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Intravenous Vitamin C as a treatment for cancer
In 1976, Linus Pauling (two time Nobel Prize Winner) working with Ewan Cameron put 100 cancer patients through trials using ´Intravenous Vitamin C´ (IVC) and concluded that IVC could significantly increase a cancer patient´s lifespan.
Three studies, supposedly replicating the work, then pooh-poohed the Pauling results. Except that the new studies all used oral doses of vitamin C, not intravenous doses. This ridiculous flaw in these studies is highly significant. For example, if you take 1 gm of vitamin C orally, only approximately 7 per cent makes it into your blood stream. (For this reason, the new liposomal vitamin C products have created a stir and found willing users. The liposomal treatment allows about 85 to 90 per cent delivery into the blood stream.) If Pauling used 50 gms intravenously, the oral level of 50 gms would have only delivered about 7 gms into the blood stream and infected tissues. Hardly a realistic comparison at all really.
Put another way, IVC using 50 gms achieves plasma levels of 300-400 milligrams of vitamin C per 100cc; at this level it acts as a pro-oxidant and can damage cancer cell membranes, while healthy cells denature the effect with an enzyme called catalase not found in cancer cells. The maximum plasma level for oral vitamin C is about 4.5 milligrams per 100cc, nowhere near enough to act as a pro-oxidant.
Since that time the medical world has become a gossip columnist´s dream. The internet resembles a war zone. Does it work, or doesn´t it? And it seems we are only just finding out.
At CANCERactive we have received a surprising amount of interest in ´vitamin C megadoses´ lately from cancer patients.
I would like to remind readers of our stance: We believe cancer is a multi-step process and we know of no single treatment, be it drug, vitamin or whatever, that is currently a ´cure´ for cancer.
That having been said, some treatments clearly do increase survival times, some treatments do shrink or remove cancer tumours and some treatments in conjunction with others do seem to go a long way towards playing a role in ´curing´ cancer.
With IVC there are those who think it can fulfill these roles, while others think it most definitely doesn´t. Controversy rules. Some think IVC has the potential to greatly increase survival, and believe that this non-invasive treatment threatens the profits of ´Big Pharma´. It is thus no wonder the skeptics come out of the closet to attack IVC.
This may or may not be true. The fact is that, although there is a lot of talk about excellent research results, I could not find many examples.
As with the whole area of ´alternative therapies´ we will try to collect together the relevant information that is already in the public domain. What you do with that information is your business. None of what we say is intended as advice.
Here we present two articles: The first on vitamin C and what is known about it (Vitamin C - the great healer). Plus an article on Intravenous vitamin C - the use of injections of megadoses of vitamin C.
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