This retired Doc has been trying to get PT study going

[ofonorow]

Owen,=20


Just wanted to check in with you. How are your clinical studies progressing ? I'm now living in Savannah and have re-newed contact with a friend of min e who is a vascular surgeon. I saw him professionally because of some incompetent leg veins I wanted him to evaluate. He has been interested in altern ative medicine approaches to vascular diseases for a number of years and es pecially interested in the ascorbate relationship. I told him of my similar=
interests and communications with you. We talked of diet, exercise, etc At the end of my checkup he said "let's just take a look at your carotids". H e figured that my being in my 7th decade I would probably have extensive a therosclerotic disease. The ultrasound showed clean left but a small plaque buildup in the right. I was a little surprised that my carotid showed even a small buildup of plaque. My diet is mostly veggie and I had been taking Rath's vitacore plus until about a year an a half ago when I became lax in taking my supplements. I'm assuming this buildup occurred fairly recently?


I felt this would be a good opportunity to study firsthand the effects of the "proper" supplements ( I have never been certain that Rath's supplementsalone were enough) on the reversal of atherosclerotic disease. I told him I wanted to get back on the very best program available and reevaluate my carotids in 6 months. He thought that would be interesting. So .... I'd like your input as to what that program should be - from your recent clinical e xperiences in dealing with these matters. I'd then like to order from you those supplements.


Interestingly, this surgeon has a large dialysis patient load and is concerned with the devastating cardiovascular effects he regularly sees in this p opulation. He might be the one to work with us on ascorbate in ESRD patient s. I haven't spoken with him about this yet.


Thanks for your help,


Cordially,


GVG

Good to hear from you. Sorry about the plaque finding.

Interesting though. What is the amount of vitamin C and lysine in Rath's products that you were taking? (The reason Tower Laboratories formed is because Rath used so little dosages in his products - saying these were the maximum most doctors would "tolerate.") The minimum vitamin C, if you can tolerate it, for CVD is 6000 mg, and I have felt that 10,000 is better and probably very protective. The amount of lysine to reverse is 5000 to 6000 mg daily.

I would recommend Tower's Ascorsine-9, at least one jar, and either Ascorsine-9 or HeartTechnology for the other daily serving . This provides about 6000 vitamin C and 6000 lysine, plus most other things I recommend. You can start here

http://www.paulingtherapy.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=33

And I can help you then start the autoship if you become interested.

If you cannot tolerate that much ordinary vitamin C, then we can discuss the liposomal alternative - Lypo-C from livonlabs.com.

This should cover you for the personal experiment. Let me know.

I also think the "mostly veggie" diet may be an issue, but it is counterintuitive and not something to change for this experiment.

I still would very much wish to see the results of a study in diabetic patients, and if after your experiment the doctor becomes interested, let us know. We can provide free product for the study. (We'll have to work out paying other measurements, but perhaps their insurance or Medicare/Medicade can pay for the tests as we discussed previously.)

Owen

[ofonorow]

Thanks for the info and suggestions. Vitacor Plus contains only 600 mg per serving of C and only 110 mg L - Lysine. Rath suggests adding Arteriforte which contains an additional 400 mg of C and 180 mg each of Lysine and Proline. He also suggests "for optimum effectiveness" adding: Pro Lysine C, Lysine Drink Mix,and finally Dr Rath's VitaCForte, all of which add 3451 mg of C and 1900 mg of Lysine to the program - a lot of pills to be taking every day. I was only getting 600 mg of C and 110 mg of Lysine from the Rath program although I did take additional C 2- 3 gms fairly regularly. I never added any of the Rath supplements noted above.. Obviously my doses were not enough to protect or reverse?


I suppose I have put too much faith in Rath's 1996 study in the J of Applied Nutrition. His protocol called for only 2700 mg of C and only 450 mg of Lysine, with a host of other supplements, and over a 12 month period he showed a significant reduction in coronary arterial calcifications and presumably a similar decrease in CAD in the 55 patients studied..


I'd like to start with your program of, at least, 6 gm of C and 6 gm of Lysine daily. You mentioned helping with autoship - what would I need to do to begin? And what has been your experience with how long , on average, it might take to see some reversal?

That is what I remembered about Rath's products.

As far as time to reverse, I remember my uncle who was diagnosed with a 90% and 50% carotid blockage after a car accident (ultrasound) and they operated (scraped) the 90% side, scheduling the other 50% side for one month later. My aunt put my uncle on what turned out to be 2500 vitamin C and 2500 lysine, and there was NO plaque found during the second operation.

From Bush's CardioRetinometry, we know that "soft" atheromas can be resolved in 10 days or so, but if there is calcification, it can take up to a year or more to completely resolve.

As far as the Rath study - it is impossible to know how much worse your situation might be if you hadn't been taking the Rath products. From our experience, its is the dosage dosage dosage.. It is simply a matter of getting the right dosage, and a doctor in our forum has come up with a table of dosage based on body weight, see:
http://www.vitamincfoundation.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=7593

[ofonorow]

Thought you'd be interested - after 25 days on the Ascorsine-9 program - MY Lp(a) 3 MG/DL - wish I had checked it initially. In thinking about why I should have a localized area of relatively fresh plaque (no calcification) in my right carotid, I suspicion that it may be related to trauma. For almost 3 months just prior to my visit to the vascular surgeon I underwent thrice weekly PT (with manipulation and fairly intense pressure almost exactly over the area where the plaque was found) for cervical arthritis and disc disease. The therapist would always ask if I was feeling dizzy as he pressed over the carotid!


I meant to ask before, how is the Vol. II of your handbook coming along? If I can be of any service to you in your research, etc. please don't hesitate to call on me.


Sincerely, G.

[Johnwen]

Interestingly, this surgeon has a large dialysis patient load and is concerned with the devastating cardiovascular effects he regularly sees in this p opulation.

I’ve been holding off a little on this post to see if anybody else would chime in on it. The problem this retired docs friend is seeing is a problem that is all to common in dialysis. Most people who are not familiar with dialysis would say it could probably be helped very much with vitamin C. The one big problem is most if not all of these patients don’t have functioning kidneys. Where is V-C removed from the body and where is reprocessed and sent back out to the body from where is blood levels controlled at?? Need I say kidneys, adrenals, urine!!! The biggest problem in dialysis is maintaining the proper ph levels in the body during the exchange which is done by flushing the blood through a semi permeable mesh with a fluid called diasylate. Most fatalities are caused by metabolic acidosis from letting the ph drop to low.
The diasylate is a cocktail of various minerals and purified water that carry the wastes out. During the course of treatment a ferrous compound is also brought in due to the fact that after dialysis most patients become anemic and need the iron to maintain their red blood cells hemi capabilities. Induction of V-C into the mix causes the ferrous to oxidise or “RUST.” Which is probably where that one article got their information from about rusting your insides from. Rendering the ferrous useless and degrading the V-C. There has been some reports of scurvy symptoms present in some patients which usually are treated with diet. Fruits, veggies etc. There also some research being done to adding V-C to the diasylate but the snag here is patents filed by some who hope to gain royalties from it if someone finds an acceptable means.
The next biggest problem is in creatine clearance which promotes the actions of ADMA (Asymetrical Dimethylarginnine) which causes a cascade of events which are described very thoroughly in the links I provided below. One can draw their own conclusions on it but there is very compelling evidence point at it. I hope this gives the retired doc a little fuel for thought.
Don’t forget the links in the references. LOTS Of reading!!!

http://vmj.sagepub.com/content/10/2_suppl/S19.long

http://vmj.sagepub.com/content/10/2_suppl/S11.long

http://www.nature.com/ki/journal/v62/n1 ... 3107a.html

http://ndt.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/conte ... /16/9/1742

[ofonorow]

Haven't read the links, yet, but trying to understand your point. You say that most people would think that taking vitamin C would help, but... So are these people doomed? And couldn't vitamin C act like CoQ10 has in certain studies of renal patients - help the kidneys begin functioning again?

[Johnwen]

So are these people doomed? And couldn't vitamin C act like CoQ10 has in certain studies of renal patients - help the kidneys begin functioning again

Where there's function there's hope! In Dr. Singh's study the patients still had some function and just moving into end stage failure. Fact is 85% of the patients on dialysis today have complete renal failure and their only hope is a transplant. It's sad to think that perhaps even if 50 % of these people responded to the CQ10 treatment or that their doctors would recommend it as they were moving towards end stage failure a lot of future suffering could be avoided. Again who would profit from it is always the question!! Politics being what it is brings us back to those who develop coronary problems after complete failure is the subject where persuing and how to deal with that problem and it's causes. I for one would like to see it resolved before it gets to this point but thats not the way our health care system works today!! Perhaps if money was not the issue alot of healty people would still be with us!!!