Safety Of Vitamins
by Andrew Saul, PhD

The number-one side-effect of vitamins is failure to take enough of them. Vitamins are extraordinarily safe substances.

As a contributing editor to a medical journal (the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine http://www.orthomed.org), I have learned that it is easier for most researchers to get a negative vitamin study published than a positive one. As with the evening news, where the policy is usually 'If it bleeds, it leads,' the scare story sells. Same with vitamin articles: the shock-story gets the front page.

There is some strong economic inertia at work. Successful vitamin therapy is a triple threat to the medical cartel. It threatens physicians because they know practically nothing about it, and it is represents real competition. It threatens the pharmaceutical industry because vitamins cannot be patented to be sold at huge profits. It threatens dieticians because the fallaciousness of their food-groups-always, supplements-never dogma will be exposed. In all three cases, it is the very success of vitamin therapy that is cause for such alarm.

The only sure way to quash the popularization of vitamin therapy is to try to discredit it by claiming it to be dangerous. This is the world's oldest way to stop progress: just declare it fraud. Condemnation without investigation. And, if you can, attack the person, not the idea. If you dislike the singer, you'll never hear the song. A really bright dictator doesn't have to burn books; just getting people to not want to bother to read them is sufficient.

So right up front, these important reminders:

There are over 106,000 deaths from pharmaceutical drugs each year in the USA, even when prescribed correctly and taken as prescribed. (Lucian Leape, Error in medicine. Journal of the American Medical Association, 1994, 272:23, p 1851. Also: Leape LL. Institute of Medicine medical error figures are not exaggerated. JAMA. 2000 Jul 5;284(1):95-7.)

In addition, there are an estimated 150,000 more people killed by other aspects of medical care, including botched and unnecessary surgeries (12,000); hospital-caused infections (80,000); medication errors (7,000); and other medical mistakes (20,000). That makes a total of a staggering quarter of a million deaths caused by the medical profession. Per year. Just in the USA. This makes medical care one of the chief causes of death in the country. (Starfield, B. JAMA. 2000 (July 26): 284, 4)

There is not even one death per year from vitamin supplements. (American Association of Poison Control Centers' Toxic Exposure Surveillance System)

Therefore, as Abram Hoffer, M.D., says: "Attacks on the safely of vitamins are really an attack on the efficacy of vitamins."
www.doctoryourself.com

Further Resources
The ABC's of Disease by Phillip Day
Cancer: Why We're Still Dying to Know the Truth by Phillip Day
Health Wars by Phillip Day
Food for Thought by Phillip Day

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