightly controlled. The local balance of oxidants and antioxidants, like vitamin C, are central to this control mechanism.
Cell Suicide
The most demanding example of control is when, during development, cells are instructed to die, often by a local increase in oxidation. Our bodies are formed by organizing cell growth and cell death to produce three-dimensional structures. In addition, cells are instructed to switch on some genes and switch off others, converting cells into different types, such as muscle cells, fat cells, or nerve cells (a process called differentiation). A classic example of cell death during development is the growth of individual fingers and toes. At first, the hand is like a mitten, but then the cells between what are to become its fingers die. The cells are constrained to enter a suicide program called apoptosis. Unless individual cells committed suicide upon a suitable signal, the structure of our bodies could not be formed. Thus, odd though it seems, cell suicide is absolutely essential to multicellular life.
By contrast, single cells evolved to maintain their existence under any conditions—this is their fight for life. Suicide is not a useful activity for a single-celled organism. Wouldn’t even defective bacteria cling to life and avoid suicide? Although this viewpoint seems obvious, surprisingly, a form of cell suicide does occur in bacteria, and is associated with bacteria that form colonies. Such colony-forming behavior may require a way to suppress aberrant cells in order to evolve successfully.4 Some unicellular organisms form complex communities that have several of the properties of multicellular organisms. More generally, bacteria exist in ecological communities; the plaque that forms on teeth is an example of one type known as a biofilm. Bacteria in dental plaque gain protection within the biofilm and can be difficult to eradicate, even with the mechanical abrasion of a toothbrush.
The programmed death of individual damage
d cells can be beneficial to a multicellular community. The “self-destruct” function might be seen as akin to intentionally flooding compartments in a burning ship in order to keep the vessel intact. Once again, a signal used to control this process is the local level of oxidation. In the body, cell suicide could limit the spread of a viral infection, for example. Similarly, in times of shortage, dying cells might donate their bodies as nutrients to neighboring cells. However, such altruistic behavior does not help the individual bacterium that commits suicide. To explain cell suicide in an evolutionary context, dying needs to carry a survival advantage.
In multicellular organisms, this paradox may be overcome. Complex multicellular organisms generally consist of cells containing the same genes. Under some circumstances, the death of an individual cell increases the probability that other cells with the same (or similar) genes will survive. For example, a litter of nine puppies has trouble nursing from eight teats, and the harsh rule of evolution is that the loss of one puppy can increase the survival likelihood of the other eight. The loss of a single copy of the genes can allow many more copies to survive. Multicellular organisms similarly protect the integrity of the whole by sacrificing individual cells, which they instruct to commit suicide when needed.
But what happens if the cell refuses the suicide instruction? Since a single cell might begin to act independently at any point, multicellular organisms have to make such defections costly. Multicellular organisms have a range of penalties for cells that defect; for instance, they may send a redox signal instructing the cell to die. Nevertheless, if these controls are lost, or damaged by a chronic shortage of vitamin C and other antioxidants, a cell might start to grow and divide, irrespective of the needs of the whole body—this is what we refer to as cancer.