Recently Science carried a report concerning the action of vitamin C in vitro on fatty acids which led to the production of DNA damaging compounds. The lead author emphasized that this did not mean that vitamin C causes cancer and this was reported by Paul Recer, the Associated Press Science writer, and also by Reuters. I have not read this Science report nor do I intend to do so since I have no argument with the author’s only important conclusion which is that his study had no relevance to whether vitamin C causes cancer. I am interested in how the press perceived and reported it and how it was used by critics to condemn the use of vitamin C and to come back to the ancient and long discredited idea that one can get enough vitamin C by a well balanced diet, whatever that is. This idea probably was current when our scientists were still swinging in the trees and spending the major part of the day chewing leafy green vegetation, when we might have consumed 3 to 4 grams daily. I defy any human today to get this amount of vitamin C from any modern diet without using vitamin C supplements.

It is amazing how few people get even the ridiculously low RDAs recommended for vitamin C. As I expected, the press almost ignored the only correct statement which was that this study was not relevant to human clinical studies since it was done in the laboratory, in the test tube, under conditions that do not exist in living tissue and from which one can draw no conclusions that have anything to do with real life. It would be just as appropriate to conclude that since oils will burn in vitro to yield heat and light that therefore no fatty acids and fatty foods can ever be consumed. I am not surprised by this report and the press reaction because it is a rehash of a similar report that appeared nearly 30 years ago. The only difference was in the public perception of the original report and the present one. With the original report there were very few competent scientists, except like Linus Pauling, willing to stand up and criticize that badly flawed piece of research. With this report you will find many comments on the internet from workers in the field who really examined this present report and accepted it for what it could mean, ie. very little to us, those of us who wish to be healthier rather than to be a milligram away from chronic scurvy. If we accepted the conclusions drawn by the press from that Science report, it would appear that the optimum amount of vitamin C would be close to zero, ie. in the scorbutic range, because then there would be the least amount of fatty acid oxidized derivatives.

In 1976, in this journal, Irvine Stone and I¹ criticized a report out of Vancouver released by scientists who had cooked vitamin C with copper, a very powerful oxidizing agent and then placed these oxidized products on cell cultures in the test tube; The cell’s DNA showed breaks. Their reported suggested that vitamin C might cause cancer. This was promptly picked up by the New York Times with huge flaming headlines and was carried around the world. After that I received many calls from my patients very worried that the vitamin C they were taking might create cancer. In the present case, as with the earlier one, both of the reports were carried in almost all the media. They carried the authors’ statement that this study was not relevant. But they then began to use their poetic license to draw all sorts of grim negative conclusions. The Science reporters are only partially to blame since they followed the implied conclusions from the original paper and by talking to critics. These were written into the report by the lead author who declaimed that his work was not relevant to vitamin C and cancer. Thus he said people can get all the vitamin C they need through a balanced diet (my comment, “If you are content to be minimally healthy and close to scurvy, especially under any unusual stress”). He also said “There is a paucity of evidence that vitamin C supplements are really good for you (my comments - “where has he been living for the past thirty years?”) Thus he is quoted as telling the Philadephia Inquirer Staff Writer, Faye Flam. “ There isn’t a single study to show that vitamin C does anything to reduce cancer risk.” This statement is not true as any cursory examination of the internet will show. The lead author, by sending this mixed message, called a double bind, can never ever be wrong for he presents two contradictory claims (1) That this study is not relevant and (2) It is relevant since he draws conclusions from it that are not warranted.

As I expected, the critics found this study very helpful. For example Dr Arthur Grollman concluded that vitamin C could contribute to DNA damage that could cause cancer. Grollman is an expert in cancer: “It just adds more evidence that there could be a significant risk to ascorbic acid.” I enjoy these meaningless statements because exactly the same statement can be made by changing the words “vitamin C” to “water” or “food.” It would probably be more accurate if the word were food.

I began to use megadoses of vitamin C in 1952 for treating schizophrenia patients. The first patient was admitted after she became psychotic following a mastectomy. The lesions became ulcerated and she became psychotic. Her psychiatrist booked her for electroconvulsive therapy, the only treatment then used, I persuaded him to postpone it so I could try vitamin C but he only gave me a weekend. I had planned to give her 1 gram three times daily. I therefore ordered she be given one gram every hour, day and night. She was started on Saturday morning and on Monday morning, 48 hours later, she was mentally normal and the ECT was cancelled. Her lesions had started to heal. She was discharged and died six months later but still mentally normal. She was not given follow up vitamin C because I did not have any idea that it might be helpful. Gradually I used more and more vitamin C and within a few years almost every one of my patients was advised to take 1 to 3 grams of vitamin C daily as part of their treatment protocol. During the past 45 years of practice I must have given vitamin C to over 10,000 patients. Perhaps about 5,000 were schizophrenic. When I became interested in the studies of Cameron and Pauling and used vitamin C in large doses I eventually discovered that very few of my schizophrenia patients, now about 1,200 seen since 1976, developed cancer.

There are a few studies which suggest that cancer is less frequent in schizophrenia patients. I have seen 10 who were schizophrenic and developed cancer. But on treatment they all recovered and are well. I have not seen a single schizophrenic patient die from cancer. The relationship is not as strong with their first order relatives, their families. From 300 families with schizophrenia very few had cancer and many were psychotic. From 300 families with cancer few had schizophrenia and many suffered from cancer. Just published is a report by Lichtermann et al² who found from a very large cohort study of nearly 27,000 schizophrenic patients treated between 1940 and 1969 and their first order relatives that the risk of schizophrenia was increased in their patients treated in hospital which they ascribed to the smoking but the risk was decreased in their relatives compared to the population at large. They concluded, “Although specific lifestyle factors, particularly tobacco smoking and alcohol consumption, probably account for the increased cancer risk in patients with schizophrenia, the decreased risk in relatives would be compatible with a postulated genetic risk factor for schizophrenia offering selective advantage to unaffected relatives.” A previous study in a New York Mental hospital showed that schizophrenic patients given vitamin C had a decreased incidence of lung cancer, even though they were heavy smokers.³ It is possible that this significant difference is due to one or all of the following factors (1) the presence or absence of schizophrenia. Our adrenochrome hypothesis predicted this would happen since adrenochrome is a potent antimitotic agent and an hallucinogen. A gene has been recently discovered missing in schizophrenia which helps the body eliminate adrenochrome.(2) The fact that almost all of them were given vitamin C which they took for many months or years. (3) The fact that seeing me gave them hope and by some placebo effect was the positive factor. However I consider the last one the least likely since it has now become clear that the whole concept of the placebo was based upon a faulty biased study in the early fifties.⁴ If vitamin C increased the tendency to become cancerous then one would have to assume that the schizophrenic factor was overwhelmingly powerful. It follows that if you do not want to get cancer, become schizophrenic, and come to me for treatment. Better still would be for you to start taking optimum amounts of vitamin C and then to become schizophrenic. It is clear that I have no sympathy for the nay sayers who continue to hypothesize that vitamin C may cause cancer. You will note that they are very careful not to say that it will cause cancer, I challenge them to provide the kind of proof they demand from orthomolecular physicians, that vitamin C has ever caused cancer in even one patient. By now you realize I am biased in favor of the enormous therapeutic value of vitamin C because Ihave seen what it has done to my patients over the past 45 years. To show that my bias is shared by other scientists, clinicians and observers I asked a few to let me have their views on the current Science report for publication in this editorial. They are biased, based upon observations and not trammeled by adherence to any creed, guild, drug company, university medical school or school of thought. We all freely admit our biases. I also challenge the critics of the use of megadoses of vitamin C to provide us with their biases.

Robert Cathcart, MD

Dr. Robert Cathcart has been using megadoses of vitamin C for over 30 years and probably has single handedly placed more patients on vitamin C than any other physician in the world. He first observed that the ability to tolerate large amounts depended upon the need. In other words, the sicker a person is the more vitamin he can take without experiencing bowel intolerance characterized by gas and loose stools.

“In regard to the Science report saying that vitamin C might cause cancer, I find this ridiculous. With approximately 25,000 patients I have put on large doses of vitamin C since 1969, you would expect a massive epidemic of cancer. If anything, I think I see less cancer than expected. My greatest interest now is the finding by Hugh Riordan, M.D. that many cancers can be cured by daily intravenous ascorbate in doses from 60 to 120 grams going in at the rate of 1 g per minute. His hypothesis is that these high levels of ascorbate cause the formation of peroxide in all the cells and that since cancer cells do not contain catalase as do normal cells, the peroxide selectively kills the cancer cells. All of these scare stories about vitamin C keep the public from acknowledging the therapeutic effects of massive doses of ascorbate. As Mark Levine points out there is a kidney threshold for oral ascorbate that causes the excretion of almost all of moderate doses of ascorbate, so that blood levels, level out for a time as doses are increased. It is obvious however, that with even higher doses, we can ingest ascorbate faster than the kidneys can excrete it. This will obviously raise the serum levels. These are the levels that those of us who advocate bowel tolerance levels of ascorbic acid and massive intravenous doses of sodium ascorbate achieve. When one takes ascorbic acid in low doses