Holistic Doctors, and medicine

quote:

---

You made the distinction between vitamin C "in nature" and manmade vitamin C. And I repeat. Because there is no structural difference, the patents are on "something found in nature".

---

My first mention of vitamin C in Message 237 was an illustration concerning patents. Apparently a bad example. I wasn't really arguing Vitamin C specifically. If they truly can't tell the difference, then I doubt if anyone holds a patent on Vitamin C. You can use any vitamin or herb you want. The original point was that we supposedly can't get patents on that which occurs naturally in nature. You haven't shown me that we can yet.

quote:

---

You can repeat ad nauseum that manmade vitamin C is not "natural" all you like. It doesn't change the fact that:

​

Both the manmade and "natural" versions are structurally, chemically, and functionally the same.

---

Hard to repeat what I haven't said. You're making an argument where there isn't one. I've been discussing patents.The only position I have in our discussion is that we supposedly can't patent something that occurs naturally in nature.Your examples have not shown me otherwise. Transgenic animals do not occur naturally in nature. Man has tampered with them.Here is an article that hopefully will help you understand my point concerning natural substances. The Promise and Problems of Natural Substances in Medicine

quote:

---

Penicillin is manufactured industrially, too. Do you complain when your penicillin isn't secreted by a fungi?

---

In Message 230 you stated: I simply asked you to show that they were identical. As I said, I haven't had chemistry 101. You had a chance to teach me something and you chose to create an argument where there wasn't any and unfortunately didn't teach me anything.

I'm afraid you've gotten the wrong info, PD.Science 30 May 2003: Vol. 300. no. 5624, pp. 1375 - 1376
Natural Substances and Patentable Inventions Learn somethin'?

Hi LindaLou. A hearty welcome to EvC. I haven't been on line much lately as I've had so much away from the computer needing done. I just want to say that I've been reading your input and I very much appreciate the great and noble effort you've made to respond to all that's been put forth for you to address. Had I been aboard I would have lent some support to your position in these issues. I follow Deborah Ray and Dr. Julian Whitaker who has the largest alternative facility in the nation. He regularly cites the scientific papers on much of what he recommends and what he addresses in public. He and Deborah Ray also do a great job of exposing the harmful effects of many conventional drugs and practices. Today on his program Dr Whitaker actually recommended a pharm drug which had no ill side effects. He intigrates in his practice but about 90% is alternative whereas before he got into the alternatives 100% was conventional. He now is able to do soooo much more in actually curing patients of things which he once was unable to do when using the conventional methodology.We also follow a number of others many of whom have also been on Deborah Ray's program. You can get the programs on line by googling Deborah Ray radio.Please don't be intimidated by those who don't see it your way. Imo, you have as much right as they do in putting forth your arguments for what you believe and I believe you've done so in a proper manner, doing the research which I've not had the time do do.I believe you said you have some heart palpatation. I've had times in my life when this has been a problem with me, but at 72 I have it totally under control and have for decades via nutrition, minerals and vitamins etc. I haven't been to an MD for about 40 years and less than a dozen times in my life. We also raised 2 boys without MDs except for a couple of injuries and childbirth. There have been a few times when we've been to NDs but try to do our own research when in need. I can emphatically claim that alternatives and nutritional are the safe and sure way to go for optimum health and wellness from my own experience and from many others who I know about.

---

BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present is forever consuming the eternal future and extending the infinite past.

Percy, the following exerpt from the website LindaLou cited appears to be quite impressive and mainstream. Could you agree to that?

---

BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present is forever consuming the eternal future and extending the infinite past.

quote:

---

Percy, the following exerpt from the website LindaLou cited appears to be quite impressive and mainstream. Could you agree to that?

---

Wow, how did Dr. Breggin manage to get his papers published in those jornals that he founded or is Editor in Chief of???Bet the peer review from himself was really brutal had he had to do a lot of revisions.In the scientific community, that means that he can't live up to the quality standards of real scientific journals. Instead of working to improve his work, he instead just decided to create his own journal so that he would never be rejected again.That makes him a wanna be, and likely a crank. At the very least, it strongly suggests that he is likely to ignore criticisms of his work from his peers.It doesn't matter so much if he's been self publishing in his own journals, since he could, technically, be producing good work regardless of how lame it looks to publish in a journal he started himrself. It does matter, however, how many times other researchers have cited his work in their own. Zhimbo is going to try to find out for me tommorow, since he has access to such information at work.ABE: Anglagard was able to search a databse of 10,000 journal articles, and Dr. Breggin is not cited even a single time.Edited by nator, : No reason given.

1. How do you know for sure that there are no others besides his own.2. Aside from the journals, how about the following mainstream activity? 3. Do you really expect the powerful entrinched conventional medical establishment to wrap loving arms around anyone who dares expose the atrocities and shortcomings of their $$ driven lucrative healthcare agenda? Edited by Buzsaw, : clarification

---

BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present is forever consuming the eternal future and extending the infinite past.

Three words, buz.Dr. Linus. Pauling.A Nobel Prize winner. A great man.And a complete loon when it comes to vitamin C.A Harvard degree (or a Nobel Prize) does not make every word from your mouth a pearl.Dr. Breggin has a total of 5 papers in pubmed.Breggin PR.Court filing makes public my previously suppressed analysis of Paxil's effects. Ethical Hum Psychol Psychiatry. 2006 Spring;8(1):77-84.Breggin PR.Psychosurgery for political purposes. Duquesne Law Rev. 1975 Summer;13(4):841-62.Lundy PJ, Breggin PR.
Psychiatric oppression of prisoners. Psychiatr Opin. 1974 Jun;11(3):30-7.Breggin P, et al.Comment on "Quizzing the expert: clinical criteria for psychosurgery"
Hosp Physician. 1973 Mar;9(3):79+.Breggin PR.The second wave.
Ment Hyg. 1973 Mar;57(1):10-3.That's an interesting list, don't you think?1973, 1974, 1975 ... nothing ... nothing ... HIS OWN JOURNAL!Huh.Wonder how that happened.

Actually, the databases I searched consist of 10,000 journal titles and at last count, over 5,000,000 articles. This is simply what all registered members of participating Texas libraries have access to due to TexShareThere are no citations to any of Breggin's work among the 65 articles where this name came up in the abstract.Of course, such a search does not cover all journals ever published, but rather the most commonly known 10,000 or so since approximately 1990.

---

Read not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, not to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider - Francis BaconThe more we understand particular things, the more we understand God - Spinoza

Buzsaw you are very kind. I don't know why I came back here to be honest, but I'm glad I did. I now have three names to look up: Dr. Lorrain Day (from PurpleDawn's earlier discussion), Deborah Ray, and Dr. Julian Whitaker. Did you know, Dr. Mercola also started out as a mainstream practitioner. So did Dr. Brooks, whose book I recommended earlier. Many of them had problems themselves, or their relatives did, which conventional medicine was at a loss to remedy. On Dr. Mercola's site, there is a story from Dr. Russell Blaylock, another ND, called "How 'Modern Medicine' Killed My Brother." http://www.mercola.com/2004/nov/24/modern_medicine.htm I found it very moving.I can see now that many people here will accept nothing as "proof" other than a study published in a peer-reviewed journal. I can understand why that would be the case; if you are a scientist, then to do otherwise would be unprofessional, that just isn't how science works. However, now that I'm involved in discussions myself, I am seeing that this often seems to be applied across the board, in all aspects of life. People take the PoV that they won't consider an idea unless it is first proved to be true, i.e. through scientific studies published in peer-reviewed journals. Personal experience is meaningless. Other people's experiences are meaningless. I don't know how I can argue with this Buz. I've seen the personal hell I've been through the past year and a half dismissed as irrelevant. It's been suggested that I have some kind of disorder and that I should go see my GP (even though the symptoms clearly began exactly when I came off the drug, and psych drugs are known to cause withdrawal -- funny, that). What the hell would he do? Put me on another sodding drug. The first one never helped me at all and I still haven't recovered from coming off it. I mentioned the person I know who sued Glaxo because on Paxil she tried to kill herself and her husband. All irrelevant. I think I reached a limit there. This attitude is the height of callousness. People here don't seem to think that it matters that people are damaged and killed by these drugs, as long as the statistics are insignificant enough, and they are willing to believe the propaganda that these drugs "save lives" because it says so in peer-reviewed studies -- even though, I think it was Modulous who agreed, that these studies can be manipulated. I looked up some info on STAR*D, which he seems to think was a conclusive study that showed that these drugs save lives, but if I shared it here, then what? I don't know Buz, I think that by arguing I let my emotions get in the way too much and I end up feeling exhausted and low, which I just don't need.Witness how Dr. Breggin is dismissed here because of disputes over his credentials. Has anyone actually looked at any of the articles on his website? Probably not, because he is also irrelevant isn't he? Is someone who criticised the establishment going to be accepted by the establishment? OK, how about two more MDs who are a little more mainstream but who also are critical of biological psychiatry: Dr. David Healy, and Dr. Joanna Moncrieff. I have one of Healy's books, which is a history of psychopharmacology in the 20th century, titled The Anti-Depressant Era. Here is an article by Dr. Moncrief in which she discusses the placebo effect in antidepressant studies, titled "The Antidepressant Debate": The British Journal of Psychiatry | Cambridge CoreThe experiences that I and others on my ND's list have had, and are having, are very real. I may not be able to argue scientifically for their validity, but maybe that just means I wouldn't make a good scientist. My ND spends a lot of time helping people on the list. None of us pay her and she's not selling anything; what she gets out of it is knowing that she is helping people. She told me to stay away from here and let my cortisol settle back down LOL. I might do that yet but it's great to finally meet you Buz. Thanks for the welcome Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.

Do you accept studies in peer-reviewed journals as a law unto themselves, i.e. they must be true because of their very nature? I will seriously consider what you are saying about Pauling if you can find a study that repeated his methods exactly, including the amounts of vitamin C that he used. So far the abstracts given here have not used the correct amounts. Yet you still dismiss Pauling as a "loon"; if you are basing that on these kinds of studies then that is disingenuous.

Good to see you're finally getting the picture, but my info isn't wrong.Note this line in your article: So the patent still isn't technically on the substance as it occurs in nature. The patent is on what man has isolated and purified. Yes it is a way around the system, but it still stands that we cannot patent a naturally occurring phenomenon. Until you understand that, you will be off course in your arguments just like you were with me.Now for natural and synthetic. Natural means nothing more than it occurs naturally in nature. Synthetic simply means manmade not that it isn't made from natural substances. People have to understand this if they don't want to be suckered by quacks from either side of the fence.So there is natural vitamin C and synthetic vitamin C. One occurs naturally in nature and the other is made in a lab. The molecules may be exactly the same in the categories you stated, but the delivery system is different.When I ingest natural vitamin C by eating an orange I get some Protein, Fat, Fiber, Water, Vitamin A, Vitamin E, B vitamins, Calcium, Magnesium, Zinc, Potassium, and Phosphorus.What I get when I ingest synthetic vitamin C depends on how it is packaged.Notice I have not claimed that one is better or worse than the other.Do you understand the differences concerning what I've said in this post?

quote:

---

How do you know for sure that there are no others besides his own.

---

He has, indeed, published in journals other than his own, in the past.But Buz, can't you see how incredibly bad it looks to create a journal seemingly to publish your own scientific work in it? Scientific publication is supposed to based upon critical peer review. That is an important quality control measure, and Dr. Breggin has simply decided to do an end-run around that.

quote:

---

Do you really expect the powerful entrinched conventional medical establishment to wrap loving arms around anyone who dares expose the atrocities and shortcomings of their $$ driven lucrative healthcare agenda?

---

Look Buz, a scientist doesn't care, or probably even know about, another researcher's activities outside of science, unless they are quite famous. What they care about is if that scientist's work is relevant to their own, and if so, is of high quality, and if the work can be cited in support of their own work.So far in my investigation, no other scientists think that Dr. Breggin's work is useful to them.He might be OK as a doctor, but as a scientist he's not looking very impressive at all.And why do you cite all of his mainstream credentials? I thought that everyone in the mainstream was evil and conspires to crush all dissent?You can't have it both ways, buz. You seem to be saying that the mainstream is evil and everyone in it is corrupt and nothing that comes out of it can be trusted. At the same time, here you are, pushing Dr breggin's mainstream credentials on us.Well, is he part of the evil, corrupt mainstream, and therefore to be rejected by you, or is he part of the rebel, freedom-fighting rebellion, rejected and reviled by the mainstream and therefore embraced by you?Pick one, becasue you can't have both.

quote:

---

Do you accept studies in peer-reviewed journals as a law unto themselves, i.e. they must be true because of their very nature?

---

What do you know of the nature of scientific peer review?

quote:

---

I will seriously consider what you are saying about Pauling if you can find a study that repeated his methods exactly, including the amounts of vitamin C that he used.

---

Surely Pauling must cite published studies in the back of his book to support his claims. Maybe you could tell us what they are so we can read what the scientific support for his claims really are?Oh, and Remember that marketing atlhealth site you sent me to? I read a bit on there about how a new study suggests that taking megadoses of vitamin C may speed up the process of hardening of the arteries.And to answer you question about where I got the info regarding doses over 2000 MG/day of vitamin C and upset stomach and diarrhea, just about every non-commercial health source I went to provided that as a caution.

That studies published in the most prestigious journals can be flawed. Do you not agree yourself that this can happen? For example, the STAR*D study that was much-touted. According to NIMH, 27.5% of patients had a remission on the first antidepressant they tried. When the drug was switched or more drugs were added another 21-30% of the non-responders remitted. A switch to a third antidepressant worked for 20% of those who didn't respond to the first two drugs.While such results might appear promising, there are some things to bear in mind. They first excluded from the study anyone who was known not to respond to the drugs they were testing or even to SSRI antidepressants in general. Moreover, there was no placebo control in this study. Why not? Perhaps because most AD studies show little or no efficacy over placebo. It is not standard practice for an AD study not to include a placebo group. Additionally, spontaneous remission rates for depression are often estimated at being 20-30%; the majority of people get better within 6 months, with or without treatment.This study does not show that ADs help millions of people, though I'll hazard a bet that many were put on the drugs anyway after this study was published. You see web sites crowing, "third time's the charm." What you don't see are studies on how stopping these meds abruptly and switching them affects the body and specifically the CNS. No one seems to be interested in doing those.NIMH also hired researchers for this study with extensive financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the ADs that were studied. As I said, the case with most of these kinds of studies is that they are done by the very people who manufacture the drugs and who have a vested interest in a certain outcome. I would like to see many more independent studies done with no such conflict of interest. That study was from 2000. Dr. Mercola said at the time of writing that he hadn't seen the study and so he couldn't comment on its methodology, but that it sounded like more study would be needed. It would be helpful to at least see an abstract. Dr. Mercola actually does not advise people to take vitamins, for the most part. But his word is not law, and I feel it's important to get info from a variety of sources before making up one's mind. I'll link to this site again, because orthomolecular medicine does involve giving vitamin megadoses: Welcome To Orthomolecular.org You might be interested in reading the link there titled "Rationale for Intravenous Vitamin C in Cancer Patients." My daughter and I have been taking more vitamin C than this for 2 years and it has never been a problem. Nor has it been when my husband is taking it. They're quite simply wrong. He gives an extensive bibliography, but I've had to hunt out the study citations from the text. It is not a book written for scientists, though it does get a bit heavy on the molecular science at times. He was clearly very aware of research being done by others at the time and was influenced by it. Unfortunately, in citing studies by anyone, all this book provides is a name and a year.They're not hard to find if you spend a little time Googling though. Here is a link with dozens: http://www.doctoryourself.com/biblio_pauling_ortho.html

Scientific peer-reviewed studies do not represent proof, nor do they permit a final conclusion. There are no final conclusions within science because all conclusions must remain tentative to qualify as science. And peer-reviewed studies only represent evidence which can added to the body of evidence from other peer-reviewed studies to form hypotheses and even eventually theories of how things really work in the real world.In the absence of sufficient supporting evidence it wouldn't really be accurate to call some of your conclusions we're discussing here wrong, but it would certainly be fair and honest to state that many of them are unsupported by the results from any clinical trials. What should wave a red flag for you, and for anyone else investigating the world of alternative medicine, is the lack of research and clinical trials. The best you can say about alternative medicine is, "Maybe true, maybe not, maybe good for you, maybe bad for you, who could know." You say that Molbiogirl's abstracts "have not used the correct amounts" of vitamin C. Where are the studies that established the correct amounts? That's a rhetorical question, because they're aren't any. You're in essence asking Molbiogirl to rebut with technical papers a claim that as of yet has no scientific foundation.I repeat again, the scientific method is the best approach we have for reliably establishing the nature of the real world. Anecdote is a known very unsound approach for learning about the real world, and it provides practically all the evidence in support of all sorts of scientifically unestablished claims, from Bigfoot to ESP to UFOs to numerology and so on and so on and on and on.The online world contains a huge number of examples of anecdote. The most common used to run something like this: "Forward this email to all your friends and you will have good luck. If you break the chain of this email then misfortune will overtake you. Robert F. failed to forward this email and he lost his job the next day. He went home and forwarded the email, and the next day he was called back in to work and given a vice-president's job."That's anecdote, and while the anecdotes you're relying on may seem much more persuasive to you than the above, probably because much of it comes from real people who really believe what they're saying, it's still anecdote, which makes it unreliable in the extreme as a source of medical information.At best anecdote can serve as a guide when seeking possible fruitful opportunities for scientific investigation, but it cannot serve in any way as reliable medical information.--Percy