Monte Lai - The Vitamin Cure: Clinically Proven Remedies to Prevent and Treat 75 Chronic Diseases and Conditions

MONTE LAI, PhD

www.humanixbooks.com

Humanix Books

The Vitamin Cure

Copyright 2018 by Ching-San Lai

All rights reserved

Humanix Books, P.O. Box 20989, West Palm Beach, FL 33416, USA

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data is available upon request.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any other information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

Interior Design: Scribe Inc.

Humanix Books is a division of Humanix Publishing, LLC. Its trademark, consisting of the word Humanix, is registered in the Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.

Disclaimer: The information presented in this book is not specific medical advice for any individual and should not substitute medical advice from a health professional. If you have (or think you may have) a medical problem, speak to your doctor or a health professional immediately about your risk and possible treatments. Do not engage in any care of treatment without consulting a medical professional.

ISBN: 9781630060954 (Trade Paper)

ISBN: 9781630060961 (E-book)

In memory of Lawrence H. Piette

This book is a culmination of over forty years of my academic and industrial work in which I engaged with an aim to find ways to improve health and wellbeing of the public. My interest in antioxidant vitamins dates back four decades when I was pursuing my Ph.D. degree in biophysics in late professor Lawrence H Piettes lab in Honolulu, Hawaii. Professor Piette who was the pioneer in the field of free radicals in biology and medicine was my mentor and inspiration in science. This book is dedicated to him.

I would like to thank all the people who provided their time and valuable advices when I worked in the pharmaceutical industry in San Diego. It is not possible to mention them all here, Timothy R. Billiar, M.D., Mike Ziegler, M.D, Marv Rosenthal, Ph.D., Chung Y. Hsu, M.D, Ph.D., George Gill, M.D, Fu-Tong Liu, M.D, Ph.D., Ferid Murad, M.D., Ph.D., the late Mitchell Fink, M.D and the late Leonard Arthur Herzenberg, Ph.D.

I also would like to express my appreciation to Ron Epstein, Ph.D. and Larry Wade for reading a part of the manuscript. This book would not be possible without relentless support and love of my son Shawn and my dear friend Hena Hsu. I wholeheartedly appreciate their enthusiasm and encouragement throughout the course of this work.

Poison is in everything, and nothing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy.

Paracelsus (14931541)

Father of Toxicology

In the 1970s, Linus Pauling, a two-time Nobel laureate, recommended large doses of vitamin C to prevent and cure cancers. He himself was taking 8 g of vitamin C daily, and he was fit and healthy well into his 70s. Paulings claim received tremendous media attention; he was frequently in the news. During that time, I was a graduate student pursuing my PhD in biophysics in Honolulu, Hawaii. Paulings media exposure was of particular interest to me because my dissertation investigated free radicals and antioxidants. High-dose vitamin C produces hydrogen peroxide, which kills cancer cells in the body. Recently, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) recommended intravenous high-dose vitamin C injections as a form of cancer therapy for treating certain advanced stages of cancer. Owing to my own research work, I had already become aware of the ways in which antioxidants like vitamin C and vitamin E work to scavenge harmful free radicals (molecules with unpaired electrons) in the body.

I continued my research work in the field of free radicals in biology and medicine after I joined the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee as a faculty member, devoting my research to nitric oxide, a gaseous free radical that is crucial for countless aspects of human health, ranging from the heart to the reproductive organs. In 1995, while taking a sabbatical leave, I decided to resign from my position as a full professor of biophysics at the medical school and serve as president and CEO of a new pharmaceutical company, focusing on the design and development of new drugs, in San Diego. Over the past two decades, I have acquired extensive knowledge in the pharmaceutical field by being at the forefront of the research on the pros and cons of therapeutic drugs in treating diseases and conditions.

Diseases and conditions can be divided into categories of acute and chronic. Modern medicine has done much in the field of acute conditionssuch as trauma, infections, burns, bone fractures, or migraine attacksbut it has had limited success in treating chronic diseases like Alzheimers, Parkinsons, or diabetes, among others. Therapeutic drugs for chronic diseases are largely designed to treat symptoms rather than causes.

Take type 2 diabetes as an example: Most diabetes drugs can lower blood glucose. But high blood glucose is a symptom, not a cause, of type 2 diabetes. Compare this to how a fever is a symptom rather than the cause of an infectionbacteria or viruses are the causes. Antipyretic agents that prevent or reduce fever, such as naproxen or acetaminophen, may control the fever, but they cannot eradicate the pathogen that causes the infectionthe agents treat only the feverish symptom, not the causative pathogen. Likewise, diabetes drugs treat only the symptom of high blood glucose, not the cause of type 2 diabetes.

At present, the root causes of most chronic diseases are still elusive. Both genetic and environmental factors are known to play pivotal roles in etiologies of chronic diseases. Chronic diseases are often related to gene mutations. A single gene mutation rarely causes chronic disease; although people who carry a hereditary mutated gene may be at an elevated risk, it does not mean that they will inevitably suffer from the disease. Environmental factors are known to affect epigenetics (how our genes interact with the environment) as well as trigger the expression of predisposed hereditary genes. A nutrient-deficient diet and an unhealthy lifestyle are by far the two most important environmental factors associated with the causes of a host of chronic diseases. Conversely, a nutrient-rich diet and a healthy lifestyle can stave off chronic diseases.

You may have browsed through the internet or read a newspaper and found an article claiming that vitamins are effective in treating diseases. Yet several months later, you may have seen another news report make the opposite claim, suggesting that vitamins are not only useless but also possibly harmful to health. You might not know what to believe anymore. I am certain many people feel this way. Nowadays, information is readily available on the internet. With just a few keystrokes, you can find ample health-related data about vitamins and essential elements. Nevertheless, it is difficult to sort through all the available findings to build a reliable knowledge base that will improve your health and that of your loved ones. The aim of this book is to provide you with easily accessible, evidence-based knowledge about vitamins and essential elements for the prevention and treatment of chronic diseases.

Before you dive into the contents of the book, you need to know how clinical data are generated. First, several kinds of clinical studies exist. Let us start with the simplest one. A doctor prescribes vitamins to treat a patient suffering from a disease, and after taking vitamins for a few months, the patient recovers from the illness. The doctor publishes his findings in a scientific journal. This is called a case study. If the doctor prescribes vitamins to a group of patients rather than a single patient and publishes his findings in a scientific journal, that is called an observational study. On the other hand, if the same doctor publishes the findings of a study in which he divides his patients into two groups, in which one group receives vitamins and the other group receives a placebo, and neither the doctor nor the patients know who is taking vitamins and who is taking the placebo, that is called a randomized controlled trial.