Transcription
[Music] It's a real pleasure to be here today. I've been speaking on natural health for 36 years, and I want to take you back in time to when I was first starting out, and I spoke to some very elderly folks at a society luncheon. Oh, there maybe a hundred or so. And everyone was having their very nice dinner, and it was very posh. And then they introduce the health guy. Now, normally, you get this talk after lunch. You get it before lunch. So, what I talk on is about how to improve your health with natural methods, vitamins for instance, and other stuff like that. So, I'm talking to a bunch of fairly elderly people, and I'm wondering, is this message getting through? How am I doing? And you look for feedback, don't you? When you talk to folks. And all through the talk, I'm getting more and more eye contact. And pretty soon, people are they're either getting up for some other reason, or they're they're getting ready to come up and and talk to me afterward. So, I finished the talk. I'm up there on the stage. I have the podium. I have my notes. I finished the talk, and the grannies stormed the stage from both directions. They surrounded me. They stole my lecture notes. Now, I'm told you won't do that, but this is how interesting this message is to all ages. Talking about, for instance, vitamins. Can you use high doses of vitamins safely and effectively? The answer is yes. Let's take a look at this film clip.
In the last hundred years, we went from not having any vitamin supplements to having them over the counter and readily available. And yet, most people don't know how important vitamins really are. And if they take large enough doses, they can use them to prevent illness. And if they take large enough doses, they can use them to treat illness. Once again, how can that be? I didn't hear it on the news. In fact, on the news, it said you shouldn't take too many of those vitamins, you know, not might not be a good idea. And yet, they don't provide any evidence of that. They just say it. Doctors say, "I don't believe in vitamins." Well, we're not going to um a shaman. We're we're supposed to be going to a scientist here. It's not about belief. It's about facts. Over the last 23 years, according to the American Association of Poison Control Centers, there have been 10 a total of 10 deaths alleged to be caused by vitamins. That's 10 in 23 years. That's less than half a death per year. And these are unproven, unverified, but they are attributed to vitamin consumption. We have a nation where the very thing that will help people is being presented as actually dangerous. There have been studies that purport to show that if you take an extra multivitamin every day, that it's going to hurt you. And that's just nonsense. There are studies that purport to say that vitamin C will cause a kidney stone. Well, I've searched the medical literature and I've asked all my students to search the medical literature and my colleagues to search it, and as soon as they find scientific evidence of a vitamin C caused kidney stone, send me the paper. Send me the reference. It's been 30 years, and I've never gotten one. Now, either everybody's dumb, or it's a myth. There's an assumption that vitamins are basically like drugs and should be regulated like drugs. There's an assumption that if it's therapeutically valuable, it must be dangerous because drugs are. So, we have been taught our whole lives to be consumers, mostly consumers of modern medicine, which is pharmaceutical medicine.
So, how well does this work? I raised my kids all the way into college, and they never had any antibiotics. Not one dose, not ever. [Applause] Even more interesting. We never met our doctors. The children never met their pediatricians. You know how you're in a group practice and there's several doctors and they come and go. You get a card saying Dr. Smith's retiring and Dr. Joan is Dr. James, whoever is new. When we'd get these cards every few years, and we never met them. Now, natural healing is not about avoiding doctors. It's about not needing them. It's a big difference. If we needed them, we would have gone. We loved our children. We would go, but we found a way to not need them. And that was by using high doses of vitamins, even with little kids. Now, I'd like to mention at the outset, I have no financial connection with the supplement industry. I have no connection with the natural products industry at all. I try to maintain that. I think it's important because I think you and I would prefer it that way. That way, we can speak to what really works. And I'm not a physician. My background is in education. I was premed in college, and then I became a dairyman, then a teacher, then a prison teacher. No, not as an inmate. Then a college instructor for five, nine years with the State University of New York. But teaching is hard work. So, I took Mark Twain's advice. He said, "I hired a home and gave a lecture. I have not done an honest day's work since." And further following Mr. Twain's advice, I wrote books. One is called Doctor Yourself, and the other is impolitely entitled Fire Your Doctor. Now, Fire Your Doctor is a title that came out of my own experience. I fired my first doctor when I was a teenager. I was in college, a freshman, and I'd really been getting into the whole college thing, you know, away from home the first semester, you know, getting into all the activities, and I managed to get on the honor roll, and I was in all the clubs, and I was going out and having fun, and I got anxiety, real stress syndrome, so much that I went over to the infirmary and talked to the doctor. And the doctor, after what could only be described as an extremely brief consultation, gave me a little white envelope with some capsules in it, and it said, "Take two." So, I took two in the water fountain. This is before dinner, so my stomach was empty. And by the time I got to the dining hall to meet my friend for dinner, I was higher than a kite. Now, he had given me horse tranquilizers or something, and the fact is they worked. I mean, I didn't have any anxiety at all. You know, I said, what I I flushed them down the toilet because I knew even then this this can't be right. I mean, this is not the solution to my anxiety for me to just be kind of ah for the rest of my life. So, I started looking into maybe going to medical school, and I went to see surgical procedures at local hospitals. Now, my very first time in the operating theater, and this is exactly how it happened. My children accused me of the occasional exaggeration. Well, they may be right, but this time, this is on the level. I was there bright and early, and they gowned me up, and I had the mask on and scrubbed and the gloves and everything. And I'm in there. I was in the theater before the nurses even came in. So, the nurses come in one after another, and then they bring in the patient, who's a woman about 80, and she was in for a breast biopsy. So, they wheel her in, and I'm the only gowned, masked non-nurse in the theater. So, she looks up at me and says, "You're not the doctor, are you?" And I said, "No, ma'am. I'm not." And she closed her eyes and said, "Oh, good." I brought relief on my very first day. By the way, the benign tumor was not a problem. They removed it. She was all set. Things happen. Time goes by. Had a family. And that's when it really struck home. It wasn't academic anymore. No, I didn't go to medical school. No, I didn't pursue the conventional education. I started becoming a bit of a rebel, which now you can say is an activist for many years. That's just a a rebel, I suppose. That's 36 years into the biz. I got my first college teaching job in two New York State penitentiaries. One was a woman's prison, the other was a men's prison. It was a men's medium and a woman's max. These are serious voices. I want to tell you about this nutrition course that I taught there. I was talking to the inmates about maybe if you ate better, it would make you healthier. I said, "Can you get vitamin supplements?" And they just kind of laughed. And they said, "Can you get good food?" And they said, "No, the food's awful. It's starch and meat and and sugar." I said, "Well, can you get anything? Do they give you any vitamins?" And they laughed again. And one fell said, "Well, you can buy vitamins at the PX at the prison shop. You can get a multivitamin." I said, "Well, look, why don't you try taking a multivitamin twice a day and stop eating sugar and can you get wheat germ?" And they said, "Yes, they sell wheat germ." I said, "Okay, good. Get wheat germ. Put that on your food." Now, this was the advice I gave. One day after class, this really big inmate stopped to talk to me. I mean, this guy, he was just tall and wide. He had to turn sideways to go through the door. This was a big big man. So, he comes up and says, "Um, can I talk to you for a minute?" And I said, "Yes." And he said, "I just want to tell you I've been doing that nutrition stuff you said. I've been not eating sugar, and I've been taking a multivitamin twice a day, and I've been putting wheat germ on my food." And I said, "Yes." And he looked down at me and said, "I just want you to know I feel more clear." And then he turned and left the room. I wonder what the long-term consequences to society would be if we could get more inmates feeling more clear. Now, this is a minimal adjustment. This is just not eating sugar, putting some wheat germ on your food, and taking two cheap multivitamins that literally cost two cents a piece at any discount store. What happens if you increase the dose? What about people that have actual diagnosed chronic serious illnesses that are not responding to medication? Let's take a look at another film clip.
I worked with a lady once who was suicidally depressed. She lived at home with her family. She was in her 50s, and she spent all day sitting in a corner, face to the corner. She wouldn't talk to anyone. She wouldn't eat with anyone. She was totally uncommunicative. She was under the care of a psychiatrist, of course, as she should be. And the psychiatrist had her on a variety of medications, which you would expect. The family was wondering about nutrition. And I mentioned to them about Dr. Hoffer's work with niacin, and they wondered how much he needed to take. This person was very seriously ill. And I mentioned that Dr. Hoffer normally gave about 3,000 mg a day of niacin, but some people need a lot more, especially very sick people, and they should give her as much as it takes to make her better. Well, they figured they could do that. So, at 11,500 mg of niacin a day, she was sitting at the table and talking to them like nothing had happened. So, they went to the psychiatrist, showed the psychiatrist this recovered person, and the psychiatrist said, "Well, I don't think you should take all that niacin. It might be harmful." So, they stopped giving her the niacin, and she was back in the corner. Safety with niacin. There's not one death from niacin per year on average. There have been one or two attributed over the last 15 or 20 years, but there's not even one death per year from niacin. And how many people that are suicidally depressed actually go and end their lives? [Music] [Laughter] [Music] If you recommend high doses of niacin to your clients, it is important that you understand that most people when they take a lot of vitamin B3 or niacin will have a flush. Now, if you've ever had a hot flash or a sunburn, you know what that feels like. So, you don't want to just say to everybody, "Oh, take 11,500 milligrams of niacin if you're depressed." This is a special case, and I want to really emphasize that. But I can tell you that the Dr. Hoffer I refer to, Dr. Abram Hoffer, a Canadian psychiatrist, practiced for 55 years and treated countless thousands of patients with mental illness with niacin. His normal prescription dose was 3,000 milligrams a day. That's 1,000 milligrams breakfast, lunch, dinner. You divide the dose for better absorption and to reduce the flushing. You take it with a meal also to reduce the flushing. But even a thousand milligrams, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for many people will still cause a flush. The flush itself is harmless. It's just a vasodilation. It's completely harmless, but it's kind of annoying. If you want to avoid the flush, there's two ways you can do it. One is keep taking the niacin. It'll stop in a couple of weeks. The other way is you can get no-flush niacin. Sorry about the name, but it's called inositol hexaniacinate or no-flush niacin. The other type of niacin that's put in most multivitamins that also does not cause a flush is called niacinamide. All of them are niacin. All of them are vitamin B3. You don't have to have the flush to have the results. I worked with a fellow, we'll call him Jim. He was 21 years old, and he was insane. He was so insane that he had been thrown out of the New York State Hospital for being too violent. Just let that sit for a minute. Think about it. They sent him home. His parents, of course, lived in abject terror of what this 21-year-old psychotic young man would do. He slept one hour a night, and he wandered the streets of the city, the other seven, and he punched holes in the living room wall and did other things which scared his parents. On a good day, we were all able to get together and talk. And I mentioned Dr. Abram Hoffer's protocol using niacin about 3,000 mgs a day, and also Linus Pauling's contribution to this, which was to take about 10,000 mg a day of vitamin C. Again, you divide the dose. Jim agreed to do it, and did. The first night he slept 18 hours. After that, he slept seven hours a night like clockwork. The following Friday, his father gave me a call. He said, "I can't believe it." I said, "You can't believe what?" I thought it was maybe the fact he was sleeping better. He said, "No, this morning Jim came down to the breakfast table and said, 'Hi, Dad.' He hadn't done that in a long time." This is niacin, vitamin B3.
What about vitamin C? You hear a lot about that. First thing I want to mention is vitamin C does not cause kidney stones. It just doesn't. As a matter of fact, in 1946, Dr. William J. McCormack of Toronto, Canada, showed that vitamin C actually prevents kidney stones. And not only that, it actually dissolves kidney stones. Now, there are five kinds of kidney stones. And without going into details, I can tell you that vitamin C either prevents them or dissolves them. Does that mean some people that take vitamin C get a kidney stone? Sure. A lot of people who don't take it get a kidney stone. If you want to learn more about this, I want to remind you that I have a website called doctoryourself.com. And at doctoryourself, we have hundreds of papers and thousands of references. And for those who are familiar with science, I want to mention to you that the website is peer-reviewed. We have over a dozen researchers and medical doctors who actually look the website over for accuracy. But these are the researchers and medical doctors that use vitamins. They're called orthomolecular. Orthomolecular means basically nutritional medicine. Here's an example of what vitamin C can do. A young woman, oh, I would say she was about 25, was allergic to everything. Now, they may have more than 72 tests now, but when she had her allergies tested, they put 72 needle pricks into her arms and back. And then the idea is to see what the skin reacts to. She reacted to all 72. She asked me if nutrition might help this. And I gave the usual answer, which is, well, I'm not sure, but if you haven't tried it, it might be worth trying some extra vitamin C because vitamin C is an antihistamine. So, she did. She started taking about 18,000 milligrams of vitamin C a day, and within a month, she was allergic to nothing. That surprised me. But here's one that surprised me even more. Are you familiar with bee sting allergies? Very serious, aren't they? Well, I had a friend of mine had a family, and for some reason, they all came down with scarlet fever. So, we were talking, and I mentioned that vitamin C is not only an antihistamine, but it's also an antiviral and an antibiotic and it's an antipyretic. That means it lowers temperature. This is good. Antiviral, lowers fever, antihistamine, antitoxin, antibiotic. You see the problem? It's too good. It's too good for too much stuff. It sounds kind of quacky, doesn't it? That can't be right. It's counterintuitive. And if this were any good, how come your doctor isn't doing it with you? And for 36 years, I've been telling people the reason for that is they go to medical school, they study medicines, the school's funded by the pharmaceutical industry, they get a medical doctor degree, and they practice medicine. Well, what's your surprise? To try to get vitamin therapy from most doctors is sort of like trying to get chia in a French restaurant. So, back to Tim. Tim started taking lots of vitamin C, and he gave it to his family. They recovered very quickly from scarlet fever. And a few weeks later, Tim said, "Oh, and by the way, I have a bee sting allergy." Now, I didn't know that. And he said, "Oh, by the way, I was stung by a bee a couple weeks ago. I didn't know that either." And he said, what I did was I took a lot of vitamin C. He took 25,000 milligrams of vitamin C in the first hour. By the end of the day, he had taken 100,000 milligrams of vitamin C. He didn't need his medication. He never had the constriction and dangerous lack of breath that can go along with this type of problem. And he did it using the vitamin. Now, I don't suggest that people do that kind of thing. But I do suggest that if you have allergies and you start taking more vitamin C, why not ask your doctor for a gradually decreasing dose of your medication? There's nothing unreasonable about that. It's called the therapeutic trial. Most doctors will do it. And if your doctor won't, refer to the title of my second book. Here's another one for you. I said it's an antiviral. How good an antiviral? Viruses are everywhere. Common cold is viral. Influenza is viral. Bird flu, swine flu, all those different flu, they're all viral. There's some people who think that the black death might have been possibly viral, not just bacterial. A lot of problems are viral. Polio is viral. Pneumonia is usually viral. Back a few years ago, I'll tell you how many. There was a physician named Dr. Frederick Robert Cler, practiced in North Carolina. Duke University Medical School graduate, board-certified chest specialist. He treated viral pneumonia with massive doses of vitamin C, which he usually gave by injection. He could cure viral pneumonia in 72 hours with vitamin C in massive doses. He published in medical journals over 20 times, and this was back in the late 1940s. Another example, there was a doctor named William Kaufman. He used niacinamide. Remember niacin B3? He used the no-flush form, niacinamide, to treat arthritis and got clinical success with 2 to 5,000 milligrams a day. You know when he did that? Before Hitler invaded Poland in 1937. Klaus Yoncot, professor of biochemistry at Columbia University, showed that vitamin C kills polio viruses in 1935. We're not just making this up. There's a track record of high-dose nutritional research that literally goes back 75 years. And once you tap into it and use it with your own family, you realize what you have learned. And this is why for me, having children was what taught me to become self-reliant. I mean, they put the baby arms and say, "Here, Dad." I was 22 when my son was born. Now, that's not super duper young, but it's young enough. And I had another one at 24. Well, I had some help from my wife. It's a cool room. I I enjoy talking to you. I'm going to see how cool it is. Coming down. This is true. I went through airport security. You know about airport security. And they usually do various different things. Stand this way. Come over here. Take these off. Think. Do this. For the first time ever, I had something that happened to me that I thought you might have a professional interest in. I had my hair patted down. Has anyone had their hair patted down? Come on. All right. Okay. There's like four of us. And it's mine, too. It's It's not like it's a rug. [Applause] All right. Now, we're talking about viral pneumonia, and I just mentioned the P word, polio. Connor reported 47 cases of people he cured with vitamin C that had polio. And he actually talked about that at a medical society meeting, and they ignored him. Let's push the envelope. Let's talk about the most feared virus on the planet. And that's AIDS, isn't it? HIV. Now, there's a lot we don't know about HIV. There's a lot we don't know about AIDS. And if there were a cure, you would have heard about it. But here's something that's interesting. There was research research done at Harvard published in the New England Journal of Medicine that showed that people with AIDS that take vitamin supplements have a 27% reduced death rate than those who don't. How many people heard that on the news? Yeah. You see, and I've never talked to a doctor, a dentist, a nurse, or a faculty member at a college that ever heard of that study. And it was done at Harvard and published in one of the finest journals on the planet because it's about vitamins doing it right. Imagine a 27% decrease in deaths. What would that mean year after year? What would that mean in Africa? What would that mean? And what would it cost to try it? Now, you ready for this study at John's Hopkins? They found the same thing. People that were HIV positive that took vitamin supplements had only half the increase, half the incidence of full-blown AIDS. So, only half as many HIV positive people developed full-blown AIDS, and they took vitamins. Now, you ready for the doses? You're bracing yourself, aren't you? Oh my gosh, he's going to talk about really big doses again. They took about uh five times the RDA. That's three Centrums. That's three chalks. That's three gummy bear Flintstones. And that's half as many full-blown AIDS cases as John Hopkins. You've heard of John's Hopkins, haven't you? These are very, very important studies that have been all but ignored. Well, no longer, because people like you and I are going to tell other people that the research is there, and we've posted it at doctoryourself.com, and I talk about this in my books, and we have the references to back it up. You can take this as far as you want. Here's an actual case history. 25 years ago, I worked with a woman who had everything wrong with her life. First of all, she was HIV positive, and she was an alcoholic, and her personal life was a mess, and she was just unhealthy. She did not eat well, and had psychological problems and other things as well. I suggested to her that she should improve her diet and take lots of vitamins, and she thought that was a good idea and to some extent did it. She still maintained drinking off and on. I'm sorry to say there's not a sure cure for everything, is there? She still had trouble in her life, but by golly, she took a lot of vitamins, and she took a lot of vitamin C. In the last few years, she has been retested, and they cannot find HIV in her body. And you know what they're saying now? She never had it. Oh yes, she did. She went to so many doctors and had so many treatments and so much confirmation. There is no question she had HIV. And you know, she still might. I'm not discounting the seriousness in the matter. All I'm saying is something good is happening when they can't find it. So, when we talk viruses, think about it. How far can we go with this? How far can we go with it? Little baby.
This last year, I became a grandfather for the first time. Oh man, is that fun. [Applause] Baby gets vitamin C a lot. My children were raised on vitamin C and vegetable juicing and a mostly but not quite plant-based diet. I used to take them along with me to lectures. It's always a lot of fun. Take your kids when you do a lecture. And afterwards, people come up and they go right to the children. Do you really take all that vitamin C? Do you really drink carrot juice? And they say, yes. You really never got vaccinations. That was true, too. So, when we talk activists, we're also talking avant-garde. There are many things to know about this, but one thing we do know, whether you get children immunized or not, it turns out if you give them vitamins, they have fewer side effects from the immunization. And if you give them vitamins, the shots actually provide better protection. It's a win-win. You can't go wrong with nutrition. Good nutrition never hurt anyone, but good nutrition is appropriate, and that means higher doses than you ever imagined. How high? Imagine a 21-pound baby. Approximately 11 months old, maybe a year. A friend of mine who was a health professional himself came to see me and said, "The baby has been sick for a week. Nobody's getting any sleep. Runny nose, coughing, high fever, fretful, flush skin, all kinds of problems. The child had been sick really most of its first year of life. It had been on 11 courses of antibiotics in 11 months." Now, common sense tells us that's not a good idea, and any doctor or nurse will confirm that. 11 courses of antibiotics into a child, not even a year old. And of course, the child was still sick. There's an old saying, if the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. The use of antibiotics is getting to the point now where it's actually causing diseases. In prisons again, where I can tell you with some confidence, disease-resistant strains of bacteria are a serious matter. Tuberculosis, for instance. Now, unless you shoot them all, sooner or later, these prisoners are going to come back to your community. So, it's in our interest, everyone's interest, to make sure we solve what's really wrong. And double bumping them and putting 90 into a cabin designed for 45 is not going to exactly slow down the spread of TB either. Even the state of New York, if you ask them, will admit that 20% of their inmates are positive for TB. And the captain of the guards at the women's prison I worked at said 50% of the women there were HIV positive. It's more like a hospital than a jail. Cancer. What could be more frightening than that? This statistic. That's what a peer-reviewed scientific study showed that the actual benefit from chemotherapy in the United States of America to the five-year survival of a cancer patient is only 2.1%. Chemotherapy is 97.9% ineffective. I know a few oncologists. No wonder they're depressed. I did graduate work at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, inner-city Boston. It's right next to Harvard Medical School. I was there because I was an observer and a counseling trainee, and I used to see some pretty sick people. And this one young woman was particularly memorable. She was dying of leukemia. The hospital fed her literally canned soup, white bread, and Jell-O. That's not enough. That's not good nutrition. She died. I remember seeing her husband. He was in his early 30s. He was just sitting in the hallway with his head in his hands, a medical book open in front of him, trying to figure out what happened. Here's good news. The National Institutes of Health has actually funded studies that have shown that high-dose vitamin C given intravenously is selectively toxic to cancer cells. That means vitamin C in really high doses given intravenously kills cancer cells without hurting normal cells. Now, this is really, really important. And the amount of vitamin C used is between 35 and 100,000 milligrams of vitamin C given intravenously, usually every second or third day for a week or two, followed by oral doses, high oral doses for a long time afterwards. How well does it work? A woman called me up from New England. Her mother was dying of pancreatic and colon cancer. That's a rotten combination. The mother didn't want to eat. She had no energy. She was depressed. You certainly understand that. The mother had given up, but the daughter didn't. The daughter said, "What about an IV of vitamin C?" I said, "Well, I don't know. You're going to have to look pretty hard." And she found a doctor. She had to go to another state. She found a doctor that would give intravenous vitamin C. She drove over an hour with a mother that didn't want to drive for 10 minutes. Went there, had the intravenous vitamin C, and on the way home, the woman felt so much better. She said, "Let's stop and have something to eat." Her attitude had changed. Her energy level came up, and her her appetite came back. Saw a lady one time. She had arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis. Rheumatoid arthritis so bad her hands looked like I could do. She was 47. She wondered if nutrition could help. I said it's always worth trying good nutrition. I said maybe juicing would be good. There's a lot of literature on fresh vegetable juices and how it can restore people. So, she started. I didn't see her in person for months later. When she came in the door, I thought I had the wrong person. She had nearly complete range of motion. It had been six months. She had lived on fresh vegetable juice two weeks out of three for six months. Now, that's a pretty health nutty thing to do, isn't it? I said to her, "What did you do?" She said, "What do you mean, what did I do? I did what you suggested." And there she was. When I was a young father, I was visiting a very elderly gentleman, friend of mine up in Vermont. I was 27, 28, had two little kids, and he was in his 80s. You know how Vermonters are. They're kind of quiet and reserved. His name was Morris. And I said to him, it's kind of a joke. I said, "Morris, I'm getting old." He kind of stood there for a minute and thought about it, and then he said, 'Well, keep right on. That's what I want you to do. Well, I want you to get out your juicer, dust it off, juice the vegetables, take the vitamins, and have the healthiest life you can. It has been a real pleasure to talk to you today. Thank you, Dr. Saul. Thank you so much. This is liberating information. And I on my a personal note, a lot of you always tell me how good I look. I'm going to be 57 in a couple months. No. And but I want you to know that the reason part of the reason I I'm so healthy, the stuff that he's talking about, I've been doing it for years. And I just want to encourage you to if you haven't educated yourself about all of this, please do.