Re: "High doses of iodine are remarkably well tolerated"...

Donald W. Miller, Jr., M.D., "Extrathyroidal Benefits of Iodine":

http://www.jpands.org/vol11no4/millerd.pdf



"Iodine was used for a wide variety of ailments in the 19 and
early part of the 20 centuries, especially for syphilis and chronic
lung disease. For many years physicians used potassium Iodide in
doses starting at 1.5 to 3 g increasing up to more than 10 g/day for
weeks at a time to treat bronchial asthma and chronic obstructive
pulmonary disease, reportedly with good results and surprisingly
few side effects. The Nobel laureate Albert Szent Györgi
(1893.1986), the physician who discovered vitamin C, writes:
.When I was a medical student, Iodine in the form of KI [potassium
iodide] was the universal medicine. Nobody knew what it did, but it
did something and did something good.. The standard dose was 1 g,
which contains 770mgof iodine.

This 19 century medicine continues to be used in gram amounts
in the 21 century, by dermatologists. They treat inflammatory
dermatoses, like nodular vasculitis and pyoderma gangrenosum,
with SSKI (supersaturated potassium iodide), beginning with an
iodine dose of 900 mg/day, followed by weekly increases of up to 6
g/day as tolerated. Fungal eruptions, like sporotrichosis, are treated
initially in gram amounts with great effect.

A 54-year-old man, thinking it was iced tea, drank a .home
preparation. of SSKI in water that his aunt kept in the refrigerator
for her rheumatism. Over a short period of time he consumed 600
ml containing 15 g of iodide, an amount 100,000 times greater than
the RDI for iodine. Twelve hours later he developed swelling of the
face, neck, and mouth, and had transient cardiac arrhythmias, but
made an uneventful recovery.

High doses of Iodine are remarkably well tolerated. Herxheimer
gave 5 g of KI, four days on, three days off, to 2,400 asthmatic
patients and had 12 cases of myxedema and only four patients who
had swelling of the thyroid gland."