There are lies, damned lies and statistics. )Mark Twain)
The researchers gave 8,000 mg of vitamin C to about 50 people and compared the speed of symptom reduction to those not taking the vitamin. They concluded that vitamin C is useless.
There is so much wrong with this using this study to discourage the use of vitamin C, that I hardly know where to start:
STUDY DESIGN WEAKNESS
The medical world takes pride in using Best Evidence, as the basis for their acceptance or rejection of a medical practice. This study had none of the basic standards of Best Evidence:
- It was too small: only about 50 participants in each group.
- There was no comparison to placebo.
- It was not double-blinded or even single-blinded; the participants knew what they were taking.
- There was no objective evidence; answering a questionnaire is totally subjective. Can you pinpoint the day when half of your flu symptoms have abated?
- We can’t be certain that the participants always took all of the pills.
I have no doubt that had the study concluded that vitamin C actually helped these people, it would have been rejected as useless and we would not have heard about it. I say this because hundreds, if not thousands of positive vitamin C studies have been ignored by conventional medicine throughout the last 80 years.
INTERPRETATION OF RESULTS
“Patients who received usual care without supplementation achieved a 50% reduction of symptoms at a mean of 6.7 days compared with 5.5 days for the ascorbic acid group…”
Now I’m not a statistician, but a junior high school calculation shows that 5.5 is 18% less than 6.7. Personally, I’d be happy to take a safe treatment that would make me feel better in 5 days rather than 6 days. The only reason the researchers can conclude that the supplements “did not significantly decrease the duration of symptoms”, is because of the small number of participants. The smaller the study, the larger the difference needs to be in order to reach statistical significance. If the trial had been larger and the results were consistent with these results, it would have been significant. Why did they stop the study in the middle? Statistical significance may be unrelated to significance to real people. Drugs are approved for use with far lower success percentages.
By the way, similar results were achieved by zinc supplementation in this study, with similar interpretation by the researchers.
WAS THE DOSE OF VITAMIN C HIGH ENOUGH?
Generally, 8 grams of vitamin C per day is a serious dose. However, the work of orthomolecular practitioners over the past 70 years gives a different idea.
Dr. Robert Cathcart gave large doses of vitamin C, often ten grams or more per day, to tens of thousands of patients over a period of 30 years. He wrote several important articles summarizing his work and clinical observations. To me, this is more important evidence than clinical trials run by statisticians. Cathcart’s most important contribution to the understanding of vitamin C is that the sicker a person is, the more vitamin C he needs. He proved this by observing the tremendous rise in the amount of vitamin C a person’s bowels can tolerate when he is sick, compared to when he is healthy. Although it varies among individuals, an average person can take about 8 or 10 grams of vitamin C in a day before he begins to develop loose bowels. When the same person is sick with the flu or other contagious disease, he can take 20 or 50 or more grams without any bowel intolerance. This means that when the body is sick, more vitamin C is absorbed. Cathcart recorded his observations of people’s improvements after taking vitamin C, and in my eyes, there is no better evidence than this.
Of course, Cathcart was not alone. The orthomolecular literature is vast, and anyone willing to spend at least 10 hours of study cannot help but be convinced of the power of vitamin C to prevent, alleviate symptoms, and even cure infectious disease.
Dr. Cathcart used the image of a fire. When a fire first starts, it could be put out with a cup of water. If that’s not done, you will quickly need a bucket of water, and eventually you will need a firehose. Sometimes even that is not enough.
Every orthomolecular doctor or naturopath knows this. In fact, because of human inability to make vitamin C in the liver, like almost all mammals do, we should take a few grams of vitamin C supplementation every day of our lives. I usually recommend that healthy adults – especially in “Corona times” – take 2 grams, twice a day. At the first sign of illness, double or triple this amount. And if you become sick, you should take something like 2 grams every hour.
Before the experiment we are talking about, I suspect that no one was taking much vitamin C. Then they got sick with Covid-19, and were given 8 grams a day. In the light of the above, this dose was not enough! Having observed the effect of vitamin C on people near me, and having received reports from hundreds of people – including some sick with Covid-19 – to whom I have given vitamin C, I am quite confident that if the trial participants had been given twice the dose they were given, the results would have reached statistical significance even with the small sample size. I’m also confident that if they had been taking several grams a day since the Corona outbreak, many would not have become very sick at all. They should also be taking vitamin D as a preventative.
CONCLUSION
Doctor please, do not use this study to discourage people from using vitamin C properly. Do not be like those who will use this study to say that vitamin C is not helpful. Study orthomolecular medicine. You can do great things!
