Resistant Bacterial Infections Treated With Vitamin C

By Maureen Kennedy Salaman

President, National Health Federation
January/March 2004

When scientifically proven treatments are ignored by mainstream medicine because they are unpatentable and unprofitable, the medical consumer’s only choice is to endure barbaric medical treatments that, if they don’t kill outright, leaves him with a lifetime of disability.

Despite nearly 70 years of scientific proof and anecdotal evidence that large doses of vitamin C effectively treats bacterial infections, medical doctors continue to use amputation when antibiotics cannot stop their spread.

Vitamin C could very well be society’s answer to the antibiotic dilemma, boosting the effect of antibiotics and healing to such a degree that “incurable” infections can be cured.

I saw this for myself over 20 years ago when my former husband almost lost his hand to a cat scratch. I recorded the experience as an article for Let’s Live magazine entitled “Fighting Infection – The Cat and The ‘C.’” Here it is again:

Of all the impacts made on the lives of myself and my family, few have surpassed the impact effected by a small Siamese kitten taken into our home after the death of the 19-year-old Siamese cat, Sam.

Sam had been everything a cat should be. He was mysterious, self-contained, capable and utterly fearless. He was particularly distinctive in his thinking process, in the way he could reason things through for himself, arrive at his own conclusions and put them into practical action without human assistance.

Such independence and wisdom were hard to believe even when watching him open a cupboard, knock over his box of food and eat the spilled portion. Other times, Sam would patiently convey his thoughts to me in pantomime.

It was no small task to find a cat to qualify for Sam’s paw prints.

The kitten we finally decided upon—because of his looks, size, disposition and background of his parents – we quickly dubbed Sammy Jr. Sammy Jr. came from a long line of carefully bred, highly intelligent, blue-ribboned Siamese cats, all of which had won their awards not only for the finest in physical appearance, but for their intelligence and friendly disposition.

And so with these fine qualifications behind him, Sammy Jr. swept suddenly into our lives like a four legged meteor.

He was so commanding, so egocentric, so aggressive we soon began to feel that maybe what we really needed was a more common specimen – a cat, say, from the city animal shelter who not only needed a friend but had to have one in order to escape the fate of unwanted animals.

Sammy was a master of the art of living fully and completely in the here and now of things. He never permitted life to become uninteresting, either for himself or for those around him. I cannot begin to explain his thinking process when he would go to the backyard barbecue pit and roll around in the charcoal until he resembled an actor in black-face with white-ringed eyes
close tightly.

He then marched into the house greatly enjoying the fact that he sent the entire household into a frenzy of activity trying to salvage rugs, chairs, sheets and quilts from the path of this potential soot blot.

My husband, Frank, and our friend, George Briggs, swept him into the sink and scrubbed him thoroughly. At least two men were necessary for the job - - one to hold him and one to scrub him. In order to shorten the drying time they decided to use a blow dryer.

The moment the blow dryer was turned on, the alarms went off in the kingdom of Sammy’s vivid imagination and, as he rallied against the terrifying foe, his tooth plunged directly into the bone of Frank’s right index finger. On his flight down Frank’s leg, he ripped open his leather shoe about three inches down the middle.

Too busy to dwell on the incident and excited about seeing our son, Sean, in a University of Southern California production of Two Gentlemen From Verona, we dropped by the hospital to let a doctor check the bite and give Frank a tetanus shot, antibiotic and painkiller. Then we left for Los Angeles.

The student-orchestrated play was a thrill to both of us, but by the end of our four-day stay, Frank was in almost intolerable pain, in spite of a constant ingestion of pain pills. His hand had swollen to twice its normal size and resembled a rubber glove that someone had blown up. The fingers protruded like useless appendages from a mound of purpled flesh. The skin was stretched so tightly that you could see the outline of your reflection in the back of his hand.

Upon arriving home we drove directly to the emergency hospital. A very efficient staff hovered around Frank’s hand, called in two more doctors, and within two hours of our arrival Frank was wheeled into the emergency operating room for the first of three emergency operations.

The verdict was unanimous-osteomyelitis, infection of the bone - - very serious. The bacteria had eaten away the bone, the joint, and the knuckle, and continued to travel down the hand. The laboratories were unable to identify the bacteria. Grim-faced doctors told me it would most probably cost Frank his hand - - and possibly his life. He was put on intravenous antibiotics around the clock. His hand was slashed open across the palm and down both sides of the finger to the bone and washed every two hours in an attempt to stop the raging infection.

I went before the hospital board to try to get vitamin C administered to him intravenously. I was told that they were sure it was a good treatment, but they knew nothing about it, and they did not allow treatments of which they had no knowledge.

I called in an internationally-known hand specialist, one who has written textbooks on the subject, to consult with the two hospital doctors.

The problem was a difficult one. Circulation to the hand (and, compounding that, to the bone) was very limited. Five weeks of antibiotics had not touched it. It was an ideal spot for the still unidentified bacteria to fester and spread - - which
it was doing with alacrity.

The verdict was unanimous – AMPUTATE!

We began to consult with holistic doctors and leading nutritionists to find alternatives to this chilling diagnosis. We talked with Dr. Bob Cathcart. It was then that we garnered the courage to challenge the best of contemporary, orthodox medicine with a simple vitamin.

We became convinced that if we could just get Frank well enough to get him out of the hospital, we could save his hand.

When Frank refused amputation on the first of the month, the doctor warned Frank that he might pay for this delay with his life, as there was nothing to keep the infection from relocating elsewhere in the body.

A friend of ours, a doctor for whom we hold great respect and affection, told me I was naïve, that I didn’t know what I was doing and it would end up costing Frank his right hand - - if not his life.

After five weeks in the hospital on intravenous antibiotics and three operations, Frank insisted on being released. Upon his release, I drove him directly to the Holistic Medical Group in San Jose where Dr. Rettner administered 60 to 75 grams a day of vitamin C intravenously. I gave him 30 grams per day of oral C and liquid garlic.

We packed the hand in a garlic and red clay poultice at night. The pain, which had required two codeine tablets every four hours, stopped with the second treatment. Within nine days, before our believing eyes, the infection stopped, the swelling disappeared, and the deep open gashes left from the surgery healed, leaving only hairline scars.

Frank kept his appointment in surgery for the planned amputation. With a broad smile, he held out a no longer misshapen or discolored right hand to shake the hand of a very shaken surgeon.

They had “never seen this happen before,” “One in a million,” they said.

As I watched their shocked faces, a scripture verse came to mind: “God has chosen the simple things of the world to confound the wise.”

It is to such conscientious women and men of vision and courage - - to whom health is more important than orthodoxy – that we owe this victory. And the miraculous power of a simple but oh-so versatile vitamin we call “C.”

Vitamin C Alone

The first physician to aggressively use vitamin C to cure infectious diseases was Fredrick R. Klenner MD, beginning in the early 1940s.

Vaccines were not available for many diseases then and Dr. Klenner consistently cured chickenpox, measles, mumps, tetanus and polio with huge doses of the vitamin. He also successfully used the vitamin to treat pneumonia, encephalitis, herpes, hepatitis, bladder infection, hemolytic strep and staph infections.

Dr. Klenner used massive doses of vitamin C for over 40 years of family practice and wrote dozens of medical papers on the subject.

He wrote, “Some physicians would stand by and see their patient die rather than use ascorbic acid because in their finite minds it exists only as a vitamin.”

In 1952, William J. McCormick MD published an article in the Archives of Pediatrics New York (V.69, n. 4, April 1952) stating that “the potent therapeutic action of ascorbic acid when given in massive repeated doses. 500 to 1,000 mg., q.q.h., (every fours hours) preferably intravenously or tramuscularly . . . when thus administered, the effect in acute infectious processes is favorably comparable to that of the sulfonamide or the mycelial antibiotics, but with the great advantage of freedom from toxic or allergic reactions.”

Vitamin C is remarkably safe even in enormously high doses. Compared to commonly used prescription drugs, side effects are virtually nonexistent.

It does not cause kidney stones. In fact, vitamin C increases urine flow and favorably lowers the pH to help keep stones from forming. Dr. McCormick has used vitamin C since the late 1940s to prevent and treat kidney stones.

How much vitamin C is an effective therapeutic dose? Dr. Klenner gave up to 300,000 milligrams (mg) per day. Generally, he gave 350 to 700 mg per kilogram of body weight per day.

Robert Cathcart MD took Kenner’s research one step forward and introduced a simple dosing method called “titration to bowel tolerance” (TBT), which permits a very sick outpatient to administer ascorbic acid in exactly the correct oral dose each day.

Vitamin C and Antibiotics for Today’s Resistant Diseases

While in Europe recently, I was horrified to see a television news piece about a beautiful two-year-old girl who had both legs removed due to a septic infection. They were celebrating because her life was saved, stubbornly ignorant of the research showing they could have saved her legs as well.

Thanks to this ignorance, more Americans die from hospital infections every year than from automobile accidents and homicides combined.

A study by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta showed that nearly 8 percent of all enterococci bacteria, the leading cause of blood infections in hospitalized patients, were resistant to the antibiotic vancomycin in 1993, more than 20 times the rate detected four years earlier.

Since vacomycin-resistant enterococci are nearly always resistant to other antibiotics as well, many of the estimated 19,000 patients attacked by the bacteria each year have infections that doctors consider untreatable.

This is so horribly unnecessary! Especially since today’s researchers are learning the truth.

Harvard researchers found that vitamin C reduces bacterial resistance to antibiotic therapy. They exposed strains of staph bacteria to ascorbic acid for six hours. In four out of six of the strains, the bacteria showed less resistance. They found that the doses of antibiotics could be reduced by 50 to 75 percent after resistant strains of bacteria were exposed to the vitamin C.

They also found that previously ineffective doses of penicillin and tetracycline not only inhibited resistant bacteria, they killed 23 to 93 percent of the initial bacteria population when vitamin C was added to the protocol.

There is no excuse, none at all, for a little child to lose her legs to a septic infection. Not when the solution is so inexpensive, available and proven. If you, or anyone you know, is confronted with threat of amputation, arm yourself with information and insist on the medical care you deserve and which can save your life and limbs.