by Jim West (please share and cite)
My alternative theory for scurvy
Scurvy was found among sailors on ships. But the ship's wood was treated with arsenic to ward off barnacles and other pests. The sailors maintained the arsenic treatment to the wood.
Arsenic was used much as a preservative for the foods that were being shipped back in those days. Sailors drank arsenic tonic water, as a pepper-upper.
The original scurvy cure was "scurvy grass", known for its high sulfur content, which combines with heavy metals enabling them to be passed out through the kidneys.
Captain Cook originally used onions (not citrus), also high in sulfur.
The stories about oranges and lemons are a cover-up for the history of scurvy as arsenic poisoning. They threw a bone to the vitamin C loving health nuts who helped to spread the stories.
Sulfur in citrus
Dr. Thomas Lind is said to have cured scurvy with citrus in his experiments, but citrus is biological vitamin C not ascorbic acid, which is a dead synthetic fraction of live biological vitamin C. Ascorbic acid is the profitable industrial definition of vitamin C.
Citrus also contains some small amount of sulfur.
A related issue, started by Justin (in the comments), is that ascorbic acid, the commonly used form of "vitamin C" is not actually vitamin C. See related post.
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But vitamin C also detoxifies arsenic https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/252047
ReplyDeleteBut ascorbic acid is not actually "vitamin C". And we don't have the full text of the study. More later...
DeleteThe common arsenic compound in earlier times was arsenic trioxide. The following study finds that ascorbic acid renders cells more vulnerable to arsenic trioxide.
Delete"...ascorbic acid... a sensitizer... to arsenic trioxide."
https://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/69/9_Supplement/5479
Arsenic and ascorbic acid are both reducing agents. Ascorbic acid could enhance the arsenic compound. That's one reason why ascorbic acid is dangerous, aside from its innate toxicity..
DeleteOK fair enough
ReplyDeleteThis video has the bullshit story of syphilis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bWNF_eNwvI What's the real story? Arsenic again or something different?
ReplyDeleteSymptoms are minor, but the mercury treatments were deadly. Germs got blamed. The usual routine.
DeleteOh yeah like what was said about smallpox
DeleteThey're able to treat Lyme Disease and Syphilis with Apheresis which is a method to cleanse the blood of heavy metals such as mercury? How would this be possible unless it's really mercury poisoning?
ReplyDeleteMaybe the treatment doesn't actually succeed. Or maybe it merely introduces a temporary hormetic effect, i.e., as described at harvoa.org/polio/toxcredo.htm
DeleteI reviewed the first known Lyme Disease epicenters, which were near Lyme, CT. The epicenters formed a vertical pattern on the map, which lead back to the apparent toxic source, i.e., coal-fired power plants feeding several states in the NE.
It seems that spirulina is quite beneficial for detoxifying arsenic https://jpad.com.pk/index.php/jpad/article/view/851/816
ReplyDeleteSuch a thin "article"... no count of females vs males, no description of the "placebo". No other context or consideration of contradicting controls etc. No consideration of the mechanism for the results. No consideration of hormetic effects.
DeleteThis is something to keep in the back of our minds but not much more.
Was arsenic banned on the ships after the supposed Vit D discovery? Or how was the scurvy resolved?
ReplyDeleteScurvy still occurs: https://www.google.com/search?q=scurvy+incidence&oq=scurvy+incidence
DeleteIn the wikipedia article on scurvy, it states that the advent of the steamship reduced scurvy much. Possibly I think, because steel replaced wood in ship construction, and arsenic was less prevalent.
ReplyDeleteAre you sure that vitamin C didn't have just as much as a protective effect because I know (from you and others) that poisoning would give people skin eruptions that would result in a smallpox diagnosis and there's literature about what we now call vitamin C greatly mitigating or even completely preventing skin eruptions. "The most important observation on the medical aspect of this disease is the cachexia with which it is invariably associated and which is actually the soil requisite for its different degrees of virulence. I refer to the scorbutic cachexia. Among the lower-classes of people this particular acquired constitutional perversion of nutrition is most prevalent, primarily on account of their poverty, but also because of the fact that they care little or nothing for fruits or vegetables. That a most intimate connection exists between variola and scorbutus is evidenced by the fact that it is most prevalent among the poor or filthy class of people; that it is more prevalent in winter, when the anti-scorbutics are scarce and high priced; and, finally, that the removal of this perversion of nutrition will so mitigate the virulence of this malady as positively to prevent the pitting or pocking of smallpox. A failure of the fruit crop in any particularly large area is always followed the succeeding winter by the presence of smallpox" -Charles Campbell MD
ReplyDeleteDo people like Campbell provide a table of results as would be found in a bonified study, or just their anecdotal claims? Do they identify the poisons as oxidizing or reducing agents?
DeleteI don't see them doing that.
Ascorbic acid could help if the poison were an oxidizing compound but if a reducing compound, then ascorbic acid could facilitate the poisoning.
Seems Campbell was writing in the early 1900s, perhaps before discovery of vitamin C? Do you have a source for that quote?
DeleteCampbell wrote relevantly in 1974: https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/55342
DeleteThat was another Campbell the Campbell I was quoting lived between 1865 and 1931 http://www.whale.to/a/campbell2.html He talked about bedbugs causing smallpox but smallpox was as I understand just a blanket term for skin eruptions and more than one thing can cause skin eruptions. Have you watched the video on Ekaterina Sugaks website about smallpox where she elaborates on how smallpox was a blanket term for skin eruptions?
DeleteThere must be toxicological investigations for any such ideas to make sense. Arsenic and "smallpox" have similar symptoms if not identical.
ReplyDelete