OHHHH NO NOT THIS ON STATINS!!!

[Billyk]

Too much information...
I would like to offer my own experience.
At 52 years of age I was hospitalized after complaining many times to my physician who finally sent me to a cardiologist who finally performed a stress test who finally sent me for an angiogram. Zip Zop I now have a stent in right proximal as it was 85% occluded. The reason I had to complain is I was not specifically having "chest" pain, my "numbers" were great. I am a Type II diabetic, and about 80 lbs overweight, I was on vytorin, etc for 5years they did not think I was in this bad a shape. So for me 5+ years of doing what the doctor wanted came close to killing me. Statins, just say no, the heck with all of the BS in the statistics. You know... liars, damn liars, and statistics!
Fast forward 2 years and a lot of research later. I have not taken a statin since two months after the stent placement. I do however take 16-20 grams of C, 400mg of Alpha Lipoic acid, B-100, 3-6-9 omega complex and 1 aspirin. I have had two retinal exams and my eye doctor is amazed at the reduction in atherosclerotic buildup in the arteries on my retina! I do take actos for my Type II but am going to halve the dose next month as my A1c has been 5 for the last 12 months; with that I will also loose the lisinopril as my pressure is 112/60. I am still 70 lbs over what I should be.
Empirical, yes, but it works well for me and I just passed my stress test yesterday, feel great and all I take are my vitamins, and aspirin and 1/2 the dose of actos (which if I get my diet and exercise sh** together can get rid of that too).
So long story short I went from 9 prescribed meds to one!

[ofonorow]

Thank you for this great "anecdotal" report! I am particularly interested in

I have had two retinal exams and my eye doctor is amazed at the reduction in atherosclerotic buildup in the arteries on my retina!

Does your doctor happen to have before/after retinal photos?

And can you place the time the photos were taken w/r to when you began statins, and then began vitamin C?

[godsilove]

The truth I speak of is that a vast majority of illness in our species is caused by our inability to synthesize ascorbate, as the other 99.99% of mammals do. Were we able to replace this missing factor in the population, not only would there be far less illness, the large pharmaceuticals would have little or no reason for existence. (There would be no market for statin drugs, for example.)

Of course disease exists, but my point is that much (if not all) can be explained by the absence of ascorbate, and, but to a far lesser extent, some other nutritional factor (e.g. coQ10, vitamin B12, etc. etc.). However, medical professionals are routinely taught that this notion is nonsense and "quackery."[/color]

But none of this (i.e. vast majority of illness being due to the GULO mutation) is backed by convincing scientific evidence; it is largely hypothetical.

I think the evidence speaks for itself. Why do you think there hasn't been EVEN ONE study run to test the Pauling therapy at the recommended dosages?

There has to be a justification for running a clinical trial - based on pre-clinical evidence or in this case, peer-reviewed case reports demonstrating both biological and clinical plausibility. As I've mentioned before, if Pauling Therapy is so successful, then why doesn't an alternative practitioner compile a consecutive case series that is independently reviewed? This is a less costly alternative then running a pilot clinical trial, and could serve as grounds to justify spending money on a clinical trial.

I'll have to go back, but you surprised me in the discussion of the "huge mountain" of statin research saying that they have proven "prevention" but that it is not a pallitive treatment.

Why is it surprising? Statins are indicated for lowering cholesterol and for risk reduction - not for relieving pain symptoms. There are other treatments for that.

That was quite an admission, since vitamin C, on the other hand, is advocated as a quick turn around of advanced CVD. Something you seem to want to avoid studying. Yes, alt. doctors who are willing to buck orthodoxy see these turn arrounds routinely. I am more interested in regular cardiologists, who would naturally be skeptical. What have they got to lose by trying? (Their patients have a lot to lose.)

Avoid studying? Hardly....to the contrary, I'd love to actually see some clinical evidence that goes beyond anecdotal reports.

I am trying to point out that prevention is a side issue. Critically ill patients can be made well in less than 30 days. Without any risk of toxicity.[/color]

I thought we were discussing statins - the majority of patients prescribed statins are not "critically ill", so prevention is the important issue here.

Hard to say. I've been hearing hundreds of reports from people who have adopted the Pauling-therapy, usually without their doctors knowledge, for more than 15 years. The similarity of the reports is what is convincing. I'd say that I became a believer after about 20 or 30 in the first year. However, without Linus Pauling and the Pauling/Rath Unified Theory, it probably would have required more for me to feel comfortable "sharing" with CVD patients, maybe 50 or one hundred.

Perhaps something the foundation could do is get patients who are considering Pauling therapy to volunteer to be a part of a case series, and have their test results independently reviewed by a cardiologist. After reports from a satisfactory number of patients have been compiled, you can try and get them published in a journal or present the findings at a conference. It's not as rigorous as a clinical trial, but it is something.

Well, I don't know what the percentage is but I'd say the majority, probably now more than 100,000 papers, articles and studies, are of tests in humans. These are described in books by Pauling, Stone, Cheraskin, Levy, etc. The problem is that there is some date, probably in the 1960s, and maybe the 1970s, where even the abstracts are not catalogued by medline. This ignores more than 30 years of extensive vitamin C research. Fortunately, we have the books.

Have you seen this abstracts? If they are not all catalogued, how can you be sure that there aren't any negative studies amongst them?

As far as "how many show efficacy of vitamin C in heart disease", I have reported on most of what I could find in my book, especially the Canadian George Willis, MD studies in both guinea pigs and humans. His results should have sparked considerable research, or so we are led to think. Instead, what happened is that research in vitamin C became taboo after Willis.

Do you have a citation for his studies in humans (with respect to vitamin C and heart disease)? I'm not able to find a single one that investigates ascorbic acid supplementation in living human subjects.

[ofonorow]

Glad you are still contributing godsilove! (The last discussion was of the lysine binding sites, and LDL's lack of such receptors. I was afraid you had conceded the argument...)

But none of this (i.e. vast majority of illness being due to the GULO mutation) is backed by convincing scientific evidence; it is largely hypothetical.

This is not a true statement.

It is a statement any person trained today would make because the bulk of "convincing" vitamin C research was done early in the 20th century, and is not cataloged. Fortunately, great minds/scientists have reviewed this "lost" science, and many highly competent and scientifically trained persons have written books to preserve the knowledge, e.g. Pauling, Stone, Cheraskin and Levy. In fact, we have posted Irwin Stone's entire book (The Healing Factor) online. It contains a great deal of evidence, condensed into book form, which illustrates that indeed, a surprisingly wide variety of illness are actually symptoms of chronic scurvy. See:http://www.vitamincfoundation.org/stone/

Medicine cannot not study something, then use supposed ignorance to justify ignoring it.

There has to be a justification for running a clinical trial - based on pre-clinical evidence or in this case, peer-reviewed case reports demonstrating both biological and clinical plausibility. As I've mentioned before, if Pauling Therapy is so successful, then why doesn't an alternative practitioner compile a consecutive case series that is independently reviewed? This is a less costly alternative then running a pilot clinical trial, and could serve as grounds to justify spending money on a clinical trial.

???? The justification used in practice seems to be the bottom line of the pharmaceutical company studying a particular drug. You seem to accept thousands of studies on statins and literally no studies of vitamin C as a reasonable and appropriate situation. I don't.

What is a "peer-reviewed" case report? How can a peer review a case report?? (Pauling published his first three case reports.)

The idea of having an alternative practitioner compile cases sounds reasonable, but it would be a waste of time because it would never get published in a recognized journal.

Wy should the onus being on "alternative practioners" to conduct such trials? That is a neat trick, since it is the cardiologists making all the money by slowly poisoning their patients.

I am usually libertarian in these matters, but I would like to see a law that forces cardiologists to consider alternative treatments when faced with a less toxic treatment, and one with potentially superior outcomes.

The clinical trial I would like to see would pit statin drugs (the higher dosage the better ) and vitamin C/lysine, (the higher dosage the better.) No need for placebo, I have seen other studies that pit say fibrates against statins. You and cardiology would fear for the health of the vitamin C group. I would fear for the statin groups. Consider the vitamin C/lysine placebo if you will.

Do you have a citation for his studies in humans (with respect to vitamin C and heart disease)? I'm not able to find a single one that investigates ascorbic acid supplementation in living human subjects.

This is exactly the problem. They are hard to read (scanned papers provided by the Canadian Medical Assocation) but we have posted all the Willis papers here:
http://www.vitamincfoundation.org/pdfs/

I devoted an entire chapter in Practicing Medicine to the Willis work, which was important, and long before Lp(a) was known/discovered. In short, Willis was a cardiologist and noticed the uniformity of the plaque formations close to the heart, where the blood pressure and physical forces were the greatest. He theorized that mechanical force (heart beat) was causing the problem, and that the body was compensating with plaque. At that time, the role of vitamin C and collagen was more widely recognized, and Willis theorized that a lack of vitamin C was the root cause. He devised a series of experiments to find out. (circa 1950) He used guinea pigs because of their known inability to manufacture vitamin C, and was able to induce atherosclerosis identical to humans in the pigs deprived of vitamin C - from memory 100% deprived suffered atherosclerosis, and 0% got plaque who were getting vitamin C. (There was some confusion because even back then they suspected cholesterol in the diet, and some pig groups were fed cholesterol, which did seem to affect the severity of the atherosclerosis.) AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF THE INTIMAL GROUND SUBSTANCE IN ATHEROSCLEROSIS, G.C. Willis, Canad. M. A. J. Vol 69, 1953, p. 17-22

He then examined tissue levels in humans of vitamin C post mortem and discovered relatively normal levels after sudden death (e.g. accident) but almost no vitamin C in tissues after prolonged chronic illness. (ASCORBIC ACID CONTENT OF HUMAN ARTERIAL TISSUE, G. C. Willis, S. Fishman, Canad. M. A. J., April 1, 1955, Vol 72, Pg 500-503)

Then he tested oral vitamin C in humans - and invented a way to take x-ray pictures of arteries. He reported that 2/3 of the patients plaques either reversed or stayed the same - with only 1500 mg of vitamin C daily. (SERIAL ARTERIOGRAPHY IN ATHEROSCLEROSIS, G. C. Willis, A. W. Light, W.S. Cow, Canad. M. A. J. Dec 1954, Vol 71, 1954, p. 562-568 )

Finally, knowing he could induce atherosclerosis in guinea pigs by depriving them of vitamin C, he designed an experiment to see whether atherosclerosis can be reversed. In a large group he deprived them all of vitamin C, and then sacrificed some to verify they had atherosclerosis. They all did, and the assumption was that all the remaining pigs too had atherosclerosis. Then he began feeding vitamin C and testing to see what happens. Slowly,
the pigs arteries returned to normal, and he titled the paper "THE REVERSIBILITY OF ATHEROSCLEROSIS, G. C. Willis, Canad. M. A. J., July 15, 1957, Voll 77., Pg 106-109"