We live in an ever-changing ding-dong, ping-pong world of science, research, technology and medicine complexes. In this world, doctors, like their patients, are captives. The doctor may be a researcher-physician. But this breed is rare. Often, he is a diagnostic agent depended on feeds from research scientists and the pharmaceutical industry. Researchers never all agree on any subject. But for the sake of not disturbing public confidence in their work, they often strike a consensus, which may be correct or wrong, and it is this consensus the doctor prescribes in his consulting room. Until Dr. Barry Marshall challenged his colleagues that surgical removal of the vagus nerve was an incorrect answer to peptic ulcer, in their wrong belief that this nerve activated acid pumps in the stomach, surgery was the trend which was gradually giving way to acid-pump inhibitor drugs. So much money had been pumped into the research of two of these, Taga met for example, and Dr Marshall posed a threat to the investors when he came up with the idea that Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium, was the cause of stomach ulcer. From a surgically removed ulcerated stomach ulcer tissue, he scooped out some Helicobacter pylori (H.pylori), cultured it in a beaker, drank the solution, developed stomach ulcer, wiped away H.Pylori with antibiotics and cured the ulcer. How would Taga met sell if doctors changed gear? Dr Marshall almost lost his licence to practice in the controversy which followed his experiment!
Dr. William Bates, too, almost lost his licence to practice optometry in New York after he said eye glasses were not the answers to focal problems. His answers were exercise, relaxation and suppleness of the six eye muscles which, when stiff, cannot effectively and efficiently adjust the eye ball to register focal objects on the retina, the light responsive portion of the eye. This natural solution would have brought the eye glasses industry to ruin. Dr. Bates survived the plots of his professional colleagues. Today, he has many disciples who have simplified his thoughts for medical lay persons. I have just begun to read the book of one of them, Martin Brofman entitled IMPROVE YOUR VISION in which he says, for example:
“Our physical eyes are the organs of outer perception but they also relate to our inner perceptions. Eyesight is not just a physical process involving acuity, it is a multidimensional function affecting and affected by our emotional and Mental State of Being. Eyesight is also linked to personality and each type of vision impairment correlates with a specific personality type”
I am a long-sighted person, and I am futuristic to a fault. I have found, too, that many short-sighted people, that is people who cannot see distant objects without the aid of certain eye glasses, are people who are easily unnerved by fleeting events or matters of the moment. In short-sighted people, the focused image does not reach the retina, and, so, cannot register in the brain; in far sighted people, it registers past the retina. I engage in exercises which focus the eyes on the tip of my nose for some time. But, going by the Bates method, I have to change some of my perceptions of existence to rid myself of the emotional stresses which, he says, register on the muscles of the eyes as in any other organ. Consider, for example the status of the OBLIQUE MUSCLES. They wrap around the eyeball like a belt on the waist line. The one above is called the superior oblique muscle, the one below the inferior. When these muscles are tense and contract, they alter the shape of the eyeball, flattening it. And this affects light transmission. Dr Bates and his disciples say eye glasses merely force vision through whereas the right solution consists of eye muscle exercise, nutrition and emotional balance, all of which are aimed at relaxing these tension-soaked and contracted muscles. Thus, the healing of faulty vision has both external and internal handles. In the introduction to IMPROVE YOUR VISION, author says of the internal handle:
“If you have impaired vision, you have not been yourself. You have hidden or suppressed your real self, or lived according to an image of what you think you should be. Can you imagine what your life will be like when you discover you don’t have to do that, and you can be the real YOU? Will you feel fear?”
ONE of the legacies Dr Bates left behind after his death in 1931 was the success story of the author of IMPROVE YOUR VISION in the INTRODUCTION SECTION of this book. In 1975, he suffered from a cancer in the spinal cord for which his doctors gave him just one month of live. In that period, he learned about how this perceptions and emotional stresses may have given rise to this condition, went off unappetising prescription diet, the doctors had prescribed for him since he was going to die, anyway, changed his perceptions and survived the cancer.! His world view changed, and he found medicine can be a ping-pong!
We live in an ever changing world. Last Thursday, some readers of this column telephoned me to ask if I had heard the news that day of a research which suggested that Vitamin C had caused kidney stones in some people. The callers did not say if the research was Nigerian or foreign, or of where the news was published. The wife of one of them declined immediately to follow the daily family routine of taking 1000mg, of alkaline Vitamin C with breakfast. I told her husband, who often called me, that my wife and I and our children, when they were at home, took this much dosage of alkaline Vitamin C regularly for many years and have reported no signs of kidney stones. I appreciated the fear of his wife. You have to have lots of nerves not to be “four legged” after you have been “forewarned,” as the Pyrates used to admonish us ahead of their “sail” back on the university. For many reasons, however, including a lack of the details of their research at this time, I find it difficult to swing along with the news. But that is not to say that large doses of Vitamin C may not dispose some people to developing kidney stones, if other conditions make them potential sufferers. I will explain some of my reasons for not warming up to the report at this time.
Which Vitamin C?
1) It is unclear if the investigation distinguished between pharmaceutical or artificial Vitamin C and natural or “health food” Vitamin C. It is important to know which type the kidney stone sufferers took before calcium turned to stones in their kidneys. Lately, pharmaceutical Vitamins and cheap Calcium brands which the body does not absorb well have been found to cause all sorts of problems.
Cow’s milk
2) Were the study subject’s cow milk drinkers? The Calcium in cow’s milk has been found not only to be too dense for human needs, it is poorly absorbed and metabolised as well.
Oxalic acid
3) Do the study subjects consume a lot of oxalic acid-rich foods? Among these foods are Pumpkin vegetable (ugwu) Sorrel (sobo tea), Spinach, beans, Rhubarb, Brussel spronts, and some of those other Cruciferous vegetables widely acclaimed for high antioxidant activities. In Nigeria, pumpkin leaves previously an Igbo vegetable delicacy, has becomes an important part of the national vegetable cuisine. And because of its rich iron content, the juice is widely used for blood building as well as for treating debility and for convalescence from illness. In Lagos, the nation’s commercial capital, pumpkin vegetable is the mainstay of many subsistence farmers because of the huge demand for it in homes and restaurants. I experienced a havoc excess oxalic acid can unleash many years ago at The Comet newspaper in Lagos. I had just returned from a trip to Senegal where, everywhere I went, I discovered that sorrel tea, to the Senegalese, was what tea or coffee was to the English man or woman. For several weeks, I drank sorrel tea both at home and in the office. Many of my colleagues joined the queue. Soon, my knees began to ache on exertion, especially wherever I climbed the stairs which I had to do many times a day, shuttling between my office on the third floor and the newsroom and business department, because there was no intercom connection. Thanks to my pharmacist friend from Apa, near Badagry, Mr Ogun, who, with another pharmacist friend in those days co-founded Health Acres with which Mr Akin Soname from Ikene and Mr S.K. Oluwo of blessed memory, then Managing Director of BAGCO, were connected, to produce local herbs. He told me of how oxalic acid combined with free calcium-oxalate stones especially in the kidneys. When I stopped drinking sorrel tea, my knee weakness and pains disappeared. Perhaps I did not have enough substances in my body to prevent a union of calcium and oxalic acid or to break or to dissolve it. Lately, I discovered that any time I added Crayfish to a meal, I experienced heel on alighting from bed the following morning. When I stop crayfish, the pains disappear. So, I stopped crayfish.
According to James F.Balch, M.D., co-author of PRESCRIPTIONS OF DIETARY WELLNESS, and Mark strangler, N. D., in their PRESCRIPTIONS FOR NATURAL CURES, a deficiency of magnesium in the diet is a more likely cause of Kidney stones.
They say:
“A study of 55 people with recurrent kidney stones looked at the effect of supplementing 500mg of magnesium daily for up to 4 years. The average number of recurrences of kidney stones dropped by 90 per cent. Also, 85 per cent of the people in the study remained stone-free as compared to 41 per cent who did not supplement magnesium. Studies have also shown that the combination of Magnesium and Vitamin B6 supplementation is very effective in reducing kidney stone formation. One study of 149 people with recurrent kidney stones who supplemented B6 (10mg) and Magnesium (300mg) had 92.3 per cent improvement in stone formation.
Boron and Vitamin D
DOCTORS often advice diet supplementation with a good Multivitamin/Multi-mineral complex. A good one comes with Boron and Vitamin D, among many others, both are calcium mobilizes for bone mineralization. The body makes Vitamin D from cholesterol under the skin when exposed to the sun. Almost every edible (bread, canned food etc) is Vitamin D fortified these days. So is cow’s milk and many beverages. Can one not really become overdosed with Vitamin D in these circumstances? Can an overdose not cause over-mobilisation of Calcium? And can over-mobilisation of Calcium not lead to free form calcium which can congeal in the absence of Magnesium and Vitamin B6, for example?
Uric acid
Most kidney stones are Calcium stones among other kidney stones are Uric acid stones. Some researchers have suggested that over production of Uric acid is meant to protect the body. I doubt if Uric acid sufferers will agree. It causes joint, bends fingers and toes, causes joint knobs on them, and produces peppery sensations and needle prick pains on the skin in addition to joint, a knee joint damaging condition. But these researchers say Uric acid flood is protective because the body opens the Uric acid tap only when antioxidants are Balch and strangler recommend warm lemon juice drink for Uric acid clearance, the same remedy natural therapists reach out for to chase away joint, perhaps because of its alkalinizing effect.
What about phosphates
MANY physicians do not wish to accept that an association exists between diet and the occurrence of kidney stones. But, characteristic of the ding-dong, ping-pong nature of these matters, other physicians are pressing the point. Antagonist’s experiments in which calcium-rich food, uric acid-forming foods and phosphates were significally reduced in the diet and stone formation persisted. It would appear insist the proponents that not enough consideration was given to other occurrences in the kidney which support precipitation of these substance and the ensuing stone information. Such occurrences include heavy metal presence and infestation of infection agents, particularly in India. In the Western world where a lot of phosphates are consumed, especially from soft drinks and fertilizer frown food drops, there occurs more cases of kidney stones in the exposed population than in other parts of the world with minimal exposure. When in excess, phosphorus and its derivative Phosphates support Calcium leach from the bones and excretion through the urine by the kidney. If, due to any reason, including dehydration, which is common, Calcium precipitation will occur in this organ if the kidney lacks capacity to move out Calcium as fast as it cores. There are too many factors that can cause a kidney stone havoc that makes a narrowing of the searchlight unable to provide a broadsided solution. The Parathyroid glands may be a part of this picture if they malfunction and cause Calcium to leave the body at an alarming rate the kidney may not cyle wit. In the 1980s, I met a young First Class engineering graduate of the University of Lagos, who had this parathyroid gland problem. His legs were so weak that he had to walk aided by crutches. His parents, like his doctors, wanted any medicine that would normalise Parathyroid gland function. I was naive in this area. In retrospect now, I wonder if the problem wouldn’t have been a case of systemic candidacies! A check of his blood under the dark field microscope would have been able to say if it was! Hormones, too, would have their own roles to play in calcium not precipitating in the kidney. Are the hormones of the research subject in a state of balance?
Dr Linus Pauling
If he has not gone too far away from the vicinity of the earth, Dr. Linus Pauling, like his disciples, would be turning in his grave, as they say, with research work on Vitamin C such as the one in reference. He devoted most of his search life to Vitamin C research. Twice, he won the Nobel Prize for his work. And each time remarkably, he had not shared the Prize with anyone, as often happens. The kernels of his work are that
1) Vitamin C is required to hold all the 100trillion cells in the adult human body together, through support for the production of collagen, the cellular cement, which is the most abundant form of protein in the body.
2) For a number of reasons, the 60mg daily recommendation set by doctors for adults is no longer sufficient in today’s polluted and stress – filled life.
3) Man cannot produce or store Vitamin C for a long time like some animals. So, by the time gums are inflamed and bleeding, or the teeth are loose in their sockets, both classically sign of scurvy, much more damage of sub clinical scurvy would have occurred in the organs within.
4) To him and his colleagues, the optimum daily need of a man, had he the enzyme like some animals to produce Vitamin C, would be, per body kilogramme weight, what these animals produce to be in good health.
5) Some of these animals produce between 3,000 and 19,000 mg every day for about 154 pounds weight. For humans, the tissue saturation point of the Vitamin C was then established at, first, at 1,500mg daily, but later reevaluated at 5,000mg for this weight in healthy individuals devoid of any form of stress.
6) When guinea pigs, primates and some fish were studied, the researchers found that guinea pigs consumed about 2,000mg of Vitamin C a day when at peace with themselves and about 7,000mg to 10,000mg when under stress. From this, scientists now believe humans need about 1,000 times more Vitamin C (that is 6,000mg daily) than today’s allowance of 60mg.
Vitamin C has been shown to be an antioxidant, to boost immunity, sperm count, asthma, diabetes, and practically all diseases. In 1990, Dr Abram Hoffer and Dr Linus Pauling studied 12,000mg Vitamin C therapy a day on cancer patients whose conditions had defied surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. The cancers were of the breast, ovaries, cervix, uterus and 61 other types. In addition to Vitamin C, the subjects were given other supplements (1.5 to 3grammes of Niacin, 250mg of Vitamin B6 800 international units (I.U.) of Vitamin and 30,000mg of selenium” a control group of 3 cancer patients was giving no supplements. For most control group patients, the average survival rate was seven months but 122 months in the treated group. Even the 20 per cent poor responders in this group lived twice longer than the control (placebo) group patients.
Vitamin C, at much higher dosages than the conservative doctor is preferred to 60mg a day, will continue to excite other doctors and their patient alike. If, indeed, Vitamin C has a hand in the formation of kidney stones as some readers of this column reported last week, it may simply be a case of an “accessory after the fact”. The solution to such stones, therefore, has to be found at the roots. After all, don’t people who do not take Vitamin C develop kidney stones?
