Читать книгу Orthomolecular Medicine for Everyone - Abram Hoffer M.D. Ph.D. - Страница 47

Low-dose vitamin studies are the ones that get negative results. Most vitamin research is low dose. You cannot test the effectiveness of high doses by giving low doses. Any time nutritional research employs inadequately low doses of vitamins, doses that hundreds of orthomolecular physicians have already reported as too small to work, vitamin therapy will be touted as “ineffective.” You can set up any study to fail. One way to ensure failure is to make a meaningless test with the choice to use insufficient quantities of the substance to be investigated. If you shoot beans at a charging rhinoceros, you are not likely to influence the outcome. If you give every homeless person you meet on the street 25 cents, you could easily prove that money will not help poverty.

One reason commonly offered to justify conducting low-dose studies is that high doses of vitamins are somehow dangerous. They are not. There are those who may not believe this next statement, but it is not a matter of belief—it is a matter of fact: there is not even one death per year from vitamin supplements.²³ We call for double-blind, placebo-controlled testing of alleged vitamin side effects. And let the opponents of vitamin therapy cite the double-blind, placebo-controlled studies upon which they have based their toxicity allegations. They can’t, because there aren’t any.

It is ironic that critics of vitamins preferentially cite low-dose studies in an attempt to show lack of vitamin effectiveness, yet they cannot cite any credible studies of high doses that show vitamin dangers. This is because vitamins are effective at high doses, and vitamins are safe at high doses.

Patented drugs have parents—pharmaceutical manufacturers—who promote and defend them. Vitamins are not patentable and so have languished as orphans. The use and promotion of vitamins in high doses has depended on the energy and enthusiasm of physicians who have seen what they do, and patients who have been helped when all else failed.