How Vitamin C Fights Cancer by Ron Hunninghake (Transcript)

Today I’m shooting for clarity. I always want my lectures to be clear, but probably more so than ever before. I hope this group gets a good clear understanding of how Vitamin C can be a very effective tool in the fight against cancer.

Here at The Center, the Bright Spot for Health, this has been one of our major research focus areas. We have a lot of patients coming to us these days with cancer, to be treated with the IV Vitamin C. I would like to dedicate my lecture today to the first successfully treated cancer patient here at The Center.

George Williamson developed adenocarcinoma of the right kidney in 1980. His case was written up by Dr. James Jackson and published in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, which you can now read online. George appropriately had his kidney removed, but by that point he already had metastases, it had already spread to his lung and his liver. I’m sure most of you know that once it starts to spread, that is a very ominous progression of the disease.

Based upon Dr. Riordan’s relationship with Dr. Linus Pauling, a two-time Nobel Prize winner, who was very interested in Vitamin C, as well as Dr. Ewan Cameron, a Scottish surgeon who was doing IVC research in Scotland. Dr. Riordan started George on 30 grams of IV Intravenous Vitamin C, twice a week and George began to feel better.

By the time he had completed 15 months of this therapy, he went back to his oncologist. The oncologist verified that the metastases were gone and the cancer had cleared up. Then 14 years later, at the age of 84, George died of something completely different than his cancer. Earlier this year, his wife, Opal, passed away. I’ve been very grateful to both of them and their enthusiasm for The Center. I always want to remember that we are here at The Center to serve people.

Cancer isn’t something that just happens. It happens to real people and people like yourselves and our family members. My wife has had breast cancer, and we have friends who have fallen victim to cancer, so we need really good tools to help patients overcome this dreaded illness.

I’m going to be talking a little about chemistry today, but remember my goal is to make it understandable, so for all of you who used to freeze up in school whenever the word chemistry was mentioned, you can relax. I’m going to keep it simple and you need to understand this if you want to understand what makes Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) so special in the realm of cancer therapy. There is a term called redox and it is really a part of the whole life process.

I’m sure you’ve heard the word antioxidant. An antioxidant is something like if you cut an apple and you leave it exposed to the oxygen, the oxygen will oxidize the surface of the apple and it will start to turn brown. However, if you squeeze a little bit of lemon juice on it – that is a reducing agent – it is an antioxidant. So, an anti-oxidant reduces the oxidative effect. It sounds a little confusing, but as we go along, I want you to see that this actually is kind of a circular thing you can oxidize, but you can also reduce, and you can regenerate some of these molecules like Vitamin C to kind of put it back into battle again, recharge it, give it a new life so it can do its job better than it otherwise could.

There is a very interesting phenomenon that occurs around Vitamin C and I’m going to try to explain this. You know, most of us have heard the term Vitamin. Vitamin C is also ascorbic acid, but we refer to it as Vitamin C because vitamins are small amounts of something that does something else.

We know Vitamin C prevents what disease? Scurvy! Right but it only takes a very small amount. The recommended daily allowance to prevent scurvy is like somewhere between 60 to 90, to maybe a little bit more of milligrams of Vitamin C. About the amount of Vitamin C that would fit on the head of a pin.

Now, do you think that amount would be enough to treat cancer? No, we have to think of Vitamin C in terms of dosage, so if we are going to get into using Vitamin C, now maybe small amounts of Vitamin C could be somewhat helpful in preventing cancer, but in treating cancer we’re going to have to use larger doses. So at low dosage, Vitamin C acts almost purely as an antioxidant, which most of us know it as.

But what is surprising, and what most oncologists still don’t know or understand, is that at much higher doses, Vitamin C can act as both, an antioxidant and a pro-oxidant. It doesn’t suddenly change, it always is, and always has been, and always will be an antioxidant. But, it enters into a special chemical reaction in the body that creates a pro-oxidant effect which we are going to go into in just a second.

What antioxidants do in the body?

Here we have Vitamin C acting as an antioxidant. Basically what antioxidants do is they have these – here is ascorbic acid – Vitamin C – it has these electrons and it very generously donates them to this treacherous free radical which can act as a harmful oxidant to your body. We think it is excessive oxidants that over time injure the cells, change the DNA, and set them up for the formation of cancer.

So, Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) can neutralize free radicals. But, when it does, once it has given its electrons away, it now becomes dehydroascorbate, this is the oxidized form of Vitamin C, and the body gets rid of it.

Here is a specific example where two iron atoms are reduced (the +3 is reduced to the +2) by ascorbic acid and now you have reduced iron and the dehydroscorbate acid is excreted in the kidneys. We’re not using it anymore.

What happens to this reduced iron? It interacts with oxygen. What happens when you take a piece of metal, say iron lying on the ground, if left there long enough it rusts? Rusting is a form of oxidation, so because it interacts with oxygen and it forms an oxygen free radical which is very damaging. That results in the formation of something we all are familiar with which is hydrogen peroxide.

We know that hydrogen peroxide can be used to treat wounds, and if you know a little bit about cell biology it has a regulatory effect in the cell, and it can be used to fight infections. So this is how, when you put Vitamin C in and it interacts with iron, it can have a pro-oxidant effect in the body.

Let us take this one step further. The peroxide itself can interact with more reduced iron, if it is available, and it will form a very, very harsh free radical called the hydroxyl radical. This hydroxyl radical is much more potent as an oxidizing agent than even hydrogen peroxide itself is.

Now here is the key part, this is the part that most doctors don’t understand. So you are going to be ahead of most of the oncologists in the world just by understanding this one slide. Mainly, if you are using Vitamin C in bigger doses, and you are reducing the iron in your body, or the copper, or any metal in your body, if you reduce it, then that can go over and interact with the peroxide and form the hydroxyl radical.

But, if you can take this oxidized iron and once again reduce it, do you see how this is starting to form a cycle? What you need though is, you need a continuous supply of high dose Vitamin C. This is the IV Vitamin C. If we are putting IV Vitamin C in, in large amounts, and we’re reducing the iron, and it is interacting with the peroxide, what we have happening is, like a water wheel.

And as long as the Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) is going in and the oxidized form is going out, it is turning the wheel and producing more and more of the hydroxyl radical. It is the hydroxyl radical that is acting as the pro-oxidant to kill tumor cells if you have the right dosage. If you have the right dosage.

This is why so many doctors and so many researchers have misunderstood Vitamin C. They think of it as a little trace vitamin. But in order to get this pro-oxidant effect, you are going to have to add in large amounts of Vitamin C in order to reach a certain threshold to where the hydroxyl radical is formed.

Now, this is not just me talking, this phenomenon was recently verified at the National Institutes of Health in this particular research project. Ascorbic in pharmacologic concentrations, not nutritional, but pharmacologic concentrations, selectively generates the ascorbate radical and hydrogen peroxide in extra cellular fluid in vivo. In other words, in a living body, this phenomenon happens. You can read about it in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Vitamin C as preventive agent

Coming back to what role the oxidants play in the body, we were talking about the word redox. Redox environment, a simple rule of thumb is, that an environment of healthy cells is reducing. In other words, the free radicals are controlled, rather than oxidizing. We depend upon oxidation for metabolism, immune defense, and cell signaling purposes, but we must avoid the damage it can cause.

In other words, when your oxidation gets out of control there is too much damage to the apple surface and it becomes rotten – too much damage to the iron, you can’t use it anymore because it rusts too much. The body’s life is a process of keeping that in balance, keeping it in check. That is why we now know, it is a clearly established fact, that colorful fruits and vegetables, which are rich in antioxidants, create and just what I just said, a healthy reducing environment in ourselves. That helps us prevent the cellular damage that can lead to cancer.

So, Vitamin C, as an antioxidant, is a great preventive agent. All of your antioxidants help to control excess oxidation. What we need, if the damage is already done, and the cancer has emerged, you can’t rely upon just the antioxidant properties of Vitamin C, now we need something a little tougher, a little bit more potent. That is where the high dosage of Vitamin C comes in and has been shown to kill tumor cells. This is what we call tumor cytotoxicity. It is toxic to the cells that make up tumors. So, the high dose intravenous Vitamin C generates hydroxyl radicals which can damage the cells, except that healthy cells have a protection built in.

Since peroxide is a normal part of cellular physiology, healthy cells have their own protective enzyme called, catalase. What do you think cancer cells have? Do you think they have catalase? No, they are low in catalase and that is what makes IV Vitamin C so slick. That probably isn’t the right scientific word, but the fact that it can, at the same time, act as an antioxidant and protect your healthy cells, yet generate the hydroxyl radical, a very powerful radical that attacks the cells that are low in catalase, namely your cancer cells, means this is almost like a smart bomb or a smart drug in the sense that it is going to strengthen your basic protective mechanisms but attack the invading tumor cells.

That is why we are so excited about IV Vitamin C here at the Center. It is not just us though, there has been a number of researchers who have demonstrated this phenomenon. We are not the only ones anymore who are looking into this. I think Dr. Jackson, our Bio-Center Lab Director, did a search on IV Vitamin C studies around the world, and I believe he found over 60 that are now going on. So, research is starting to get behind this.

But, I still think the general understanding of Vitamin C is, it is just a little vitamin that you drink in your orange juice, yes it is good to help you prevent cancer, but when you have got a really serious disease like cancer, Vitamin C is not strong enough. Well, folks, I think it is strong enough if you use the right dose.

How oxidation works

This chart shows how oxidation works. Normally when you increase the level of oxidative stress in any cellular environment, if you injure the cells, they will start to divide more rapidly. It is like an inflammatory response as they try to adapt to that particular stress.

But, if the damage is great enough the P51 gene, which will tell the cell, “Hey, it is time to quit, there is too much damage here”, it will create an automatic suicide of the cell. That is what they call programmed cell death or Apoptosis. So, this is normally what happens, and this is what chemotherapy and radiation therapy takes advantage of.

When you have cancer, the oncologist is pouring on the oxidative stress, hopefully in a focused way to get your tumor cells to die, to get that tumor cell to shrink. The problem is, this high level of oxidative stress can be harmful to normal tissues. This is basically the mechanism of how chemotherapy and radiation therapy works.

The Riordan IVC protocol in a sense is using the same mechanism, oxidative stress in the form of the hydroxyl radical, but at the same time we are protecting the healthy cells. We don’t advise this as a standalone therapy, we think it is best used in conjunction with whatever type of conventional treatment you are receiving. In other words, if the oncologist says you need to have radiation therapy and maybe some chemotherapy, do this in conjunction with that therapy.

This is where the misunderstanding gets in the way, because a lot of oncologists still think of IVC as only an antioxidant, and if you are taking a chemotherapeutic agent which causes oxidative stress to kill the tumor cells, a lot of doctors are afraid the Vitamin C is going to neutralize the effects of the chemotherapy.

Our research tells us differently. Even theoretically we would say that at the same time the Vitamin C is protecting the healthy cells, it is going to help the chemotherapy attack the cancer cells. This is written up in a protocol we have available to practitioners at this time. We’ve been doing a lot of IV Vitamin Cs, we have a lot of experience. Since 1994 the number of IV Vitamin Cs done onsite has continued to grow.

Basically, what happens as we increase the dose of IV Vitamin C, we usually start people out at 15 grams, then we go up to 25 grams, and we keep taking their dose up, then after we infuse the Vitamin C we do a measurement of their blood on the other side to see how much Vitamin C we have gotten the concentration up to.

If we were to take the Vitamin C levels of everyone in the room, assuming that no one has had an IV Vitamin C, it would be around 1 or 1-1/2. What we’re shooting for with cancer patients is somewhere around 350 to 400. It’s like 400 times the normal blood level of Vitamin C that is required in order to really generate a good strong dose of hydroxyl radical to attack those tumor cells. We use the post IVC level as a way of confirming the dose we are giving is right for that particular patient.

Each patient is different, they have different diets, different diseases, different oxidative stress loads, different cancers; even the same type of cancer can be at different stages in different people. We use that information to help us guide our therapy to make sure we are giving an adequate amount of dosage to each patient.

We’ve been studying this very carefully; even Dr. Jackson has kept a close eye on the lab and you can see that as we increase levels we get a higher range. Some people, even at 60 grams, have a very low level because they have a large amount of oxidative stress. In that case, if the tumor is still there, they need to get it out, they need to change therapies, they need to do something so we can reduce their oxidative stress load and get their Vitamin C level up as high as possible.

This is some of the groundbreaking research that was done here at The Center in the 1990s, where we took different lines of cancer cells, then we grew them on culture plates with different concentrations of ascorbic, Vitamin C. As you can see, as the concentration ascorbate in the growth media increased, it killed the surviving cells and it went down to around 350-400, almost all the various cell types of cancer were killed by this dose of Vitamin C.

I want to show you another study that we did here that I think is important, and this is the reason why I tell patients, you don’t want to rely upon IV Vitamin C alone if you have cancer. When we took and grew cancer cells, this was colon cancer cells, on a thin layer culture plate, it didn’t take very much Vitamin C to kill off all of those cancer cells, at 200 mg per deciliter. However, if we grew that same type of cancer cell on a dense layer, a thick layer, it took quite a bit more Vitamin C to penetrate in, to actually kill those tumor cells. It did kill them, but it took quite a bit more.

Then Dr. Casciari, from the International Institutes of Health, who is one of our consultants, had a model that simulated a tumor. It is called the Dense Hollow Fiber model, it is like a tumor growing in your body. You can see the green line, we never did completely eradicate those cells because the Vitamin C had to try to penetrate in to the tumor. So, what I tell patients is, get the tumor out if you can. Remove the tumor if it is possible. Have the radiation therapy to shrink it down. Do the chemotherapy to shrink the tumor down as much as you possibly can. That is going to get you into the realm where the IV Vitamin C is going to work more effectively.

And, if you’re going to use the IV Vitamin C simultaneously you won’t have the side effects that a lot of people have with the various forms of chemotherapy.

Now this research I just showed you was replicated, it was done in the 1990s, but again it was replicated at the National Institutes of Health and published in 2005, Pharmacologic Ascorbic Acid Concentrations Selectively Killed Cancer Cells: Action as a pro drug to deliver hydrogen peroxide to the tissue.

So now we have a validation of what we have been doing, we just need to pick up the action here and find out how we can do even better.

In summary, IV Ascorbate reaches cytotoxic plasma levels for only a short duration. This is the second part of the lecture now. We give the IVs usually about twice a week, sometimes we give it three times a week. The plasma levels that we achieve with an IV are only high for several hours, a relatively short duration. We typically do them about twice a week. My concern is, the potential exists for the emergence of IV Redox Chemotherapy, which is the way they now refer to it at KU Medical Center IV Redox Chemotherapy.

What about resistant tumor cells starting to reemerge in between IVCs? Can we improve the effect of the IV redox with oral Vitamin C redox, and something that I am going to call redox recycling?

I’m going to enter into a different discussion with you now because for awhile we were forgetting about the value of oral Vitamin C. There is no question that IV Vitamin C, if you have cancer you want to do IV Vitamin C. But, can we improve the results of IV Vitamin C by using the appropriate dosages of oral Vitamin C in conjunction with other specialized nutrients?

Redox Recycling

Let’s talk about redox recycling. Remember, I told you the dehydroascorbate, which is the oxidized form of Vitamin C, is excreted rapidly by the kidneys. Whereas the ascorbic acid is generally reabsorbed, depending upon what blood level you have. So, what we might be able to do, before the dehydroascorbate is jettisoned, what if we reduced it back to Vitamin C? What if we put it back into action again, and preserved that Vitamin C so it could be utilized again? This term is called, redox synergy. It is the technique of using several antioxidants in a synergistic manner to increase the efficiency of redox recycling.

To put this in graphic terms, here is your dehydroascorbate, the oxidized form, and if you use antioxidants, there are a number of antioxidants that you can use, and donate those electrons to the dehydroascorbate, now you have ascorbic acid back again, it is ready to go. Putting this into my water wheel analogy, here is the ascorbic acid coming in, here is the dehydro-ascorbate acid being formed, but if we don’t get enough of this we’re going to run out and we may not make enough of the hydrogen peroxide and the hydroxyl radical that we need.

But, what if we could somehow recycle the dehydroascorbate back up here and put it back through the loop again one more time? This is what synergistic antioxidants will do. If you are using vitamin E, selenium, B3, zinc, and other forms of antioxidants, you can regenerate ascorbic acid from your dehydroascorbate and thereby raise your level of the hydroxyl radical in your blood stream using oral forms of Vitamin C. At least this is the hypothesis that redox synergy can do this.

There was a study done last year – it was a small study, where we looked at healthy volunteers, of whether or not a mixture of oral antioxidants versus just Vitamin C or E by itself, would increase the anti-oxidant capacity of their blood stream. This was measured by looking at the percent inhibition of induced lipid peroxidation. That is a mouth full, but what it really means is if you’ve got free radicals wandering around in your blood stream, it can damage your cell membranes. Your cell membranes are made out of lipids. If you get lipid peroxidation, that is damaged cell membranes.

So, they looked at four different groups in this study, people who were taking Vitamin E alone, 400 units; there was another group taking Vitamin C alone, 500 mg; the third group was taking C+E; and the fourth group was getting a mixture of antioxidants and selenium, zinc, folate, the B vitamins.

What they found is that, indeed, redox synergy did occur, that the mixture of vitamins and minerals was more efficient than the Vitamin C or E alone they presumed because this antioxidant mixture contained various antioxidant compounds with different redox potential leading to the possible development of a chain reaction. So you can use antioxidants in combination with Vitamin C to stop the damaging effects of free radicals.

Now, how does this apply to cancer? We’re not the only ones that have been looking into this question of what do we do about cancer? A good friend of Dr. Riordan – Dr. Abram Hoffer, who for the last 50 some years has been a leader in the field of orthomolecular treatments of various diseases, developed a cancer regimen. This was before 1978, when he put it to the test in a 15-year study where he looked at 134 advanced cancer patients. He offered them this combination: Beta Carotene, 30,000; B-Complex 50-100; 12,000 mg Vitamin C; nowadays he has taken them up to as high as 40,000 (this is oral Vitamin C); 300 units of Vitamin E; 600 units of Selenium; and 60 of Zinc.

When you have a serious illness like cancer, your digestive system can handle a lot more Vitamin C than it can when you’re in your every-day state of health. He offered this to 134 patients. Some entered the study but didn’t want to do the vitamins, and some did. What he found was, the people who took his regimen, they had various types of cancer: breast, uterine, lung, pancreas, ovary, just all types.

He found that the number of months survival was much higher with the people who took the vitamins, compared to the number of months of those who didn’t. So, the people who took the vitamins had about 45 months of survival, compared to 2.6 months. This is also published in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, totally ignored by conventional medicine.

To me, it is an important finding because it indicates that maybe redox synergy and high dosage of oral Vitamin C does have a role to play in enhancing the effectiveness of IVC therapy.

Let’s look back at another study, one of the groundbreaking studies in this whole field of using Vitamin C in cancer patients. This was Dr. Cameron & Pauling’s study where they gave terminal cancer patients 10 grams of IV Vitamin C daily for 10 days, then they gave them 10 grams orally to follow. They were able to show a 4-fold increase in life expectancy.

Now, what we don’t know, and the reason I’m going to point this out is, we don’t know if they got it once a day, or several times a day. With 10 grams a day, you can try to take it all at once, or you can split it up and take it several times during the day. They said in their paper if they would have used higher doses than 10 grams they might even have had better results. I’m going to show you that maybe they, indeed, would have.

Unfortunately, when this was published back in the 70s Mayo Clinic said, “Okay. We’re going to try to replicate this study.” Now, when you do a replication, you should at least do the study the same way the original researchers did it. The Mayo studies did not involve any IV Vitamin C, it was all just oral Vitamin C given once a day. So, they gave 10 grams of oral Vitamin C to 200 late stage cancer patients. There were a lot of questions raised about how well the study was controlled, but they did not show any statistical benefit. This is one of the reasons why conventional medicine said, “Hey, let’s just forget the whole Vitamin C issue because this is the definitive study”.

Well, it really wasn’t, but that is what happened back then. Now, here we are bringing up the whole Vitamin C thing again because we are getting new research findings to suggest that maybe this could be a useful tool in the fight against cancer.

Dr. Riordan was one of the authors on a study, Vitamin C Pharmacokinetics. It was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. What they did was, they looked at what happened when you gave Vitamin C orally compared to IV, starting with a very low dose. They took the subjects and they completely depleted their Vitamin C. So, they were starting with subjects who were really in a state of scurvy. Then they looked to see what happened to their blood levels when they started giving them very small amounts. The most they got them up to was 1.25 grams of Vitamin C. That was what they utilized then to make their calculations.

They calculated what would happen if they gave them up to as high as 100 grams of Vitamin C. The highest level they were able to get after 1.25 grams of Vitamin C was a blood level of 2.4, which our normal range here at The Center is 0.6 to 2.0, so it boosted their level a little bit, but not very much. Whereas, when they gave that same amount by IV, it boosted their blood level up to 15.6.

Now, this is a significantly higher level. This led them to the conclusion of their study. They said, “We need to think of Vitamin C when it’s being given as an IV as something different, than when it is being given oral”. And, for this reason we should reopen the study of Vitamin C, looking at it as an IV therapy for cancer as opposed to an oral therapy. This was just some of their graphics, to show you the blood levels of Vitamin C was much higher by IV, whereas with oral Vitamin C the maximum they could get up to was about 3.9. So, the implications of this study is that intravenous Vitamin C is a plausible means of delivering enough Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) to generate the hydroxyl radical.

Now the average plasma Vitamin C level is about 1.2 and unfortunately what this report stated was that you really don’t need to take more than 200 mg per day because, if you do, most of it will be lost in your urine. How many of you have been to your doctor and told them you were taking Vitamin C and he told you all that is doing is giving you expensive urine.

Well, a lot of that statement is based upon this and other studies that 200 mg per day is a saturation dose, therefore let’s not even pay any attention to oral Vitamin C, if we’re going to use it, it has to be given just IV. Don’t get me wrong, if I have cancer I want IV Vitamin C as the treatment of choice.

What I’m talking to you about now is that maybe we should consider using oral Vitamin C in-between in order to keep the levels of Vitamin C high enough to possibly generate the hydroxyl radical. Their computer calculated at the highest level you could possibly get was 3.9, which I’m going to call the Max-C.

In other words, based upon their model if we all took as much Vitamin C as our digestive systems could possibly handle, the highest we could get would be 3.9. I’m sure all of you are thinking, well, gosh the treatment for cancer, in order to be effective has to be around 350 to 400. It has to be at 100 times this amount. So this would make it seem like oral Vitamin C doesn’t make any sense at all.

But, here is the deal. The role of science is to make predictions. So, their model predicts 3.9. If science says all geese are white, it only takes one black goose to prove them wrong. Let’s see if we can find some black geese here. I’m going to show you 2 unpublished studies. One done by Steve Hickey and another one done by myself.

The first one is the Pharmacokinetics of Oral Vitamin C. What Hickey wanted to do was see if he could prove that by using oral Vitamin C he could break the barrier. And in other words, break the sound barrier for Vitamin C. Indeed, even with just a 5 gram dose of standard Vitamin C and a 5 gram dose of something called liposomal Vitamin C, he was able, at about 3 hours out, to exceed that 3.9.

This is the NIH study showing that this is about as high as you can go. He did it with 5 grams. This may be more than you want to know, but Vitamin C Pharmacokinetics has a dual phase to it. If you are less than 1.2 in your blood stream, nature protects us from scurvy by reabsorbing the ascorbic acid in our kidneys. It will work very hard. That is why, even if we are not getting any Vitamin C we won’t develop scurvy right away because the kidneys will keep reabsorbing the Vitamin C as long as it can. It does not reabsorb the dehydroascorbate.

But, once you get into the phase II level, 1.2 to 3.9 level, then the kidneys excrete the Vitamin C about as fast as they can, which is a half-life of 30 minutes. So, whatever your blood level is, a half an hour later it is going to be half because the Vitamin C has excreted so rapidly. Once again, putting Dr. Hickey’s numbers in this chart, this is phase II and this is phase I – he was able with just a single dose of Vitamin C to exceed the 3.9 barrier.

Then when he did a 20 gram dose he was able to exceed it by even more, then he did a 36 gram dose, which gave him a really bad case of diarrhea, he was able to really break the barrier in two subjects. He almost doubled the plasma level of Vitamin C. So, he shared this study with me and it made me think, well gosh, maybe we can use oral Vitamin C as supportive therapy to IV Vitamin C and thereby get an even better result with the cancer patients that we’re caring for.

I thought I would like to try this with myself. So, I did one study looking at what Dr. Hickey calls dynamic flow. The NIH computer says that the plasma is going to be saturated after just 200 mg of Vitamin C, but that is only a single dose. What if every 3 hours you took 200 mg? Which means in the course of a day, taking Vitamin C several times a day, you are going to build up your Vitamin C level.

Using this technique, we should be able to break this 3.9 barrier without necessarily going to really high dosages at any one time. The reason why we think this is possible is that one of the pioneers in Vitamin C, Irwin Stone, sent a letter to the discoverer of Vitamin C, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, that Irwin Stone had a friend, Joe Kieninger, who had prostate cancer.

Joe didn’t want to take chemotherapy so he started increasing his oral Vitamin C very slowly over the course of months and months, and he got his daily intake of Vitamin C up to 80,000 mg a day, without diarrhea. He was at that level for 2-1/2 years. He was able to achieve a blood level of 32 mg per deciliter.

Now remember the NIH model says the highest you can go is 3.9. What he showed here is that maybe the model is not correct, and Dr. Hickey’s data shows that maybe the model is not correct. I did a little study myself, here is my data from the end of one study that I did. I normally take about 10 grams of Vitamin C a day, so what I did each day is, I would take Vitamin C at 7:00, 10:00, 1:00, 4:00, 7:00, and 10:00.

Every 3 hours I was taking a dose of Vitamin C. The first day was 1 gram, so that would be an additional 6 grams, which is 16 grams. The second day was 2 grams every 3 hours, then 3 grams every 3 hours. I finally got it up to 4 grams every 3 hours, plus the 10 grams that I normally take for a grand total of 34 grams a day. I had to have my secretaries help me keep track of all this, so I’m not sure how practical this is for patients, but this is just to show you that if you take Vitamin C frequently throughout the day, you should be able to generate some fairly high levels of Vitamin C.

You can see over here these and at 8:00 a.m., 11:00 a.m., 2:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. I had my blood levels checked. In the course of this experiment I had 51 blood draws. My arms looked like I was a drug addict, but other than that, we were able to get some good data about the ability to raise Vitamin C levels.

Now, normally in most laboratories, for example here at the Bio-Center Lab, the highest recorded plasma C level we’ve ever had was 5.6. And, using the strategy that I used here, I was able to achieve a level of 5.5. Most labs the highest level is 3.9. So, this method may be a way of using antioxidants and Vitamin C in order to raise a person’s plasma level.

This is a summary of the average Vitamin C levels for each day. Here is 10 grams, 16 grams, 22 grams, 28 grams, 34 grams, then I kept the 34 going; you can see that each day the blood level was going higher and higher. If I was able to sustain this for 2-1/2 years like that one prostate cancer patient, you can extrapolate that maybe the blood level would just have gotten higher. This to me shows that it got it up to 4.3, so I clearly exceeded the 3.9 max just by using oral Vitamin C. This is redox cycling.

Now, what about the ability to generate the hydroxyl radical? We know you can use alpha-lipoic acid and Vitamin K to do this. We have a special supplement called IVC Max, which has Vitamin K, lipoic acid, selenium, and a number of antioxidants which we have found to enhance the effects of IV Vitamin C.

Now, with lipoic acid you can see that the redox cycling phenomena that we were doing, with just Vitamin C alone, can be achieved with lipoic acid, as well. Actually, this research was done here at the Center showing that by adding lipoic acid to Vitamin C you reduce the amount of Vitamin 9C you need in order to kill tumor cells. The other one that does this is Vitamin K; Vitamin K will also redox cycle and generate the hydroxyl radical.

Now, what I did in my research study was add the IVC Max to the 34 grams of Vitamin C that I was taking per day. I really did not know what was going to happen. I thought that maybe the anti-oxidants would take my levels even higher, but what actually happened when I got up to 12 IVC Max capsules a day, in addition to the other things that I was taking, interestingly enough the blood levels of my Vitamin C started to go down.

The only explanation I could come up with at this point was that I was starting to create the hydroxyl radical which was neutralizing the Vitamin C. My average Vitamin C level started to go down once I added the IVC Max, which to me at first was somewhat disappointing, but then I realized this must be the oxidative stress that we shoot for with IV Vitamin C, achieved with using an oral program.

The reason why this can be important is, if you look at the research that has already been done, you can achieve apoptosis with Vitamin C in just a couple of hours. NIH data showed that there was 30% death of the Burkitt’s lymphoma cells with an ascorbic acid level of only 5.3 mg per deciliter with an exposure of only one hour.

I want to show you my data here. I had two readings where by blood level was over 5.3 and here is 5.3 and here is 5.5 and just using oral Vitamin C, so had I had a lymphoma, just using Vitamin C for that short period of time, that would have been creating a selective toxicity to that type of tumor cell. This looks at the whole study, how it went up, then when I started adding the IVC Max it started to go back down. This to me is evidence of oral Vitamin C, redox induced apoptosis.

What we’re doing here is enhancing IVC redox by maintaining low grade oxidative pressure between IVC infusions and hopefully that will reduce the likelihood of developing IVC resistance. There are some patients that are doing very well with IV Vitamin C and then suddenly the tumor starts to grow again. We’re hoping this will reduce the risk of cancer recurrence, enhance survivability and quality of life, and possibly lower cost and lower toxicity. If you can think of IV Vitamin C as an adjunct to chemotherapy and radiation, oral Vitamin C is an adjunct to IV Vitamin C.

My concluding points are that high dose IV Vitamin C has been demonstrated to generate tumor cytotoxic doses of the hydroxyl radical through redox cycling. And, twice a week IV Vitamin C creates short verse of this cytotoxicity. It may make it a very good adjunct therapy to standard chemotherapy and radiation.

But, what about using oral Vitamin C in high dosages in order to make the IVC work even better? The frequency and level of dosing of oral Vitamin C is a critical component of any redox synergy strategy. So, the next phase of our research is what level of oral Vitamin C do cancer patients need to have in order to achieve these results? We do know that if you add Lipoic acid, Vitamin K and Copper, you can possibly induce this hydroxyl radical formation, using just oral strategies along with the IV strategies.

Again, our goal here at The Center is not just to treat cancer, but to take care of cancer patients. Our goal is to give you a level of hope that goes beyond just conventional treatment. It is conventional treatment, plus using innovative nutritional strategies that will protect your white blood cells, protect your immune system, and protect your health, while you are fighting the cancer. While at the meantime improve your overall quality of life.

So, this lecture would not be possible today without the insight and vision and efforts of Dr. Hugh Riordan. This is our contribution thus far.

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