http://www.doctoryourself.com/interviewsaul.html
Nancy Desjardins: Dr. Saul, what first attracted you to natural healing and inspired you to write Doctor Yourself and Fire Your Doctor!, and especially, I Have Cancer: What Should I Do?
Andrew Saul: Probably the thing that made the biggest impact on me was when my first child was born. I was the old age of 22. They put the baby in my care and said, “Here, Dad.” Looking at that child and then watching the hospital mishandle him for the next day or so convinced me that I had to do something. In fact, I took my wife and son out of the hospital after just a day—which at the time was short—in a raging blizzard against the nurses’ and the doctors’ orders because they were making my child sick; and my wife, too.
I knew something was wrong. I could see that. They were feverish. They were fretting. They weren’t eating. They were getting ill. I took them home, and then I was faced with the question, “Now what?” You can’t just say no to medical care. You have to say yes to an alternative. The alternative has to be at least as effective, and certainly had better be a lot safer.
My reading and my experience over the last 34 years has taught me that Orthomolecular Medicine, or nutritional medicine, is the safest and most effective way to prevent and treat illness. Most people would agree that nutrition is good. Most doctors agree that vitamins are good, but what they don’t tell you is that very high doses of vitamins are curative.
You mentioned cancer. The biggest motivators behind the cancer book, which is called I Have Cancer: What Should I Do? are my co-authors. My co-authors are Michael Gonzalez and Jorge Miranda-Massari. They’re both professors at the University of Puerto Rico Health Sciences campus. Jorge and Michael both worked with Dr. Hugh Riordan, a specialist in Orthomolecular Medicine.
Dr. Hugh Riordan was also a colleague of mine on the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine. We all got together and were taking a very close look at what Dr. Riordan had been doing. He’d been treating cancer patients with extremely high doses of vitamin C orally and intravenously. Dr. Riordan started doing this in the late 1960s. That is quite a long time ago.
Dr. Riordan found that up to 100,000 milligrams of vitamin C a day, given intravenously to guarantee absorption, is selectively toxic to cancer cells. Jorge and Michael have confirmed this. This is the kind of news that I think people need to know. If there’s somebody in your family with cancer, or if you’re fighting this dread disease, you need to know that very high doses of vitamin C kills cancer cells, just like chemotherapy.
You can imagine that it is much safer, and you’re right. Vitamin C does not harm good healthy cells. It only kills cancer cells. This is tremendously important, and that’s why the book was written.
Nancy Desjardins: How much vitamin C is needed to achieve the results?
Andrew Saul: More than you ever thought. I mentioned Dr. Riordan used as much as 100,000 milligrams a day. Dr. Ian Brighthope in Australia has used 200,000 milligrams. These are enormous amounts. Other researchers have used as little as 10,000 milligrams a day, but again, this is intravenously. For most of us, we’re thinking, “Gee, an IV. That means I have to find a doctor and a hospital—or certainly a doctor—who will administer that.”
That’s a problem. One good thing we do in the cancer book, I Have Cancer: What Should I Do?, is to outline how you also can take very high oral doses. Absorption is not as good orally. The fact is that intravenously it’s guaranteed that 100% of the vitamin C goes into the bloodstream. It can fight the cancer. It can build the body’s immune system. Then you excrete it over time, and then you add more.
With oral doses of vitamin C you have to get the vitamin C into the body. The body is very good at absorbing vitamin C. The sicker you are, the more you hold. People are always asking, “Exactly how much?” and that’s a good question. The answer is that it depends from person to person on your age, your weight and, especially, if you’re sick or not.
The way you can tell with oral doses is that you look at what Dr. Robert Cathcart called ‘bowel tolerance’. That’s exactly what you think it is. Bowel tolerance means you take as much C as you possibly can until you get loose stools. This is an indicator of saturation. It’s a very important point. If you want to know how much C you should take, you can read about it, you can think about it, or you can do what works.
You can take the amount of C that gets the job done. How do you know you’re taking enough C? You feel better. People who are in pain will have less pain. People who have nausea will have less nausea. People who have radiation burns or chemo side effects will have fewer of them. People who have had surgery will find they have quicker wound healing. People who have lost their appetite will find that their appetite is normalized.
How do you know if you took too much C? You’ll have loose stools. The jingle I tell people is, “Take enough C to be symptom-free, whatever the amount might be.” It’s corny, but it works. There are two ways you can do this. You can either do the IV, which is ideal, or you can do oral doses to bowel tolerance.
Nancy Desjardins: I was very impressed with the interview, as well. That’s amazing. Going back, you mentioned sugar and vitamins. Would you say vitamin C would help with any addiction?
Andrew Saul: Yes. In another book that Dr. Abram Hoffer and I wrote, called The Vitamin Cure for Alcoholism, we discussed addictions in addition to alcoholism, including addiction to street drugs, to cigarettes and, believe it or not, even addiction to a stimulant as common as caffeine. What we find is that addiction, to use Dr. Hoffer’s work and words, is malnutrition. Dr. Hoffer said well-nourished people do not become addicted.
That’s a very, very powerful statement, and you can prove it. I’ve taught in two state prisons in New York state—not as an inmate, but I have taught in two state prisons—and I’ve worked with addicts and people who are in the slammer because they were hooked on cocaine. Some people had the center part of their nose missing inside. The septum was gone because they’d snorted so much cocaine.
They had lung problems because of crack. There were all kinds of problems. What we found is that if we could improve their nutrition even a little, the odds of them stopping smoking, doing cocaine, or drinking alcohol were higher. Alcoholics Anonymous has done a wonderful job encouraging people to get off alcohol and to do it through a 12-step program, support of others, reliance on higher power, and a lot of very, very good methods.
AA has been conspicuously silent on nutrition. Are you ready for this one? The founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill W, was a patient of my colleague, Dr. Abram Hoffer. Bill W, who had gotten off of alcohol, still had a problem with depression. He came to see Dr. Hoffer, and Dr. Hoffer had him take niacin. Bill W’s depression that he suffered with for many, many years vanished.
Bill W then got his friends to take niacin, and he found that it helped them. Then Bill W wrote two formal papers, which he circulated to the Alcoholics Anonymous membership, advising them to take vitamins, specifically niacin. Bill W was in favor of mega-doses of vitamins for alcoholics. Unfortunately, AA International has a different view, and they, to the best of my knowledge, still do not recommend it.
I think AA is good. I think AA with nutrition is far better. What about other drugs? There was a study done out in LA where they took people who were on heroin. They gave them high doses of vitamin C, and they came off heroin. Here’s a very interesting story. When cancer research was being done in Scotland at the Vale of Leven Hospital, Dr. Ewan Cameron, a colleague of Linus Pauling, was giving high doses of vitamin C to people with terminal cancer who were in terrible pain.
Back in the ‘70s in England, you could give any pain relief you wanted to a person who was dying. Doctors could prescribe as much morphine as they wanted and even prescribe heroin for pain. The theory was that if someone was in terrible pain, you just couldn’t let them suffer. Many of these terminally ill cancer patients were on huge doses of narcotics for their pain.
When they got intravenous vitamin C, they stopped asking for pain relievers in about a week. Somehow, vitamin C was relieving their pain. More interesting, perhaps, is that they had no withdrawal symptoms at all. They came off of narcotics, including heroin, without any withdrawal symptoms. What this suggests to me is that Dr. Hoffer knows what he’s talking about. Healthy people do not become addicts.
Addiction is a sign of malnutrition. Orthomolecular Medicine says when in doubt, use nutrition first. We don’t have a sure cure for cancer. Obviously, we don’t have a sure cure for alcoholism. Obviously, there are other problems that are still plaguing us. One of the reasons these problems are as bad as they are is that doctors are using everything but high doses of vitamins.