"Paul Dormer" <prd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote
> In article <CGLVj.133682$Cj7.31553@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, karljohanson@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> (Karl Johanson) wrote:
>
>> At Least Vitamin C has some physiological effects, even if not
>> the ones the consumers claim it is having. The people shelling
>> out good money for tiny bottles of water that someone says they
>> shook, are even further down the rabbit hole.
>
> Although isn't there a problem with vitamin C overdose, or am I
> mis-remembering something?
From http://www.commentary.net/view/atearchive/s76a2558.htm
"In the late 1960s, word of this reached Pauling, who was aging and
beginning to have increased concern about his own health. He initially
adopted the popular 3000 mg per day dosage.
Whether vitamin C rejuvenated Linus's tissues is unknown, but it
certainly didn't hurt his hunger for notoriety. In succession over the
next decade, Pauling and retainers claimed that vitamin C was a cure for
the common cold, for mental illness, for cancer, and for AIDS. In order
to seize the initiative from the health food gurus, Pauling gradually
raised his recommended dosage to about 20,000 mg per day. Exemplary was
Pauling's claim, unretracted to the present, that "75% of all cancer can
be prevented and cured by vitamin C alone." Although Pauling avoided
direct experimental tests ("I don't need to do experiments. People
believe me, because of who I am.") experiments were done.
Not only did these experiments fail to confirm the exaggerated claims,
but concerns arose over the safety of very high chronic dosages. Vitamin
C oxidation products were shown to degrade proteins and DNA in
physiological solutions and to damage cultures of human cells. Incidence
and severity of cancer in mice actually rose in some dose ranges,
although they fell in others. Several scientists who were unlucky enough
to obtain such results suffered vicious personal and professional
attacks by Pauling."
> A friend of mine is a vet, and one of her hobby horses is homeopathy,
> and how it's a big con. I seem to recall that she mentioned a
> homeopathic veterinary practice which seemed to be having good
> results,
> but on checking, she, or a colleague, found that they were actually
> prescribing large quantities of steroids.
I heard some flakes on the radio claiming that trials on animals don't
have to be placebo controlled, because 'the animal doesn't know if
they're getting the drug or the placebo'. I called up the radio show &
pointed out that in many cases the 'health' of the test animal is
interpreted by the people doing the study, and their knowledge of which
had the placebo can affect how they interpret the results. They hung up
on me & yelled for a while. The radio station killed that show soon
after & got the Dr Mirkin show instead.
Karl Johanson
"I don't need to do experiments. People believe me, because of who I
am."
--Linus Pauling
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