Aids And Drugs

Editor

Critical Path Project, Inc.

2062 Lombard Street

Philadelphia, PA 19146

Dear Sir:

The article, The Nontoxic Path: Vitamins, Dietary Supplements, Adjunctive Therapies, part 1, shows that there is again some interest in the nutritional treatment of AIDS. Unfortunately, the vitamin C doses described in the article are too small and will not be of help treating an AIDS patient.

Enclosed are miscellaneous articles and references I have written on ascorbate. I began utilizing ascorbate and other nutritional substances in a number of diseases in 1969 and against AIDS in 1983. As you can see I made some effort toward making the value of ascorbate in AIDS known but, being only interested in clinical medicine and not at all in politics, burned out on the subject. Nevertheless, two or three physicians call me each week about the use of ascorbate, especially about its intravenous use. Hundreds of physicians (more from foreign countries than the U.S.) have written for reprints of these articles. Some of the articles have either partially or completely been translated into different languages. Please note that I have been referenced in Jariwalla's paper and Pauling's latest book. The only physician I know who has significantly embellished the program is Joan Priestly, M.D. of Los Angeles. Also enclosed is an outline of a combined (Cathcart and Priestly) program for an uncomplicated HIV positive person. This nutritional program works much better than AZT.

There are several problems convincing the medical community to use ascorbate in the manner I describe. It is impossible to double blind the oral doses of ascorbic acid taken to bowel tolerance because there is no possible placebo. The method of increasing doses of ascorbate until a noticeable clinical amelioration is obtained precludes a double blind study. A study of the effect of intravenous ascorbate on a disease such as acute infectious hepatitis A, B, or C would be easy but the effect is so dramatic that it would be immoral for any physician who has seen this effect to do a double blind study. How can you go to a patient with hepatitis saying that you want to test on them ascorbate that will flat out .... (a physician cannot ever say cure because that means a legal guarantee but I have never seen it fail) acute hepatitis and that there will be a 50% chance they will get ascorbate and a 50% chance they will get something of no value or relatively worthless and perhaps harmful. Maybe someone could do such a study at a university or charity hospital but they could not do it in a private practice.

Ascorbate does not cures AIDS but it will prolong the life of AIDS patients and make their life much more comfortable. I have had patients tell me that they have never felt better in their life as after starting the nutritional program. There is no reason the ascorbate and other nutrients should not be used in conjunction with standard treatments where necessary.

One of the great problems is that ascorbate (used in massive doses) is too important. It sounds like a panacea. However, It has importance in the treatment of any disease that involve free radicals. This means that ascorbate should be used in conjunction with other treatments in not only infectious diseases but injuries, burns, radiation injury, surgery, cancer, allergies, cardiovascular disease, allergies, autoimmune diseases, aging, etc. The financial implications are enormous.

The following is the major point about the use of ascorbate that hardly anyone fully appreciates:

In the sense that when you throw a bucket of water on a fire, it is the water that extinguishes the fire, not the bucket; when free radical scavengers meet free radicals, it is the reducing equivalents that neutralize the free radicals, not the free radical scavengers.

Technically, enzymatic free radical scavengers such as catalase neutralize specific free radicals such as, in this case, peroxide without additional energy. However, many free radicals have to be neutralized by reducing equivalents carried by non enzymatic free radical scavengers. The energy required for these reducing equivalents originally comes from the sun, is incorporated into plants by photosynthesis, eaten by animals, and then by metabolic pathways involving glycolysis, the citric acid cycle, NADPH, glutathione, etc., processes too long to describe here, becomes reducing equivalents. This same energy has to be doled out for making ATP, keeping us warm, growing and repairing tissues, fueling the respiratory burst of phagocytosis, etc. When you are very sick and do not have the energy to move around much, you have little energy remaining for reducing equivalents to scavenge free radicals. Massive doses of ascorbate can supply those needed reducing equivalents.

Certain nutrients that are also free radical scavengers may be necessary for special metabolic processes. An example is the necessity of vitamin C in the hydroxylation of proline in the synthesis of collagen. In most, if not all, of its vitamin functions, vitamin C functions as an electron donor (by donating reducing equivalents.) By reading the medical, nutritional, and biochemistry literature, one can easily overlook the fact that most of the total of the reducing equivalents carried by vitamin C, vitamin E, ÑŽ-carotene, selenium, and yes, glutathione, cysteine, NAC, etc., which neutralize free radicals, come not from the ingested nutrient but from the energy distributing pathways mentioned above. One molecule of ascorbate carries two reducing equivalents (maybe one or two more if you count further breakdown products of dehydroascorbate) and that is it. When it gives up those reducing equivalents, it becomes DHA and has to be rereduced by reducing equivalents from the metabolic pathways or else be destroyed. The vitamin C cycles and is used over and over again. Very few of the total reducing equivalents used to scavenge free radicals come from the dietary free radical scavengers.

The AIDS patient cannot possibly take enough NAC to provide the amount of reducing equivalents necessary to quench most of the free radicals generated in the AIDS process. It is true that NAC provides cysteine in a readily available form so the body can make glutathione. Glutathione has been shown to be low in HIV (+) people; I have no quarrel with that; but the amount of reducing equivalents necessary to neutralize the free radicals generated in AIDS far exceed that which can be brought in on the NAC and other nutrients. Except ascorbate can supply the necessary reducing equivalents when huge amounts are