excerpt about possible large vitamin dose dependency

Excerpt from Andrew Saul's editorial as published in Journal of Orthomolecular Mediceine,2004 vol.19 no.2 p. 67-68


This is not a total surprise. It took decades for medical
acknowledgement
that biotin and vitamin E are actually essential to health.

Simple cause-and-effect micronutrient deficiency, a doctrine long
enamored
of by the dietetic profession, is not always sufficient to explain
persistent physician reports of megavitamin cures of a number of
diseases
outside the classically accepted few. Perhaps it is a law of
orthomolecular
therapy that the reason one nutrient can cure so many different
illnesses is
because a deficiency of one nutrient can cause many different
illnesses.

And if nutrient deficiency is basically about inadequate intake, then
dependency is essentially about heightened need. As a dry sponge soaks
up
more milk, so a sick body generally takes up higher vitamin doses. The
quantity of a nutritional supplement that cures an illness indicates
the
patient's degree of deficiency. It is therefore not a megadose of the
vitamin, but rather a megadeficiency of the nutrient that we are
dealing
with. Orthomolecular practitioners know that with therapeutic
nutrition, you
don't take the amount that you believe ought to work; rather, you take
the
amount that gets results. The first rule of building a brick wall is
that
you have got to have enough bricks. A sick body has exaggeratedly high
needs
for many vitamins. We can either meet that need, or else suffer
unnecessarily.

Until the medical professions fully embrace orthomolecular treatment,
"medicine" might well be said to be "the experimental study of what
happens
when poisonous chemicals are placed into malnourished human bodies."

References:

1. Heaney RP: Long-latency deficiency disease: insights from calcium
and
vitamin D. Am J Clin Nutr. 2003; Nov; 78(5):912-9.

2. Kaufman W: The common form of joint dysfunction: Its incidence and
treatment. Brattleboro, VT: E. L. Hildreth and Co. 1949; Chapter 5.
http://www.doctoryourself.com/kaufman10.html .

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