For a number of years I have thought that there should be people who might be said to practice theoretical medicine.
There are thousands of theoretical physicists and they have, of course, made important contributions to science
and hundreds of theoretical chemists, some theoretical biologists –
why shouldn’t there be people in the field of theoretical medicine?
My experience has indicated that many workers in medicine and such fields as nutrition
are not able to understand and appreciate theoretical and rational arguments.
Cancer is one of the most important causes of human suffering.
People die, of course; they get old and in the course of time die.
But the amount of suffering associated with death is different for different causes of death and, in fact, for different ages.
Death at an advanced age very often involves considerably less suffering for the person himself
and for members of his family and others than death at an earlier age.
If we could increase the length of life so that more people died at an advanced age and could eliminate cancer,
an especially unpleasant way of dying, then there would be a decrease in the amount of human suffering.
I read a book by a man, Doctor Ewan Cameron of Scotland, a number of years ago.
The book was published in 1966; its title is 'Hyaluronic Acid and Cancer'.
He pointed out that not very much progress was being made in the attack on cancer
by producing anticancer drugs and changing ways of irradiating a person with high-energy radiation.
In fact, the National Cancer Institute has spent billions of dollars, thousands of millions of dollars, during the last 20 years –
800 million dollars is its budget this year - and yet the mean survival time of cancer patients has changed very little.
For a few percent of these patients with certain rather special kinds of cancer there has been a significant improvement,
but for the great majority, more than 95% of the patients who have important kinds of cancer,
there’s been essentially no change as a result of all of the effort, of all the expenditure of money.
Cameron in his book said that perhaps an effective way of attacking the problem of cancer
would be to bolster up the body’s natural protective mechanisms.
Many, almost every cancer patient after surgery, when the primary cancer is removed,
has millions of circulating malignant cells, and yet not every one of them develops metastasis.
In many of them these circulating malignant cells seem to be kept under control.
This is with little doubt the result of an effective immune surveillance.
The body’s natural protective mechanisms succeed in getting control over the malignant cells
and the patient does not succumb to cancer.
Cameron mentioned that malignant cells, many kinds of malignant cells, produce the enzyme hyaluronidase,
which then attacks the hyaluronic acid in the intercellular cement of the surrounding normal tissues
and weakens these tissues in such a way as to permit infiltration by the malignant tumour.
Then in his book he went on to express the hope that some way could be found to stimulate the production by the patient
of an increased amount of physiological hyaluronidase inhibitor, which would inhibit the action of the hyaluronidase,
and in this way protect the surrounding tissues and permit the tumour to be brought under control.
For a number of years he tried to find some such way by giving to terminal cancer patients various hormones
and mixtures of hormones, thinking that sooner or later he might find a hormone
that would stimulate the production of a hyaluronidase inhibitor.
And year after year he was disappointed.
The patients with terminal cancer died at just about the standard rate; there was no effective treatment of this sort.
I was asked in 1971 to give a talk at the dedication of a new laboratory for cancer research
at the University of Chicago, the Ben May Laboratory.
In fact, Tiselius had been asked to give this address and had agreed to come,
but a week or 10 days before the occasion of the dedication he sent a telegram saying that he was ill and was not able to come.
So the organisers, the people at the Ben May laboratory, called me and asked if I would come and speak.
I needed to say something about cancer, so I presented an argument as follows:
We know one thing about ascorbic acid and have known for 40 years.
That is that collagen, the principle component, proteinaceous component of connective tissue, is not synthesised
except in the presence of ascorbic acid; ascorbic acid is required for its synthesis.
The intercellular cement in tissues contains not only these glycosaminoglycans, hyaluronic acid long chains,
but also long fibrils of collagen which act like the reinforcing rods in reinforced concrete.
They help to strengthen this intercellular cement.
And so I said that I thought that if patients were given more ascorbic acid
this would strengthen the normal tissues and help to bring the malignancy under control.
Cameron read a newspaper account of my talk and wrote to me asking, how much ascorbic acid they ought to be given.
I wrote back saying, 10 grams per day.
He began cautiously giving 10 grams per day of ascorbic acid, actually sodium ascorbate, first for about 10 days intravenously
and then orally to these patients, and immediately developed the feeling that this was beneficial to the patients.
Another argument had been presented at about the same time by Douglas Rothman, who wrote to Cameron saying that
perhaps ascorbic acid units are part of the hyaluronidase inhibitor; and perhaps ascorbic acid in large amounts
would permit the patient to develop hyaluronidase inhibitor.
Well, now of course, we feel that there are many ways in which an increased intake of ascorbic acid
operates to potentiate the body’s natural protective mechanisms.
And perhaps these 2 that I have mentioned are not the most important ones.
The fact is that it is a matter of observation, that the patients who receive good intake of ascorbic acid
have a much better prognosis than those who receive just the ordinary intake or less than the ordinary one,
because, of course, most cancer patients are malnourished anyway with respect not only to ascorbic acid but to other nutrients.
The reason... perhaps I should say why I said 10 grams per day.
But first let me say that it has been a surprise to me to get involved in cancer research.
I didn’t intend to do it.
I was working years ago in the field of immunology for a while.
And then I had the idea that there could be diseases that could be described as molecular diseases.
Sickle cell anaemia was the first disease characterised in that way, when it was found that the haemoglobin molecule
that patients with this disease manufacture differ from those manufactured by other people.
And we found that other people very quickly found a number of other abnormal human haemoglobins –
the total number known is somewhere around 300; the study of the haemoglobinopathies has extended greatly.
I decided that after 8 years of working on the haemoglobinopathies to look at other diseases
to see to what extent they were molecular diseases.
And I thought it might as well be some important disease; the choice seemed to me to lie between cancer and mental illness.
I decided to study mental illness rather than cancer, with the argument, back in 1953 this was, the argument
that almost everybody works on cancer, practically nobody works on schizophrenia and other mental diseases.
So there wouldn’t be so much competition in that field.
And I worked for 10 years on schizophrenia.
And toward the end of that period I ran across work by Hoffer and Osmond in Canada on the treatment of schizophrenic patients,
by giving them large doses of vitamins, in particular of nicotinic acid or nicotinamide.
I was astonished to read what these investigators reported.
They were giving, let’s say, 17,000 milligrams a day of nicotinic acid to schizophrenic patients,
whereas 17 milligrams a day is the amount recommended by the Food and Nutrition Board of the United States,
National Academy of Sciences and Natural Research Council to prevent pellagra
and to keep people in what the Food and Nutrition Board calls ordinary good health - I call it ordinary poor health.
Also I found that Milner had carried out a double blind study with schizophrenic patients
to see what the effect of a large dose of ascorbic acid was.
And he found a statistically significant effect, that a large intake, not very large, a couple of grams per day of ascorbic acid,
caused the schizophrenic patients to improve, much more than the controls who received a placebo.
As I thought about this matter, I realised that one might formulate a general principle
which is, that there is a concentration of each vital substance that corresponds to the optimum health.
This is not necessarily the concentration, the intake that prevents overt manifestations of deficiency disease;
it may be very much larger than that.
In fact, there is no reason, I think, to say that only the vitamins are important as nutrients.
A vitamin is described as an organic compound that in small amounts is required for life and good health.
And in the case of ascorbic acid - if we don’t get any ascorbic acid, we die of scurvy:
the connective tissue just falls apart because collagen is not being synthesised.
The joints fall apart and the walls of the blood vessels fall apart, you have internal intramuscular bleeding –
all sorts of manifestations ultimately leading to death, manifestations of degradation of the connective tissue, the collagen.
Well, it might be that even without ascorbic acid enough collagen could be synthesised to keep people from dying,
and then ascorbic acid would not have been called a vitamin.
And still the various effects that it has could be very important for good health.
I don’t think that it is essential that a substance be a nutrient, be a vitamin in order for it to have great importance,
but, of course, ascorbic acid is a vitamin and it’s the one that I shall talk about most today.
The question comes up why should I recommend 10 grams a day.
Well, that seemed a sensible and safe recommendation to make.
You know we can ask, why is it that all plants manufacture thiamine, vitamin B1,
and animals do not manufacture it, they require it exogenously.
The answer is that back several hundred million years ago a plant began running around
and eating the other plants and called itself an animal.
It was eating its immediate ancestors.
And they manufacture thiamine and other vitamins.
And so it was getting in its food - it wasn’t like the red bread mould
that requires only biotin exogenously and can synthesise everything.
This animal, it could synthesise ascorbic acid and the plants were making ascorbic acid or were making thiamine;
it got enough thiamine in its food.
Well, there is a general basic principle in biology that if you don’t need a function,
then the gene responsible for it disappears.
And the reason for that, of course, is that it becomes a burden.
So when a mutant arose which no longer had the genes that synthesise - there are a lot of them involved, 16 perhaps –
that synthesise the enzymes, that convert other materials into thiamine, the pyrimidine half,
and the diazole half, and the enzyme that hooks these 2 together.
When the animal mutant arose that had shuffled off this machinery, then he was streamlined.
He was not burdened the way the wild type was, and consequently the wild type died out.
And this ancestral animal from then on, he and all of his descendants have required exogenous thiamine
in order to be in good health.
And this happened for riboflavin and for nicotinic acid and for pyridoxine and vitamin A, the other vitamins –
all animals require these substances exogenously.
This is an indication too that the needs of animals for these substances are about the same as the needs of the plants.
But it didn’t happen for ascorbic acid.
Practically every animal species... as a very good approximation you can say,
every animal species has continued to manufacture ascorbic acid.
Why didn’t this ancestral animal give up the mechanism for manufacturing ascorbic acid?
The answer is clear: the amount that the animal was getting in the food was not enough for good health.
Consequently, and we can perhaps understand it, plants don’t manufacture collagen,
they rely on cellulose as the structural high energy, high-molecular weight molecule rather than on collagen.
So that this may well be... this perhaps is part of the process of changing from being a plant to an animal,
that you make great use of collagen and require larger amounts of ascorbic acid.
Animals have continued to manufacture ascorbic acid.
Man had a bad accident, the precursor of man, in fact the common precursor of all the primates, had a bad accident:
that of living in too good an environment around 25 million years ago.
This environment, no doubt, was in a tropical valley where the food was especially rich in ascorbic acid.
If you weighed 70 kilograms or if we convert to 70 kilograms body weight, there were foods
that for 2,500 kilocalories or 10,000 kilojoules of food energy can provide as much as 10 grams of ascorbic acid per day.
And this was close enough to the optimum to permit the mutant, who had lost one enzyme involved in the production
of ascorbic acid, to get rid of this ability and to compete successfully with the wild type, so that he replaced him.
And since then all of the primates have been in a bad way.
Most of them have restricted their habitats to the tropical regions where a good bit of ascorbic acid is available.
An analysis of the food eaten by a gorilla shows that he gets about 5 grams of ascorbic acid per day.
We moved out into temperate and subarctic regions where the food is not so rich in ascorbic acid,
and we have been suffering, of course, almost all of us, from hypoascorbemia ever since.
If we ask how much ascorbic acid do animals manufacture, animals over a 10-million-fold range of body weight,
from the housefly up to the goat say - I don’t think anyone has studied the elephant in this respect -,
we find that the average amount manufactured by these animals is about 10 grams per day per 70 kilogram body weight.
And this is then one of the reasons for saying
that this is a reasonable amount to try to see to what extent it will control cancer.
You could use much more.
Patients are being given as much as 100 grams a day and have taken,
I think, as much as, I’ve heard as much as 400 grams a day without any difficulty.
There are thousands of people who have taken several grams a day for years with no overt manifestation of serious side effects,
kidney stones and things like this, that are talked about in the medical literature without any sound basis for the suggestion.
But 10 grams a day is an amount that is easy to take.
I mentioned the goat.
I have here in this test tube, which is essentially full, 13 grams of ascorbic acid.
This is the amount that the goat manufactures each day.
And would the goat manufacture this if he didn’t need it?
I don’t think so.
This basic general principle would operate.
If he were to cut down from 13 grams to 12 grams a day he would save 7% of the wear and tear and energy
required to manufacture ascorbic acid.
And if that extra 1 gram wasn’t beneficial, why not, why shouldn’t he be saving that effort?
So I think 13 grams a day for a 70-kilogram goat is probably somewhat less
- well I won’t say probably - is somewhat less than the optimum amount.
And of course, he gets a couple of grams a day in his food, too.
In this other test tube I have the amount that a human being manufactures.
That’s zero.
So far as is known, no human beings manufacture ascorbic acid.
It’s very hard to get back the gene, the ability - only by transfer of the gene from some other animal.
I understand that human chromosome is found in cats of one kind, a certain European cat,
that it’s been introduced into the genetic complement of that animal.
But it’s hard to get back.
Only microorganisms can develop - and under special circumstances too - can develop this ability.
In this other test tube there’s a little bit of white powder down in the bottom.
That’s the 45 milligrams per day that the Food and Nutrition Board in the United States recommends for human beings.
It’s enough to prevent essentially all people from getting scurvy, but it is far too small an amount to put people in good health.
I think the goat knows more about these matters than the Food and Nutrition Board. (laughter)
In fact there is another committee of the National Academy of Sciences,
the National Research Council, that I think knows more too.
This is the Committee on the Feeding of Laboratory Animals.
They have made recommendations about monkeys.
Monkeys are primates like ourselves.
And they recommend a diet with somewhere around 4 grams a day per 70 kilograms of monkey.
Well now, monkeys are expensive, and moreover you might sometimes build up an automated colony of monkeys.
It would be very expensive and the monkeys themselves - you paid a lot for and you put in a lot of effort
to inject the monkeys and do whatever is involved in the experiment - and then they die on you.
That’s a tragedy.
So this committee has gone very carefully into the question
of what amount of ascorbic acid will put the monkeys in the best of health.
And I have more confidence in their conclusion, that 4 grams a day per 70 kilogram body weight is better than 45 milligrams a day.
Well, if we do take the proper amount of ascorbic acid and potentiate our natural protective mechanisms,
we might well be able to achieve a considerable control over cancer.
I think I might show my slides and amplify the argument as we go on.
First slide please.
Here is a curve that I drew, showing that with this vital substance such as ascorbic acid
your wellbeing might increase linearly for small amounts, small increased intakes, and reach optimal functioning at some point.
Actually, experiments with especially the red bread mould have shown that curves of this sort have very flat tops
when you study nutrients or vital substances such as the vitamins, and it’s hard to find just where the optimum is.
I have an arrow there, the functioning of the fittest strain.
This is corrected for the burden of manufacturing the material, in case that it is manufactured.
It is the place where the slope is just equal, except for a changed sign, to a straight line, presumably straight line,
that represents the burden of manufacturing a substance as a function of the amount manufactured.
Next slide.
In the next slide I have just a Michaelis-Menten curve, say, chemical equilibrium, A plus B equals AB,
which could be enzyme plus substrate combining to form, or the apoenzyme plus the coenzyme combining to form the active enzyme.
And if you have a mutant - everybody is a mutant - the average estimate is that
of the 100,000 genes that you’ve inherited from your parents, one has been mutated from that generation to your generation.
Everyone has these mutants.
There may well be people who manufacture apoenzymes with a decreased combination constant for the coenzyme.
If the combination constant is decreased 200 times then you could, by going to 200 times the concentration of the coenzyme,
get the same amount of combination with apoenzyme to form the active enzyme.
There are scores of genetic diseases known that involve an abnormality
in the combination between constant, between apoenzyme and coenzyme.
An example is methylmalonic aciduria.
Patients with this disease excrete methylmalonic acid in the urine, because they lack the enzyme
that would isomerise the methylmalonic acid to succinic acid, which would then be metabolised.
This enzyme uses cobalamin, vitamin B12, as the coenzyme.
If you give the patient a 1,000 times the normal intake of cobalamin,
then many of the patients are put into normal health and do not show manifestations of the disease.
I think that there are with little doubt thousands of diseases of this sort,
each one of which could be controlled by a great increase in the intake of a particular vitamin or other coenzyme.
Next slide.
I borrowed this slide from Erwin Stone who, around 10 or 15 years ago, was very concerned
about the amount of ascorbic acid that people needed and about the prevalence of hypoascorbemia.
It shows various animals that have been reported
as making between 2 and 20 grams of ascorbic acid per day per 70 kilogram body weight.
Next slide.
Here we have summarised some reasons for a large intake of ascorbic acid for good health.
These animals... the average of raw natural plant foods giving 2,500 kilocalories per day
or, well, giving 2,500 kilocalories of food energy, is 2 and 3/10th grams.
And I have an evolution argument, which I shan’t go into, that the optimum intake is somewhat greater than this figure.
The monkey chow I have mentioned.
Doctor Yew studied guinea pigs which, like the primates, had lost their ability to make ascorbic acid
and found that they were apparently in optimum health when they got about 3½ grams per 70 kilogram body weight.
Next slide.
I mentioned that ascorbic acid is known to be required for the synthesis of collagen, for hydroxylation of the propyl
and lysyl residues in the procollagen molecule; and it’s involved in other hydroxylation reactions.
For 40 years it has been known that a high intake of ascorbic acid
is required for good healing of wounds and burns, broken legs, fractures.
Periodontal disease - dentists are in the forefront among medical people
in giving patients large doses of ascorbic acid to improve their health.
The next slide.
Back in 1935 Jungeblut in Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons reported
that the poliomyelitis virus is inactivated by sodium ascorbate in concentrations that can be reached in the blood stream.
Various other investigators have reported the same thing.
Next slide please.
I was astonished when I started reading the literature to find how much there is.
Here are some of the references, not given in detail, about reported control of viral diseases.
The National Cancer Institute is and has been spending 100 million dollars a year for study of viruses in relation to cancer,
but 0 dollars for an investigation of ascorbic acid as an antiviral agent.
The next slide.
And to the extent that viruses are involved in human cancer, the ascorbic acid may be operating in this general antiviral way.
The work of Morishige, who is the Senior Surgeon in a hospital in Fukuoka, Japan, is interesting.
Murata published a paper on it.
Morishige had the idea that ascorbic acid would prevent infectious hepatitis, serum hepatitis, from developing
in surgical patients who received multiple transfusions, with a chance that the virus is in the blood that is infused.
He found, when he made this study with 1,250 patients, that those who got little or no ascorbic acid
developed serum hepatitis, what was the normal rate there of 7%.
But that 2 grams a day or more is 100% effective in preventing serum hepatitis, in 1,100 patients.
Now he gives 10 grams a day to all patients in his hospital,
all surgical patients and all patients in intensive care that he’s in charge of.
Next slide.
And he is reported, but not with the statistics as yet, that in these other viral diseases too
this high intake of ascorbic acid is effective in controlling the viral diseases.
Next slide.
Antibacterial action has been reported for many years.
There are several mechanisms involved.
For one thing it’s been known for 40 years that leukocytes are not effective as phagocytes,
unless they have a high concentration, 20 micrograms per 100 million cells of ascorbate.
A recent study by Hume and Weyers in Glasgow in 1973 showed that the level was about 25 micrograms
per 100 million cells in the ordinary Scots that they investigated.
If they came down with some illness, it dropped to about 10,
and this is not enough to permit the leucocytes to be effective to have phagocytic activity.
250 milligrams a day also wasn’t enough; 1 gram a day, however, did the job.
Next slide please.
Let’s see, I put that in at the last minute and apparently put it in reverse,
but I’ll tell you - it’s upside down too, perhaps we should change that.
Look at this one.
Rodney Porter has reported in his study of amino acid composition of components of complement
that C1qR and -S are proteins which have collagen-like sequences.
Professor George Fagan in Stanford University has carried out these studies.
The 2 curves to the left refer to the C1 esterase component of complement, which consists of these 3 proteins Q, R and S.
And, as would be expected, the guinea pigs with a high intake of ascorbic acid
manufacture much more of this complement component than those with a low intake.
The next slide.
Here we have studies made in the National Cancer Institute reported last year, just in abstract,
by Yonemoto, Chretien and Fehninger, showing that the rate of production of new lymphocytes under antigenic stimulation
is greatly increased in humans who are given 5 grams a day.
There’s about a doubling of the blastogenesis rate with 5 grams a day, given in fact only for 3 days;
and this increase continues for 18 days.
They haven’t determined what it would be for people with a steady intake of 5 grams per day
or 10 grams per day - 10 grams a day gives about a tripling.
It’s well known that the prognosis for cancer patients is better for those who have
a high blastogenesis rate of lymphocytes under antigenic stimulation, than for those who have a low one.
And these investigators said that these results suggest that ascorbic acid should be tried in cancer patients –
they didn’t know that Cameron had been doing this for several years.
Next slide please.
There’s a good bit of epidemiological information about ascorbic acid.
In fact, when studies are made of the diets of populations in relation to incidence of cancer of different kinds,
it is usually found that the biggest correlation of all is the inverse correlation with intake of ascorbic acid.
I’ve mentioned some of the papers in this field.
The next slide.
There was a study carried out in California from Chope and Breslow with 577 older people, starting in 1958.
They were all 50 years or older at that time, and their death rates were followed.
Those with a higher intake - here again the biggest correlation, negative between death rate and any factor,
was with the intake of ascorbic acid, even a bigger effect with cigarette smoking.
The subjects who were ingesting a larger amount of ascorbic acid had only 40%,
the age-corrected death rate of those with a smaller amount.
The larger amount was only about 125 milligrams a day.
The smaller amount 25 milligrams a day.
We are checking a population now with an intake of between 1 and 2 grams a day.
And in a few years - well there are already some preliminary results: for the first 18 months and that result was only 30% -
in fact this population wasn’t restricted to those between 1 and 2 grams,
it contained some with a smaller intake - only 30% of the age-corrected death rate.
There was apparently the same decrease in the incidence of heart disease as of cancer and other disease in these studies.
I think that it may well be that the age-corrected death rate could be reduced to a 10th of what it is in the population at present,
simply by increasing the intake of ascorbic acid, and perhaps other nutrients, by a relatively small amount.
Next slide.
And that would correspond to an increase of 20 years or more in the length of the period of wellbeing.
2 papers have appeared recently on control of polyps of the rectum,
which universally become malignant in the people who have this chronic polyposis.
And in each case, with only 3 grams per day given to the patients,
the half of them showed a disappearance of the polyps; instead of having 40 of them they dropped to 0.
The next slide.
Here we have the first report by Cameron on the first 50 cases of patients with terminal cancer, advanced terminal cancer.
They are called untreatable cancer in Scotland.
The statement is made that in 4 cases the treatment with ascorbic acid was harmful.
As I’ve looked over the data and the case histories, I concluded that this probably is not correct,
because these patients, the population of 50 - or the population of 100 including this 50 - died off
during the first few days or the first few weeks at a lower rate than the control population.
There was really no increased death rate in this first 50.
The fact that these patients died during the first 2 weeks, 4 of them,
I think, indicated to Cameron and Campbell that the ascorbate was harmful.
In all of the other cases there was a benefit.
And the benefit was sometimes a rather small amount: a decrease in pain permitting the patients to be taken off narcotic drugs,
or general disappearance of cachexia and anorexia.
Patients felt well and had good appetites, began to eat well and went back to work.
And some of them have continued to live - the next slide - far longer than expected.
One patient showed an unusual course, such as to permit him to be described in a separate publication.
He had reticulum cell sarcoma, well-diagnosed by biopsy, and X-ray diagrams showed that this disease was there.
When he received 10 grams a day of ascorbate he improved very rapidly.
As shown by these measures of illness, a decreased sedimentation rate of red cells was observed,
and glycosaminoglycan, seromucoid decreased rapidly.
After 6 months his physician took him off the vitamin C, 10 grams a day, with the argument that he was cured,
no signs of disease anymore, so he shouldn’t continue taking the drug.
Well, of course vitamin C isn’t a drug, it is a food and he was taking the amount
that probably is just appropriate to human beings.
If they were manufacturing it themselves, this amount they would manufacture.
He took him off the vitamin C and within a month he was back in the hospital.
The cancer had returned.
It didn’t respond to 10 grams per day orally when it was resumed for a couple of weeks,
but he was given 20 grams a day for 10 days intravenously and immediately improved in health.
And he has lived now for several years, getting 12 ½ grams a day orally,
and driving his lorry back and forth apparently in perfect health –
well as good a health, perhaps even better, than you expect for people 50 years old living in Scotland. (laughter)
The next slide shows the results of a study of 1,100 patients with terminal cancer.
100 of whom received 10 grams of ascorbate per day, beginning on the day that they were pronounced untreatable.
This may occur at laparotomy, when the cancer is observed to be of such a nature that it is inoperable,
or later after high-energy radiation treatment or cytotoxic drugs have been tried
and perhaps had some temporary value, but are no longer effective.
The matched controls, 10 matched controls for each of the 100 ascorbic treated patients, had the same kind of cancer.
And the survival times are measured again from the time when they were considered untreatable.
50 times the fraction of the ascorbate-treated patients lived more than a year.
16 out of 100 of the ascorbate-treated patients are alive after several years - as much as over 5 ½ years now.
The average survival time now is more than 5 times the average survival time of the 1000 controls.
The 1000 controls have all died by this time, with only 15 out of 1000 living more than 1 year - I think 15 is right.
Only 3 out of 1000 lived more than a year; it’s marked as 400 days there.
Now several hundred patients with cancer are receiving 10 grams per day in Vale of Leven Hospital in Scotland.
And they begin to receive it immediately that they come to the hospital,
no matter what the stage of development of the disease is.
I could go on and mention some individual cases, not only in Scotland but also in California,
but this is the only quantitative material that I have.
I think that every cancer patient should be put on ascorbic acid therapy.
What the relation is to the cytotoxic drugs has not yet been carefully studied.
In California patients who are receiving Fluorouracil or Methotrexate or other cytotoxic drugs
have been given ascorbic acid, also 10 grams a day.
And one observation has been made in practically every case.
The serious side effects, loss of hair and nausea and other side effects of the cytotoxic drugs,
do not show up when vitamin C is given.
On the other hand it may be that these 2 treatments operate against one another.
The cytotoxic drugs have a side effect of destroying the body’s natural protective mechanisms,
and vitamin C operates by potentiating the body’s natural protective mechanisms.
If you knock out the immune system down to 0, 10-fold or 100-fold potentiation still leaves it at 0.
In the course of time it will be possible to say what should be done
when the choice arises between taking cytotoxic drugs or taking vitamin C.
But there is reason to believe that, whether or not these other treatments are used, the vitamin C should be taken.
Well, this is the situation now.
I haven’t found anything in the cancer literature during the last 20 years that is comparable to this.
To what extent it will stand up, whether you can have a 5-fold increase in life expectancy for people at the beginning stages
of cancer, who might have a 5-year life expectancy, that would be increased to 25 years with ascorbate or not, I don’t know.
I do feel strongly that cancer and ascorbic acid are closely related.
It may be that cancer is in large part one of the manifestations of vitamin C deficiency.
That people develop cancer because they are in poor health,
because of the extremely small amount of ascorbic acid that they ingest.
Of course, I have read statements that chemicals which have been introduced into our environment,
in our food and into environment generally, are responsible for a large fraction of the cases of cancer that develop.
Ascorbic acid is known to be a detoxifying agent for almost all substances,
and perhaps it does work as a prophylactic agent by helping to counteract the effect of these cancerogenic substances.
I think that this opportunity of helping to control cancer by the use of the proper amount of ascorbic acid,
both prophylactically in people who have not yet developed cancer
and therapeutically in those who have, is so important that it should not be neglected by anyone.
Thank you.
Applause.