Orthomolecular Supplements – Part 2

Dr. Pauling developed an elegant method for determining the probable outcome of treatment using cohorts of patients who were or were not treated. After I had completed the follow up I sent the case histories, with identification of each patient removed, and the follow up study. We decided to use the duration of life as the only variable. This began when they first saw me and ended with the day of their death. There is increasing evidence that this hard measure of success is much more useful than trying to decide whether the tumor is slightly smaller or not. Patients have lived for a long time with slowly growing tumors. We agreed to publish as coauthors. I suggested that the first paper would be by Pauling and Hoffer. This was because it was his original idea to use megadoses of vitamin C and the work I had done was merely to test his conclusions. He was very firm that he would not consider this and insisted it would appear as Hoffer and Pauling.

I think he felt that as a clinician who had done the clinical work I should be the senior author. He did not have an MD. Linus Pauling, in my opinion, was the most brilliant humanitarian scientist that ever lived. Over his life time in addition to his two Noble Prizes, he was awarded nearly 40 Honorary degrees, PhD’s and DSc’s. I am sorry he was never given an Honorary MD. His contribution to human health has surpassed that of most physicians. We wrote the paper using his method for analyzing the data and my clinical material. But the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences refused to accept the paper. One of the criticisms of our paper came from some rumor, which had reached the critic that I had solicited patients to come to be seen, implying I had selected only the best prognostic patients. On the contrary I had nothing to do with the selection and I included every patient who had been referred.

Eventually we published in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine. I am the editor and I could not refuse to accept our work. That original paper was reprinted in the book by Ewan Cameron and Linus Pauling Cancer and Vitamin C. Updated and Expanded. Camino Books Inc, P.O. Box 59026, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 1993. Appendix IX is this report. We began to write a book. My case load was building very quickly and I published a second paper with Dr. Pauling and several more after that on my own. We finished most of the book except for much of the detailed clinical material but we could not find a publisher in the United States willing to publish it. The topic was still too controversial. I found a Canadian Publisher, Quarry Press, Kingston, ONT. A few months ago I sent him the completed manuscript. This contains all the original material Dr. Pauling had written dealing with each type of cancer and a presentation of my data based on nearly 800 patients.

We concluded in our manuscript that the optimum treatment for cancer today is a combination of xenobiotic and orthomolecular therapy and that treatment must be started as soon as possible. This book will be available presently. Here are the early references. Hoffer A & Pauling L: Hardin Jones biostatistical analysis of mortality data for cohorts of cancer patients with a large fraction surviving at the termination of the study and a comparison of survival times of cancer patients receiving large regular oral doses of vitamin C and other nutrients with similar patients not receiving those doses. J Orthomolecular Medicine 5:143-154, 1990. Reprinted in, Cancer and Vitamin C, Updated and Expanded E Cameron and L Pauling, Camino Books, Inc. P.O. Box 59026, Phil. PA, 19102, 1993. Hoffer A & Pauling L: Hardin Jones biostatistical analysis of mortality data for a second set of cohorts of cancer patients with a large fraction surviving at the termination of the study and a comparison of survival times of cancer patients receiving large regular oral doses of vitamin C and other nutrients with similar patients not receiving these doses. J of Orthomolecular Medicine, 8:1547-167, 1993.

Hoffer A: Orthomolecular Oncology. In, Adjuvant Nutrition in Cancer Treatment, Ed. P Quillin & RM Williams. 1992 Symposium Proceedings, Sponsored by Cancer Treatment Research Foundation and American College of Nutrition. Cancer Treatment Research Foundation, 3455 Salt Creek Lane, Suite 200, Arlington Heights, IL 60005-1090, 331-362, 1994. Hoffer,A. Orthomolecular Treatment of Cancer. In Nutrients in Cancer Prevention and Treatment. Ed. Prasad,KN, Santamaria,L & Williams RM. Pages 373-391, 1995, Humana Press, Totowa, New Jersey. One Patient’s Recovery From Lymphoma. Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients. #160 , 50-51, 1996, A new book just arrived by Burton Goldberg, edited by W.John Diamond, W. Lee Cowden with Burton Goldberg, Alternative Medicine Definitive Guide to Cancer. Future Medicine Publishing, Inc. Tiburon, California.1997. In this valuable book 37 physicians including myself, describe the alternative methods they use with clinical descriptions of some of the results they have obtained. I prefer the term complementary to alternative and expect that soon all medicine will be complementary and that physicians using only xenobiotic methods will be the exception.

Review of Previous Reports and Present Summary:

The use of large doses of nutrients for the treatment of cancer has not yet entered the mainstream of medicine, not in the Universities, nor in the medical journals, or in the wards, halls and corridors of hospitals. But it is beginning to do so, largely due to the persistence and dedication of Professor Linus Pauling. He needed forums in which to outline his views and these were provided for him by the physicians and other interested individuals. The Canadian Schizophrenia Foundation was honored to host Linus Pauling on three separate occasions, in Toronto and in Vancouver. About the same time the National Cancer Institute held a meeting in September 1990. This was not a clinical meeting. No one presented clinical data showing what nutrients might do. At this meeting Dr. Linus Pauling and two associates presented their findings. Dr. Pauling commented at that meeting “It is very interesting to be here since, for some ten years or so, you have refused every request of mine for research grants on vitamin C”.

The Proceedings, National Academy of Sciences (US) refused to publish any clinical papers authored by Dr. Linus Pauling. The first paper, by Hoffer and Pauling, was rejected. During May 10-12, (1991) Jay Patrick, President, Alacer Corporation, hosted a meeting- the Second World Congress on Vitamin C and The Immune System, in San Diego, Bahia Resort Hotel. He had hosted the First World Congress on Vitamin C in 1978 in Palm Springs. That one was addressed by Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi who won the Noble Prize for his work on vitamin C and intermediary metabolism, by Dr. Linus Pauling, and by Dr. Fred Klenner, the first physician to use megadoses of vitamin C. The Second World Congress brought together a distinguished group of vitamin researchers and clinicians including Dr. E. Cheraskin, Dr. C.A.B. Clemetson, Dr. E. Ginter, Dr. J. Priestly, and others. Their papers were published in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine Volume 6, 1991.

I also presented a report on the clinical procedures I was then using in treating the terminally ill cancer patients with Vitamin C. Dr. Linus Pauling presented an excellent outline of his research into vitamin C and Cancer but his presentation was not published. Dr. Pauling was an excellent speaker, very honest, and very blunt. The following quotation from his paper will convey some of the flavor of his presentations. “When Irvine Stone wrote to me in 1965, after having heard me give a talk in which I said that I would like to live 25 years longer in order to enjoy reading about the new discoveries about the nature of the world that no doubt would be made by scientists during these 25 years and said if I were to take three grams a day of Vitamin C, I would perhaps not only live the 25 years but even 50 years. And that was when I increased my uptake ot ascorbate fifty fold to 3,000 milligrams a day, then later to a hundredfold, 6000, then to two hundredfold, then to three hundredfold and I’m still not sure what the optimum intake is.

There is a practical reason why I stopped at three hundredfold at 18,000. Well, I think that’s pretty important. I read a statement by physicians that they should tell their patients not to worry about being constipated. I think they should worry about being constipated, its so harmful to carry waste toxic materials around an unnecessarily long period of time. So, it was Irwin Stone that got me interested in Vitamin C and of course, it was Victor Herbert who was responsible for my having begun writing books about vitamins”. So the other day I got a book published by the National Academy of Sciences on control of diseases. It mentions practically nothing about vitamins and their usefulness but it does have something about common colds. A statement that 16 control trials have been turned out, every one of which showed that Vitamin C has no value in controlling the common cold, preventing or controlling the common cold. They didn’t listen, but I’m sure they’re the 16 control trials that I discuss in my books, where I give the amount of decrease in illness.

Every one of these shows that Vitamin C has value, not that it doesn’t have value. That’s perhaps a minor misrepresentation. A couple of years ago, I got two or three letters from people who sent me clippings from a magazine. One of them said he had stopped taking his Vitamin C because of the statement in this magazine. It was a quotation from the Professor of Medicine at Yale University Medical School. I had mentioned, three or four weeks ago, while speaking in Yale University Medical School, his statement that you shouldn’t take as much as even one gram of Vitamin C per day because it will damage the liver. So I wrote to him and said that I read the literature on Vitamin C to the extent that I can, and there are a couple of thousand new papers published every year about Vitamin C, but I missed the meal. Would you please send me the references to the work done on the damage done to the liver. Well, he was a gentleman, which you’d expect at Yale Medical School and often when I write letters like that I don’t get an answer from them.

He wrote back saying oh, that was just a mistake. That was the end of that. So far as I know he didn’t write to the magazine and say that was a mistake, but he did say it to me. And there are lots of mistakes of this sort about vitamins that perhaps sometimes intentionally misrepresent the facts. For some perhaps there is a reason an economic, financial reason, that there is so much opposition in the medical establishment against improving your health by taking vitamins.” This first symposium which included laboratory and medical scientists was one of the first with this mix of clinical and preclinical data. The number attending was not very large but they made up in quality for the lack of numbers. There I met Dr. Patrick Quillin, Vice President of Nutrition, Cancer Treatment Centers of America. He was thinking about organizing a conference to consider the connection between nutrition and cancer. I thought it was an excellent idea and encouraged him to do so. The first symposium was held in Tulsa, Oklahoma, November 6 to 8, 1992. The title of the meeting was Adjuvent Nutrition in Cancer Treatment.

Over 300 physicians and others attended. Participating were seven Universities, more than 6 cancer institutes. The last half day of the symposium was taken up by clinical studies including my report, and a report from Prof Rudy Falk, University of Toronto Medical School. This was the first meeting were both the academic physicians and orthomolecular physicians met in an amicable and interesting exchange of information. The meeting was co- sponsored by the Cancer Treatment Research Foundation and the American College of Nutrition, and published as a proceedings. In my presentation at the Tulsa Conference I described how I became involved in the treatment of patients with cancer. My preliminary data indicated that the addition of vitamin C in mega doses improved the outcome of treatment substantially. I described these findings to Linus Pauling. He urged me to follow up carefully every patient I had seen and offered to analyze the follow up data using the method he had developed.

In our two recent studies, Hoffer and Pauling concluded that the addition of vitamin C improved the outcome of treatment for cancer significantly and substantially. In the first study 134 patients seen between August 1977 and March 1988 were followed until December 31, 1989. We concluded that orthomolecular treatment given to female related cancers had improved life expectancy about 20 times compared to our non random controls and 12 times for other cancers. In our second paper a second cohort of 170 patients seen between April 1988 to December 31, 1989 was followed to December 31, 1992. These results were about the same as those we had published earlier. We concluded that while vitamin C alone led to about 10 % excellent responders the addition of the other nutrients increased this to about 40 %. Orthomolecular treatment improves the quality of life. It also decreases the side effects of radiation and chemotherapy. The program is palatable.

The only patients who could not follow it were those who were getting chemotherapy and suffered severe nausea and vomiting or patients who could not swallow because of lesions in their throat. Orthomolecular therapy provides a step forward in the battle against cancer and must be fully explored. There can be no logical reason today why most of the research funds should go only toward the examination of more chemotherapy and more ways of giving radiation. There must be a major expansion into the use of orthomolecular therapy to sort out the variables and to determine how to improve the therapeutic outcome of treatment.

Hoffer A: Orthomolecular Medicine for Physicians. Keats Publishing, New Canaan, CT, 1989.

Pauling, L: Biostatistical analysis of mortality data for cohorts of cancer patients. Proceedings National Academy Sciences, USA 86:3466-3488,1989.

Pauling, L and Herman, Z: Criteria for the validity of clinical trials of treatments of cohorts of cancer patients based on the Hardin Jones principle. Proceedings National Academy Science, USA 86:6835-6837,1989.

Author: Dr. Abram Hofer