Читать книгу Orthomolecular Medicine for Everyone - Abram Hoffer M.D. Ph.D. - Страница 39

Dependency is a fact of life. The human body is dependent on food, water, sleep, and oxygen. Additionally, its internal chemistry is absolutely dependent on vitamins. Without adequate vitamin intake, the body will sicken; virtually any prolonged vitamin deficiency is fatal. Surely this constitutes a dependency in the generally accepted sense of the word. Nutrient deficiency of long standing may create an exaggerated need for the missing nutrient, a need not met by dietary intakes or even by low-dose supplementation.

Deficiency diseases occur when individuals with average vitamin requirements live on food deficient in that vitamin. Usually such a diet contains several vitamin and mineral deficiencies. There is a relative deficiency as the diet fails to provide what is required. When the requirements are so high that even a perfect diet cannot provide it, we find exactly the same relative deficiency, but as the problem is the body’s requirements and not in the diet, it is called a dependency. A dependency is also a relative deficiency. In both deficiency and dependency disease, the net result is the same, although the mechanisms are different.

A dependency may be present at birth or may be acquired. Genetic factors are involved, for no pathology can express itself except in the context of chromosomal needs failing to be met by one’s chemical environment. Genetic factors determine the optimum vitamin requirements. Vitamins have to be delivered to the cells, and this requires the transfer of vitamins across several membranes, through certain tissues, and requires the presence of the correct mechanism, of which the vitamin is a part. If a person has an efficient mechanism for absorbing a vitamin, the consumed optimum dose will be less than for a person with a less efficient mechanism. Individuals develop pernicious anemia because they cannot absorb vitamin B₁₂ efficiently. They must be given this vitamin by injection to bypass the gastrointestinal tract.

Vitamin dependencies can also be acquired, following a prolonged period of deficiency of that vitamin, usually due to severe malnutrition combined with stress. Some people even develop a dependency following a few weeks of stress before, during, and after surgery, when combined with severe malnutrition. Modern hospitals are almost unaware of the importance of special nutrition for their patients. I (A. H.) have seen many elderly men and women who dated their fatigue, tension, and depression from such an episode in a hospital. They had been given intravenous fluids but no food for many days. One was not fed for two weeks, and when food was offered, it was junk—colored gelatin and a soft drink. These patients required large doses of several vitamins before they began to recover.

The most striking proof of acquired dependency arose from an “experiment” conducted in World War II, when Allied members of the armed forces were Japanese prisoners of war for several years. The Canadian soldiers suffered from a deficiency of protein, fat, calories, vitamins, and minerals. A combination of serious diseases arising from a deficiency of calories and nutrients, combined with severe psychological stress, produced a clinical syndrome characterized by accelerated aging. These soldiers were made vitamin B₃ dependent and recovered only after they were given large doses of niacin, and they remained well only if they continued to take these large dosages. It is possible they developed multiple nutrient dependencies, but because nearly all these veterans improved so significantly by taking niacin, it is likely their dependency on vitamin B₃ was the main one. One year in captivity aged each prisoner the equivalent of five normal years of aging. That is, a veteran at age sixty, having been a prisoner for four years, would be as old physically and mentally as an eighty-year-old who had not been in these prisons.

Sixty-five years ago, nutritionists observed that a few chronic pellagrins did not recover on the usual low-dose niacin treatment. To their surprise, the patients needed 1,000 mg per day; on a smaller dose, their pellagra symptoms did not go away. They could not explain this discrepancy between theory and observation, but it is now clear that chronic pellagra caused a vitamin B₃ dependency. Experiments with dogs support this conclusion. Dogs given black tongue (canine pellagra) were cured by small doses of B₃ if they were given the vitamin soon after pellagra developed. If black tongue was allowed to remain for one-third of their life span, they required much larger amounts to become well. Thus, the evidence is strong for vitamin B₃, and we have no doubt that other vitamin dependencies are also caused by chronic deficiencies.

In addition, intakes required to prevent dependency disorders are higher than those required to prevent index diseases. The concept of vitamin-dependent disease changes the emphasis from simply dietary manipulation to consideration of the endogenous needs of the organism.¹¹ The differentiation between deficiency and dependency is dose. Every patient who was ever helped by high-dose nutrient therapy lends support to the concept of vitamin dependency. By the same token, symptoms resulting from inappropriate and abrupt termination of large doses of nutrients provide equally good evidence for vitamin dependency. While deprivation of low doses of vitamin C causes scurvy, abrupt termination of high-maintenance doses may cause its own set of problems. Called “rebound scurvy,” this includes classical scorbutic symptoms, as well as a predictable relapse of illness that had already responded to high-dose therapy.

In short, the body only misses what it needs—that is dependency. The destructive consequences of alcohol and other negative drug dependencies are taught in elementary schools. At the same time, the consequences of ignoring our positive nutrient dependencies go largely undiscussed, even in medical journals. Vitamin dependencies induced by genetics, diet, drugs, or illness are most often regarded as medical curiosities. The idea that schizophrenics are dependent on large doses of niacin remains a psychiatric heresy.

This is not a total surprise. It took decades for medical acknowledgment 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.

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.”