Vitamin C Helps Cancer Treatment

Scott: Doctor, you mentioned that you will practice chelation on cancer patients.  Can you talk about some of the results that you see?  And I'm assuming that's not the only therapy that's provided either so, but can you just talk about the results?

Dr. Murray Susser:  Well I think that cancer... that chelation is much better for preventing cancer than for treating it.  As I've said, people seem to do better in many ways when they're taking chelation.  But for dealing with cancer, with intravenous treatments, I like vitamin C.  I like oxidative therapies.  But vitamin C, in very large doses, has a pretty good track record for treating cancer.  

Linus Pauling... remember Linus Pauling?  Linus... with two Nobel Prizes, wrote some of the greatest stuff on vitamin C.  He did a study with Ewen Cameron in Scotland, many years ago.  And Scotland, part of the UK, United Kingdom.  They had socialized medicine and they did not use chemotherapy on solid tumors.  They said it did no good and was just an expensive damage to the patient.  And Cameron and Pauling decided from various reports that they figured out, that if they gave 10 thousand milligrams of vitamin C a day, orally, to these cancer patients, they could get a 30% increase in longevity.  Well, if someone has two months to live or three months to live, a 30% increase in longevity is not earth shaking.  So you live another month... and... with cancer.  That wasn't the important part of the study.  What they found...they carried on the study for eight years, and what they found is that about 8 percent of the people in the study were alive after 8 years.  And they had been given, you know, a few months to live.  So to me, that's very powerful evidence for vitamin C.

Not only that, there's a doctor Hugh Riordon, who unfortunately's dead now.  But he did great work in Kansas.  He figured out the threshold dose of vitamin C, by measuring vitamin C levels in the blood after giving a huge dose intravenously.  And he would give 50 thousand milligrams, 60 thousand, 70 thousand milligrams of vitamin C.  And he got tremendous results with patients with cancer.  And he gave it fast so that he would achieve a blood level about 100 times higher than you could get with oral vitamin C, because you can't absorb it quickly enough.  The maximum blood level you can generally get with oral vitamin C is about 4 milligram percent.  With intravenous vitamin C, given rapidly, you can get about 400 milligram percent.  And he found... he had his own lab in his office, so he could measure right there, the vitamin C levels.  And he found that by getting the vitamin C up to 400 milligram percent, he could have tremendous affect on controlling cancer growth.  And vitamin C, even at that level, is virtually harmless, in most cases.  There are exceptions to it, if you have a certain kind of metabolic quirk like a G6PD hydrogenase deficiency.  You don't have to remember that.  

Scott: OK, good!  Well in talking about vitamin C, when you hear about results like that, and we've heard lots of instances, do we know enough about how it works?  What is it doing?

Susser: One of the... yeah.  We don't know everything, by any means.  But we know that vitamin C, when gets in the cancer cell, in high concentration, it turns to hydrogen peroxide  And hydrogen peroxide kills invaders.  Now hydrogen peroxide... most people don't realize, I don't even think most doctors realize that vitamin C taken... not vitamin C, 20 percent of the oxygen we breathe becomes hydrogen peroxide at some point in our metabolism.  Did you ever hear that before?

Scott:  I have not. 

Susser:  I think that's an important part... 20 per... so in the metabolic process, oxygen goes through a lot of stages.  And one of the stages is hydrogen peroxide.  That means you've taken H2O, water, two hydrogens with one oxygen, and you've made it into H2O2.  So you've given an extra oxygen atom.   This extra oxygen atom has a minus charge to it, so it's actually a free radical.  Now the free radicals are usually bad guys.  But this is a free radical that's mostly a bad guy for invaders.  So the white cell takes this manipulation, this metabolic manipulation and it takes the H2O2 minus, splits off the minus oxygen and kills bacteria and kills cancer cells.  That's one of the theories and there's a fair amount of evidence to support that.