Did the guy have a way to tap your own sinuses at home to drain them? Everything is clogged, it even hurts behind my eyes.
Has anyone proved his belief false, or have they merely shown poor support for his beliefs? I’d certainly say that Vitamin C SEEMS to help me cut a cold short, but I have to recognize that my own anecdotal experiences are far short of a well-controlled experiment.
How’s your health?
I’m an avid reader of Arthur Robinson. Arthur Robinson worked with Pauling from 1961-1978 and co-founded the Pauling Institute. The two had a falling out in 1978 over the the effects of Vitamin C and cancer.
“He was not willing to accept the experimentally proved fact that vitamin C in ordinary doses accelerated the growth rate of squamous cell carcinoma in these mice. At the time, Linus was promoting his claim that “75% of all cancer can be prevented and cured by vitamin C alone.” This claim proved to be without experimental foundation and not true, although the possibility that modest doses of vitamin C somewhat improve resistance to cancer has never been adequately tested.”
http://www.nutritionandcancer.org/view/nutritionandcancer/s99p1074.htm
Nothing helps cure a cold except time and many days in bed watching TV, sleeping, reading and drinking lots of hot tea heavily laced with fresh lemon juice, honey and a good heavy shot of brandy, cognac or whiskey.
Rinse and repeat many, many times till the pain goes away or you pass out. You'll be better in a week or 7 days, whichever comes first.
If you're Jewish, try chicken soup. A nice big matzoh ball is an extra added attraction.
What’d he get the Peace Prize for ?
For a very interesting read about Vitamin C, try SCURVY: How a Surgeon, a Mariner and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail by Stephen R. Bown. Personally, I would go with Dr. Pauling any day over the established medical community’s consensus. They have fought against the benefits of the vitamin from the very beginning and killed untold numbers of people in the process!
Linus Pauling, Ph.D. (1901-1994), was the only person ever to win two unshared Nobel prizes. He received these awards for chemistry in 1954 and for peace in 1962.That means so much...
Umm, isn't that the excepted outcome when there are two possible choices?
Dr. Stephen Barrett is a quack and charlatan
Quackwatch review by Ray Sahelian, M.D. - Quackwatch sends an email to Dr. Sahelian
Is Stephen Barrett a Quack?
Over the years I have had many people ask my opinion regarding Stephen Barrett and Quackwatch, but I have been reserved in voicing my thoughts. However, in March 2006 we received an email from someone who claimed that Stephen Barrett had told him negative things about a product I had formulated. Then, in June, 2006 my staff received an email from Stephen Barrett (see below). This prompted us to create a page regarding Quackwatch.org in order to present our point of view. According to the Quackwatch website, this is what Stephen Barrett, M.D. says about himself.
“Stephen Barrett, M.D., a retired psychiatrist who resides in Allentown, Pennsylvania, has achieved national renown as an author, editor, and consumer advocate. In addition to heading Quackwatch, he is vice-president of the National Council Against Health Fraud, a scientific advisor to the American Council on Science and Health, and a Fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP).”
Is Dr. Stephen Barrett fair in his analysis of nutrition research and those involved in the nutrition industry?
I have not read every single page on Quackwatch but the ones I read give me the impression that in many cases Stephen Barrett, M.D. has done good research on many of the people involved in the alternative health industry, and has pointed out several instances of inaccuracies and scams (for instance, Hulda Clark and her pitiful book “The Cure for all Cancers”). However, I hardly came across reports on his website regarding some of the scams or inaccurate promotion and marketing practices by the pharmaceutical industry. Why is this? Why has Stephen Barrett, M.D. focused almost all of his attention on the nutritional industry and has hardly spent time pointing out the billions of dollars wasted each year by consumers on certain prescription and non-prescription pharmaceutical drugs? If he truly claims to be a true consumer advocate, isn’t it his responsibility to make sure the big scams are addressed first before focusing on the smaller scams? It’s like the government putting all of its efforts going after the poor misusing food stamps while oil companies cheat billions of dollars from consumers with hardly any governmental oversight.
Why is there no review of Vioxx on Quackwatch? Why is there no mention on quackwatch.org of the worthless cold and cough medicines sold by pharmaceutical companies and drug stores? Hundreds of millions of dollars are wasted each year by consumers on these worthless and potentially harmful decongestants and cough syrups. Why is there no mention on quackwatch of the dangers of acetaminophen use, including liver damage? There are more people who die and are injured from Tylenol use each year than there probably have been in the last decade or more of supplement use. If Dr. Barrett had focused his career on educating people in reducing the use of useless and dangerous prescription and nonprescription drugs (even just one, acetaminophen) he would have helped many more people than attempting to scare people from the use of supplements.
Another point I would like to make regarding Quackwatch is that Dr. Barrett often, if not the majority of the time, seems to point out the negative outcome of studies with supplements (you can sense his glee and relish when he points out these negative outcomes), and rarely mentions the benefits they provide. A true scientist takes a fair approach, and I don’t see this in my review of the Quackwatch website. I subscribe to the Quackwatch newsletter (which often has interesting information) but there is hardly any mention of the benefits of supplements. As an example, see a paragraph from the August, 2006 Quackwatch newsletter mentioned a few paragraphs below.
Bottom line: Overall, Dr. Barrett does some good in pointing out scams in the alternative health field, but, in my opinion, he is not fair and balanced, and he is not a true objective scientist as he claims to be. Someone who has a website specifically tailored for criticism needs to have a higher and more objective scientific standard, and Barrett fails in this regard.
Could Stephen Barrett, M.D. post his thoughts on Quackwatch regarding these two topics:
The first is on the billions of dollars spent on worthless and dangerous Alzheimer’s drugs as noted in The New York Times: “Alzheimer’s Drugs Offer No Help, Study Finds” By Benedict Carey, October 12, 2006. The article begins, “The drugs most commonly used to soothe agitation and aggression in people with Alzheimer’s disease are no more effective than placebos for most patients, and put them at risk of serious side effects, including confusion, sleepiness and Parkinson’s disease-like symptoms.”
The second is on drug company charlatanism by Robert Bazell, a medical correspondent for NBC. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14348176/
Those who think Vitamin C helps fight colds should take Vitamin C.
Those who don't think it helps should not take Vitamin C.
Problem solved.
Where's my Nobel Prize?
Oh,...and I forgot, wash your hands a lot. Don’t touch your eyes, nose, lips, etc. when you’ve been touching other people or stuff. Stay off of airplanes and don’t sit next to somebody who’s coughing or sneezing.
Live alone and far away from other people and children. Children are germ and virus factories. They’re filthy.
While vitamin C may not be so spectacular, vitamin D(3) along with retinoic acid from vitamin A may actually be of considerable help in fending off infections. The two have been proven to erode the outer coating that protects pathogens.
Importantly, vitamin A is the lesser of the two in the equation, and taking too much can be toxic, so the emphasis is on just taking a normal amount of A, and increasing vitamin D levels, which is much safer.
Typically, the best way to get a big dose of vitamin D is by sunlight, a 15 minute whole body exposure producing almost 30,000 IU. And this may be why the cold and flu season are more pronounced in the dark of winter. Compare this with a typical vitamin D(3) supplement, when one pill provides a mere 1,000 IU.
People vary considerably in how much vitamin D they can take without problems. For some, taking as little as 5,000 IU of pills can have side effects. But for most people, taking up to 50,000 IU a day for several days running is needed for them to have side effects.
But it is important to know what your sensitivity is to vitamin D, as some are now recommending that at the onset of sickness, you take a 1-shot dose of 50,000 IU. That is, 50 - 1000 IU pills. This is followed up with just a slightly above normal dose until you are completely better.
It is also good to use other techniques for colds and flu. For upper respiratory tract problems, such as coughing, sneezing, congestion, and runny nose, a remarkably effective treatment is gulp after gulp, gargling a large glass full of warm, salty water four times a day. This amazing therapy works for a huge range of upper RT, sinus, oral, eustation tube and other problems.
Once this is done, you can attack upper RT problems with a different mechanism as well — metallic zinc. Not zinc pills, which are poorly absorbed by the mucous membranes, but the form of zinc found in Cold-Eeze lozenges, unique to them, that does get readily uptaken, so has the precious FDA statement that they are “proven to reduce duration and severity.”
Zinc and some other elemental metals have an odd ability to inhibit pathogenic reproduction. So when used after a warm, salty gargle has flushed out much of its growth medium, the zinc works to prevent the disease from reestablishing itself. It has a bad aftertaste, but that is desirable, as it is what is fighting the infection.
For severe congestion, nasal saline spray can be very effective at loosening clogged sinuses and helping drainage.
Early on, there was an assumption that it was the vitamin C in fruit juices that helped against sickness. But in truth, there may be entirely different reasons, and varied ones at that.
Cranberry juice in quantity has been discovered to prevent pathogen cell adhesion in both bladder and intestinal infections. If it cannot stick to the cell, it cannot attack it. However, it is unknown if it could help upper RT problems.
Black cherry juice tends to reduce some types of inflammation. Pomegranate juice has very high levels of antioxidants.
Any number of other juices such as blueberry, mangosteen, and grapefruit, have all sorts of interesting health benefits.
What a crock!
Lots of people "who lack the scientific expertise to evaluate" the theory of special/general relativity accept it. So this statement is just sophistry.
I have a little bit of scientific expertise, not quite as much as Pauling, but I have a bit. The real problem for Pauling is that his experiments related to Vitamin C and the common cold were not in accordance with the ones the government wants people to run. Here, specifically double blind studies; Pauling's tests were statistical as I recall. The government cannot abide people who don't play by their rules so they work to crush them.
I remember a medical student I discussed the C/Cold issue with around the time Pauling published his book about this. He quoted a "study" that was reported in Time magazine, and probably elsewhere, which was done at the University of Maryland. The study involve twenty (20!) people. Ten were given Vitamin C according to Pauling's regimen, and ten were given placebos. Participants did not know which group they were in. After some time each participant had rhino-virus injected to his/her nostrils. And each came down with a cold with no distinguishable difference in severity. QED, Vitamin C made no difference.
So I asked my medical student acquaintance, if he thought milk was important to the growth and strength of a baby's bones. He agreed it was. So I proposed the following experiment to him: Take twenty babies, and feed ten of them milk; and feed the other ten white colored water. After some decent interval place each baby's arm so that it bridges some small gap. The drop an anvil from 15 feet above the gap so that one lands on each baby's arm. Note the severity of bone damage.
The medical student understood.
ML/NJ
He was off by one letter of the alphabet...vit D is anti microbial.