Vitamin E Therapeutics




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VITAMIN E: A CURE IN SEARCH OF RECOGNITION

by Andrew W. Saul

(Reprinted with permission from the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, 2003; Vol. 18, Numbers 3 and 4, p. 205-212.)


The most common reason for irreproducibility of successful vitamin E cures is either a failure to use enough of it, or a failure to use the natural form (D-alpha, plus mixed natural tocopherols), or both. For example, in an oft-quoted negative study (27), researchers who gave 300 milligrams of synthetic vitamin E to patients who had recently had a heart attack saw no beneficial effect. Such failure is to be expected. You can set up any experiment to fail. The Shutes would have used only the natural form, and four times as much.

Natural vitamin E is always the dextro- (right-handed) form. On the other hand, "synthetic vitamin E is a mixture of eight isomers in equal proportions containing only 12.5% of d-alpha tocopherol. One mg of dl-alpha tocopherol has the lowest Vitamin E equivalence of any of the common vitamin E preparations." (28)

There may be other differences. "Vitamin E derived from natural sources is obtained by molecular distillation and, in most cases, subsequent methylation and esterification of edible vegetable oil products. Synthetic vitamin E is produced from fossil plant material (coal tar) by condensation of trimethylhydroquinone with isophytol." (12)

While personal philosophy is the only possible basis for a decision to conduct a study using only the synthetic form of a vitamin, the use of low dosage is generally explained away by alleging doubts about safety.

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 .