< >

Chapter 4 -- continued

< --- Chapter 4, Section 3

The Suppression of Hypoascorbemia
"The medical profession itself took a very narrow and wrong view (of the body's need for ascorbic acid). Lack of ascorbic acid caused scurvy, so (surely) if there was no scurvy, there was no lack of ascorbic acid. Nothing could be clearer than this. The only trouble was that scurvy is NOT a first symptom of lack but a final collapse, a premortal syndrome, and there is a very wide gap between scurvy and full health. But nobody knows what full health is! . . . "
Albert Szent-Gyorgi 1
Nobel Laureate (Medicine, 1937)
Discoverer, Vitamin C
"More than sixty years of research on living systems have convinced me that our body is much more nearly perfect than the endless list of ailments suggests . . . (its shortcomings) are due less to its inborn imperfections than to our abusing it."
. . . again, Szent-Gyorgi 2
"We may ask why the physicians and authorities on nutrition have remained so lacking in enthusiasm . . . there seems to have existed a feeling that the intake of vitamin C should be kept as small as possible, even though this vitamin is known to have extremely low toxicity. This attitude is, of course, proper for drugs -- substances not normally present in the human body and almost always rather highly toxic -- but it does not apply to ascorbic acid. Another factor has probably been the lack of interest of the drug companies in a natural substance that is available at a low price and cannot be patented."
Linus Pauling 3
Nobel Laureate (Chemistry, 1954)
"Having worked as a researcher in the field, it is my contention that effective treatment for the common cold, a cure, is available, that is being ignored because of the monetary losses that would be inflicted on pharmaceutical manufacturers, professional journals, and doctors themselves."
. . . again, Linus Pauling 4
quoting Douglas Gildersleeve, M.D.
Although the common narrative, as it relates to scurvy, teaches that scurvy was cured hundreds of years ago, I maintain that Irwin Stone, Linus Pauling, and Albert Szent-Gyorgyi had it right: scurvy is only the most severe development in a broader deficiency condition which Stone called "hypoascorbemia."
It is a complete sham to maintain a published Recommended Daily Allowance of 60 mg. per day, when the evidence clearly suggests that an intake that is closer to 4 to 5 grams per day (perhaps 70 to 80 times the amount that orthdox medicine, and its legions of doctors and nutritionists recommend) is closer to what is required for optimal human health. To get an idea of the incredible breadth of research that has been published demonstrating the benefits of ascorbic acid in higher doses, this author has long recommended a thorough reading of Stone's work -- (not because it is current or comprehensive, but because it is concise, compelling, and written in layman's terms). Research on higher ascorbate intakes has clearly demonstrated benefits in a wide variety of modern illnesses and conditions -- from colds and other viral infections, to bacterial illnesses, heart disease, strokes, allergies, ulcers, diabetes, wounds -- even shock. The range of benefits has been proven to be so broad that Stone viewed ascorbic acid not as a micronutrient, but as something close to a macronutrient. He preferred to call it "The Healing Factor," and it is only in compiling the broad range of studies showing its many benefits that he was able to enlist the help of Linus Pauling in drawing attention to the established fact.
When living in the wild, living as gatherers of fruits and vegetables, eaten fresh with its nutrients undiminished by exposure to time, heat, or processing, most humans don't ingest 60 mg. a day of Vitamin C. They ingest ascorbic acid measureable in several grams per day -- and not in one or two lump sums supplementally, but gradually throughout the day as they eat small meals. Even the average gorilla in the wild ingests approximately 4 grams per day of ascorbate. With the recent emergence of civilization, but most particularly with the ascension of homo industrialis, such natural living has met a terminal, maladaptive end. In its place we have "civilized living" that leads to processed foods, while those that ARE fresh are aged, those that CONTAINED heat labile ascorbate are now nutrient deficient.
In the name of progress, "homo sapiens" have created an array of modern lifestyles, which cut across sub-cultures and socioeconomic levels, but which uniformly lend themselves to mass hypoascorbemia -- which itself is but one small by-product of mankind's "adventures in maladaptation."
To educate the public as to the very existence of this development would create an unfathomable diminishment in the reputation, influence, and profitability of today's medical industrial complex.
That is why the orthodox establishments fights so hard to suppress it.


Despite the fact that vitamin C was discovered as the "cure" for scurvy -- the latter recognized to be a form of avitaminosis (deficiency disease); despite the discovery of Vitamin C's chemical composition (in 1937 Albert Szent-Gyorgyi was given a Nobel Prize for asborbic acid's discovery, Sir Walter Haworth for his research on its chemical structure and synthesis), the scientific establishment has impeded further discovery of its benefits for the last 70 years.
It is not remotely an exaggeration to say that ever since the discovery of Vitamin C, with the further unfolding of the many conditions that improve from higher Vitamin C intake, established medicine has done everything possible to downplay clinical results.
In fact, the positive results are so voluminous (when you factor out the studies where the ascorbate amounts selected for test subjects are deliberately chosen at a level too small to produce a clinical impact), that we will have to be selective in what area of application we study for the remainder of this chapter. (Even Stone's work is heavily annotated with study references for those who wish to read the source materials).
Since cancer has been the focus of our open chapters and initial study, it would be interesting to note what discoveries have been made about Vitamin C -- a relatively cheap, inexpensive nutrient -- and cancer.
In 1969, Dean Burk and his associates at the National Cancer Institute published a paper showing that ascorbate is highly toxic to carcinoma cells. In fact, Vitamin C caused profound structural changes in the cancer cells in their lab cultures. As Stone notes, the group wrote:
"The great advantage that ascorbates . . . possess as potential anticancer agents is that they are, like penicillin, remarkably nontoxic to normal body tissues, and they may be administered to animals in extremely large doses (up go 5 or more grams per kilogram) without notable pharmacological effects.
This finding, alone, should have been cause to bring greater resources to bear on an area of research that could bring enormous benefit to the public. What was the U.S. government's response? The Cancer Chemotherapy National Service Center, tasked with screening new cancer-killing materials, refused to include Vitamin C in its testing for cancer-killing properties. Their reason? Ascorbic acid was too nontoxic to fit into their program! [ 5 ]
To be fair, no one has ever suggested that Vitamin C is a cure for cancer. Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi himself was resistant to any claim to quick fixes. Correction of defects may take the better part of a year, he suggested. What he did state, unequivocally -- and this is not an interpretation of clinical data, it is now hornbook physiology: Vitamin C is built into "the very heart of life's machinery . . . we are constantly building and rebuilding this machinery all the time." On this basis, Szent-Gyorgyi felt that a continuous supply of ascorbic acid was very important.
Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi, to the end of his life (he died in 1986 at the age of 93), felt that cancer research was misdirected and was overlooking the obvious. "The blindfold search for a cure for cancer seems a hopeless waste." [ 6 ]
But as is typical of our Suppression Pattern, the Vitamin C / cancer connection doesn't end here. It is not enough for Modern Medicine to turn its nose at vitamin therapy and thereby save the lives (not to mention pocketbooks, God forbid!) of its patents. The primary "approved" methods of cancer treatment in the West not only deny additional Vitamin C at a time when the body needs it most, but they utilize immune-suppressive therapies that do just the opposite: they deplete it. [ 7 ]
The position of the orthodox medical community vis-a-vis Vitamin C intake that rises above the grossest manifestations of hypoascorbemia, namely scurvy, is particularly irresponsible when one considers that for at least two generations, we have known that "all of (the impartial evidence gathered to date supports) the conclusion that vitamin C is intimately involved in cancer as well as in scurvy."
Going all the way back to James Lind's autopsy reports of scurvy sufferers (1753) one find expressions such as "all parts were so mixed up and blended together to form one mass or lump that individual organs could not be identified" -- to which Pauling was led to comment, "(this is) surely an 18th-century morbid anatomist's graphic description of neoplastic infiltration."
More recently, in 1954 and 1959 Dr. W.J. McCormick, a Canadian physician, formulated the hypothesis "that cancer is a collagen disease, secondary to a deficiency in vitamin C. He recognized that the generalized stromal change of scurvy (changes in the nature of the tissues) are identical with the local stromal changes observed in the immediate vicinity of invading neoplastic cells., and surmised that the nutrient (vitamin C) that is known to be capable of preventing such generalized changes in scurvy might have similar effects in cancer. The evidence that cancer patients are almost invariably depleted of ascorbate lent support to this view."
Vitamin C Against Cancer Supportive of this position is the observation that "anemia, cachexia, extreme lassitude, hemorrhages, ulceration, suspectibility to infections, and abnormally low tissue, plasma, and leukocyte ascorbate levels, with terminal adrenal failure, are virtually identical with the premortal features of advanced human scurvy." [ 7b ]
Those who think that this observation is circumstantial are not familiar with the enormous amount of clinical work that has been done over the years supporting the benefits of orthomolecular (high dosage) vitamin C in connection with cancer. Thousands of studies exist substantiating the benefits. [ 7c ]
And yet ever bit as compelling, are the proven benefits of increased vitamin C intakes in the prevent and treatment of heart disease . . .


Discovery: Most Heart Attacks & Strokes
Are Rooted in Vitamin C Deficiency;
Dr. Linus Pauling Passes The Torch
"Never forget that you are fighting one of the most important battles for human health . . . (The battle) will be long and hard."

Linus Pauling [ 8 ]
One of the most shocking demonstrations of the Suppression Pattern at work in the orthdox medical community concerns the described physiological mechanism connecting ascorbate deficiency, arteriosclerosis, strokes, and coronary heart disesae. Though obviously not the sole etiological factor in all cases, what IS known is that all of these conditions are initiated or worsened by ascorbal insufficiency; the correlation and causative factors are well-described, as are the profit motives that prevent these facts from being widely known to the public. The role of Vitamin C as a potential "anti-atherogenic" is, or should be, an important debate in medicine, since atherosclerosis "and its clinical manifestations, particularly angina pectoris, myocardial infarction and ischemic stroke, is the single most important cause of morbidity and mortality in the Western World."
The "discovery" itself appears to have been properly credited by Dr. Linus Pauling to a noteworthy understudy, Dr. Matthias Rath. The discovery was so amazing, that Pauling was moved to comment before his death in 1994 that, "(You should) never forget that your discovery is one of the most important discoveries in medicine ever." [ 9 ]
That heart disease and circulatory conditions were connected to a lack of Vitamin C had long been observed. How could it not? The same breakdown in tissue structure observed in scurvy could be observed in all of the above mentioned diseases -- only it was made manifest in the circulatory system. Sign posts were occasionally reported, such as the observation that Vitamin C converts cholesterol into water-soluble bile acids. [ 10 ] Still -- no one was able to definitively put all the causative factors involving vitamin deficiency and heart disease until Rath.
Before Rath, no one was able to provide a viable explanation for why animals don't get heart attacks, but people do. [ 11 ] Surely, it would seem likely that someone would have come along in the interim between Szent-Gyorgyi's discovery of ascorbate as the "cure for scurvy" and Rath's emergence -- someone to press this issue. After all, by the time Rath started speaking out -- with Pauling's backing and assistance -- it had been well known for most of the twentieth century that one of the primary differences in the physiology between animals, which don't get heart attacks, and homo sapiens, who do, is that humans can easily suffer from ascorbate deficiency, whereas most of other animals, as we've stated, cannot. They make their own.
As can be expected, Rath has been the subject of numerous "ad hominem" attacks, and equally predictable is his branding as a "quack" by the orthodox medical community. [ 12 ] He has been engaged in extensive litigation, criminal and civil, [ 13 ], which is standard operating procedure for any one who threatens the orthodox system with therapeutic systems or products that threaten profits in the orthodox system (high profile cases immediately coming to mind include Rife, Reich, Hoxsey, Wright, Koch, Naessens, and Burzynski). [ 14 ] But a fitting criteria in the current study with respect to Rath's work is not whether his antics have been respectable, his actions self-serving (i.e. he commits the unpardonable sin of actually selling his own brand of vitamins), or the delivery of his message less than elegant.
In an orthodox system, which is, as we explored in the side bar earlier in this chapter, loathsome of anything truly "evidence-based," the most relevant question is, "Is it true?"
Rath's initiation into the world of corrupt medicine goes all the way back to his last year in medical school when his father died of a heart attack. After graduation, Rath was hired on with a research project, sponsored by the German Research Foundation. The goal? To identify the mechanisms by which cholesterol and other fat particles "get stuck" inside blood vessel walls. By the time Rath began his research, cholesterol-lowering drugs were already a billion dollar a year industry, so there was plenty of research grants to go around to try and help supporting the "high cholesterol" juggernaut. At that time, medical research in cardiology was focussed on "bad cholesterol" or low-density lipoproteins. Not only was "LDL" acknowledged by orthodoxy as the main factor causing atherosclerotic plagues -- and therefore a primary and direct causative agent in the case of most heart attacks and strokes, but research funds were fueled by "Big Pharma's" lust to have yet another problem to "fix."
Rath's career path took a dramatic turn when he began to question the role of a newly discovered risk factor in heart disease: "lipoprotein(a)." What followed is best told in Rath's own words:

" . . . Our own studies involving more than ten thousand research data and measurements left no doubt that in order for the 'bad cholesterol' to stick inside the blood vessel wall, it needs the biological adhesive lipoprotein(a) The results established together with my colleagues were an important milestone towards the understanding about the nature of cardiovascular disease. What we found was that everywhere cholesterol was deposited in the blood vessel wall there was the biological adhesive tape 'apo(a)'. It was clear that the deposits were not dependent on the amount of cholesterol but on the amount of 'adhesive' present in the body. At that point we did not know that this, also, would only be the partial truth and that heart and strokes would turn out to be primarily the result of vitamin deficiencies.
These discoveries on the 'sticky cholesterol' lipoprotein(a) were so new, that the American Heart Association (AHA) did not accept the presentation of these data at their annual convention in 1988. They simply did not believe it. It was not until one year later that the AHA invited me to give a presentation at their annual convention in Anaheim in November, 1998. At the same time the AHA accepted these findings in their official journal, Arteriosclerosis.
Lipoprotein(a) turned out to be a ten times greater risk factor than cholesterol. More importantly, no drugs, not even cholesterol-lowering drugs were able to lower this risk factor in the blood. But by far the most intriguing question about this new risk factor for heart attacks and strokes was the fact that it was only found in humans -- but rarely in other living species.
It was back in 1987 when I made the following decisive discovery that should change medicine forever: The sticky risk factor lipoprotein(a) was only found in humans and other species that had lost the ability to manufacture their own Vitamin C. Apparently, there was an inverse relationship between the lipoprotein(a) molecule and the deficiency in Vitamin C. I immediately started to do experiments on Vitamin C and lipoprotein(a) and later conducted a clinical pilot study where Vitamin C was shown to lower elevated lipoprotein(a) levels.
Imagine the year 1987, Vitamin C was considered quackery and no reputable medical institution was even willing to consider conducting clinical studies with vitamins. The knowledge about Vitamin C as a carrier of cellular bio-energy was entirely lost in the medical education, and patentable pharmaceutical drugs were considered the only form of acceptable medicine . . " [15]
After having his findings reported in Arteriosclerosis, Rath sought out the counsel of Linus Pauling, who, subsequent to their initial meetings, recognized the enormous value of Rath's work and created a place for him at his marginally funded research organization, The Linus Pauling Institute.
Rath had already successfully established the principle behind the Vitamin C - lipoprotein(a) connection and its relation to heart disease, but he needed something more definitive. He needed "more scientific proof." As so many of his fellow 20th century researchers in Vitamin C research had done, he used guinea pigs to conduct the next phase of his investigation. He began with a theory that followed naturally from his findings to date: that guinea pigs, which, as we discussed early in this chapter, share the human genetic disorder of having virtually no Vitamin C manufacturing capability in vivo, would develop arteriosclerotic deposits once they were put on a vitamin C deficient diet. He further conjectured that if one analyzed the "plaster cast" that was deposited in the arterial walls, he would find the sticky lipoprotein(a) fat molecules.
If Medical Science resembled anything close to a quest for Truth . . . if Profit Motive were not the largest, mightiest, heaviest sphere in the Scientist's constellation, whose gravitational field was so great that it warped the orbits of all other objects in Scientism's galaxy, Rath might have had a chance. The Truth would have leaked out and been embraced by an honorable medical tradition whose primary consideration was the welfare of its patients (i.e. customers, victims, and gullible 'tards') and not its own self-enrichment. But, alas, such is and was, not the case. As it turned out, Rath was able to show that a deficiency in Vitamin C -- which in humans would equate to levels far above the "Recommended Daily Allowance" -- caused a weakening of blood vessels, similar to scurvy. The fatty deposits, indeed, were composed of cholesterol, lipoprotein(a), and other risk factors in the blood. Cardiovascular disease developed "as an inevitable response of our body to repair the blood vessel walls weakened by vitamin deficiency." [16]

Guinea Pigs
TOP: Guinea pigs receiving too little vitamin C in the diet develop cardiovascular disease. BOTTOM: Guinea pigs receiving optimum vitamin C have clean arteries. Orthodox medicine, in its collusion with the pharmaceutical industry's multi-billion dollar cholesterol drug business, has no choice but to suppress this finding and its many implications. To have the public understand the underlying cause of coronary heart disease would cause the collapse of a huge profit center for organized medicine in the West. [16]

So how has Rath's miraculous finding been received by organized medicine? Was it received in terms that were anything close to Pauling ("But no matter what happens, never forget that your discovery is one of the most important discoveries in medicine ever.")?
Of course not.
Rath and Pauling, for all their collective genius, were still not able to see through the common narrative. Yes, they could see that, to use Rath's words, the medical community was guided by "economic greed of stratospheric proportions," [17] and yet they held onto irrational notions of science's commitment to the quest for objective Truth -- like seasoned political scientists who, despite all evidence to the contrary, refuse to jettison the common narrative and accept that democracy is a co-opted tool of plutocratic power and has nothing to do with fulfilling the will of the People -- but rather was CREATED by Elite to give the People, the plebs, the illusion that they were the ones in charge.
What meaning could people of the calibre of a Pauling or a Rath -- or anyone else who sacrifices their soul in the quest to uncover life's deeper secrets -- find in a world where Science is recognized as little more than a co-optation tool for powerful, monied interests?
It would seem, very little.
And so, Pauling and Rath plodded along, achieving success in having their newest finding published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 1990.
The following August (1990), Pauling and Rath attended an arteriosclerosis meeting in Venice, Italy, where "the entire cream of medical researchers and medical opinion leaders in the area of cholesterol and heart disease were present." Rath gave his presentation, noting in just a few sentences the discovery about lipoprotein(a), vitamin C deficiency and heart disease. How did the conference respond?
"From that moment on, the conference was not the same. The mood changed to that of a funeral . . . "
Even within Pauling's very own Institute, the mood within the organization termed somber. When certain researchers openly professed a desire to work with Rath on what, on the surface, appeared to be an exciting new area of scientific research, they were dissuaded by their co-workers. "If you work with Dr. Rath, you will ruin your career," they were advised. [18]
Pauling and Rath should have gotten the hint, but they didn't. They continued under the illusion that Science operates on a level playing field. After successfully publishing twice in the Proceedings, Pauling himself attempted a third publication, under the title "Solution to the puzzle of human cardiovascular disease: its primary cause is ascorbate deficiency leading to a deposition of lipoprotein(a) and fibrin/fibrinogen in the vascular wall." After some mutually agreed modifications, the editor in chief, in a move that violated the rules of the academy, decided to send the manuscript to reviewers. They rejected the publication of the landmark paper with the argument, "Since there is no puzzle of cardiovascular disease, there can be no solution to this puzzle."
( Translation: "Alright, guys -- you've had your fun. But now it's time for you to get your heads screwed on straight. Are you really that nuts? Do you have any idea what kind of economic impact our industry would suffer if this kind of material were to be positively received by common lay persons? Did you really think you would go very far with findings that would singularly torpedo the multi-billion dollar a year cholesterol lowering drug market -- and injury many of our own personal incomes, as well? Get with the program!" )
This is not to say that the medical industrial complex did not at least attempt to profit from the Pauling/Rath finding. They did. On the only terms they knew how: with criminal price fixing practices on vitamin raw materials [19], while simultaneously creating the "Codex Alimentarius" on the international level, which would ban any natural health claims in all U.N. member countries -- which is to say, throughout the world. (Interestingly, the decisive U.N. Committee on nutritional supplements is headed by the German government. "No wonder -- Germany is the world's largest export country for pharmaceutical products." [20 . . . and this battle is still ongoing.]


Vitamin C Under Attack Not everyone who has studied the "Vitamin C research suppression phenomenon" fails to initially see through the common narrative. One such individual is Dr. Stephen Sheffrey, who self-published Vitamin C Under Attack: Unfair trials bombard high-dose benefits in 2000. A dentist by trade with a keen interest in nutrition (like Weston Price), Sheffrey decided to write about the suppressed benefits of high-dose Vitamin C intake after he himself had taken 10 grams or more daily for several years -- 100 to 200 grams daily during signs of illness. He knew from personal experience and his own research that most of the warnings published on the dangers of high-dose Vitamin C were overblown, if not deliberately misleading.
The author doesn't present his material without covering the necessary, well-established caveats. Most notably, orthomolecular intake levels of Vitamin C (say, in excess of one or two grams at a time) are found to cause discomforting side effects with 20% of the population: diarrhea, intestinal discomfort, chapped lips, etc. [21] Some of those in the "20% camp" are able to negotiate their way through a high-dose regimen, but many are not.
But what 80% of the general world population that would benefit from higher ascorbal intakes are subjected to is massive misinformation. Sheffrey divides his study according to the tactic used to scare the public away from higher dosing: deliberately deceptive trial studies, inadequate dosing, faked data on "side effects and safety," etc.
On occasion, even in the face of well-orchestrated efforts to discredit higher dosages of a human nutrient that would adversely affect pharmaceutical sales, the truth gets through. (Example: the National Cancer Institute's admission that of 46 epidemiological studies it examined, in 33 there was evidence of "statistically significant treatment of cancers of the mouth, esophagus, stomach, pancreas, breast, anus, colon, and cervix.") [22] But the vast majority of studies on the benefits of higher dose Vitamin C, funded as they are by vested interests, utilize a consistent, predictable, menu of disinformative methods to prevent the public from realizing the benefits.


Summary: Hypoascorbemia and Cancer
As Metaphors For a Disfunctional Art
Vitamin C is more than a singular molecular entity with known nutritional benefits. It is a metaphor for the natural world -- largely existing where foods that contain it are fresh, raw, and uncooked. It quickly diminishes in potency as it is removed from that world, and it is scorned and scientifically libelled because of the threat that a more complete understanding of its function and use would bring to monied interests. Its absence from the diet brings maladaptation . . . disease . . . not in an abrupt low-dosage-induced burst of scurvy as modern medicine would have us believe, but in gradual stages as we deviate from what nature has predeterminated as optimal.
This is hypoascorbemia.
Cancer, like Vitamin C, is also a metaphor -- but in this instance, it stands for the converse : deviation from the natural world. A hodge-podge of loosely connected ailments, the very word itself represents the attempt to redefine nature and define a set of conditions from which an unsuspecting public can be bilked and not cured.
Studied fully and completely, we could, if so inclined, see the irreparable mess that medicine has become with just the study of these two metaphors -- sitting as they do at opposite ends of a thorough gaze of civilization.
But then, we would lose the perspective that comes with comprehending our past -- that comes with seeing the inevitability of that with which we currently live.


Over the preceeding pages we have reviewed my own personal experiences with approaches to cancer that met the "suppression pattern," and examined one of the most notable cases in recent history -- one difficult to dismiss by even Modern Medicine's most staunch defenders.
In describing the "suppression pattern," we have succeeded in identifying a reoccurring social symptom -- but can be locate the cause of the disease?
This, I believe -- as stated early in this chapter -- requires us to go back in history, to the earliest stirrings of our current age of civilizations. If there is a global "operating system" that has set the tone for humanity's course over the past 6,000 or so years (and I believe there is an abundance of evidence that there is), then have the "cultural mimetics" of this operating system made the medical atrocities we now witness inevitable?
Indeed.
More importantly, our quest leads us to a place where a clarity emerges as to "Civilization's End" as we know it. We can reach a point where we may understand why the system cannot be repaired.
It can only be destroyed and then be rebuilt.

In seeing this we can reach a point in our exploration where we, to borrow from Spencer, have a cognition of humanity . . . and it is not so much that we will not want history . . . rather, having distilled its essence, we will no longer need it.

  1. Stone, The Healing Factor p. xi. The remark is made in the opening paragraph of the second Foreward. There are two in this volume: the first by Linus Pauling; the second, by Albert Szent-Gyorgyi.
  2. Moss, Ralph W., Free Radical, p. 253.
  3. Pauling, Linus, Vitamin C and the Common Cold, p. 4.
  4. Ibid., p. 48. In a footnote on the same page, Pauling adds, "This name (Douglas Gildersleeve, M.D.) is probably a pseudonym, assumed by the author for professional reasons. I maintain this only serves to make yet another point about the 'doctors who speak out'."
  5. Healing Factor, p. 94. Additionally, Pauling himself notes that although as little as 5 mg. of ascorbate "is believed" to be enough to "prevent scurvy in most people," ascorbate is not is so non-toxic that people have been given "as much as 150 grams (g), one-third of a pound, of sodium ascorbate by injection or intravenous infusion by mouth without serious side-effects." (See Cancer & Vitamin C, p. 100.) Additionally, see Vitamin C Under Attack, p. 56, where authors of a 1969 study reported that nontoxic substances "have been largely if not totally excluded from consideration in the screening program." (as cited on p. 86: "Benade L., Howard T., Burk D., Synergistic killing of Ehrlich ascites carcinoma cells by ascorbic acid and 3-amino-1,2,4,-trizole. Oncology 1969, 23:33-43.
  6. Free Radical, p. 253-254.
  7. Ask Dr. Weil: Vitamins & Minerals, p. 12-13. I admire Andrew for his attempts to press the boundaries of orthdox medicine's stodgy resistance to those proven contributions that eminate from the "alternative community," but too often he proves to be a "company man." He has to be. Again, "respectable people are loath to rock the foundation of the very system that is itself the source of their respectability." Nonetheless, in this brief monogram, Weil's brief comments on Vitamin C were fairly in accordance with recommendations of other alternative physicians. He recommends 1,000 mg. of Vitamin C twice a day "at a minimum." (Yes, that's 3300% of the U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance.) And he admits that "we need more of it when exposed to toxins, infection, and chronic illness." How much? "I'd go up to 2,000 mg. three times a day." (A whopping 10,000% of the U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance. Oh my!) What isn't mentioned is that the most common forms of orthodox cancer treatment (chemotherapy and radiation) are highly toxic, so he is inadvertently admitting that if you're going to go through conventional cancer treatment, you're going to place demands on the immune system that require higher ascorbate intake to counter the more rapid depletion these treatments create. Predictably, the vast majority of oncologists don't say a word to their patients about the effects of orthodox treatment on this vital nutrient.

    7B --- Cancer & Vitamin C, Linus Pauling, p. 99-107.

    7C --- See Vitamin C Against Cancer by H.L. Newbold, M.D. (1981); Vitamin C: The Master Nutrient by Sundra Goodman, Ph.D.; The Vitamin C Connection by Dr. Emanuel Cheraskin (M.D., D.M.D.), et. al. (1983); The Vitamin Controversy by Dr. Emanuel Cheraskin, (1988); and Ascorbate: The Science of Vitamin C (2004) by Dr. Steve Hickey and Dr. Hilary Roberts. Dr. Cheraskin, alone, shared in approximately 1,000 clinical experiements, eventuating in about 80 published papers in the technical literature. Controversy, p. 183-193.

  8. Ten Years that Changed Medicine Forever, Matthias Rath, M.D., p. 15 (Introduction). The quote is, according to Dr. Rath, a comment that Linus Pauling made to him in 1994 in one of the last conversations before Pauling's death. This author, knowing Pauling through stories from his own mentor, Dr. Russell Jordan, believes the quote to be most probably accurate.
  9. Ibid., p. 72. The quote above it on atherosclerotic mortality is taken from Vitamin C [R. Paoletti, et. al., editors], p. 59 -- citing Gotto AJ, Farmer JA (1988). Risk factors for coronary disease. In: Braunwald E. (ed.) Heart disease: a textbook of cardiovascular medicine, 3rd edn. Saunders, Philadelphia, pp. 1153-1190. As an aside, the deficiencies in many of the studies cited by B. Frei, and similar studies funded by orthodoxy, is addressed in Vitamin C Under Attack: Unfair trials bombard high-dose benefits [Stephen Sheffrey, 2000]. A thorough reading angers the impartial reader on the mere basis of the outrageousness of the tactics used.
  10. The author was first exposed to the finding of Jacobus Rinse, Ph.D., in Dr. Morton Walker's How Not to Have a Heart Attack, p. 116. Note that even in the work of Rinse and Morton, dealing with the effort to perfect a dietary regimen for heart disease patients, there can be observed the same tendency, a la James Lind, to complicate the matter and pull it into the realm of ineffectiveness.
  11. To accent his findings in this area, Rath even titled his book on the subject, Why Animals Don't Get Heart Attacks ... But People Do!. A well-written and less technical treatise on this subject, however, is covered in his Ten Years.
  12. By way of example, see his treatment in the online "Skeptic's Dictionary," http://skepdic.com/rath.html, or Dr. Stephen Barrett's commentary in: http://chealth.canoe.ca/columns.asp?columnistid=3&articleid=2854. Obviously, it would take a separate book to do justice to the ongoing debate between Rath and his critics, and for the record, this author does not agree with Rath on every point. By way of example, my belief is that although Vitamin C contributes to an effective "anti-cancer" regimen, I would agree with Szent-Georgyi himself that it is not an effective treatment, after the fact. Rath crosses the line and says it can be, which I believe overstates the case and threatens the strength and legitimacy of his other statements and findings. For the purposes of this discussion, however, I wish to narrow the focus to the relationship between Vitamin C and the above stated circulatory ailments.
  13. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthias_Rath.
  14. A sampling of this suppressive "legal" warfare on therapeutics that prove too threatening to vested interests can be found in Dan Haley's, Politics in Healing.
  15. Ten Years that Changed Medicine Forever, Matthias Rath, M.D., p. 56-58, in section marked, "How I got interested in cardiovascular research."
  16. Ibid., p. 68-69. Note: the sequential use of this footnote for both quote and caption is intentional.
  17. Ibid., p. 72.
  18. Ibid., p. 75.
  19. Ibid., p. 73.
  20. Ibid., p. 127.
  21. Stephen Sheffrey, Vitamin C Under Attack: Unfair Trials Bombard High-Dose Benefits, p. 198.
  22. Lynne McTaggart (ed.), The Cancer Handbook: What's Really Working, p. 147.
Commentary on Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions ...

< --- continued from Chap 4-3.

Commentary: Going beyond Kuhn, I found the "mythology of history as progress" even better articulated by Hiram Caton (no relation) in his The Politics of Progress.
"Until you have got a true theory of humanity, you cannot interpret history; and when you have got a true theory of humanity, you do not want history."
Herbert Spencer

Taken from "Introduction," p. 3.
One of the primary theses of Hiram Caton's work is that the rendering history since the 17th century has been fashioned to show consistent progress and make diminutive our primitive beginnings. "One fruit of the renovation of historiography was a view of the history of the human species as an advance from primitive conditions." (p. 21) All the usual suspects are included in his coverage, of course, Kepler, Huygens, Locke, Newton, etc. But to make Caton's observations juxtapost Kuhn's we see that the suppression of historical information necessary to upholding current paradigms is not merely a tendency, but an absolute requirement to maintaining any semblance of legitimacy. So rooted is the myth that the history of science is this linear march of unending improvement that Kuhn is moved to write, "Does a field make progress because it is a science, or is it a science because it makes progress?" (Kuhn, p. 162) Nonetheless, this is a myth which is indispensible to sustaining the respectability of science in the mind of the public. After all, with each successive scientific revolution, how could the victorious camp ever admit to something less than progress? "That would be rather like admitting that they had been wrong and their opponents right." (Kuhn, p. 166) "When it repudiates a past paradigm, a scientific community simultaneously renounces, as a fit subject for professional scrutiny, most of the books and articles in which that paradigm had been embodied. Scientific education makes use of no equivalent for the art museum or the library of classics, and the result is a sometimes drastic distortion in the scientist's perception of his discipline's past. More than the practitioners of other creative fields, he comes to see it as leading in a straight line to the discipline's present vantage. In short, he comes to see it as progress. No alternative is available to him while he remains in the field." (Kuhn, p. 167).
Those who hold that orthodox medicine has not been suppressing effective treatments for the entire of its existence know nothing about the history of science itself!
  • Leaving Caton and Returning to Kuhn: Each paradigm brings with it new puzzles. But the new paradigm may fail to solve problems that earlier paradigms handled easily. (p. 140). One example that strikes this author poignantly, because it involved the theoretical underpinnings for an Alpha Omega Labs product called Bone Builder, is that of biological transmutation. The product itself made use of a well observed fact that is completely denied by modern chemistry: that biological organisms have the ability to transmute elements. An abundance of further examples that can be readily shown in the laboratory to prove that biological transmutation is a fact of everyday life (see C. Louis Kervran's Biological Transmutations, which we discuss at greater length in a later chapter).
  • One of the most ubiquitious, commonly used defense mechanisms used by the orthodox establishment (and, in our study, replace this with "orthodox medicine") is the pejorative labelling of those who identify Elite misbehavior as "conspiracy theory" -- never mind that the very nature of maintaining the established order and preventing people from seeing through the mythology of the "common narrative" requires well orchestrated conspiracy. One of the best examples of this is demonstrated in the very historigraphical tools used to uphold a major tenet of scientism: that, as Hiram Caton has noted, history (be it the history of civilizations, the history of science, the history of medicine) is presented as progress to uphold the glory of the present system and make its precedessors (which have failed and are now dead) diminutive. Every civilization has followed this pattern -- without exception. In every empire and in every age, the reigning culture has attempted to inculcate the idea that it will succeed where all others have failed -- irrespective of the fact that each successive civilization uses but a slightly different variation on its path to failure of the the many that preceeded it. Arnold Toybnee noted not less than 25 prior dominant civilizations over the past 5,000 years have taken this path. He notes that sixteen are completely dead and buried, and all but one exhibit the distinctive characteristics of disintegration: Western Civilization. (See A Study of History (abridged, p. 244)) My position is that Toynbee's close, personal association with the Elite prevented him (just as it prevented Quigley, see Tragedy & Hope, p. 7) from seeing that Western Civilization has already passed the point of no return. The inevitability of this was not lost on Spengler (see Decline of the West).
  • A corollary to the notion that "history is the record, proof, reinforcement, source of common narrative, and propaganda major" of its prevailing Elite is the mythology of cumulative acquisition of unanticipated novelties, which "proves to be an almost non-existent exception to the rule of scientific development. The man who takes historic fact seriously must suspect that science does not tend toward the ideal that our image of its cumulativeness has suggested . . . cumulative acquisition of novelty is not only rare in fact but improbable in principle. . . . The man who is striving to solve a problem defined by existing knowledge and technique is not, however, just looking around. He knows what he wants to achieve, and he designs his instruments and directs his thoughts accordingly. Unanticipated novelty, the new discovery, can emerge only to the extent that his anticipations about nature and his instruments prove wrong. Often the importance of the resulting discovery will itself be proportional to the extent and stubbornness of the anomaly that foreshadowed it. Obviously, then, there must be a conflict between the paradigm that discloses anomaly and the one that later renders the anomaly lawlike . . . There is no other effective way in which discoveries might be generated." Examples throughout history abound, if objectively examined in this light: "only after the caloric theory had been rejected could energy conservation become part of science . . . Einstein's theory can be accepted only with the recognition that Newton's was wrong . . . It is hard to see how new theories could arise without these destructive changes in beliefs about nature. Though logical inclusiveness remains a permissible view of the relation between successive scientific theories, it is a historical implausibility." (p. 96-98)
  • The transition between an old paradigm and a new are rarely smooth. The parallels between upheavels in politics and in science are striking. "Political revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, often restricted to a segment of the political community, that existing institutions have ceased adequately to meet the problems posed by an environment that they have in part created. In much the same way, scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, again often restricted to a narrow subdivision of the scientific community, that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way. in both political and scientific development the sense of malfunction that can lead to crisis is prerequisite to revolution . . . the parties to a revolutionary conflict must finally resort to the techniques of mass persuasion, often including force." (p. 92-93). The revolution, as I have been able to observe it in the U.S., is already running at full-steam. The FDA is presecuting, imprisoning, has even murdered, those who stand in the way of the money machine that fund their top management: primarily the pharmaceutical industry.
  • It is hard to make nature fit into a paradigm. (It is the author's belief that this a logical corollary of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem in mathematics.) "That is why the puzzles of normal science are so challenging and also why measurements undertaken without a paradigm so seldom lead to any conclusions at all. (To make a paradigm work you have to) beat nature into line." (p. 135)
  • Science can never be a reflection of truth, because it is limited by commonly held precepts and cultural memes -- but most importantly, political / economic forces that are the strongest and most durable forces in our current cultural operationg system -- a system which has rules the majority of humanity for at least the last 8,000 years.
    The prevailing pharmaceutical paradigm can never allow the acceptance of evidence-based medicine (which, to be effective, will almost always be derived from nature Herself, since the physical system itself is an artifact of nature). Thus, the pharmaceutical paradigm must be destroyed to allow acceptance of effective healing evidence. But that cannot happen without the introduction of a more compelling, dynamic paradigm . . . hence the timely need for Meditopia.
    G.C. (author)
    Beaumont Prison, 3/27/05
  • Each paradigm brings with it new puzzles. But the new paradigm may fail to solve problems that earlier paradigms handled easily. (p. 140).
  • A scientist is much like a chess-player. He will test millions of possible moves, but never the rules of the game (prevailing paradigm, p. 144-145).
  • The old must die off for a new paradigm to take hold. "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." (Scientific Autobiography, Max Planck) . . . (p. 151)
  • "The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced. Lifelong resistance, particularly from those whose productive careers have committed them to an older tradition of normal science, is not a violation of scientific standards but an index to the nature of scientific research itself. The source of resistance is the assurance that the older paradigm will ultimately solve all its problems, that nature can be shoved into the box the paradigm provides. Inevitably, at times of revolution, that assurance seems stubborn and pigheaded as indeed it sometimes becomes. But it is also something more. That same assurance is what makes normal or puzzle-solving science possible. And it is only through normal science that the professional community of scientists succeeds, first, in exploiting the potential scope and precision of the older paradigm and, then, in isolating the difficulty through the study of which a new paradigm may emerge." (p. 152) The exploitation of a paradigm and its eventual submission to a new replacement, as well as the direction of the paradigm's replacement, is more influenced by monied interest than any other factor. (See Spencer Klaw's The New Brahmins, p. 168-227, which, although dated and focussed on the scientific community in the U.S., clearly spells out the nature of this influence.)
  • For all the ballyhooing over its strict adherence to the scientific method, modern science is as much influence by unsubstantiable feeling and emotion as it is anything objective. "Even today Einstein's general theory attracts men principally on aesthetic grounds, an appeal that few people outside of mathematics have been able to feel." (p. 158). Or as Nobel laureate Paul Dirac put it, "it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment." (See Kaku's Hyperspace, p. 189). What logical or reasonable basis, for instance, can be seen in science in the famous exchange between Wolfgang Pauli and Neils Bohr? To recap, physicist Wolfgang Pauli gave a lecture on the Heisenberg-Pauli unified field theory with "many eager physicists in attendance." When he was finished, however, the lecture received a mixed response. Niels Bohr finally stood up and said, "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough." (Again, Hyperspace, p. 137). In this light, it is even easier to see how monied interest and high entropy solutions could influence the direction of science. After all, under the cultural operating system that civilization has been obeying for 8,000 years, what is more aesthetic or beautiful or motivating than money? Nothing.
  • "The very existence of science depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community . . . The group's members, as individuals and by virtue of their shared training and experience, must be seen as the SOLE POSSESSORS [emphasis added] of the rules of the game or of some equivalent basis for unequivocal judgments. To doubt that they shared some such basis for evaluations would be to admit the existence of incompatible standards of scientific achievement. That admission would inevitably raise the question whether truth in the sciences can be one [won]." (p. 168). As it relates to the health sciences, where evidence-based medicine has consistently shown that simple, low entropy therapeutic solutions that work in accordance with nature are superior to more complex, more profitable therapeutic approaches, this flawed feature of science becomes glaring. For as the sole possessors of the rules of the game, the dominant group, the assenting majority that constitute the acknowledged, authoritative, scientific community, must -- of necessity -- destroy its competitors. Suppression, again, is not an option. It is a necessity. From this angle, we again see why modern medicine, holding sway over that area of science devoted to health care, could never come to an agreement with that stream of thought and practice that is "evidence-based."
  • It is on account of science's fundamental flaws, written into the very fabric of its being, that "we may have to relinquish the notion . . . that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth." (p. 170)
  • "We are all deeply accustomed to seeing science as the one enterprise that draws consistently nearer to some goal set by nature in advance. But need there be any such goal? Can we not account for both science's existence and its success in terms of evolution from the community's state of knowledge at any given time? Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal?" (p. 171) The fact is, science doesn't have any nature-specified goal, and the only common force that unifies all science as its one and only "deficiency nutrient" -- the absence of which would starve any scientific enterprise -- is MONEY. Proofs of this that can be drawn from the medicine community abound. In fact, the only way that modern medicine could ever have evolved into anything other than the current cesspool of corruption, payola, widespread death-by-doctoring, and iatrogenesis as the world's leading epidemic, is if there were a close conjunction between making money and curing patients. Because of the effectiveness of low entropy therapeutic approaches, such a conjunction does not, could not, and will not ever exist. Caught between the demands to return a profit and the demands of nature to cure the patient, it is the patient that will lose under our modern cultural operating system.
  • The uniformity of education and grooming of scientists means that all who want to be in the CLUB drink from the same cyanide-laced punch bowl. Whatever virus or defect exists in the prevailing paradigm will therefore be MAGNIFIED. (p. 177).
  • By having a paradigm, the scientific community -- as this is so very evident in medicine -- must have something to DEFEND, but any phenomenon is inclined to align itself with economic benefit. The bigger the money, the stronger this centripetal force. (p. 179).
  • Ohm's Law: Sometimes the new paradigm employs NEW DEFINITIONS or understandings of old terms. This section provides insight into why the Medical Industrial Complex must so viciously fight evidence-based health care: Meditopia doesn't replace the vinyl siding; it identifies a serious crack in the foundation that requires the destruction and rebuilding of the whole house. (p. 179)
  • As we saw in the example on the previous page involving the work of Dr. Gerald Dermer, what is endorsed by one group of scientists in one discipline will be opaque to another.
  • Kuhn takes the position that "practitioners of the developed sciences are . . . fundamentally puzzle-solvers. Though the values that they deploy at times of theory-choice derive from other aspects of their work as well, the demonstrated ability to set up and solve puzzles presented by nature is, in case of value conflict, the dominant criterion for most members of a scientific group." (p. 205). I most strongly disagree. Since the very measure of success under our current cultural operating system centers around one value and one value alone -- making a profit -- it only stands to reason that consciously or unconsciously, the problem-solving process will always be biased towards a solution that affords financial opportunity. Those who would disagree are not being honest with themselves. Take the very word itself: SUCCESS. Now repeat it gently in the mind, as if it were a Hindu mantra. Is there anything other than financial prosperity that is evoked in the Western mind when this word is repeated? Of course not. To grasp the truism of this observation is to understand why Modern Medicine was, from inception, doomed to be an abysmal failure -- like so many other facets of Western civilization, from which it was born.
  • Modern medicine does not represent a step forward in man's understanding and employment of health care. It is a dysfunctional step backwards. There are other parallels to be found in other scientific disciplines. For all the laudations concerning its advancement in our understanding of physics, "Einstein's general theory of relativity is closer to Aristotle's than either of them is to Newton's." (p. 207).
  • There is a "relative scarcity of competing schools in the developed sciences" (p. 209). The school that makes more money will, by application of pure common sense, be in a better position to squash its competitors. This insight, yet again, shows why Modern Medicine could never serve in the best interests of the patient. That system which can skillfully extract the most money from a given pool of patients will have an enormous edge over a system which is purely devoted to the best outcome for that same patient pool.
  • Kuhn closes by stating that "scientific knowledge, like language, is intrinsically the common property of a group or else nothing at all." (p. 210). However, Kuhn fails to delineate the inherent, fascist condition by which the group imposes its view of the world ON EVERYONE ELSE! In doing so, he fails to illuminate the effects of its powers of co-optation, the employment of cooperating state powers, and the suppression of its competitors . . .
    I simply must finish Meditopia when I get out of this prison.

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