Pushing The Limits

Ascorbic acid or vitamin C is a known antioxidant. Clinicians have conducted numerous studies to discover its role and effectiveness on life-threatening diseases such as sepsis, acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), cancer and COVID-19. Dr Alpha 'Berry' Fowler joins us in this episode to share his work on vitamin C and its role in improving the survival of critically ill patients. He also talks about ongoing trials on vitamin C and its possible benefits on COVID patients. If you want to know more about the research backing up the success of vitamin C in disease treatment, then this episode is for you.   Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: Learn the mechanism of sepsis in lung disease. Discover the role of vitamin C in treating patients with sepsis and ARDS. Find out more about past and ongoing trials on vitamin C.   Resources Learn about Dr Fowler's Phase 1 safety trial of IV vitamin C in patients with severe sepsis. Explanation lecture of the CITRIS-ALI study by Dr Fowler JAMA publication on CITRIS-ALI Article on the sequential organ failure assessment (SOFA) scores and mortality of patients involved in the CITRIS-ALI trials Dr Paul Marik's protocol for sepsis using vitamin C and steroids   Episode Highlights [04:02] How Dr Fowler's Research on Bacterial Sepsis Began Dr Fowler started working on mouse models to investigate sepsis. A solution made from mouse pellets was injected into ten mice, five of which received a treatment of vitamin C. The septic mice in the control group all died while those treated with vitamin C were crawling around, drinking water and eating. Dr Fowler then started using animal models to determine how vitamin C treats sepsis. [09:05] How Sepsis Damages the Lungs In sepsis, the lung barrier is injured. The progression of sepsis traps activated neutrophils in the capillary space of the lungs. Activated neutrophils release their DNA and enzymes, damaging the capillaries. Plasma then fills the air spaces, causing the patient to drown in their fluid. [09:34] The Role of Vitamin C in a Septic Lung In vitamin C-treated mice, the lung’s barrier function is preserved. Vitamin C stops neutrophils from disgorging their DNA into the extracellular space. Free DNA has become a marker to predict mortality. Blood reanalysis showed vitamin C lowered free DNA circulation as a result. Vitamin C completely inhibits the expression and appearance of inflammatory proteins. [16:15] Phase 1 Safety Trial Outcomes In a randomised, blinded trial, 24 patients were enrolled to determine the safety of vitamin C. Organ failure score was tracked in all patients. The higher the score, the higher the incidence of mortality. Patients treated with vitamin C saw a dramatic and significant reduction in their organ failure score. Vitamin C also improved their chance of survival. Intermittent infusion of vitamin C every 6 hours could get the plasma level up to 3000 times the normal level. [25:47] Phase 2 Proof-of-Concept Trial Outcomes Patients enrolled in the study had septic ARDS. The vitamin C treatment resulted in no adverse event. After 96 hours, 19 of 83 placebo patients died while only 4 of 84 patients with vitamin C died. Upon follow-up after 28 days, 46% of placebo patients died while only 30% of treatment patients died. This was the first blinded trial to show vitamin C’s impact on the mortality of patients with ARDS. [28:17] Explaining the Inconsistency of the SOFA Score Jean-Louis Vincent created the SOFA score. Jean-Louis Vincent sent a letter to the editors of Dr Fowler's work that the data was incorrectly analysed. Reanalysis showed the patients who died had the top SOFA score. Vitamin C significantly impacted organ failure scores. Vitamin C treatment resulted in a significant number of ICU-free days, improved mortality and more hospital-free days at day 60. [36:05] Is There Another Trial Underway? The NIH tasked the Prevention and Early Treatment of Acute Lung Injury (PETAL) Network to turn towards COVID treatment.  Dr Fowler started a trial on vitamin C as a treatment for patients with early COVID pneumonia, and the results are dramatic. There is another trial for sepsis and vitamin C planned by the PETAL Network involving 1000 patients across 69 medical centres. [39:48] Why Larger Doses of Vitamin C Are Not Administered The primary concern for higher doses of vitamin C is the formation of renal stones. A safety trial is first recommended before vitamin C treatment for COVID pneumonia can begin.    7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode ‘The cage that the mice got the sepsis and the vitamin C, they were all crawling around, drinking water and eating. And I knew at that point that we had stumbled on something pretty significant’. ‘One of the first things we found was that the lungs of the treated mice that were septic, they weren’t injured’. ‘Most people understand sepsis as being a bacterial infection, but they don't understand that it's actually taking all the organs and causing oxidative damage to multiple organs, not just the lungs’. ‘We had kind of a basic grasp on the immune system and how vitamin C could alter the septic immune response and how vitamin C could protect the lung’. ‘Vitamin C was actually improving the possibility of survival’. ‘The amount of vitamin C that you administer is critical. Dose matters’. ‘You’re going to save not only thousands and eventually more — hundreds and thousands of lives. You’re going to reduce hospital bills enormously’.   About Dr Fowler In his 35 years of service at VCU, Alpha A. ‘Berry’ Fowler, M.D., Professor of Medicine and Director, VCU Johnson Center for Critical Care and Pulmonary Research, has had a profound influence at VCU and beyond. Considering his robust grant support and over 300 publications and abstracts in clinical areas including adult respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and sepsis, he might well be lauded for that alone.  Likewise, with over 16 years as Pulmonary Disease and Critical Care Medicine (PDCCM) Division Chair, with numerous ‘Top Doc’ awards and other honours, his pursuit of excellence in clinical care, impacting thousands of patients and their families, might well be the highlight of most careers.  To learn more about Dr Fowler’s research on vitamin C, you may contact him at 804-828-9071 or send a message to alpha.fowler@vcuhealth.org.    Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your friends so that they can learn more about vitamin C. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. If you would like to work with Lisa one to one on anything from your mindset, to head injuries,  to biohacking your health, to optimal performance or executive coaching, please book a consultation with Lisa here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/consultations Lisa's latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how a mother and daughter defied the odds after an aneurysm left Lisa’s mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74 and the medical professionals told her there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again. Lisa used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and to bring her mother back to full health within 3 years. Get your copy here: http://relentlessbook.lisatamati.com/ For Lisa’s other two best-selling books Running Hot and Running to Extremes chronicling her ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books. Go to www.runninghotcoaching.com for Lisa and Neil’s online run training coaching. For their epigenetics health program all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to  https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/. For Lisa’s gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection ‘Fierce’, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection. To pushing the limits, Lisa   Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com. Lisa Tamati: Hi everyone and welcome to Pushing the Limits. This week I have an exciting interview with intensive care medicine doctor, Dr Berry Fowler, who is an intensivist from the Virginia Commonwealth University. The director of the VCU unit via 35 years of service at the VCU Johnson Center for Critical Care and Pulmonary Research. And he's also the author of a number of studies around vitamin C. So today we're continuing that conversation that we've been having in the last few weeks around the importance of vitamin C. Last week, we had Professor Margreet Vissers on, from Otago University, talking about—who worked with vitamin C in cancer. She's been studying this for 20 years. And Dr Berry Fowler has been studying vitamin C in regards to sepsis and pneumonia and how to use it in COVID. And he's been researching in this area with vitamin C for over 15 years. So some really amazing insights into this incredible vitamin and how it can help with all of these things. So please don't miss this episode. If you enjoy the content, please share it with your family and friends. You know, there’s some important messages that we're wanting to get out in this vitamin C thing that I've been doing, because I lost my father recently and this would have been a major player and I was desperate to get him help with intravenous vitamin C, and I was unable to until way too late. And so I'm desperately wanting to get out the information about this research about the clinical studies that have been done, the research that's been done, to share this really important information.  As always, I really appreciate a rating or review for the show. If you can do that, that'd be so so appreciated. And if you've got any questions, please email me at support@lisa tamati.com, if you want to discuss anything that was brought up in these topics, in this podcast. I'm also doing some one on one consultations. I have a limited number of spaces available for people who are wanting to work with me one on one. If you are facing difficulties in areas from whether it be around some of your health aspects like head injuries, obviously I've spent five years researching head injuries. I have a lot of knowledge around vitamin C. I have a lot of knowledge around biohacking, around epigenetics trained as an epigenetics coach, gene testing, and so on. And I work with a very small number of people who are needing help with these areas. As well as of course run coaching and mindset in high performance. So if you're wanting to get some one on one support with me, please reach out to me it's lisa@lisatamati.com. And I can send you the information there. Right over to the show now with Dr Barry fellow who is sitting in Virginia in the USA. Well welcome everybody to Pushing the Limits. This week. I have a very special interview continuing our series around intravenous vitamin C or vitamin C in general. I have Dr Barry Fowler with me, who is sitting in Virginia and Dr Fowler has agreed to come and have a little chat today about his work in this area. Dr Fowler, I've done a wonderful extra introduction. So we won't go into all your amazing credentials and your achievements, of which there have been many. But Dr Fowler, can you just give us a little bit of background? You are the director of the VCU Virginia University over in the States. Can you tell us a little bit about your work and your background? Dr Berry Fowler: Okay, well, I am professor of medicine in the Division of Pulmonary Disease and Critical Care Medicine and I'm one of the ancient doctors in the division, just turning 71 last week. I trained at the Medical College of Georgia in the US, then went to the Medical College of Virginia in the US, then went to the University of Colorado for pulmonary and critical care disease training, and then came back and joined the faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University which used to be the Medical College of Virginia, it's now VCU, in 1982 and I've been here ever since. Lisa: Wow. Dr Berry: I rose slowly through the ranks. I led the pulmonary division for a number of years, for approximately 17 years, and then stepped aside in 2016. And all during this time, at least for 13 years now, we've had this interest in vitamin C. And it's interesting how our interest in vitamin C developed. It first started at a very molecular level where we were studying cardiac ischemia, but some of the heart attendings. And then slowly began to get back to what we have been doing for years which was bacterial sepsis. And we had some molecular reasons that drove us towards vitamin C. And so first thing we did was we created an animal model of sepsis. And let me explain that. It was pretty straightforward to create. We had 30 gram mice and we went to the mouse cage and collected mouse pellets. Then took them to the laboratory and sonicated them really hard until it became a solution. Lisa:  So this is the fecal matter. Yes. Dr Berry: And we would take that solution and centrifuge it really hard so that all the solid matter went to the bottom of the tube and we just took off the liquid from the top, which contained multiple different kinds of organisms. Lisa:  So all the bacteria. Yes. Dr Berry: Yes. And so we took that, put it in the refrigerator overnight and then came in the next morning. And we had 10 mice. We had 5 control mice and then 5 treatment mice. So all the mice first were injected into their peritoneal space, you mentioned that earlier, with a tenth of an mL of this solution containing all this bacteria. And so all 10 mice. And then in the mice that were going to receive the vitamin C, we injected a tenth of an mL, which was 200 micrograms per gram of bodyweight of the mice and then closed off the light. By that point, it was about 4:00 in the afternoon. And just let the mice sit in the laboratory where we had left them and I always get to work at 6:00 in the morning and I was thinking, ‘Holy cow, I got to see what's going on.’ And so I went into the lab where we had the mice and the cage that was the control mice that were septic. They were all dead. In the cage that the mice got the sepsis and the vitamin C, they were all crawling around drinking water and eating. Lisa:  Wow. Dr Berry: And I knew at that point that we had stumbled on something pretty significant. This take us back to around 2010. Maybe 2009. My laboratory has had this intense interest in sepsis ever since I finished my training at the University of Colorado. And so what we decided is that we would begin to use the treatment animals and some control animals to determine exactly how vitamin C was working. Lisa:  To look at the molecular, the mechanism of action. Why is this happening? Why are they surviving better? Dr Berry: So what we did was—in these studies, we were always comparing the control mice to the treated mice. And one of the first things we found was that the lungs of the treated mice that were septic, they weren't injured. Lisa:  Wow. Dr Berry: And we have a number of ways to determine the way a lung is injured. One of the things that happens in sepsis, and this might have been what you and I were talking about earlier, is the lungs barrier function, which is the ability to keep the blood in the blood and keep the air in the air. Lisa:  Yes. Dr Berry: It gets injured. And so the bloodstream floods into the airspaces of the lung. Lisa: And fills it. Dr Berry: Yes. And one of the things we discovered was lung barrier function was preserved and the vitamin C treated septic mice. Lisa: Wow. So you're perceiving that it’s stopping the plasma and the neutrophils getting into the alveolar space. Dr Berry: Exactly.  Lisa: And the NET— of one of your lectures, you talk about neutrophil extracellular traps (NET). Is that a part of the barrier function?  Dr: Berry: Very nice. When are you starting medical school? Lisa: Thank you, Dr Fowler. Dr Berry: So what happens as sepsis progresses is that there are a bunch of molecules that live in the capillaries of the lung that begin to get expressed. And what they do is they trap neutrophils that are activated in the capillary space of the lung. And one of the things that happens in a highly activated neutrophil is they disgorge their DNA and all of the enzyme systems inside a neutrophil begin to damage the capillaries. And then what happens as the capillaries get injured, the plasma from the lung, just a vein from the bloodstream, just flows into the lungs. Lisa: So you’re basically lost—it's like your skin barrier, if you like, between the ear and your insides is disintegrating. Dr Berry: Well, one injury from sepsis is like drowning. Lisa: Wow, so you fill it with your own fluid. Dr Berry: The airspaces of the lung fill up with your own plasma. Lisa: So when you have, cause sepsis—I don't think most people are not aware of the progression of sepsis to acute respiratory distress syndrome. That this is a sort of a linear progression that happens, isn't it? That you actually get lung—because most people understand sepsis as being a bacterial infection but they don't understand that it's actually taking all the organs and causing oxidative damage to multiple organs, not just the lungs, but particularly the lungs. And so this is a very important finding that what you've had here because this means that if you can stop the vitamin C, if the vitamin C can stop the neutrophils from disgorging their own DNA into the extracellular space, which is then, that's in a marker, isn't it? That cell-free DNA, when you take a plasma drawn and you see that cell-free DNA floating around at a certain level, that's a predictor of mortality, isn't it? Dr Berry: Listen, you've done some fabulous reading. But let me just tell you, it's been known for several years that in septic individuals, one of the unfortunate things that will predict mortality is how high the cell-free DNA arises in the circulation. And I don't want to jump too far here, but I will tell you and the vitamin C trial that we reported one year ago this month, that when we reanalyzed the blood from those individuals, we found that vitamin C dramatically lowered the cell-free DNA in the treated patients. Lisa: Wow. That was in the CITRIS-ALI study? Dr Berry: Exactly. Lisa: Oh, okay. That's a new finding from that study because, yes, we will go through that progression of how you got to do that study. So let's bookmark that for a moment and backtrack because that is a very important finding for that study. So let’s backtrack a little bit. So we are talking about vitamin C being able to protect the lungs if we put it very simply and protect the barrier function of the lungs, stop the neutrophils from disgorging the DNA and causing these traps, which is a predictor of mortality. What are other things is vitamin C doing? And why is a septic patient, without fail, going to be very low in vitamin C? So you’re using that for Vitamin C. Dr Berry: I'll get to that in a minute. But what we demonstrated in a huge number of murine mouse studies is that the septic lung in a control animal, the septic lung began to express many inflammatory proteins. And that's just your endogenous immune system trying to protect itself. But we showed in the next cage, in the septic mice that we had treated with Vitamin C, that the expression and the appearance of those inflammatory proteins was totally inhibited completely.  Lisa: Wow. Dr Berry: Yes. The idea of leaping from preclinical animal studies into humans was that we had kind of a basic grasp on the immune system and how Vitamin C could alter the septic immune response and how Vitamin C could protect the lung. Well, protecting the lung in terms of septic critical illness is very, very important. Lisa: Absolutely. And so then you went to a phase one safety trial, which was really to look at some basic markers. Is this going to be damaging for people if they get vitamin C and look at hypertension? And is it going to affect the kidneys and so on. I think some of those safety mechanisms. Can you tell us a little bit about that phase one safety trial and then the outcomes of that trial? Dr Berry: Well, I can tell you, I had this really close colleague. His office sat right next to mine. He's a molecular biologist, basic scientist. And after we'd done all these murine studies, one day he walked in, he looked at me, said, ‘Fowler, this needs to go into the hospital. We've developed all this data. You've got to make it happen to get it into the hospital’. We designed this little safety trial, enrolled 24 patients. The safety trial was randomized and it was blinded. And so half the trial was just controlled sepsis. The other half was septic patients treated with Vitamin C and we had no idea who the hell was giving vitamin C to people who were critically ill. Lisa: Yes. Dr Berry: And we found it had no impact. But one of the things we were shocked at, and we were just trying to define, was vitamin C safe?  Lisa: Yes. Dr Berry: One of the things we tracked was what is called an Organ Failure Score. And we found that all of the patients treated with Vitamin C, their Organ Failure Score reduced dramatically and significantly. Lisa: Wow. Dr Berry: And the way Organ Failure Scores, basically you're counting numbers. A higher number is a higher incidence of mortality. Lower numbers are improved and that vitamin C was actually improving the possibility of survival. Lisa: So this is like, in my father's case, is the sepsis progressed and I was unable to get him Vitamin C as we discussed earlier, Dr Fowler, early enough for him to get to survive. But as I watched his sepsis progress, more and more organs started to fail. So his liver started to fail. His kidneys started to fail. His heart started to fail. And so this is the Organ Failure Score. If this person's Organ Failure Score is going up, that is a very strong predictor of mortality. Dr Berry: Yes. Lisa: Okay, so this was reduced with the people who received the Vitamin C in the small trial. Dr Berry: So what we did, we took the data, we combined it with our preclinical data, and applied to the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute. They had just published an announcement where they were asking for anybody who could think of some clever trial. And we said, ‘Well’. And so we submitted an application. What the NIH wanted, they wanted the proposal for a phase two, proof of concept trial. Lisa: Right. Dr Berry: And so what we proposed was a trial that had seven medical centers. I have friends in seven medical centers around the US. And with this application in and that was I guess you guys don't remember Hurricane Sandy. Lisa: Yes, I do. Dr Berry: Hurricane Sandy was just—it killed the Atlantic Coast of the US. And the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute happens to sit on the Atlantic Coast in Washington, D.C. And it was a year and a half before we found out that we had received the highest priority score because of the application that we had submitted. And the NIH gave us 3.2 million dollars to do a multicenter, randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled trial, proposing to administer 50 milligrams per kilogram of intravenous Vitamin C every six hours for ninety six hours. Patients were continuously receiving vitamin C. Lisa: Can you explain why that continuous topping up that level is important every six hours? Dr Berry: That's a great question. So from the safety trial that we had performed, we analyzed the plasma Vitamin C levels that we had achieved by infusing. So basically someone your size, for example, would probably get maybe 3 1/2 grams intravenously every six hours for ninety six hours. And what we showed was, we could get the plasma level up to basically three thousand times the normal plasma level. So from a normal diet, human plasma levels of vitamin C are about 70 to 80 micromolar. When you give the protocol that we had settled with, we got the Vitamin C levels up to five millimolar. Lisa: Wow. Dr Berry: Yes. And so that's what we were shooting for in this NIH trial. And that's what we did. We charged into it, the trial. What we had proposed again, was the Organ Failure Score as well as the two biomarkers. We also proposed in the secondary outcomes, days on mechanical ventilation. Lisa: Yes, which is hugely important. Dr Berry: And what we were studying specifically, was patients who were septic, who had gone on to develop acute lung injury called Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, ARDS. And so when a patient was septic, like your father, we would become a fly on the wall and visit the patient every day until a lung injury developed. And that's when they would get randomized. Lisa: This was a critical—from my analysis of the data, that was a critical thing in the phase. So you had to wait until I basically had developed ARDS before you were able to put them. So this wasn't really a sepsis trial, but more of an ARDS trial. So the progression of the sickness comes into play here, doesn't it? If you’ve gone through day one, like in the phase... Dr Berry: In the safety trial... Lisa: Yes. Dr Berry: The second aseptic individual walked in the door, that's when they got random. Lisa: Which is a much better, more effective with the timing. Dr Berry: We had a couple of patients who got Vitamin C in the emergency room. Lisa: Yes, wow.  Dr Berry: You know you have to get informed consent. You have to get the pharmacy on board and get the patient enthused. Lisa: I wish I'd had you tending to my father. We could have had that from the moment he got to the emergency. That would have been, I think we would have had a different outcome. But so this was a key point that you had to wait until I had developed ARDS. So in this CITRIS-ALI trial, so here you have, I think it was 47 patients in the control and 47 in the intervention group, was it right? Dr Berry: 83. And 84 in the Vitamin C treatment. Lisa: Oh, 83. I'm sorry. Sorry. So 167. One of the big questions I had in my— why was mortality not one of the primary objectives of the study? Dr Berry: That has been the most frequent question. When we answered the NIH, they had put out a program called, UM1, and we applied to the UM1 program and they were not interested in mortality as a primary outcome. Part of it was this. There had been hundreds of sepsis trials and nobody had ever shown any impact on a treatment for sepsis. And so NIH didn't want to get burned again so they said that they wanted a physiological outcome. That was the Organ Failure Score. And they wanted a biochemical outcome. Those were the biomarkers. Lisa: It's the C-reactive protein, procalcitonin and thrombomodulin. And yes. So the reasoning was that we don't want to shoot for the stars here and automatically hope for a decrease in mortality and a decrease of days in hospital. We're going to go for something else just to see if this has legs, so to speak, if this treatment is possible, possibly going to work. And that's why they went for the safer scores, rather than the mortality. Looking back, do you think... Dr Berry: By the way, we haven't talked about this yet, but SOFA stand for Sequential Organ Failure Assessment Score. Lisa: Thank you. Yes, it's amazing the jargon that you pick up and then forget that you haven't explained yourself. So what actually was the outcome? This was a seven multicenter trial. You did a double blinded. This was incredibly important because I know Dr Paul Marik had also done a study with intravenous Vitamin C, thiamine, and hydrocortisone. And one of the criticisms that was thrown at him was that it wasn’t a double blind, randomized controlled trial, so it didn't have any meaning, which is absolutely tragic. So this was—what was the outcomes of this phase two trial? Dr Berry: So we enrolled 170 patients. One of the placebo patients we had to take out because that patient did not have septic ARDS. They had Acute Eosinophilic Pneumonia. That's something else to discuss later. And then in the Vitamin C arm, we had two patients with Acute Leukemia who had no coagulation in their bloodstream and they were hemorrhaging into their lung and that was not sepsis. So as I mentioned, we had 83 in the control placebo and 84 in the vitamin C-treated group. First of all, we saw no, and I emphasize capital N-O, adverse events. There was not a single adverse event.  Lisa: Exactly. Dr Berry: All right. And so what we showed was in 96 hours, placebo patients in the trial, 19 of 83 died within 96 hours. Lisa: Wow. Dr Berry: In the Vitamin C group, 4 of 84 patients died. And if you look at the statistics and the analysis of that, the difference is P=0.0007. We then followed the patients out because in sepsis trials, there's always this demand to see what is happening to a patient at 28 days. Lisa: Yes. Dr Berry: And what we showed was 46% of placebo patients died and only 30% of the Vitamin C treated septic patients with ARDS died. Lisa: Wow, that's a huge result in my mind. Dr Berry: And that was the first trial. I'm not slapping myself on the back, but I will just tell you, that was the first trial to ever show in a blinded fashion, an impact on ARDS.  Lisa: Yes. On mortality of ARDS. Dr Berry: Yes. Lisa: And this was extremely sick people. Now, unfortunately, the SOFA scores didn't show any difference and the C-reactive protein markers didn't show any difference. Dr Berry: So let me explain. Lisa: Is it because... Yes, is it because of the mortality. Dr Berry: So we thought publishing the results of the trial in probably one of the most important journals on the planet, JAMA, which as it turns out, is a very, very conservative journal. And they had their ideas about what we could and we couldn't say. So we published, and this is very important for you to listen to and all of your listeners, we published that there was no difference in the SOFA scores at 96 hours. And immediately, letters to the editor started coming in and one of the most important letters to the editor was the person who created the SOFA score. His name is Jean-Louis Vincent in Brussels, Belgium. He told us that we had analyzed the data incorrectly and that what we were reporting was a survivorship bias. Lisa: What does that mean? Dr Berry: And what he said we needed to do, and he provided five publications where he had important statisticians tell him that analyzing the data, like we reported, as a worst rank, best rank scenario, that we had to reanalyze it so that the patients who died, what we were reporting was the SOFA scores on the people who had survived. Lisa: Not the ones who died. Dr Berry: We had not considered the SOFA score on the patients who died. Lisa: And because they died so quickly. Dr Berry: So what we did was we went back and the people who died along the way, those 19 patients, they got the top SOFA score. The patients who survived and left the unit, they got a low SOFA score. And so when we reanalyzed the data, according to the way these letters that had come in from Dr Vincent and two or three other colleagues, it turns out that Vitamin C significantly impacted the Organ Failure Score. Lisa: Wow.  Dr Berry: And then we—here's the important thing, we reported that February 25th of 2020. So you can go to JAMA, you can look it up and you can see our response to the SOFA score reanalysis. Lisa: Because this was a key factor in my father's case. They threw the CITRIS-ALI trial at me and the original data from JAMA, which said negative result, which when I analyzed... Dr Berry: That lets you know that the doctors were not reading JAMA. Lisa: Exactly. And they weren't on the up to date and they did not look at secondary outcomes and they did not look at the parameters of the score and I was not able to present the case. They had just read it briefly. Dr Berry: Let me go on. We had a strong trend to ventilator-free days and the people who got the Vitamin C, but it just missed statistical significance. Lisa: Yes. Dr Berry: But we had a strong significance for the people who got Vitamin C in Intensive Care Unit-free days. Lisa: Which is huge. Dr Berry: So the people who got Vitamin C had a significantly higher number of ICU-free days. There was an improved mortality. The other thing is patients who got Vitamin C had significantly more hospital-free days at day 60. Lisa: Wow. So they were actually out of the system altogether. Do you think—now this is controversial, I'm playing devil's advocate here. But do you think the fact that it costs so much for someone to be in ICU when they have sepsis—I think in America it's something like, to the order of 60,000 dollars US a day—and the medications that they are typically on are costing around 20,000 dollars a day, do you think that if you come along with Vitamin C and you start dropping the mortality rate, you start dropping the days? Is that part of the resistance to accept and acknowledge these findings, that the pharmaceutical companies are going to lose out on profit? Dr Berry: Oh no no no. No, no, no. At VCU, Virginia Commonwealth University—that Anitra knows well—the average care cost per day is about 46,000 per day because that accounts for medical care, nursing care, radiology, all laboratory data, respiratory care, caring for the ventilator. All of that is somewhere in the neighborhood of about 45 to 50,000 dollars per day. And so, if you have a treatment, first of all, that gets people out of the ICU earlier and keeps them out of the hospital, think about the impact on the cost of care. Lisa: Yes, it’d be huge. Dr Berry: But here's the other thing. There's not going to be any drug company out there who would argue with that. They are all trying to do the best they can with their different antibiotics, but the common antibiotics that are administered in an ICU when patients are septic levofloxacin, meropenem, vancomycin. Just one day of meropenem is 1500 per day. Lisa: Exactly. It's a lot of money.  Dr Berry: Yes.  Lisa: So you don't think that... Dr Berry: And listen to this. That's the cost of the drug. That's not the cost of pharmacy preparing the drug, cost of nursing administering the drug and so on and so on and so on.  Lisa: Okay, so all right. So if you can work this problem out and if you can get this in all ICUs around the world, we're going to save not only thousands and eventually more hundreds of thousands of lives, you're going to reduce the hospital bills enormously. So this is incredibly important work. And you've proven—so the statisticians proved in that phase two trial that the way that you are measuring it was incorrect because a lot of people, as you said, 19 died in those first four days in the control group and only four, so that skewed—if you like—the statistics to initially look like we hadn't had a win here. Now, that's been rescinded and you've managed to get JAMA to publish it in a different light, that the SOFA score was impacted. What has been the effect now? Have you got another trial underway or have you got one in sight? Because this work’s too important, obviously, not to be taken further into a phase three. Dr Berry: All right, so you are in New Zealand where there's not much COVID.  Lisa: No. Dr Berry: We are in the United States, where it's a pandemic, where we are close to 220,000 people who have died from the virus. We are at 50,000 new cases per day. Lisa: Oh my God. It's so...  Dr Berry: And there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,800 to 2,000 patients dying per day of COVID. And so because of that, the network that I'm part of, that unfortunately—I'm going to have to jump off and listen to it, because it's been going on since 2:00, the annual meeting of the Prevention and Early Treatment of Acute Lung Injury Network, abbreviated P-E-T-A-L, the PETAL Network. The PETAL Network was tasked by the NIH to turn sharply towards COVID treatments. Lisa: Yes. That makes sense. Dr Berry: And so we were thinking, ‘Well, maybe vitamin C to treat patients with early COVID pneumonia’. And so what we did was we started a trial. We have studied 20 patients now and that trial is complete, where patients who develop COVID infection and develop early COVID pneumonia, so it's just at the start of an oxygen requirement, are treated with Vitamin C and the results have been pretty dramatic. We are in the midst of writing that up. But again, it's a—open label trial. It's not blinded. Everybody in the world knows that an open label trial does not have the power like we did with CITRIS-ALI. Lisa: Yes. Dr Berry: And so what is happening at a world level is that all of the health organizations around the world have come to bear to try to design treatments for COVID pneumonia. Lisa: Yes. Dr Berry: And that is ongoing right now. And there are like 9 or 10 major networks in, across the world. Probably, I'm not sure if New Zealand is included in that, but Europe, the US, possibly Australia. I don't know if they commit to participating in what is called the network of networks formation. Lisa: Yes. Dr Berry: So right now, the next trial for patients with sepsis that's not COVID is going to be conducted by the PETAL Network where we will be probably next April, starting a trial with a thousand patients. Lisa: Wow.  Dr Berry: Using vitamin C conducted by the PETAL Network. Lisa: Gotcha. Dr Berry: And the PETAL Network has 69 medical centers. So doing a trial that would get a thousand patients can be done within a year. Lisa: Wow. So this is exciting stuff because this is hopefully you'll be able to reproduce and show a strong correlation between intravenous vitamin C and I'd like to see the decrease in the mortality rate. That would be a key factor. Some centers are already using vitamin C because as you mentioned before, there were no adverse reactions. And this is like in all of the studies that I've seen there has never— this is a low risk intervention and my argument when fighting for my father was that, ‘He's dying. There is no other options. Why can't I throw the bus in? Why can't I put intravenous Vitamin C’? And they were like, ‘You still have to go through all the ethics committees’. I had to sign off from every single doctor and every single nurse in the ICU unit of which there are many. Dr Berry: Well, let me make another statement. So Paul Marik, who was using 1.5 grams of Vitamin C, 200 milligrams of thiamine and 50 milligrams of hydrocortisone, administered every six hours. That meant that the patients were only getting 7 grams. Lisa: Very small amount. Dr Berry: In the CITRIS-ALI, I mean, some patients got 16 to 18 or 20 grams. Lisa: Yes. Dr Berry: According to body weights, 50 milligrams per kilogram. In the aftermath of that article that you mentioned that Marik published, there have been efforts to repeat that trial. The vitamins trial came out in January, using that and it failed. Then another trial, the ACTS trial using the Marik protocol failed. And then a trial that I just participated in called the VICTAS trial completely failed. And so the Marik protocol is not an effective treatment for sepsis. And well, look. As I think Anitra Carr mentioned to me a couple of years back, the amount of vitamin C that you administer is critical. Lisa: Absolutely. Dr Berry: So dose matters. And the adult, again, of your size, you probably weigh 120 pounds or something would probably get somewhere in the neighborhood of about 12 and a half to 13 grams, spread out over a 24-hour period. And then you would get it for four days. Lisa: Yes. And that is still a relatively low dose. Dr Berry: It is. Lisa: When I'm doing intravenous vitamin C with my mum, I did it with my dad prior and unfortunately, months prior to his aneurysm. Too little, too late. We were getting 30 grams. We get 30 grams a week. When I take my mum and niece today for an intravenous Vitamin C is a prophylactic as I try to keep her, as a 79 year old healthy, 30 grams. So why—I had this question certainly with Dr Marik’s protocol. It seemed to me to be very low, although the six hourly is obviously a very important point as well. Why not do the bigger dosages? Like in Japan, I know they did a study with up to a hundred grams of Vitamin C in a burns case, a burns trial, where they had some markers of sepsis there. Why are you not trying higher levels? Dr Berry: Let me come in here quick? Because I'm going to have to jump off in about 8 minutes. But listen to this. The major concern for those high doses of vitamin C, and if you talk to the oncologists who have been using it for years, they will give, like you said, they will give massive doses. And I'm talking massive, like in somebody with pancreatic cancer, they will get 60 to 80 grams intravenously, Monday, Wednesday and Friday for seven weeks. Lisa: Yes. Dr Berry: But the major concern, in somebody who's septic, who's hypotensive, in shock, that you're giving vitamin C, one of the major concerns is that it causes a significant rise in oxalate crystals formatiion in the kidneys. Now, I will mention here in the CITRIS trial, we had no evidence of renal stone formation. Lisa: No. And I mean, that was one of the arguments that the doctors had at me, ‘You could have damaged his kidneys’. And I said, ‘Well, the last time I looked, being dead damages your kidneys too’. To me, that wasn't even a consideration. And he had—after the very first vitamin C, and for my dad, his kidney function went from 27 percent to 33 percent. He's actually improved his kidney function overnight. And I know that's just one anecdotal case, but kidney stones are not going to kill you either. So surely that's not the most important consideration here when you've got a septic patient who is on death's doorstep. Dr Berry: With vitamin C struggling in the United States after the CITRIS trial, the Federal Food and Drug Administration, they always have to be concerned about adverse events. And we have put together a trial randomized and double blind using Vitamin C in patients with COVID-pneumonia. That's about to start. Lisa: Wonderful. Dr Berry: And we had, I unfortunately let my IND, Investigational New Drug lapse after CITRIS. And so I've had to claw our way back into the good graces of the FDA. And one of their major, major, major complaints was, ‘You're going to be forming renal stones’. And we're using the same protocol that we used in CITRIS. So FDA got their nephrologists involved and finally gave us the IND. But for us to begin treatment of COVID pneumonia, they have demanded that we first do a small safety trial to show that we are not causing any renal stone formation. We can get that done. We currently have somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 to 70 COVID patients in the MCV hospitals right now. Lisa: Wow. Well, Dr Fowler, look, I know I'd love to spend another five hours with you discussing all this because I think it's incredibly important, both for COVID and for the sepsis and for pneumonia and for obviously, for cancer. I just want to thank you for your dedication to this. I mean, you could be in retirement and sunning yourself somewhere, relaxing, but, you know... Dr Berry: That's right. Lisa: You know that this work is critically important. And I heard one of your lectures is the equivalent of two 747 planes going down every day filled with people. Dr Berry: Every day in the United States. Lisa: In the United States alone. Dr Berry: That’s just in the U.S. Lisa: Yes. And these people, thousands of families being destroyed with losing loved ones. I'm one of those, unfortunately, sitting here all the way in New Zealand. And so this work is incredibly important. So please keep going. And I'm desperate to hear what comes from this COVID clinical trials and the other sepsis trials, obviously. So thank you so much for your work, Dr Fowler, and I really appreciate you. Dr Berry: It's been wonderful meeting you and speaking with you, and your and your audience. And when you have Anitra on a couple of weeks, give her my regards. Lisa: I will definitely do that, Dr Fowler. That's been awesome. Thank you, Dr Fowler. And all the very best there in Virginia. Dr Berry: Take care. Bye. That’s it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review and share with your friends, and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com. The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional

The battle against cancer has been ongoing for hundreds of years now. But recently, interest in using vitamin C to improve outcomes for cancer patients has been growing. And the results of these various studies look promising. Biochemist and medical researcher Professor Margreet Vissers joins us in this episode to explain her current research on vitamin C and how it helps the immune system fight cancer. She also talks about the other health benefits of vitamin C, as well as some of its limitations. Is vitamin C the cancer treatment we’ve been looking for all along? Tune in to find out.    Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: You will learn about vitamin C’s role in controlling tumours. Discover how humans metabolise vitamin C differently from other animals. Know how intravenous vitamin C turned around a leukaemia patient’s relapse.   Resources Watch Professor Margreet Vissers' lecture on her work on vitamin C. “The power of C” on University of Otago Magazine Das, A. B., Kakadia, P. M., Wojcik, D., Pemberton, L., Browett, P. J., Bohlander, S. K., & Vissers, M. C. M. (2019). Clinical remission following ascorbate treatment in a case of acute myeloid leukemia with mutations in TET2 and WT1. Blood Cancer Journal, 9, 82. doi: 10.1038/s41408-019-0242-4 Vissers, M. C. M., & Das, A. B. (2018). Potential mechanisms of action for vitamin C in cancer: Reviewing the evidence. Frontiers in Physiology, 9, 809. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2018.00809 Ang, A., Pullar, J. M., Currie, M. J., & Vissers, M. C. M. (2018). Vitamin C and immune cell function in inflammation and cancer. Biochemical Society Transactions, 46, 1147–1159. doi: 10.1042/bst20180169 Carr, A. C., Vissers, M. C. M., & Cook, J. S. (2015). Parenteral vitamin C relieves chronic fatigue and pain in a patient with rheumatoid arthritis and mononeuritis multiplex secondary to CNS vasculitis. Case Reports in Clinical Pathology, 2(2), 57–61. doi: 10.5430/crcp.v2n2p57 Dachs, G. U., Munn, D. G., Carr, A. C., Vissers, M. C. M., & Robinson, B. A. (2014). Consumption of vitamin C is below recommended daily intake in many cancer patients and healthy volunteers in Christchurch. New Zealand Medical Journal, 127(1390). Retrieved from https://www.nzma.org.nz/journal Carr, A. C., Vissers, M. C. M., & Cook, J. (2014). Parenteral vitamin C for palliative care of terminal cancer patients. New Zealand Medical Journal, 127(1396). Retrieved from http://www.nzma.org.nz/journal Carr, A. C., Vissers, M. C. M., & Cook, J. (2014). Relief from cancer chemotherapy side effects with pharmacologic vitamin C. New Zealand Medical Journal, 127(1388). Retrieved from http://www.nzma.org.nz/journal Pullar, J. M., Carr, A. C., & Vissers, M. C. M. (2013). Vitamin C supplementation and kidney stone risk. New Zealand Medical Journal, 126(1384). Retrieved from http://www.nzma.org.nz/journal Carr, A. C., Pullar, J. M., & Vissers, M. C. M. (2013). Beating the blues: The association between fruit and vegetable intake and improved mood. New Zealand Medical Journal, 126(1384). Retrieved from http://www.nzma.org.nz/journal Carr, A. C., Vissers, M. C. M., Lewis, J., & Elder, P. (2012). Multiple nutrient insufficiencies: Hypovitaminosis D and C in young adult New Zealand males. New Zealand Medical Journal, 125(1364). Retrieved from http://www.nzma.org.nz/journal Carr, A. C., & Vissers, M. C. M. (2012). Good nutrition matters: Hypovitaminosis C associated with depressed mood and poor wound healing. New Zealand Medical Journal, 125(1362). Retrieved from http://www.nzma.org.nz/journal   Episode Highlights [04:50] Vitamin C and White Blood Cells After killing bacteria, white blood cells destroy themselves so that the toxicity doesn’t spill into tissues. Vitamin C plays a role in regulating the cell death pathway. Margreet observed that white blood cells low in vitamin C did not go to resolve the end of the infection. [07:15] How Neutrophil Extracellular Traps (NETs) Work NETs are a variation of vitamin C’s mechanism. Neutrophils are cells attracted to infection and eat hundreds of bacteria. They have oxidants that kill bacteria. Neutrophils eject ‘niche’ or the DNA package inside them. The niche has microbicidal proteins. The niche forms ‘traps’ that localise bacteria on the site of infection. [13:18] Vitamin C Production in Animals All animals make their vitamin C mostly in the liver; some produce the vitamin in the kidney. Animals that can make vitamin C do it on demand. They can increase production a hundred times to keep blood levels saturated. Humans lost the gene to make vitamin C; thus, we are dependent on food for supply. When we are sick or infected, our body consumes vitamin C fast. If we do not replenish our vitamin C, our body levels will decline. [16:35] Route of Vitamin C Administration Plasma vitamin C levels go up to a maximum level of 100 micromolars. Kidneys filter and regulate vitamin C. Saturated tissues will not absorb any more vitamin C; the excess will be released in the urine. Oral intake is suitable for day to day intake while people with severe illnesses will need infusion. Vitamin C infusion results in high plasma levels for a short period. Any excess will pass, and the plasma levels will be back to normal in 8 or 9 hours. [22:01] Function of Vitamin C The enzyme needed to produce collagen needs vitamin C; thus, the vitamin is good for the skin. It plays various roles in inflammation, wound healing, controlling infection, and even brain function. Vitamin C regulates gene expression. Vitamin C supports the production of serotonin, as well as other hormones that regulate mood and reproduction. [27:48] What Vitamin C Dosages Do We Need? The Ministry of Health recommends 200 milligrammes a day for wellness. Foods high in vitamin C, such as kiwi fruit, capsicum, and broccoli, are recommended. But only a few people eat a good range of fresh fruit and vegetables. Margreet says if the aim of vitamin C intake is to alleviate illness, it is usually not achievable through our daily diet. Each condition requires a different recommended intake. [34:17] The Role of HIF Protein in Cancer Hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF) is a transcription factor protein that switches genes on and off. HIF is present in all cells at all times and responds to low levels of oxygen. Under low oxygen levels, areas with poor blood vessels are provided with oxygen by generating new blood vessels. Cancer cells hijack this mechanism to have their supply of blood vessels, making the cells grow more. Hijacking the HIF protein also results in switching the cancer’s energy source to sugar. [39:06] The Role of Vitamin C in Cancer The HIF proteins need to be shut off to prevent cancer from worsening. Enzymes that need vitamin C can switch off HIF proteins that need to be shut down, slowing down the tumour’s growth rate. Though it is tough to prove preventive action, many cancer rates have significantly decreased to half when vitamin C status is good. To maintain your well-being, keep vitamin C levels at optimum levels. [45:07] Does Vitamin C Pose Any Risk? Vitamin C’s oxidation products need to be cleared out of the body. No toxic dose has been identified, provided you have good kidney function. There is no actual risk of kidney stone formation and kidney injury. People getting an infusion must be tested for kidney function. [49:10] IV vs Oral Vitamin C Administration for Cancer Any amount of oral vitamin C has not shown potential to benefit solid tumours. Infusion is more advantageous than oral administration because it gets vitamin C to the core of the cancer to switch HIF protein off. Margreet shares the story of Anton Kuria, a previous leukaemia patient on IV vitamin C who experienced remission for two years. Vitamin C restored the normal functioning of the cells and wiped out most of the cancer cells. He relapsed not because he stopped vitamin C but because the cancer cells acquired new mutations. [59:30] How Vitamin C Contributes to Quality of Life Vitamin C regulates adrenaline and boosts energy because it is key to making molecules that help energy production. It also alleviates the side effects of chemotherapy. Vitamin C also improves brain fog, concentration, mood, pain, nausea and fatigue. It does not interfere with other cancer treatments. [1:06:02] Applications in the Clinical Setting Vitamin C is probably not going to kill cancer, but it can control it. Vitamin C gives an insight on how to manage the disease in the clinic. The excellent response to vitamin C is an opportunity to make it work better with other treatments. There will almost certainly be a quality of life benefit. It can alleviate the side effects of cancer and the disease itself. The beneficial effects manifest, so it is worth doing. [1:16:56] What Needs to Be Done? We need to figure out how to apply vitamin C clinically and under specific circumstances. Give people the best information so that they can make the right choices. With better information, clinicians can also make informed choices for the benefit of their patients.   7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode ‘All of these things that cancers do to promote their survival is mediated by this response, and right at the center of this is the vitamin C off switch’. ‘Vitamin C is a very labile molecule, so very easily lost. And if you're not putting in more supply, then your body level is going to drop’. ‘If there's any wealthy people sitting out there, if you want to support this sort of research — it is absolutely essential because we're losing people left, right and center to these horrible diseases like cancer, like sepsis’. ‘I'm excited about this research, I really am, because it's going to save lives’. ‘That's why we try to do the research — because doctors have the patient's best interests at heart’. ‘Our clinical people, they’re at the coalface, and they're having to make life and choice decisions for their patients all the time’. ‘Many cancer rates significantly decreased by up to half for a number of cancers if your vitamin C status is good rather than bad’.   About Professor Vissers Professor Margreet Vissers is a biochemistry academic from Waikato University and is currently the Principal Investigator and Associate Dean (Research) at the University of Otago in Christchurch, New Zealand. She has written and published journals and books about how vitamin C can help cure and prevent cancer. If you want to learn more about oxidative medicine from Professor Vissers, you may contact her at margreet.vissers@otago.ac.nz.   Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your friends so that they can learn more about vitamin C. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. If you would like to work with Lisa one to one on anything from your mindset, to head injuries,  to biohacking your health, to optimal performance or executive coaching, please book a consultation with Lisa here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/consultations Lisa's latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how a mother and daughter defied the odds after an aneurysm left Lisa’s mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74 and the medical professionals told her there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again. Lisa used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and to bring her mother back to full health within 3 years. Get your copy here: http://relentlessbook.lisatamati.com/ For Lisa’s other two best-selling books Running Hot and Running to Extremes chronicling her ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books. For Lisa and Neil’s online run training coaching, go to www.runninghotcoaching.com. For their epigenetics health program all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to  https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/. For Lisa’s gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection ‘Fierce’, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.   To pushing the limits, Lisa   Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.   Lisa Tamati: Welcome everybody back to Pushing The Limits. This week I have Professor Margreet Vissers with me who is sitting in Christchurch. Now Professor Vissers, I'm just super excited. I'm a little bit nervous and excited to be talking to you today. Margreet, so can you tell us firstly, what your background is? Give us a little bit of context. You have a PhD done, free radical research and oxidant research from what I understand, and now you are very much deep into vitamin C research. Can you give us a bit of your background first? Professor Margreet Vissers: Okay, yeah, yeah. Morena, Lisa. it's lovely to chat with you. I've trained originally as a biochemist. So when I was at Waikato University, I had this lecturer who kind of got me excited about biochemistry, it was a new thing at that time. And so I continued, that's become my passion, just understanding how things work in our bodies. So, I became interested in white blood cells. When I was doing my PhD, my PhD was on white blood cells that fight infections.  And something we know about white blood cells is that they need a lot of vitamin C. They have a lot of vitamin C and we never knew why. So, all our white blood cells have a lot of vitamin C. So, there was always this question as to why do they need that. And that kind of percolated away in the background while we were researching other things. And then one day, these experiments where you added vitamin C and to kind of knock out any oxidant fixed because it's a well-known antioxidant. And it has this remarkable effects on the cells that I was working with which was the complete opposite of what I had expected. And when this happens in the lab, you usually think, ‘Are my samples in the wrong way’? I've got the best hunches.  So instead of acting as an antioxidant, it seemed to be enabling cell death. And which was like really paradoxical. And, and so we did it again. And you know, same thing happened again. And not only was it a really strong effect, which antioxidants usually are, they're usually more graded. It was also an on-off event. So, if there was no vitamin C, it didn't happen. And if there was just a bit, it happened really well.  And so we're looking for another activity. This is not an antioxidant, actually. We're looking for a different kind of function. And so this was in about 2001. And at the same time—so that wasn't work with white blood cells, that I was doing that, and that was a cancer work.  And so, around about the same time, there was a discovery made overseas about this new class of enzymes that regulates hypoxia, the hypoxic responses, survival response, and that those enzymes require vitamin C to function. And I realized that what I’d—because I've been gone on thinking, ‘If it causes cells to die. Maybe it does this in white blood cells because that's the one thing that we need our white blood cells to do’. Apart from kill bacteria, we then need them to die themselves off. Lisa: Yes. Prof. Margreet: And to die tidally. Without, we need them to devastate the tissues around. It's a very controlled process. And I thought, ‘Maybe that's what vitamin C is doing in the cell. That it’s regulating the cell death pathway’. And so I did these experiments with white blood cells that didn't have any vitamin C and essentially showed that exactly to be true. That if white blood cells were low in vitamin C, they did not go on to resolve this what would be the end of an infection. So… Lisa: So they wouldn't end up... Prof. Margreet: They would end up. So, normally you have your white blood cells that kill the bacteria. They then destroy themselves in that process, because it's an endpoint reaction, and we need to clear those white cells. And so you need to clear them. They're full of all kinds of toxic things. You need to clear them in a way that doesn't spill all that toxicity into the tissues. Other white blood cells come along and eat those white blood cells. So they—it's like wrapping your garbage.  So that if they didn't have vitamin C, that didn't happen. So, the other white blood cells would come in, but they basically couldn't see those other cells around them. And so they get the cell death and cell leakage. And I thought, ‘Ah, so scary. There's all kinds of things that happen when you're low in vitamin C’. And so this, and then I realized also that actually, this factor that controls this process, is also the thing that allows cancer cells to grow. And, and so this is a normal response in ourselves, and we need it for survival. You know, I swear, every day survival is dependent on this process working well.  Cancer cells hijack the system to enable them to survive. And so, that means that it allows them to grow outside of an oxygen supply to make new blood vessels, to create a different energy source, so they can live on sugar instead of a more complex energy. It enables them to evade chemotherapy and enables them to undergo metastasis. All of these things that cancers do to promote their survival is mediated by this response, and right at the center of this is vitamin C off switch. Lisa: Code that. So can we just pick up just a tad there. So, I've listened to a lecture by Dr. Berry Fowler that we mentioned earlier, talking about NETs, Neutrophil Extracellular Traps. So, is that what we're talking about here? So the neutrophils are coming along, eating the bugs?  Prof. Margreet: That's a variation on that thing. So yes, neutrophils are astounding cells. And so, their function is to kill bacteria. The primary way that they do that—so they are attracted to any place where there's an infection. The primary way that they act is to first of all, eat the bacterium so that one neutrophil can swallow hundreds of bacteria. And then inside that pocket inside themselves, they pour onto those bugs within minutes, toxic enzymes and oxidants, including chlorine bleach that kills the bug.  So, what they also do is they can inject from themselves, from the cell, they can inject their DNA. They can kind of melt the nucleus inside the cell with the DNA package. They can unpackage that, and then they can inject that from the cells, and that's what we call a niche. And that niche is coated with some of those microbicidal proteins. DNA is, as you might have seen pictures of it, that's a really sticky line… Lisa: Yes, like egg white. Prof. Margreet: …molecule. And so that can basically go a long way, and it doesn't degrade very easily. So, your body doesn't have a lot of DNAs floating around that can chew up DNA. So, these traps can sit there and they trap the back. They literally physically trap the bacteria onto the site of the infection. So, that can basically help localize that infection so that it's not traveling to other parts of the body. Lisa: Does it even cause things like, if this infection was, say in the lungs, you'd get whiteout and that's the whiteout. Actually, what you're saying… Prof. Margreeet: The whiteout in the lungs is either lots of neutrophils, just a lot of neutrophils, or a lot of fluid. Where we're seeing new neutrophil NETs, or their traps, and in the lungs as in COVID patients. So, there are these peculiar things going on in the lungs of COVID patients, where they're seeing quite localized and didn't wash out. So, not the kind of diffused whiteout that you see in a pneumonia, someone with respiratory distress, but very localized pockets. And we think that looking like, as all this information’s unfolding pretty much as we speak. It looks like neutrophil NETs central to that process that enhances that cytokine storm in COVID patients who end up with severe disease. So currently, the literature is jumping with… Lisa: With vitamin C, and what would be helpful or not in the COVID scenario? No one's know it yet? Prof. Margreet: No, it's not jumping with vitamin C and COVID. The Chinese, interestingly, published protocols for how to handle COVID patients. And they have they recommend, as soon as the patient comes into, into the hospital, should be giving them intravenous vitamin Cl to keep them out of ICU. And, or as soon as they get into ICU, to prevent them progressing. They've got very careful protocols about… Actually, their protocols say that helps. This is definitely a helpful step. We haven't taken that up, the rest of the world, despite some people advocating for it. Lisa: So why would that be? Is it because… or we don't want to go into that?  Prof. Margreet: That's a very good question. I've struggled with answering that question we come up against it all the time. That people will give vitamin D before they get vitamin C. Even though people have been—we've shown that patients who are really ill, have low vitamin C, unless you give them more.  Lisa: So, the sicker we get, the more vitamin C—and I've seen some of your lectures where you've shown graphs of people coming into hospital, and then the levels of plasma vitamin C are very low compared to the generally well, population. And I know from other research that I've done too, in this case, like my father's with sepsis. He would have been probably at the level of scurvy. I can't show that because they couldn't explore it, and would have been needing massive dosages of vitamin C. So the sicker we are… so, this is what's funny people is that animals produce their own vitamin C. The goat is the king of vitamin C making. I believe from Linus Pauling’s work. And the goat can produce up to 70 grams a day of vitamin C. We don't Prof. Margreet: So yes. All animals bear a few, make their own vitamin C in the liver, and some animals in the kidneys. There's a few miscellaneous animals, including all primates, of which we have one—so, chimpanzees and gorillas and monkeys in us, who way back, lost the gene to make it. And so we're dependent on eating it. Guinea pigs similar, and fruit bats are the other most common species.  So, we're dependent on eating it for our supply. Now, all animals that make their own, make it according to demand. So, they keep their blood level saturated, no matter what. So if they get sick, and their body starting to consume more, their liver makes more. And so they just keep themselves saturated. And they can increase production up to 100 times, in order to maintain that level. So we can't do that. So we're totally dependent on what we put in our mouth.  And so, once we get sick, and our bodies consuming more, if we're not compensating for that, then our body levels will decline. So it's totally about supply and demand. So, when you're normally well, your body's just ticking over a little bit. A good diet is good to keep you optimal under those circumstances. You get a cold, you're consuming a little bit more. Now most people, when they get a cold, they run off and get some citrus or something because that's what that feels like eating them naturally. If you get a flu, that demand goes out even more. If you get pneumonia, it goes up even more. And so the sicker you are, the more vitamin C your body's consuming. Not all. Some illnesses are more oxidative than others.  But any infection, like the minute you ramp that up, and that can be like a local infection. It can be burn infection. So it doesn't have to be like a whole body infection. We just recently did this—have been doing a study with people with chronic wounds like leg ulcers, and most of those people have low vitamin C status. And that won't be helping the wound. So as soon as your body has a demand to put on it, vitamin C is a very labile molecule, so very easily lost. And if you're not putting in more supply, then your body level is going to drop. Lisa: And then we're also limited out with the oral administration of vitamin C. Our bowels can only tolerate, before we get diarrhea, or something like that. So if our power intake to the levels that we might need if we were severely ill, we wouldn't get up—because our plasma levels only go to 100 micromolar from what I understand. We can't actually get higher than that from all dosing. Prof. Margreet: Oh well, only a little bit transiently. So, if you wouldn't take a one gram tablet, your plasma level would go up to above 100 for a little while. So maybe that might get up to 150. But your kidneys will clear that. And so I always kind of give the analogy of a dry sponge. So if you imagine that you're pouring water on a dry sponge, that your body is... Your blood is only the delivery mechanism, so vitamin C is going to get from your blood into the cells. If your blood levels are low, your tissue levels will be low. So that's a dry sponge.  So if you pour more vitamin C onto there, it will go into circulation. But as soon as it's in the blood supply, it will be sucked out into those tissues. So your kidneys will never see that above 100 micromolar. Once your tissues are saturated, so the whole sponges which you might, if you pour more on and then you touch, and then your blood supply goes up over 100, stays over 100 because your tissues are not taking up any more than they need. Then there's a filter in the kidneys that regulates that all vitamin C passes out, and then it's like, ‘How much is in the bloodstream’? ‘Do I need any more’? ‘And then I'll take it back up’. So it gets taken back up or not. And if the body's got enough, then no more be taken up and end up down the toilet which is fine. Lisa: Yes, it's not going to hurt you. But if so, then intravenous vitamin C has a different mechanism though, isn't it? We can get the micromotors up quite high. Prof. Margreet: Intravenous delivery is such fast, express delivery. And so it's to be what—it can do two things. What we think, it can be useful in under two circumstances. So normally for your day to day health, oral intake, this is ample. If you are really—a lot people in ICU, or who are people with severe pneumonia who are turning over vitamin C at a great rate, it's really hard to get like you might need to give those people seven or eight grams of vitamin C a day, in order to restore, get their plasma level sit close to normal. So it's hard to give that amount of oral intake to people who are that sick.  And so under those circumstances, the easiest thing to do is just to inject that, and that's what we call infusion. So then you bypass the gut, you can just infuse it straight into the circulation. And the rate of infusion determines that that plasma level will be very high for a very short time, then it will go out into the body where it needs to be. And any excess will pass out. And then urine. So after about eight or nine hours, you're back to normal. But your tissues, your sponges. Lisa: Yes, so that they are in what they need. The vitamin C that's actually in the cell will stay around longer than, won't it? And do its actual job, if it's in the mix. Prof. Margreet: It's doing its job, that’s right. So those cells that had become depleted and now have a function restored. And what we've discovered is, it's not just one function anymore. So in the last 10 years, vitamin C has been shown to be involved in supporting... So initially there—everyone will know about... Walk into any chemist and you'll see vitamin C creams for sale, cosmetics. Rub it on your face, or whatever. But because we all believe that vitamin C is good for our skin. And it is good for your skin, actually. It's really good for your skin. But getting a few rubber done, it doesn't actually get into your skin when you rub it on.   Lisa: Right. Don't waste your money on expensive cream. Prof. Margreets: We know that... That's right. We know that it makes collagen juicy. So the enzyme that makes collagen, that needs vitamin C to work, was the first member of a family. Of about at the moment, there's about 60 members of this family. So, and apart from making collagen, they do all kinds of other things. So including regulate all about gene expression. So what we've discovered is that, it's really important to support enzymes that determine how your cell function changes. So… Lisa: It reads the DNA so to speak. So this enzyme, one of these enzymes.. Prof. Margreet: These enzymes apply or remove marks from the DNA that say, ‘Read this gene, or don't read this gene’. And that's changing all the time. As cells respond to different stresses in different scenarios, and go through different growth phases. And vitamin C turns out, is absolutely critical for that process to be working well. And so you know, sort of… Lisa: This kind of fit everything in the body. Pretty much like every single cell in your body. Prof. Margreet: To greater and lesser extent.  And so that said, that's at the most fundamental level. It seems that that process is actually quite extraordinarily sensitive to changes in Vitamin C. So, I kind of make the analogy, about a car running, when running on three cylinders, or two cylinders, instead of four cylinders. Yeah, you can still get it to go along the road. But, you know you're not getting the best ride… Lisa: Not the best of your motor. Prof. Margreet: ...that you might get. And so you know, it is we're discovering so many things, so many fundamental processes that require vitamin C to work optimally. And also that they are responsive to small changes— relatively small changes in vitamin C status. So there are mood enhancing enzymes that do the same thing. We've just published a study with students from Otago, who are all extremely well. Probably one of the wealthiest populations we've ever studied but they don't eat well. When we gave them kiwi fruit today, it just brought their vitamin C levels up. They felt well, then they’re already well.  Lisa: They're already healthy. They don't have... Prof. Margreet: They are surely well. So, they were—and even not at the extremes of deficiency. So it's like you can… we should be where animals are—optimal all the time. The dialogue around vitamin C for decades and decades was about avoiding deficiency. The only thing that became a problem was when you had scurvy, and were dying, and anything else was fine. And so what we're discovering now is that—it’s not fine. You need to be the best you can be in order to avoid all kinds of scenarios. So it's… Lisa: It's about optimizing… Prof. Margreet: Probably the most, of all the vitamins that we've—well actually, vitamin B6 has a very fundamental… But probably the most diverse in that section of all the vitamins. So it's doing many things, in many places that affects an awful lot of functions. Lisa: So we're talking like inflammation, wound healing, infectious states, and controlling infection. We're talking about skin collagen production... Prof. Margreet: Absolutely, our brain is loaded with vitamin C. Lisa: Well, it is one of the biggest users of the vitamin C. Prof. Margreet: Yes, yes. So it's… Our brain is very hungry for vitamin C. So it's near for many reasons, including the support of molecule size serotonin, which is like your feel good moods. The production of other hormones that regulate mood reproduction.  Lisa: Yes. Yes. Yes.  Prof. Margreet: The list goes on and on. Lisa: My mind just goes wow. This could help with things like brain injuries, which I'm heavily into helping... Prof. Margreet: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Lisa: And RDA is one of the lowest in the world, isn't it? It is 45, I think milligrams or something ridiculous. That is not okay. Why can't we get this changed? You know we need 200 to 500 at least, don't we? Prof. Margreet: Yeah, there is a recommendation from the Ministry of Health that 200 milligrams a day as the recommended target for wellness. But RDAs are a confusing measure because they're actually the number at which 90% of people will avoid deficiency. So which is, right at the bottom, what do we need, in order to not die, basically? And so that message gets a little bit confused with, ‘This is how much we need, total’. And so 45 milligrams a day is, most countries around the world have up to the limit to at least double federal muster around 100, which is still in the minimum. But we just want bet our aims to get the New Zealand RDA…  Lisa: So maybe say one of your cats in a… I think it was work by Dr. Levine or [29:00] Maggie’s showing the rates from the 45 milligrams type thing up to 2.5 grams a day. It was a steep curve. Well, 50 milligrams in 500, where you get a huge benefit and then, even if you wanted to optimize, you could go even up to two and a half.  And of course then if you have one, oh no some horrible disease, or you have a lot of stress, or you have cognitive issues, or you have sepsis, or you have pneumonia, and then you may need like up to I don't know how many times. And that's one of the questions, isn't it? That you are trying to elucidate is that, ‘What are the dosages that we need’?  Prof. Margreet: That’s right, and I think we were hoping to hit, as instead of seating a whole new RDA for everything, is to have a recommended intake for different conditions.  Lisa: Absolutely. Prof. Margreet: So that you'd know if you hit a few, or if you do have a medical challenge of some sort. They use vitamin C infusions for burns patients. Lisa: Yes. Prof. Margreet: Because we know that burns patients chew through vitamin C. So that kind of massive inflammatory response does require your body who needs to be given a lot more vitamin C. So there is your, I can recommend it to intake for burns patients.  Well, if we knew that, when you have the flu, ‘Here's your recommended intake’. But when you have, if you have issues with this or that, you should be taking this amount. So which I think might be easier for people to get their head around than just one level, because we think that if we sit a daily intake aimed at alleviating illness, then that's normally not that achievable through our daily diet. And so you can't see it as an unachievable target for people to take vitamin C that they can't get from their diet because... So we always recommend food first and that is, so, 200 milligrams a day is what you would get if you did as you were told, an eight five plus. One of those five of the high vitamin C food, then you'll be fine.  Lisa: You're in the range. Prof. Margreet: So easily. So one kiwifruit, or some capsicum or a good amount of broccoli, or just if you can mix it up. But if you are eating a good range of fresh fruit and vegetables, you would be there. Lisa: But if you're eating just bananas or something that is on the five a day, but isn’t  high on the vitamin C level, you won't be meeting those recommendations. So we need to get a little bit more specific.  I want to go now into the cancer story, because I know like in the 1970s, Linus Pauling, who was a brilliant man, double Nobel Prize-winning scientist, sort of jumped in two feet first—if you like—with cancer. His studies that he did with cancer and vitamin C have extended the lives of these cancer patients that he was dealing with, four times as long.  But he sort of started a storm—if you like—of controversy, because back then there was no mechanism of action that was understood as, ‘How could this be happening’? And from there, it was sort of, plucked out of the year. Where is this vitamin C thing’?  You and your colleagues around the world have now sort of elucidated some of the mechanisms of action, and actually given some validity to what Linus Pauling was saying and later researchers. So now if we go into the cancer story, there's still—I mean I've lost two friends this week to cancer. We desperately need this research to be completed or furthered fast. So if there's any wealthy people sitting out there, if you want to support this sort of research, and is absolutely essential, because we're losing people left and right to these horrible diseases like cancer, like sepsis. We know that they're going to be beneficial. But you've actually discovered, so the HIF. I wanted to talk about the HIF protein… the HIF-1. Prof. Margreet: Yeah, that's the protein that I was mentioning… Lisa: Yes, earlier when I'm… Prof. Margreet: It’s also active in the white blood cells.  Lisa: Yes. Can you explain what the HIF protein does in regards to tumor growth, and why vitamin C is so important in regards to that. Prf. Margreet: Okay. So what is that, that's an acronym for Hypoxia-inducible Factor. Scientists are great at giving meaningless acronyms to meaningless terms. So, it’s a protein, it's what we call a transcription factor protein. So it's a protein that travels to the DNA, and switches genes on and off. These are master regulations proteins in these families of transcription factors.  So HIF is a major transcription factor that is present in all our cells all the time. Its role is to respond to low levels of oxygen. And so, if for some reason our oxygen supply is cut off. For example, if you had a tourniquet applied to a part of the end, and you cut off your blood supply, those cells in that tissue would get hypoxic. We need that not to die off. We need that to survive, that tissues, that when you restore the blood supply, that everything's actually fine. That's the normal function of the HIF protein, under conditions of low oxygen, just switch on a survival response.  It also does that, if you know has a lot of responses to basically regulate oxygen around your body. So it will, in areas where there are poor blood vessels, it will regenerate new blood vessel formation. You can't live without this protein. So we can't generate an animal that doesn't have it, doesn't survive beyond birth.  So this process is hijacked by cancer cells. So if you imagine, you will have seen pictures of a growing tumor starts off as a few cells. When that tumor, when that little clump of cells gets to be two millimeters across, it's very small, that doesn't have its own blood supply. And no oxygen will get to them, will get to the center cells, and they'll die. And this two millimeter tumor will die off. So but what happens when those cells run out of oxygen, because they switch on this HIF protein. And so when that switched on, those cancer cells now say, ‘Aha, I can make new blood vessels’. Lisa: They grow. Prof. Margreet: And it does that, it makes new blood vessels, can grow bigger. And as it grows bigger, every time it starts to run out of oxygen in the center, it makes new blood vessels. And so the tumor can grow, and grow, and grow. As well as switching on that formation of new blood vessels, it also turns those cancer cells into, ‘If I'm not getting enough oxygen, I need to get my energy from sugar now. I can't use our oxidative mechanism of energy creation’. So they become glycolytic. So then they start to depend on sugar for energy. We know that this is a property of tumors, that they're totally switched on to that. And when they get switched on to that, they stay on that. And so then they're able to become acidic, and they get all of these properties that cancer cells have. And it's all switched on initially by this protein.  And so the more HIF is expressed in your cancer cells, the worse off—the better off the cancer is, and the worse off patient is. So there's a huge effort being put on to trying to switch HIF off than cancer cells. Unfortunately, switching it off is not as easy as switching it on. And because it's switched off by a mechanism you have to turn on. And so the turning on of that mechanism requires either supplying of these enzymes. The switching off of HIF is done by these enzymes that need vitamin C. So when you supply vitamin C, you're then supplying energy to the off switch. And the off switch will dampen down that tough response. So that means doesn't come on as easily, you know, much how you keep it going...  Lisa: Not grow as fast... Prof. Margreet: And the HIF is ramped down and the cancer will grow more slowly. So that's one mechanism that we have now very good evidence for, indicating that giving vitamin C to cancer cells… Lisa: Slow tumor growth treatment  Prof. Margreet: … is a really good idea.  Lisa: So this, I saw another one of the charts with the mouse model that you had on the tumor growth showing the ones who had the vitamin C, the tumor growth was much slower than the ones who didn't, so that was because the HIF was switched—in effect switched off by the vitamin C. Well, I'm excited about this research, I really am. Because it's going to save lives. And this is the whole point of the call. And I don’t know if this conversation gets a little bit scientific, but hang in there with us people because this stuff's really important for life.  So can this prevent cancer? So if I want to be prophylactic, I want to be like, I don't want I've got cancer, perhaps genetically in the family, and I've got a higher risk. Can I take higher dosages of vitamin C with the hope of keeping the HIF from ever been switched on? Would that mean... Prof. Margreet: We know that having optimal vitamin C makes it harder to switch that HIF on. The other thing we know, it's very hard to prove any kind of preventative action, because you need to have huge studies to do that, with thousands of people. Those studies that… there's a lot of epidemiological work out there that has looked at people's vitamin C status, and their susceptibility to different cancers. And so, but there can be many factors can play a part in that, and we don't know whether that's just the HIF, or whether that's a boost in your immune surveillance, or whatever functions there may be. But many cancer rates significantly decreased by up to half for a number of cancers, if your vitamin C status is good rather than bad.  Lisa: Wow. Being over the 50 micromolar level...  Prof. Margreet: Yes. So if you’re—people who are that kick themselves to optimal level, have lower incidences of many diseases, actually. And they live longer, and just all measures of well-being are improved. But they also have much lower cancer rates. Lisa: Wow, so there's a reason, even if we don't have the whole answer yet for dosages and so on, would be to keep your vitamin C levels at the optimum, not at the minimum, your entire life, if that’s possible. What you mentioned before that there is a technology that's perhaps underway, that will be able to just, with a fingerprint, a prick of blood, be able to tell us what is in our blood, that would be amazing. I want one of those exactly where we are. Prof. Margreet: I think your doctor’s surgery once… Lisa: Yes, they definitely don't, because that would be just gold. I mean, in a situation like with my dad at the hospital, I couldn't get a vitamin C test to prove that he had a nutrient deficiency and so therefore, didn't treat the nutrient deficiency because I couldn't do the test. Prof. Margreet: Yeah, it's very difficult. It's a very… it's not an easy test to do. And so a lot of standard labs don't do it regularly. So you got to be fussy with the blood sample. And it's often a challenge in a clinical setting. Lisa: Okay, I hope that they do manage to do this because this would be very beneficial for everybody's health, because it's everything from heart disease to blood—we mentioned collagen to having good skin, to all of these sorts of things. But we would be well advised to make sure that we are getting our optimal vitamin C dose.  Is there a danger, like I’ll be completely upfront, I have an intravenous vitamin C once a week at the moment and my mum's on it for once a week. I won’t keep that up forever. I'm also taking oral vitamin C as well. I usually take between two and four grams a day, and I'm not saying that I recommend that for anybody but that's just what I'm doing because I want to... There is no toxicity with vitamin C, is there? There's no risk, I mean on one hand an expensive way but that's... Prof. Margreet: Yes well. No, no toxic dose has never been identified, provided you have good kidney function. So you do need to be on the clear. If you can't clear it, or if you're dehydrated, and you're not producing any urine, you'd need to be on the clear because it will oxidize in your body. And when it does, those oxidation products need to be cleared out. And so you know it is, that’s the waiver.  So your body clears it to 100 micromolar for a reason because you don't actually want to have massive amounts running around all the time. And providing your tissues is saturated, any additional excess that you put on, it's not going anywhere, just going out. Lisa: So I had down Dr. Ron Hunninghake on the podcast a couple of weeks ago there. He's a doctor from the Riordan Institute. I don't know if you know the Riordan Institute. And he said he's overseen personally as a doctor over 200,000 IV, vitamin C sessions, if you'd like. And I said to him, ‘Well, you know, one of the arguments that I face with doctors with my dad, was that it could damage his kidneys’. Apart from the fact that they did damage your kidneys too, which was my argument back. They said that kidney stones could be an issue. And that was one of the problems.  Dr. Hunninghake, I posed that question to him. And he said in his 200,000 IVs, he's had three people with kidney stones, but they all had them previously. And he doesn't think there is—again, he hasn't done the clinical studies—but he doesn't think that there is a huge risk for kidney stone formation that is also dependent on the calcium being in the kidneys from what I understand. So that that is one of the arguments. That is… Prof. Margreet: That's right. Yes. Because it’s the thing you will hear. It’s the first reason why you wouldn't want to take vitamin C. And I think we are trying to… it is important that you can clear it. So you do need, and I think for, rather than causing kidney injury, you don't—You need a functioning kidney. You need functioning kidneys to clear it. Otherwise, you will end up with problems. But anyone who's given an infusion is usually tested or checked for that. But... Lisa: Or in a case, like with dad’s, there wasn't any option. So like, it was that or nothing. He wasn't going to survive. Prof. Margreet: You only need to clear... as long as you're making urine. Unless your body is, as you know, completely deficient. It is something that you need to lift. So it's a little bit… do say to people… if our patients are dehydrated, we give them a drink, right? Because we give them fluids if they're dehydrated, we give them fluids. So if your body is missing something that it's supposed to have to function, should give them some. Lisa: Yes, it would be a simple thing, especially if we can test it. Prof. Margreet: It would not, it's not a big deal, really, to give them some. I think the cancer story is a little more complex than that. Because what we think with solid tumors is that,  because any amount of oral vitamin C has not been shown to benefit solid tumors paricularly. And what our hypothesis was, is that if you give intravenous vitamin C, you achieve a higher level in the plasma. So you're basically trying to get the vitamin C to the place where the vasculature is poor, which is that hypoxic center of the tumor. The oxygen can't get to because the blood vessels are poor, vitamin C can't get there either. And you need both to get there. So… Lisa: To kill the chamber basically, Prof. Margreet: ...to switch that HIF off in that place. So we think that if you give infusions, then that increased dose actually gets to that core of the tumor. Lisa: And this is where? Prof. Margreet: So this is where an infusion is an advantage than oral vitamin C. This is where Linus Pauling got into, where he got into strife bit, and he was giving intravenous doses. He maintained that they had an additional benefit. The conditions at the time, didn't believe that. And they repeated his experiments with oral dosing, and found it to have no effect. And so he didn't, that time we didn't know about half, and he didn't. So he was arguing back and forth. And so it just became a bun fight, actually. There was no resolution, and a lot of acrimony, and never did the cause any good for him, or the clinicians either, and certainly not the patients. Lisa: This is such a shame, really, because it is also something. Prof. Margreet: So, kind of tone was set at that time. And, and it's taking a long time to pick that conversation. I think now we have not only the health mechanism, but we have these epigenetic, or the genetic regulatory enzymes that are also involved in many cancers. And in fact in a number of cancers, those enzymes are the mutated enzyme. They're the mutation in those enzymes that will drive the cancer. It's very common in hematological cancers, common in some glioblastoma, so brain cancer, and bowel cancer.  So there are two mechanisms whereby vitamin C might work. And so, we have just recently shown with myeloid leukemia that if you have a mutation in that enzyme, and you give additional vitamin C to those cancer cells, then… So if you have a mutation, you have two copies of every enzyme. If you take one out, 50% left. That 50% is trying to do the job at a hundred percent, and it isn't able to. So if that enzyme, that last 50% needs vitamin C given a vitamin C boost, within upping its level, you can upregulate it. And we think that it's now restoring normal function to those—they didn’t stop behaving like cancer cells...  Lisa: And actually... Prof. Margreet: ...and just behave like normal cells. And so this would be a great treatment adjunct for chemotherapy.  Famous illogical cancers, because you now have cells that would respond normally rather than be these aberrant, crazy cells.  Lisa: I know that you had a case, so I won't mention the name in case and that's not okay. But I know that you… Prof. Margreet:  Oh, it is okay to mention the name.  Because Anton's family have actually asked me to mention his name. Lisa: Okay. So yes, I heard about Anton Kuraia's journey with leukaemia and how he had intravenous vitamin C, and that put him into remission. And he unfortunately lapsed later on and if you pick up the story there, but you got a tissue analysis, or you managed to get some tissue when he relapsed later on. In the two enzymes, the TT2, is it? And the W . . .  Prof. Margreet: That's one of these enzymes. So Anton is the case that we've learned a lot. And he, very generously when he read that… So he had this turn around, like a miracle response to vitamin C. And which really piqued our interest at the time we didn't know about the TT enzymes, and I almost lost my money on that. And thought, he wouldn't surprise me if he had one of these mutations, but he was in complete remission for two and a half years. And while he maintained a vitamin C regime, so he was taking it continued with intravenous vitamin C, each injectable, for couple of weeks, or something during that time. And when I spoke with him, I said, ‘You know what? I'd really like is I'd like to figure out just why this has happened and lapsed some of your cancer cells. But you haven’t got any sign’, which is great. Lisa: Yes, which is great.  Prof. Margreet: And we had no idea, quite what was going on, and how long that remission would hold for. And, unfortunately, two and a half years later, he relapsed. But at that point he said, ‘You know how you wanted some cancer cells? Well, I have some, and I don't want to know that’. But he pushed through and sent us a sample. And it was of his bone marrow, which, we had one sample, and I'm like, ‘Well, we need to think about what we do with this one’. We had a really good plan. And, and we managed to get a bit of funding from the local bone marrow cancer research trust for a project. And they're like, ‘If you got a good project’, and I’m like, ‘I do actually have a really good project’.  So I put a young post-doc onto that, who has been absolutely marvelous, and together with the clinicians in Auckland, we tracked down the risks of Anton samples that were in the Auckland clinic, and ran the DNA analysis, the genetic analysis on his cancer, and discovered that he had not one but two mutations that involved a requirement for TET2 activity. And so both of the clients, so myeloid leukaemia is a clonal disease. One clone can have one mutation, another clone can have another mutation or both. They're two clones, each one with a mutation that required TET2 or a feature TET2 activity. Both of those clones were wiped out by the vitamin C.  Lisa: Wow. So they kicked them alive? Prof. Margreet: Yes, yes. But what we discovered was that, that didn't wipe out the cells completely because that one of the clones came back. Lisa: Was it because he stopped the vitamin C, like if… Prof. Margreet: What we discovered was that when it came back, that clone had acquired additional mutations, as they do often. And so cancers do that, they cause you to be more and more aberrant as it continues. So the original mutation was still there, but so were additional mutations. And so the second time around, the vitamin C treatment worked a little bit. It seemed like it was trying to work. He went and had more chemotherapy. And then that didn't work, got sent home again. With weeks to live anyway, back onto the vitamin C, and got better. But the blood cell count never came down to zero again, and… Lisa: So basically the cancer was stronger the second time with more aberrant mutations. Prof. Margreet: Yes. But he didn't, he didn't seem to know what's going on. But my gut has got really good. Lisa: So something was, so that brings in the quality of life because that's proven, isn't it? If you're having to have chemotherapy, and having vitamin C can be very beneficial for quality of life. Least fatigue, least nausea, all of those sorts of horrible things that happened to poor chemo patients can be... Prof. Margreet: That’s a story we believe, of just replenishing the depleted supply in your body. So basically, you're giving your body these toxic cocktails, you're expecting your body to function, and then respond. And at the same time that's running out of a vital nutrient. And so if you, if you can restore that, then your fatigue levels… so one of the things that vitamin C does is it supports the promotion of energy. So it regulates adrenaline. Absolutely key to making adrenaline, to making molecules that support energy production, energy metabolism.  And so, if you're starting to run low on those things at the same time as you're undergoing the chemotherapy, what can be written off as a side effect of the chemotherapy can be alleviated. A few can restore some of those normal functions. So a lot of the kind of brain fog, things, ability to concentrate, mood things, pain, and nausea and fatigue, a lot of the measures improve. Lisa: Wow. So that alone is a reason to be considering it. Prof. Margreet: It's a very important consideration.  Lisa: Absolutely, it’s quality of life.  Prof. Margreet: Absolutely, as far as we can tell, it does not interfere with any other cancer treatments. Because that's the other worry that people have, doctors have, that, ‘I don't know, because it might interfere with the treatment I'm trying to give you for your cancer’. Lisa: And this is a problem when people go to their oncologist, their local oncologist. They’d be saying, ‘Don't do vitamin C’. This is why this information is so key to be able to share it. Prof. Margreet: Well, that's why we tried to do the research. Because doctors have the patient's best interests at heart. And they worry when patients come in and say, ‘You know, should I take this? Can I take that’?and they're throwing everything they can at the cancer. And they worry that something else that you’re doing might work against that. And so they are always very cautious and rightly so. Because we want our doctors to be working from evidence, from an evidence base.  And currently, we don't have those answers here. That we can absolutely say… I mean, this is why we're working so hard to try and identify the causes, and how vitamin C is working. So that then we can give that information to the clinicians, who can then put that together with their patient information and say, ‘Well, for you on this drug, this will be fine. You do that, you know, and in fact, it will help with this and this and this’. So or, ‘Under these circumstances, now, I'd rather you didn't do that, until you've got this out of the way’, or whatever. So we can manage better advice and give patients an idea as to what they can expect.  So like, with the haematological patients, we’re starting to identify what genetic subgroups of the cancer might respond. So then you might be able to say to you, to a cancer patient, ‘Looks like you've got this mutation. This is very likely to be helpful for you’, or ‘It looks like you don't have this mutation. It's unlikely that it's going to help you. You can try, but it's unlikely’. So we can be a little bit more… Lisa: more nuanced? Prof. Margreet: …real, rather than just a kind of blanket response. Lisa: The hard thing is and when people are in dire straits. You haven't got the luxury of waiting another 10 years perhaps until the research is done. And so you're in this catch 22 type of situation. And you have to, as a patient or looking after a loved one, sometimes make calls on the direction that you are going to go based on this that you acknowledge without actually having 100% proof in. This is an argument that nobody can really win because I mean, it's a really tough situation.  And I certainly, with it with my dad, but in with my mum's story as well. And so I understand the frustration of people and what they’re going. But with Anton for example, he obviously went and got the intravenous vitamin C, prior to it being proven to help, and it obviously gave him a few more years.  Prof. Margreet: That's right. And at the moment, we're at the point where we're learning a lot from patients like that. If he hadn't done that, he hadn't done that, no one would have done it. And we wouldn't know what we know now. And we're learning from other patients like that, as well. So let's see… Lisa: Anecdote versus... Prof. Margreet: So there is anecdotal evidence, what I say to people and often get asked by cancer patients, ‘Should I do this or not’? One of the things that we're learning and we've learned, we are moving the story forward. The things that we've learned, even from Anton's case, is that vitamin C is not probably not going to kill your cancer. So in his case, even when he went into complete remission, the vitamin C was controlling his cancer. That was it. It didn't eliminate it. So that knowledge is gold. Lisa: Yes. Actually. Prof. Margreet: And because that gives us an insight into how we might manage that in the clinic. If we were going to do this in the clinic. We would know that if we're seeing a response from a cancer patient, we're seeing a good response to vitamin C, there’s an opportunity. It buys you more time. But it can give us insights into how we might work better than with other treatments. So that information is gold.  The one thing that you know, I can understand entirely how any individual cancer patients like, ‘Well, I need the answer now. I have this in my own life, with my husband. I'm not waiting for the research. I’m not going to wait for that’. Lisa: Exactly. Prof. Margreet: ‘You need to announce it now’. But suddenly my priorities can then change upfront. I now have voice inside and I want, ‘We want an answer now’. And so, as far as, you know, the vitamin C treatment does, I often think, ‘Well, what would I do myself’? And I think from what we know now, knowing that, we know, there will be a quality of life benefit. Almost certainly. And that in itself would be worth raising payment for. So just to alleviate, as many of the horrible scientific treatments, and the disease itself.  Secondly, is that, if what we know is that if you are going to see a benefit from vitamin C infusions in cancer, you would see it quite quickly. So, this is not something that would take months and months to manifest. So, if it were doing something, you would notice something quite, quite soon. I mean, Anton's case was quite remarkable. In a case with a cancer like that, within two weeks he was beating it. Nearly tears.  Lisa: From nearly dead to better.  Prof. Margreet: A month later, he had a bone marrow biopsy taken. And he was back to normal. So if it's going to work, and I think even with a solid tumor, if it were having a beneficial effect, you will know quite quickly.  Lisa: So it's worth doing.  Prof. Margreet: So if you wanted to try, then you first try, but you have to pay to try.  Lisa: You have to find a doctor to do it.  Prof. Margreet: So it is, there are good people around who . . . It’s an unproven treatment. Lisa: And that's what you're working on.  Prof. Margreet: And so, we're trying to move that story forward. It's inordinately slow. Lisa: And it's a shame that the arguments, or the problems, the controversy that has surrounded the original research, if you like, has colored some of the reactions you get, now. You get this polarizing effect that hopefully reason will calm things down eventually. We can just talk about the scientific evidence, the evidence, the evidence, the evidence. And then perhaps we can just bring it back down to a non-emotional level. Because as a loved one who's just lost somebody, because I believe we could have had a chance to get him back, my dear back, if we had had access to vitamin C from day one, but not day 14. It's hard not to be emotional about that.  Prof. Margreet: Absolutely. It really is. And I can understand that entirely. And this is why we're not giving up. Lisa: Yes. But it's so important, the size, it’s so important. Prof. Margreet: But the controversy around this is what it is. I’m trying very hard to walk a line between that were drawn by either side. And my argument is always, for what do we actually know, and what if we actually measured?  And let's just stay with it? Because we can… I thought that's what I’m trained to do, actually. So that's what I should do. The narrative is being influenced, I think the discovery of the new enzyme activities is helping a lot. Because people are starting to see how it might work. And just showing how it's working, is very key to getting people to accept what just what they need to do. So, little by little.  Lisa: Little by little we’ll get there.  Prof. Margreet: Little by little, I hope I live long enough to... Lisa: Long enough to… yes. In the meantime, we can make our own educated… This is what—that you've coming from a scientific background, I'm coming from an anecdotal background, or a background of I have to make decisions, life and death decisions for my loved ones. I'm going to take certain risks because the alternative was not a good one. And so, I think both—as a loved one of a patient, I desperately need that research to be done. I want that hurried up. We all want it, we want the results.  Prof. Margreet: Me too. I want it hurried up. Lisa: And meanwhile, I'm going to make some educated decisions myself, on what I do for me and my family. And I think that's the best approach that we can do. Because we can't always wait until, when we haven't got the timeline, when we love somebody who's sick. And so we’re headed to make those educated decisions ourselves, and then live with the consequences.  But what I think is important that we have informed consent, informed discussions around these things, and that we try to take the emotions out of the whole thing. And actually, instead of—in the hospital I was sort of shut down because, ‘You're not a doctor, and you don't know anything’. And that's not true. And there was no willingness to even look at the clinical studies that I presented, that they were coming from my doctor friends who are supporting me on the outside, to try to present this on the inside of the hospital. It came down to legal arguments, more than anything else. And that's frustrating to think that perhaps you lost somebody because of a legal situation. The work that Dr. Merrick has done in this area and Dr. Berry Fowler, who’s coming on the show next week. It’s really, really exciting for me. Prof. Margreet: Well, those two clinicians have some very compelling stories to tell. I do, I do understand. I understand entirely, that I sit here in my office just above ambulance bay watching, and above the ICU board, and seeing… Lisa: seeing people struggle every day, Prof. Margreet: …thinking, there are things we could be doing better. And it is about getting those conversations going. So far, I think we're getting good traction in New Zealand with getting with conversations. But it's, it is extremely… Lisa: It is extremely slow. But then you and Doctor Anitra Carr, looked at his stuff as well. And that's exciting that we are making progress. And so I just want to, we've covered a lot of ground today. And we've really gone through in all sorts of places, but I just want to thank you for your sacrifice, because I know this is a huge amount of work. This is your life's work, basically. And I don't know if everybody was recognized for what their contribution, they're actually making to humanity. And I think and what you're doing is just absolutely wonderful. So thank you, because it is going to save lives. It has, has already saved lives.  Prof. Margreet: Well, I don't know that I have. But we have some wonderful colleagues globally as well. And so, there is a network of people who support each other on this, and some very good people doing excellently in a lot of places. Quote Mark Levine. What that man has done is extraordinary. In terms, he has provided the best information that we've ever had on vitamin C. With his own interesting stories to tell about how his colleagues’ treated...  So, some wonderful work has been done, and eventually people will just see. Actually, this is just, I just keep saying, this is just a thing that we need to eat. It's a vitamin that we need, an orange to keep our bodies functioning. Just like we need food, and we need to breathe, and we need water to drink. Now, we don't argue with those things. But this is just one of those things, when we need to figure out how we do this, how we do this piece. And under what circumstances so, you know, let's try to take the emotion out of it… Lisa: Yes, you're very good at it.  Prof. Margreet: I think it's the only way forward. And to give people the best information so they can make fit, so they can make the right choices, so clinicians can be making informed choices that they know is for the benefit of their patients. Because our clinical people, they're at the coalface and, and they’re having to make life and choice decisions for their patients all the time. And so they have high degree of caution around that. And that's what we want from them. So we need to provide them with the best information that we can get for them to make those clinical judgments. Lisa: I think that's a perfect place to wrap it up. Professor Margreet Vissers, you've been absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much for the work that you and your team are doing. Please continue. And if there are any rich people out there listening, please fund this research. Continue to fund this research because it's very, very important work and we desperately need it. So thank you for your time today. Prof. Margreet: My pleasure.  That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review, and share with your friends. And head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com. The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional

Sepsis, acute respiratory distress syndrome, cancer and COVID-19 are seemingly incurable illnesses. We say ‘seemingly’ because there is a way to battle all of these diseases. Cardiologist and lawyer Dr Thomas Levy joins us in this episode to explain vitamin C's role in disease treatment. He also talks about other essential therapies and nutrients that can help prevent illness and improve our health. If you want to know more about intravenous vitamin C's benefits and how it can save lives, then this episode is for you.   Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: You will learn how oxidation causes disease. Discover how vitamin C fights oxidation. Learn more about the other key players in oxidative therapy and other useful nutrients in health and disease. Resources Join Lisa's free live webinar on epigenetics to know more about personalising health according to your genes. You can also join her free live webinar for runners to learn how to run faster and longer without burnout or injuries. Grab a copy of Lisa's book Relentless from Amazon, her website or in bookshops near you. If you want to develop mental toughness, enrol in Lisa’s online course, MINDSETU. If you love running adventures, stream the documentary Desert Runners on TVNZ. Access Dr Levy's books through his website. Learn more about Dr Paul Marik's protocol for sepsis using vitamin C and steroids.  Access the VICTAS study investigating the efficacy of combined use of vitamin C, thiamine and corticosteroids on patients with sepsis.  Learn more about the controversy surrounding the CITRIS-ALI trial investigating IV vitamin C in patients with sepsis-induced acute respiratory distress syndrome.  Watch Professor Margreet Vissers' lecture on her work on vitamin C.   Read on Dr Rhonda Patrick’s assessment of clinical data on Vitamin C and her findings. Episode Highlights [06:10] How Dr Levy’s Vitamin C Research Began Dr Hal Huggins, a leading biological dentist, asked Dr Levy to do medical consultations on his patients and follow them long-term. Dr Levy saw a patient with an advanced neurologic disease but remained energetic after numerous dental work.  He began his research into vitamin C when he learned that Dr Hal gives the woman 50 grams of vitamin C through an IV. [18:46] What Causes Disease? When you have an excessive amount of oxidation among your biomolecules, it causes disease. Oxidation happens when a molecule loses electrons. A biomolecule in an oxidised state loses some or all of its functionality. Toxins cause toxicity and secondary disease by oxidising biomolecules. Toxins have different physical and chemical characteristics that allow them to penetrate organs and tissues, resulting in various clinical diseases.   [21:52] How Does Vitamin C Work? Vitamin C is a small molecule with a structure similar to that of glucose. It also uses the same cell uptake mechanism as glucose.  Vitamin C battles oxidation by reduction, a process by which electrons are donated to biomolecules. Vitamin C donates two electrons instead of one.  The give and take of electrons induce a microcurrent.  The process of oxidation and reduction helps relocate the energy-containing molecule where it is needed. [26:46] How Is Vitamin C Administered? IV administration gets enormous amounts of vitamin C into the body more quickly and at a higher concentration. It is usually given to patients in dire straits, but if you are needing higher doses due to things like sepsis, ARDs, pneumonia or cancer then IV vitamin is the best method. Liposome-encapsulated vitamin C gets absorbed almost completely into the gut, unlike other oral forms.  Liposome itself is a complementary supplement. It contains a lipid called phosphatidylcholine, which is identical to the natural cell wall of our body.  All modes of vitamin C administration (intravenous, oral, liposome capsules) are equally important, depending on a patient's situation.  In the hospital setting, vitamin C is given at constant levels every six hours. As a result, this keeps a more or less steady state of vitamin C in the body. [31:59] Controversies Surrounding Vitamin C Studies Dr Levy says controlled trials are necessary only when a drug with potentially positive effects also has potential downsides. Since vitamin C is an essential nutrient, Dr Levy thinks it’s not necessary to do a trial with a large sample size. Large trials are designed to support pharmaceuticals. [53:09] What Are the Other Key Players in Oxidative Therapy? Hydrogen peroxide kills pathogens and hydrates and oxygenates tissues to heal them. Nebulisers with 3% hydrogen peroxide or less help with acute viral infection, respiratory problems, and coronavirus. Ozone is the most potent anti-pathogen agent. [58:07] Why Are Vitamin C & Oxidative Therapy Not Mainstream Treatment? Mainstream medicine is ignoring broad-spectrum treatments such as hyperbaric therapy, ozone, hydrogen peroxide and vitamin C. Pharmaceuticals are multibillion-dollar companies. Doctors can only implement treatments in such a fashion that does not threaten those profits. There is more politics in medicine. Patients are being told something that is factually not true and, sometimes, a deliberate lie. [1:06:10] What Are Other Nutrients Beneficial to the Body? Magnesium is the most important single supplement. It antagonises intracellular oxidative stress caused by calcium. The recommended dose of magnesium is 600 to 1000 milligrammes. No other nutrient can substitute for magnesium. Magnesium deficiency can cause and worsen many diseases. People should never take iron supplements unless you have iron deficiency anemia. Keep ferritin levels at 25 or 30 microgrammes per millilitre. Only take enough iron to get the blood level back to normal. 7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode ‘Take responsibility for your own health and understand that we are all humans and that one person’s education may not have included some of the things that are happening now’. ‘We are co-learners with our patients’. ‘If you have a doctor who is annoyed by your questions or not open to explanations don't just walk away, run away from there and find one who is willing to work "with" you’. ‘Deal with your emotions, talk to some family and good friends, start your own research track and be the captain of your health care’. ‘Be preventative, not the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. And if you are in deep trouble, make sure you are vigilant. Make sure you ask questions’. ‘If everybody on the planet had access to hydrogen peroxide nebulisation and started doing it, there wouldn't be a single case of coronavirus on the planet in a week’. ‘If you're a clinician, and you've given just one patient who is just absolutely on death's doorstep intravenous vitamin C, and the next day they're well or 90% well, you don't need to repeat that with a thousand patients. You don't need to repeat it with five patients’.   About Dr Levy Dr Thomas Levy is a board-certified cardiologist and a bar-certified attorney. After practising adult cardiology for 15 years, he began to research the enormous toxicity associated with much dental work, as well as the pronounced ability of properly administered vitamin C to neutralise this toxicity.  He has now written 11 books, with several addressing the wide-ranging properties of vitamin C in neutralising all toxins and resolving most infections, as well as its vital role in the effective treatment of heart disease and cancer. Others address the important roles of dental toxicity and nutrition in disease and health. Recently inducted into the Orthomolecular Medicine Hall of Fame, Dr Levy continues to research the impact of the orthomolecular application of vitamin C and antioxidants in general on chronic degenerative diseases. His ongoing research involves documenting that all diseases are different forms and degrees of focal scurvy, arising from increased oxidative stress, especially intracellularly, and that they all benefit from protocols that optimise the antioxidant levels in the body.  He regularly gives lectures on this information at medical conferences around the world. His 11th book, Hidden Epidemic: Silent Oral Infections Cause Most Heart Attacks and Breast Cancers, was published in September of 2017. If you want to learn more about oxidative medicine from Dr Levy, you may contact him at televymd@yahoo.com or through his website.   Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can optimise their health. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. To pushing the limits, Lisa   Transcript of the Podcast Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com. Lisa Tamati: Welcome, everybody. I'm absolutely excited about this next interview that I have for you today. It is with Dr Thomas Levy who is sitting in Miami in America. And he is a board-certified cardiologist. He's also an attorney at law, and he has written 11 books. Now, talk about overachiever, this man is amazing. But above all, he is a humanitarian. He is someone who writes about what he believes. He's a straight talker. And today we're going to be talking about vitamin C, continuing on this journey after my experiences in hospital recently with my father who died of sepsis, and I was unable to get him vitamin C. I am on a mission to let people know about how intravenous vitamin C works in the cases of things like sepsis, pneumonia and corona.  And I'm getting a series of experts, we've already had Dr Ron Hunninghake on the show a couple of weeks ago. And this is his colleague, Dr Thomas Levy. You know, Dr Thomas has written a book called Curing the Incurable about vitamin C and its history, which is over 80 years old, a huge amount of evidence, a huge clinical experience with vitamin C. And Dr Levy, he knows how it works, the mechanisms of action, some of the reasons why this is not in the mainstream hospital care for these for viruses, and for cancers, and so on. And I really hope you get a lot out of today's episode. You know, he is a man who does say it as it is. And I really, really respect him for doing that. Because, it's very, very hard for a doctor to criticize anything within the medical world and the way things are set up. But Dr Levy sort of tells us how it is—some of the systemic problems we have. And it's a really interesting interview, above all, about vitamin C and its mechanisms of action. So please take a good listen. Take heed of his advice. And make sure you share this with family and friends, especially if anybody is dealing with any major sort of health issues; it would be really beneficial.  Just as a reminder, we are holding every couple of weeks with our company Running Hot Coaching, a running master class every second Tuesday at 12:30pm, New Zealand time. You can register for the next one at runninghotcoaching.com/webinar. On alternate weeks at the same time on a Tuesday at 12:30, New Zealand time, we are holding our Epigenetics webinar, which is all around personalizing health according to your genes and helping you understand this great set of genes that you inherited and what you can do to optimize your life, your fitness, your nutrition, your mindset—everything according to your genes and your epigenetics, how they are expressing right now. So register for that at epigenetics.lisatamati.com. That’s epi—E-P-I—genetics.lisatamati.com And as a reminder, go and grab my book Relentless, my new book. If you haven't read my old books, Running Hot & Running To Extremes and you like running adventures, make sure you check those out. And just as a side note too, Desert Runners, which was a movie that I was involved with, is now playing on TVNZ OnDemand. It's on the Pulse Channel, I believe, under Documentaries. If you haven't seen that movie and you love adventures and running adventures, please go and check that out on TVNZ if you're in New Zealand.  Right before we head over to Dr Levy, just a reminder, please, please, please give the show a rating and review if you enjoy the work that we do. This is a huge amount of work that goes into each one of these episodes. And it is for love, definitely not for money. And I really appreciate a rating and review. We are going to be introducing a way that you can support the podcast as a Patreon if you'd like in the coming weeks, so that you can actually support the work we do and get some bonuses for doing so. So stay tuned for that. Right, over to Dr Thomas Levy in Miami. Lisa Tamati: Well, hi everyone and welcome back to Pushing the Limits. This is Lisa Tamati here. And today I'm absolutely jumping in on my skin from excitement because I have Dr Thomas Levy, who is one of the world's most renowned researchers and doctors in vitamin C among a whole lot of other things. Dr Levy is also a board-certified cardiologist and a lawyer to boot. Go figure that one out. But Dr Levy is sitting in Miami, and he has given up an hour of his time today to share information that I think is absolutely crucial that you guys pay attention. So whatever you are doing, drop it and listen to this interview, because the work that Dr Levy and many of his colleagues have been doing, it’s been 40 years in the making and we're going to be talking today about vitamin C.  Now recently, I had Dr Ron Hunninghake from the Riordan Institute on the show and we had a great interview. And now we're going to continue that conversation with Dr Levy, with his experience. So welcome to the show. Dr Levy. It's fantastic to have you. Dr Levy: Thank you, Lisa. Glad to be here. Lisa: So Doctor, can you tell us a little bit—just in brief—your background and your journey towards vitamin C? Dr Levy: Well, in a nutshell, I was a garden variety, mainstream cardiologist some 25 years ago. And through a bunch of circumstances that I won't go into it's—I don't know, call it karma or destiny or something like that. At the same time, I decided to wind down my cardiology practice, I met Dr Hal Huggins in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Dr Huggins, in my opinion, was the first and the world's leading biological dentist. He just wasn't a tooth mechanic, he took care of the whole body while addressing what was going on to the mouth.  And anyway, to make a long story short, he ended up asking me to do medical consultations with his patients and follow them up long term. But that only occurred after I visited his clinic a few times. And I saw things that, well. In med school, you're taught: don't exist. As an intern and resident in internal medicine, you're taught these responses can’t take place. And in addition to seeing just overall dramatic improvement in patients—and I'm not going to say this is routine, don't get me wrong—but I saw a couple patients that had been wheelchair-bound with MS for over a year. And they took a few steps at the end of two weeks. I mean, so there was clear stuff going on physiologically.  But the thing that really hooked me was, one day, early on, he had this very elderly patient with advanced neurologic disease. He was getting a ton of dental work—extractions. I mean, the type of stuff that puts a college kid in bed for a week. What he did, he gets his wisdom teeth yanked out, he just goes. ‘Ugh, I got to rest’. Well, at the end of several hours of this work, this woman was energetic. I couldn't believe, and I said, ‘Something's wrong here’. I said, ‘Hal, what's going on’? And if you knew Hal, you’d know Hal is a very dry, sarcastic person. I loved it. And he just pointed at the IV, I said, ‘Okay, yeah, that's an IV, Hal. Thanks’. ‘What does that have to do’, I said, ‘What's in it’? ‘Okay Hal, what’s in it’? And he said, ‘50 grams of vitamin C’.  Lisa: Wow. 50 grams... Dr Levy: And that just came from left field, smacked me between the eyes, and I literally and figuratively went rolling across the room. And as the expression goes, ‘I wasn't going to be misled by my lying eyes’. I saw something. It happened. Something was going on here and at that point in time that began my research with vitamin C and just about everything else. Lisa: Wow. So that's the story. And this is coming from dentist—Dr Hal Huggins was very, very famous for making us aware of amalgam fillings from what I understand and root canals. I need to go back and read his books after discovering him in one of your lectures and thinking, ‘Crikey, I've got a heck of a lot of those’. So I need to look into those for myself. Dr Levy: Absolutely. Lisa: Yeah. Got me a bit worried. I've already spent a bloody fortune on this. So I don't know. So, you've come from cardiology and internal medicine and to this. And then you went to a law degree. Just to add to the achievements that you've had. And then... Dr Levy: I might add, Dr Huggins has taught me more real medicine than I ever learned before. So, my really—my second medical education was the one that counted. Lisa: Wow. And so this is really important. So, because people I think, Dr Levy—and we were talking previously—a lot of just people listening, when you go to your doctor, they are not God, and they don't know everything on the planet. And what I try to advocate—and I'm not saying that your doctors paid or whatever—but what I'm saying is take responsibility for your own health and understand that we are all humans, and that one person's education may not have included some of the things that are happening now. Dr Levy: So along those lines, I like to tell people that, just as you pretty much said, you have to take responsibility for your health. And you need to understand and you need to proceed at your comfort level, which means if you have a doctor, he or she who is put off or doesn't want to take the time or is irritated by you asking questions, don't walk out of that office, run out.  Okay, so you need to find physicians, medical care, that will work with you. And as we all know, I mean, hey, physicians like to believe they're brilliant, but it's mostly in their head. Okay, so, you know, they spend their time, they do their time in school, but in my humble opinion—and I know this is somewhat snide and sarcastic, but I gotta say it anyway—I find that most physicians view getting a medical degree as the validation that they no longer need to think the rest of their lives. ‘I'm a doctor, now I don't need to do anything else’. Okay, that's obviously only the beginning. And you should be continuing to learn and realize that you made a lot of mistakes until the day you die or lose cognitive function. Lisa: Yeah. And this is remaining humble in your process to learning. And this is not just for doctors, this is for everybody. You know, like we have to be constantly learning. I love what Dr Hugh Riordon said in one of his talks, that we are co-learners with our patients. And I thought, ‘That is brilliant’. Dr Levy: That’s a good way of putting it. Lisa: That's how a doctor should be approaching this. Okay, let's dive deep into the weeds here with vitamin C. So Dr Levy has written a book called Curing the Incurable, please go out and get this book, among many other books. He's written over 11 books. One was Death by Calcium, The Magnesium Reversing Disease. Yes, I'll find my notes here. Primal Panacea. His website, by the way, before we go any further is peakenergy.com. If you want to find out more about those books, really, really highly recommend people go and do that.  But let's go into Curing the Incurable when I listened to this book, unfortunately, Dr Levy after my father passed. I was just like, ‘What the hell? And why has this been such a battle? And why is my dad not with me still’? Because I am sure if you had been his physician from day one, my father would be still with us. And that's a big call to make, but this is what I believe based on your book and other research that I've done around this. Can you tell us, Curing the Incurable, you talked about Dr Klenner, you talked about Linus Pauling, Dr Iriwn Stone. Can you give us a little bit of background—this is 40 years that you guys have been saying this stuff, you and your colleagues that vitamin C is a cleanser... Dr Levy: Well Klenner in 1940, that's 1940. So that's 80 years. Lisa: 80 years? Wow. Okay, got that wrong. 80 years with Dr Klenner. And then Dr Linus Pauling—Linus Pauling Nobel Prize winner, two times in the 70s I believe, was the next sort of step in the process. Yeah. So like, we’ve known about this for so long, why is it not getting that message across? You know, why? Dr Levy: Well, this is not a medical issue. But you asked a the direct question, I'll give you a direct answer. Money. Money runs everything. And the pharmaceuticals are multibillion dollar industries. So what I've said many, many times is, ‘you don't bump out a billionaire’. Billionaires who will not be excluded, they're not being minimized. The only way you get something done is to hopefully analyze the situation and implement it in such a fashion that it doesn't threaten those profits. Okay? So I mean, if you can put an additive into gasoline to make it a little more efficient, but not eliminate the gasoline, and the companies will probably let you be. But if you come along with something that replaces gasoline, don't think the gasoline, oil companies are gonna take it lying down. It should not come as something surprising to people, except for the fact, and this is what people need to realize, doctors are the same type of people as any other profession. All right. We beat our chest and we try to make ourselves angels, if you will, but we're not even close. You have wonderful politicians, you have vicious politicians. You have wonderful physicians, you have, I won’t say vicious, I'll say physicians that do not place the patient's welfare as their number one concern. Whereas you have other physicians, unfortunately, of  a tiny minority who would give their life for their patient. Lisa: Yeah. And you really put them first, and these are quite rare. And this is why, you know, this is, like, having Dr Ron Hunninghake on, recently. He's one of those, you know.  Dr Levy: Yes, he's spectacular.  Lisa: He’s spectacular. Dr Levy: He is one of my best friends. But that's one of the reasons why he's my best friend. Lisa: Yeah. Because, and we just connected so well, because I could see the heart and the man and the compassion. And, you know, I have had the privilege of having some of those types of doctors, and scientists as well, on the show because I searched those types of people out who are not cowards. I mean... Dr Levy: Let me say this, since you mentioned Dr Hunninghake. I don't have a clinical practice. But I often get emails from around the world of people, ‘How can I see you? How can I do that? Can you recommend somebody’? Well, there's only one person on the planet that pretty much practices the way I would practice, and that’s Dr Hunninghake. So for someone who would be interested in following up on the type of concepts—in our, we're in this day and age of Zoom conferences and everything like that. They have the facility to offer video consultations in which he can analyze the data. And even if you could never see him directly, he can get you going in the right direction. Lisa: Absolutely. That's a really good recommendation, you know, especially if you're fighting something serious. So back to the vitamin C story. So Linus Pauling, or Dr Klenner firstly, was using this in practice back in the 40s. And had some miraculous—and that word is probably not a good one to use because it implies something—but had some incredible recoveries and saw this. And then Linus Pauling’s work where he had cancer patients who lived four times longer in his study. And he was only using quite small doses of vitamin C. And then of course, the Mayo Clinic coming along and replicating his study. But using oral vitamin C, that's not a replication, and that one is still being quoted.  So what is it that vitamin, C does? Let's get into a bit of biochemistry here and help us understand. Why is it such a broad spectrum panacea? Why can it help sepsis, coronavirus, any virus, hepatitis, shingles right through to cancer? Dr Levy: Well, first, I would say let's understand what causes disease. there. And when I say that I mean all disease. I'm not talking about a percentage of the disease. What causes all disease is having an excessive amount of oxidation among your biomolecules relative to their normal state of reduction. So oxidation is when a molecule loses electrons and then it's in an oxidized state. When you have a biomolecule, RNA, DNA, protein, fat—you name it—enzyme, and that molecule gets oxidized, it loses one or more electrons. It either becomes less functional or completely devoid of function. So you completely take one biomolecule out if you will when it’s oxidized.  Now you have different ages that oxidize and they're known as toxins. Toxin is the same thing as a pro oxidant, free radical, they're synonyms. So the enemies of health if you will are toxins no matter how you encounter them, because all toxins cause toxicity and secondary disease by oxidation, nothing else.  Now you might say, well, how could then just that cause so many different diseases? Well, that's because the toxins have different physical and chemical characteristics. One toxin goes in the fat, others goes in water soluble, one penetrates membranes, one's ionic, one concentrates in this tissue—that gives you a variety of clinical disease, because different areas and different biomolecules are being concentrated to varying, in different degrees throughout the body. That's the entirety of what causes the disease.  So when we hear this idea that oxidation causes disease, well, yes, that's true, but it's much more accurate to say, oxidation is disease. Okay? A tissue of a given disease, liver disease, whatever, there's not an additional ill-defined thing that's wrong with that tissue other than the unique array of oxidation. Now, having said that, your basic overall goal of therapy is to reduce—in other words, donate electrons back to biomolecules that have been oxidized. And the extent to which you can do this pretty much dictates the extent to which you can either stop the progression, reverse the progression, and in early stages even resolve chronic disease, no matter what the disease. So this is an antioxidant. Okay, the toxin is a pro-oxidant, an oxidizing agent. And the antioxidant is a reducing agent. A toxin takes away electrons, antioxidant donates electrons.  Now vitamin C, even though there are many, many antioxidants out there, they all have a positive impact. The thing about vitamin C is, number one, it's a small molecule. Number two, it's very closely structured to glucose. Now we know every cell in your body takes up glucose. So vitamin C tags along and uses the same mechanisms as glucose for uptake into the cell, right? Number three, each vitamin C molecule can donate two electrons rather than one. So that makes it doubly important. Number four, it has an intermediate stable state. We know we talked about how vitamin C gets used up quickly, that's true. But it's sort of a biochemical phenomena type thing, when the vitamin C loses one electron it can stay indefinitely in the intermediate state where it can either donate another electron or actually go in the opposite direction. And when you have a lot of vitamin C in the cell, what happens when you reduce, oxidize, reduce, oxidize? Give, take, give, take, give, take? You induce microcurrents. So electron flow is a current. Right. The more effectively vitamin C can do this trillions of times a second, determines as to how well you can establish healthy microcurrents inside your cells with healthy transmembrane voltages across the membrane. Lisa: So this is meaning— oxidation isn't always a bad thing, is it though? Like when I... Dr Levy: No, not at all. Lisa: So when I exercise, I'm causing an oxidative stress onto my body and it's causing a hormetic effect that hopefully my body's going to see more soldiers to build my muscles stronger or whatever the case might be. And so this is like a redox, it’s like a cycle that is important and it's for cycling of the electrons that creates this microcurrent. Dr Levy: The whole thing is designed—you're right—there's oxidation reduction and oxidation is part of it. The thing about a toxin is, a toxin takes electrons and keeps it. Lisa: I gotcha, so yeah.  Dr Levy: Vitamin C gives electrons and then when you take them away from electrons it goes back and forth, back and forth. But the toxin once it takes the electrons it becomes electronically more stable, biochemically more stable, and it doesn't give the electrons up. So that's a net fact of electrons from the tissues. Lisa: Wow. Yeah. So this is stealing your energy. Dr Levy: And the thing about it is with the oxidation, you need oxidation to stay alive. The thing about—one of the things oxidation does is it helps you relocate the energy-containing molecule where you need it. Okay, so, when you have vitamin C in the blood, you need active transport, you need to consume energy to get vitamin C inside the cell. And so the purpose of part of the energy is to get your energy providing substance in an area where it better does its function. So yeah, you absolutely need oxidation to balance back and off this.  And the other thing, too is, when your oxidized vitamin C level gets high in the blood, then you pass into the cell without the consumption of energy, but then you need to consume energy inside the cell to restore the vitamin C back to its reduced state. But the important thing there is, the vitamin C, has unique ways of taking that energy and getting it where it's needed. So just because you're consuming another antioxidant to reduce vitamin C back to its normal state, that's not a loss of energy. It's a translocation of energy. Lisa: Yep. So that's when things like will define we know it's going backwards and forwards. So this is the transporter of—what was that—the SVCT2 transporter that's getting it into the cell, that’s getting the vitamin C into the cell. So if we go and say intravenous versus oral, versus liposomal delivery of vitamin C. Oral has certain limitations, although important for everyday use. Liposomal vitamin C, like we're all hearing about liposomal vitamin C, is that a better way of delivery? What is the difference between intravenous, oral, and liposomal—in short, perhaps? Dr Levy: Well, first of all, when somebody says, what would you use? My answer is all of them. Lisa: All of them, yeah. Dr Levy: Okay. And I'm not going to arbitrarily if I'm sick, just use one and not the other. They all have their own unique contribution. Intravenous, obviously allows you to get an extremely large amount of vitamin C inside the body much more quickly and at a higher concentration than you could by any other form. However, I also just told you that the vitamin C in the blood, you need to consume energy to get the vitamin C inside the cell, and it's reduced for.  Okay, well, when you take liposome encapsulated, vitamin C, because it's like a little cell, a little fat, globule cell-like structure that's got the same construction, around the liposomes as the natural cell membranes in your body. So that gets absorbed almost completely and very properly in the gut, unlike the other oral forms. And then once it's inside there, it's either in the lymph or the blood. The lymph eventually makes its way into the blood. And then as the blood circulates, the liposomes can then get inside the cell without the consumption of energy. Lisa: So if you've got a very sick patient who isn't really responsive to recovery, like can't handle a lot of oxidative stress. This would be a better delivery system, perhaps to get it to them without... Dr Levy:  Well, certainly if you have a loved one who's in the hospital, and… Lisa: He can't get intubated.  Dr Levy: ...the doctors are giving you a hard time and they're don't they don't have a tube down the throat. Lisa: Yes. And I would have done that if I had my case with my father. But he was unfortunately intubated. So I was stuffed in that. I had liposomal in the hospital room ready to go for when he was extubated. But unfortunately, we never got there. So I was really reliant on the intravenous way. And the intravenous is, like you say, a very, very powerful way for someone who is in such dire, dire straits. You know, as my father was in sepsis.  Can we answer just one question on the liposomal? I was concerned about the number of omega-6, like that’s a phospholipid, and there's a lot of omega-6 in the delivery mechanism. Is that going to be a problem when you've got—we tend too many omega-6 and not enough omega-3 in our diet. If you're taking a lot of liposomal vitamin C that way, is there the issue? Well, not really? Dr Levy: I don't think so. The type of lipid that's in the liposome—in this case, we're talking about the LiveOn product, I got to say that because there's a lot of fraudulent liposomes out there. That LiveOn became so prosperous so quick. Everybody wanted to jump on the bandwagon. And in the process, not realizing that it's a very complicated process to make quality liposomes. But those other companies had no problem with it; they just lied.  Waiting to get the letter so that they can stop, but have been made an ungodly amount of profit until they're told to stop. But, the liposome lipid is past the phosphatidylcholine. And this phosphatidylcholine is identical to the phosphatidylcholine that’s in the natural cell walls of your body. So, really it's the liposome itself is a positive supplement in addition to what's inside the lens. Lisa: Uh-huh. Oh, that clears that one up for me. Because I was concerned about the amount of omega-6 that I might be giving to my mom, in this case, recently through liposomal delivery. Okay, so now let's go into—I was fascinated by the work of Dr Marik, Dr Paul Marik. I think you know of his study with intravenous vitamin C in the ICU setting. Unfortunately, it wasn't a double blind, placebo controlled trial. But he had a small trial with 96 patients, 47 in the control and 47 who received vitamin C. Now these were very small doses. And Dr Berry Fowler has also done this similar work. And Dr Berry fellows coming on in a couple of weeks.  So Dr Marik—he reduced—this is the statistic that got me and what I used when I was advocating for my father, a 40% mortality rate was in the control group with sepsis; 8%, when they got the vitamin C, along with hydrocortisone, and thiamine and that's a hell of a drop. And those are all people. Those are people that are still walking around now, and this is a small study. Dr Levy: And the thing that maddens me is when you want to try something different, some of the standard opposition is where you don't have a double blind placebo control bla bla bla. Number one, if you have something, which as a competent clinician, you know has helped, and very importantly, has no defined toxicity, and is not experimental, and is inexpensive. The only time the trials that you're talking about are warranted, is when you're using a drug that has the potential to have a greater or positive effect, but also has the potential downside for negative side effects. So you need to balance one against the other.  When you're talking about something like vitamin C, which is the most important nutrient in your body, it's a ridiculous and foundationless argument. So it's, to me, unethical to the highest degree, if you're a clinician, and you've given just one patient, who is just absolutely on death's doorstep, intravenous vitamin C. And the next day they're well, or 90% well. You don't need to repeat that with 1000 patients. You don't need to repeat it with five patients. Okay, so we really have—if you'll excuse the expression—a back-ass-wards way of approaching research. But it's all designed, as I said before, to do one thing: support the pharmaceuticals. Lisa: And this is a legal thing, isn't it? Because evidence-based, it really was—and this is Dr Ron Hunninghake said this to me, ‘Evidence-based is not evidence-based, it was designed for the pharmaceutical companies so that they could defend their drug in a court case that they did with a placebo controlled group that didn't get it, so that they could prove it’. But it's not a practical approach for all of medicine to do it in this style.    I mean, hyperbaric, I’ll use as an example. I do hyperbaric oxygen therapy. It was a key player in my mother's rehabilitation for her brain aneurysm. Also in the oxidative medicine family. They did a trial—a clinical trial—but the people know if they're getting hyperbaric. So they did, the control was 1.3 atmospheres and the other one was 1.5 atmospheres. 1.3 atmospheres, it's not a placebo, that’s a treatment. So they all got better. And they said, ‘Well, they all got better. So therefore there is no’... And it's just like, seriously? Or in Dr Marik study with a— or in the CITRIS-ALI study, sorry, where the SOFA scores were taken as the primary endpoint and not mortality is sort of backwards in my head. Surely we should be looking, ‘Did these people die or not’? Rather than this sequential multi-organ failure score. I get why they did it, because they were an early stage study, but it did throw a spanner in the works. And that wasn't a sepsis of study. That was an ad study, because they already had sepsis for too long. And that's why we probably didn't see the dramatic results in that one. Because that was one of the studies that was checked back at me when I was fighting for my father, the CITRIS-ALI study, bla bla bla. Didn't help with the SOFA score. Didn't help with the CRP. Didn't help with a couple of the other markers. And I was like, mortality and days in ICU, it did help with. And these people were already extremely sick because when they came into the study, they were already very far along the process. Dr Levy: Which is what Madison likes to do with their prescription drug. Right now with the coronavirus in the US, I suppose elsewhere in the world, they have Remdesivir. And they're doing trials over Remdesivir with the endpoint of looking for less days hospitalized. So I mean that the same thing that they trashed on the one hand, but that's their endpoint with this insufficient drug therapy, if you will. ‘Let's see if it helps a little bit. And now we're going to get all excited. We took our prescription drugs, and we lessen the hospital days by 10, 20, 30, 40%’. Lisa: Yeah, and ‘But we'll ignore vitamin C that could actually get the people and prevent them from dying’.  Dr Levy: Even though it's also been documented by Hackney studies to decrease like the hospitalization as well, Lisa: As well. And they have been studied around the world now with the coronavirus with vitamin C. So, a really sarcastic question. Do you think President Trump is getting vitamin C right now? Or is he on Remdesivir? Dr Levy: Well, I don't have a crystal ball. But I think he is getting what was reported, which was—this is significant. Nobody talks about this but had this happened at the beginning of the pandemic, it would have been just incredible news, but shows like  yours, the articles on the orthomolecular medicine news service, all this stuff… It’s absolutely mind blowing to me that it's in the mainstream news, very casually mentioned, that President Trump was getting zinc, vitamin D, melatonin.  Lisa: Oh, wow. Dr Levy: Yes. Okay, and I mean, that was out there up front. What the medical community must have just choked on their tongue when they saw that our president was getting at least some natural approach to bring his virus under control? I doubt he was using vitamin C. But it's possible. Lisa: Wow. But at least he’s on the melatonin and the zinc. I mean, that is a step forward. So but you know, like, you hear this coming from the head of the FDA, ‘None of that has been proven to help. Vitamins A, B, C, D, zinc, melatonin, vitamin C, none of those has been proven’. Dr Levy: That's where politics gets into medicine. I've often said—and I'm sad to say it, and I don't mean to be sarcastic at all—there's more politics in medicine than there is in politics. Lisa:  Yes, yeah. Dr Levy:You have a better chance of a politician giving you an honest statement about a controversial issue than you have a drug representative or a physician representing a drug company, giving you the straight scoop about drugs. What you just said, and they'll say it all the time, ‘There's no study this. There's no study that’. It's a bald faced lie. What could you say beyond the fact that they're just lying? Now, let me say, let me backtrack with lie. I should say they're telling something that's wrong. Lie means intent. So I can't tell you whether it's their intent to lie, like, ‘I know I'm telling you something that's wrong’. But there's no question that most of the time, they're just telling you something that's factually not true. And I dare say most of the time, a deliberate lie. Lisa: And it's ignorance. Dr Levy: No,  nothing wrong with ignorance, Lisa: So they won't go and look at the damn study and its data. Dr Levy: Ignorance can’t be remedied because ignorance doesn't mean, you have to have a closed mind. It just means you have a mind that hasn't been exposed. Lisa: Yeah. I mean, don't we, you know, with the situation with my father. I had the studies, I was working with doctors outside who were helping me get the studies, present the studies, and they said ‘Don't want to see them. Won't be presenting them. All you're worried about is, is it legal? And with our staff are not trained in doing vitamin C infusions, and whether we are allowed to do it’. It was not about the clinical Dr Levy: Well in New Zealand it was a registered medicine. Lisa: And not in the hospitals. I was told point blank is an unlicensed medicine in our... Dr Levy: I think, I'm not sure but I think you can say that was another lie. A lot of times our pharmacy, they'll do, they'll lie like anybody else. It’s something they don't want to do. So they'll just toss it aside, always not allowed. Until you take the law book, and stick it in their face, and say, ‘You're wrong, Stop lying’. Lisa: But you, you know, as a lawyer, and as someone who's brilliant, can do that. A loved one who's fighting for their family who hasn't slept in two weeks, who doesn't know about the law is buggered to be quite fear [41:16]. And so this is—why I'm doing these interviews because I want people to be just made aware of this sort of situation.  So, okay, vitamin C, can help. And we've seen the studies now. And perhaps we'll link to some of the studies in the show notes with sepsis. And Dr Berry Fowler said, used this analogy, just in the States, ‘Two 747s of people are dying every single day of sepsis who don't need to be dying’, who are crashing into the ground, basically. There are a number of people, are dying daily in the States alone. Let alone the rest of the world from sepsis, which could be drastically helped with intravenous vitamin C. Do you think, like Dr Marik included thiamine and hydrocortisone? Is there a necessary additive or a beneficial additive to that protocol? Or is vitamin C the key player here? Dr Levy: Yeah, no, they're not necessary at all. That's not to say they didn't have a positive impact. I mean, like when people ask about supplements, ‘So what supplements should I take’? And I mentioned something, that they ‘What about this, this, and this’? I said, ‘Well those are all good, too, but as far as being vital to the response, no’. And in fact, predating Dr Marik’s study about a year earlier, they did a study in Iran, of all places, with patients with sepsis getting roughly the same dose of vitamin C every six hours. And that was it. And they got the same response and mortality rate.  One thing about the hydrocortisone that makes it especially unnecessary in sepsis is, sepsis is a state where you have massive infection, massive increased oxidative stress throughout the body. When you have increased oxidative stress, what are you going to do? You're gonna, like we talked earlier, oxidized biomolecules? Well, as it turns out, in addition to oxidizing a lot of biomolecules, you also oxidize the cortisol receptors. Cortisol has receptors they bind to. Well, I just said, what happens when you oxidize a biomolecule that doesn't work? So those receptors aren’t taking up the cortisol anymore, so the body's natural reflex is to produce a large amount of cortisol. In fact it is documented in sepsis patients, that there's already a high level of indiginous hydrocortisone. So then what happens when you give vitamin C? When you give vitamin C, one of the first things it does, is it starts reducing those oxidized hydrocortisone receptors, and then the hydrocortisone that's already circulating in the body can bind to the receptor, gets taken up into the cell. Okay, and one of the primary functions of hydrocortisone—not well known, I don’t believe—is that it profoundly increases the uptake of vitamin C inside the cell. Lisa: In that way it would be beneficial? Is it why Dr Marik perhaps used it in this case? We don't—can't really… Dr Levy: No, I don't think so. Because if that was the case, he wouldn't have given the hydrocortisone at all. I mean, you're already, there’s already present and high amounts of it inside the body. So I can't say for sure what his reasoning was. Lisa: Yeah. Well, maybe it was a limitation of the study. And he had to use a drug. Possibly we conjecture here. So when you release cortisol—just for the people listening—it is an anti inflammatory, isn't it? It is one of the stress hormones and it basically takes energy away from you making inflammatory responses. And that’s its beneficial use Dr Levy: Right and it's my opinion, based on the evidence, as I reviewed over the years is that vitamin C, of course is a powerful anti-inflammatory. And I would tell you that the reason hydrocortisone is a powerful anti-inflammatory, is because it gets the most important anti-inflammatory vitamin C inside the cells where it's needed. Lisa: That makes good sense. Are you aware of... Dr Levy: Remember anti-inflammatory just means you're in an area of increased oxidative stress that needs more electrons brought into it, that's all inflammation is. And another point to just to buttress all of this is when you have inflammation starting anywhere—often talking about the coronary artery getting inflamed, vitamin C levels go down to nil. So you have a lot of oxidative stress inside the blood vessel. Okay. And what's the first immune cell to show up? Lisa: Neutrophil Dr Levy: Neutrophils more specifically, the macrophages. The macrophages has 8,000% more vitamin C inside of the blood. So all you're doing in my humble scientific opinion, I think—personally and scientifically—that the primary role of the immune system since it’s precipitated always by areas of increased inflammation increase oxidative stress. My opinion is the primary—not the only but the primary—role of the immune system, is to bring vitamin C where it's most depleted. Lisa: Wow. And that's what the macrophages are doing. So are you aware of the work of Professor Margreet Vissers? She's a professor here in New Zealand at Otago University and Dr Anitra Carr as well. But Professor Vissers is coming on next week, on the show.  And forgive me, I don't have a scientific background. I'm trying to get my head around all this science, biochemistry, but she had showed on one of her lectures, the neutrophils coming to the site of infection, say, pneumonia or sepsis, eating the bacteria into into the neutrophils, they gorge on those bacteria, it's a good thing. The bacteria then inside the neutrophils and if the neutrophils don't have vitamin C in them, they vomit out—for the want of a better description—their own DNA. Eventually, they sort of explode and leave out and put all this DNA into the cytoplasm? And this is causing—so when you get wiped out on the lungs, that's lungs being filled up with neutrophils. And then the macrophages are made to come along and eat the neutrophils from what I understand. And they will only do that if there is vitamin C in the neutrophils. Dr Levy: Both the macrophages and the neutrophils are phagocytic. Okay. And even though the macrophage has the most, I said 8,000% more vitamin C than the blood. The neutrophils have 4 to 5,000% more vitamin C in the blood. So they're sort of like—with regard to vitamin C content—they're right up there with the macrophage. And both the macrophage and the neutrophil, gave these phagocytic Pac Man like qualities, if you will. Lisa: Yeah. And they're eating the bugs and getting rid of them. So she was talking about—no, Dr Berry Fowler—god I’m mixing my things up. NETS, neutrophil extracellular traps), have you heard of those? And the vitamin C prevents—from what I understand. And we'll have Professor Margaret on next week—that it stops the neutrophils from regurgitating basically their own DNA and poisoning the space around them and then the macrophages won't eat them. And then in the case of say, as acute respiratory syndrome, you've got white out and you can't get rid of it. It's not going to go away and it's not going to be taken out by the macrophages. Yeah, it’d be interesting to work to look at those NETS, neutrophil extracellular traps. That was Dr Berry Fowler that was talking about that. But I've got so much research in my head, I'm probably mixing professors up. I don’t have a biochemistry degree anyway. I'm doing my best. So hopefully I haven't butchered it. Okay, so what should people do—on a practical standpoint—if someone is in hospital with a loved one, they've got pneumonia, they've got coronavirus, they’ve got sepsis, how can they get their doctors to give intravenous vitamin C or liposomal delivered vitamin C? What would be your—so they're not in a situation like I was fighting against the machinery. Dr Levy: So we're talking about someone who's not intubated yet. Lisa: Yes. Because when they're intubated, you’re buggered. But you gave me a couple of things that I never thought to bring into the conversation with the doctors. I brought them the clinical studies, I brought in the evidence. But I was saying to the doctor, ‘I'm going to come after you. And I'm going to sue you if you don't do this, because the evidence is there’. Dr Levy:  And draw the vitamin C level and when it comes back low, ‘This doctor is a nutrient level that's low, please treat it’. Lisa: Yep. Okay, so get the vitamin C treated, by the way, in my local hospital, they were unable to test it. Okay, so that's just ridiculous. So is it a very difficult thing to test for vitamin C levels?  Dr Levy: I think so. Not that I know of. It involves a certain technique, and you either have the technique or you don't, but it's not something sort of exotic or out there. Lisa: Oh wow. So anyone who is in that situation, basically, you need to get vitamin C, in somehow. And ideally, you're having it in six hourly, intermittent, constant levels, so that your, because vitamin C has a very short half Life, can you explain that a little bit? Why the intermittent—the every six hours is crucial? Dr Levy: Well, it's just excreted, that rapidly of the blood, once it's in the—it’s excreted that rapidly in the kidneys, once it's in the blood. Like that, it goes down quickly. And that's why you have every six hours, so that as it starts going down, you have another bump up so that you more or less keep a steady state. Which is also why liposomes are so good because once they get taken up inside the cell, they effectively become a long acting form of vitamin C because they've been taken out of the area where they can be rapidly excreted.  You know, you're talking about what to do for a patient in the hospital. And this would help anybody but it will especially help with the acute viral infection, respiratory problem, and the coronavirus. And believe it or not, it actually relates back to vitamin C. And that's the nebulization or inhalation of hydrogen peroxide. Lisa: Oh, yes, I wanted to ask that. Dr Levy: Hydrogen peroxide. Okay, little known facts, number one inside the body and inside the lungs, after it kills the pathogen, you know what's left? Oxygen and water. That's the breakdown products of hydrogen peroxide. So at the same time, you kill the pathogen. You do the two things that are most important for healing tissue. You hydrate it and oxygenate it. Lisa: Yeah. Dr Levy: Number two is we now know, that the respiratory lining of the lungs naturally produces and excretes hydrogen peroxide 24/7. So that you actually have hydrogen peroxide, existing already endogenously to protect you against new pathogens as you breathe in. And when you get an infection, that production increases, so all you're doing with hydrogen peroxide nebulization is you're augmenting a natural response. Lisa: Wow Dr Levy: And add to that the fact that there's been no infections, pathogens of any type that have been found to be resistant to hydrogen peroxide. Now, vitamin C and hydrogen peroxide. The Fenton reaction, vitamin C goes in, donates the electron to iron which passes along to peroxide, make hydroxyl radical oxidized, kills the cell or the pathogen or whatever.  Another thing, little known fact that vitamin C does, is outside of the cell, it stimulates hydrogen peroxide production. So it causes more peroxide to be produced, which then passes easily into the cell and continues to give the vitamin C inside the cell more fuel to resolve the oxidative reaction that kills the patch. Lisa: Wow. So okay neutralizing hydrogen peroxide. So just a normal 3% food grade hydrogen peroxide that you can buy at the chemists or the... Dr Levy: Right. 3% or less. So only 3% percent is a little potent but if it's not, that's great but you could get a very positive response with half a percent or a 10th of a percent but I said don't I say, why not go up to the percent that you easily tolerate and get the job done a little more quickly’? Lisa: Is there any danger with people you know going out buying nebulizers? So when you buy a little nebulizer, is it like the essential oil sort of thing that you have? You need to have a towel over your face or like you do when you get a cold and you put menthol or something in it. If you've got one for me. Oh, okay. No, that wasn't what I was picturing. Okay. Oh, great. nebulizer. Okay. And you just put it in here. Dr Levy: Put the liquid in.  Lisa: Yeah. Yep. And then you just breathe it. And for 5 to 10 minutes, sort of, a day. Dr Levy: Yeah. Lisa: Yeah. And if you've got a cold or something like that, it would help or flow things like that. Dr Levy: That sounds grandiose. But I want to say to anybody that's listening, if you have this device, if you have your peroxide, you need never suffer from a cold or respiratory virus again, which also means influenza or flu. Wow, you should never suffer from that again. I don't know. I can't make it any clearer than that. Lisa: No, that's amazing. Dr Levy: But once you have the nebulizer, you know, how much the vitamin C cost? To heal your cold or flu? Less than 10 cents. Lisa: Really? Like the vitamin C side of things? Dr Levy: No, it's much cheaper than vitamin C. Lisa: The hydrogen peroxide.Okay, so, hydrogen peroxide and vitamin C... Dr Levy: And if people want protocols or articles, you could give them my email. I don't I don't try to hide from people who I get all upset and agitated about something. And I mean, I can't do consultations. But if people want information, a little guidance, you can give them my email address. Lisa: Wow. Are you sure? Dr Levy: Yeah. No problem. It's been available for many years now. Lisa: Okay. That's, that's amazing. What is the email address that people can get you on the inductance? Dr Levy: It’s my initials, T-E, Thomas Edward. Last name, Levy, L-E-V-Y-M-D. televymd@yahoo.com.  Lisa: Wow, that's very, very, very generous of you. Is ozone, because I have been studying ozone as well. I've got a home ozone machine here. Is it—that’s related to hydrogen peroxide too? Dr Levy: Yes, it’s interesting. Hydrogen peroxide, ozone, ultraviolet light, hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Yep, they're all basically doing the same thing, just but by different routes and different points of access. Well, I gotta say it for the peroxide too. But ozone is probably, if you had to pick one, the single most potent anti pathogen agent, there is. You put ozone in the presence of a pathogen, pathogen’s gone. Okay. But most of these therapies that I'm telling you about have an equal impact if you apply them correctly.  And of course, the only reason that ozone shouldn't be at the number one on top of the list is, access, ozone machine, position, control. What I said with hydrogen peroxide, unless you don't have current, you can use batteries, you can do in the Serengeti in Africa. So you can have access everywhere on the planet to—and the other thing too, is even if you don't have a nebulizer, and you're really want to take it down to bare bones, you can take a little spray and spray the back of your throat several times early on, and that will probably do the trick as well, just not as effectively if you've already let it get down into your lungs, whatever the infection is.  But this is, you're using nature's natural antibiotic. Peroxide is produced in every cell of the body in the extracellular space. And it breaks down into water and oxygen what horrible metabolic byproduct. Lisa: So there's all this whole family of oxidative medicines. I mean, I've studied hyperbaric, I've been in a hyperbaric clinic, I've got ozone here, I'm gonna get the peroxide, I’ll definitely do intravenous vitamin C, and all sorts of vitamin C. These are all in the oxidative family and they all have the ability to get more oxygen delivered to the cells and more nutrients, in the case of vitamin C, to the cells. So they all have a very similar basis or mechanism of action, don't they?  Dr Levy: Yes Lisa: And this is why they work on such a broad spectrum, from corona to cancer in the powerful agents, because I think the pharmaceutical, they don't like broad spectrum things either. Because if you've got something that can fix that, but that and that as well, then ‘Oh, I can't possibly be right. And we can't sell the drug for this, for this, for this if we’ve got that’. And then for this oxidative medicine family it’s just being ignored across the board. So ozone is also facing the same issues. Hyperbaric is facing the same issues. As is vitamin C. I haven't studied UV radiation, but that's next on my radar as well. So it's the same problem right across.  And I have seen with my latest book, telling the story with my mom, bringing her back, that hyperbaric oxygen therapy was a massive part of her brain's recovery. We could get oxygen to the cells. I got into vitamin C later in the piece, and she has an intravenous vitamin C, every week. And we do six grams a day for her orally, as well. And my mom is now 79, and she was at 74 and a half. Or she's turning 79. And we were told she would never do anything, again, never have any quality of life, put her in an institution and she'll be gone within a few months very likely. And I just absolutely refuse to believe this. And not—even though I'm not a doctor, I was able to find all these great things by accessing great minds like yourself, reading the books, doing the hard yards, doing the thousands of hours of retraining the brain, and doing the research, doing the hard yards. And now I've got my mum back. And so that really makes me want to fight for people too, because I get frustrated. I've lost a friend this week to cancer. I've lost parents of friends a few weeks ago. People, unfortunately, when I go to tell them something and send them off in the right area of research very often go, ‘No, my doctor says, ‘That's rubbish. And therefore I'm not listening to you’’. Dr Levy: But I just said let me put a little punctuation mark and an exclamation point of what I just said. But if everybody on the planet had access to hydrogen peroxide nebulization and started doing it, there wouldn't be a single case of coronavirus on the planet in a week. Lisa: Wow, wow. That's a really big call. So we should be getting this in our arsenal at home right now, all around the world, because this is something that's achievable, easy, cheap, and something that we can do proactively. Are there any dangers with people doing peroxide, can we overdose? Can we do anything? Dr Levy: Only if you start going to very high concentrations, anything that's pro-oxidant. And obviously hydrogen peroxide is pro-oxidant. Because it's killing the pathogens. You're not killing the pathogens with an antioxidant effect. If you continue on high dose peroxide, yeah, you can start causing oxidative damage, just like with anything else. But at 3% or below, the only thing you might notice if you're doing too much is you might start getting a little irritation in the nose, a little soreness in the throat where you've really gone too far. But only because you've killed all the pathogens. And now you're starting to irritate the normal tissue. Lisa: Right? So with ozone it's different. So like with ozone, you can't breathe ozone. Dr Levy: You can take it just about anywhere else but the lungs don't like the ozone at all. And the interesting thing too is I told you, too, about peroxide breaking down to water and oxygen, if you use an oximeter. And you read it about 95 and then you start to nebulize after 30 seconds to a minute, you're going to start seeing that oxygenation level go up 96, 97, 98, 99, sometimes 100. Lisa: Wow, that is absolutely—I've got oximeter coming up because breathing techniques are another thing that can actually change your whole chemistry in your body with carbon dioxide and so on. This is also a very interesting and powerful mechanism I don't know if you're aware of the work of Patrick McKeown, the great book The Oxygen Advantage, and again it's helping the body use its own mechanisms, breathing in this case, to optimize the delivery of oxygen by raising our tolerance to carbon dioxide levels, which has been a very fascinating read that I'll be covering off in another episode. Dr Levy you've—just before I let you go because I know we’ve recorded on for a few while [1:05:36] and covered a lot of ground. I heard you talk in one of your lectures and I haven't read this book yet The Magnesium Reversing Disease. Briefly touch, was in the Death By Calcium book as well. This was news to me, that calcium—if we start there—calcium, we need in the body is an essential nutrient, but if it's in the wrong places, we can be running into trouble and this is causing... Dr Levy: It’s a toxic nutrient. Iron, copper, and calcium are your three toxic nutrients. You absolutely need them in low levels. And above those levels, they're all absolutely toxic. Okay, so every disease cell, I don't care what the disease is—whether it’s an infection, toxin, lupus, scleroderma—every disease cell has increased intracellular oxidative stress, which is always caused by calcium.  Increase the calcium, you increase the stress and then magnesium is the yin and yang. You increase your magnesium, you decrease your calcium, They’re physiological antagonists. That's why magnesium is, hey this may shock some, people your most important single supplement. Because when you're magnesium deficient, nothing can substitute for magnesium and most people are deficient. But let's say you're deficient in vitamin C, you can partially compensate by taking other antioxidants.  So when people like to just play well, ‘What's your most important oxidant, supplement’? Yeah, magnesium. Of course, I'm going to take vitamin C and vitamin D and vitamin K, too, as well, and iodine. But magnesium is the only one that cannot be substituted—for well, vitamin D can be substituted for either—but a magnesium deficiency causes many diseases and makes all diseases worse. Lisa: Is there a good type of magnesium? Because there’s like carbonate, threonate… Dr Levy: You know the really good ones, you have the anion and you have the cation. Okay, you've got the magnesium, the cation, and the anion can be of no consequence or major consequence of clinical impact on your body as well. Magnesium Chloride, interestingly, is extremely important in inhibiting and eradicating infections, especially viral. So I'm going to talk about coronavirus. I say your magnesium supplementation should be in the magnesium chloride form. You know when you're dealing with a brain problem, well then your magnesium three and eight, that gets across the blood brain barrier well. But all of the glycinate and the carbonate, they all have their own unique features. And it's just a question of what else you want to take along with it. Lisa: So you take a mixture of different types of magnesium perhaps to cover all your bases ideally. Yeah... Dr Levy: If they’re not covered within the supplements. Yes. Lisa: Okay, so 600 to 1000 milligrams, I've heard you say is a good, is it correct? Dr Levy: Yeah, that's about right. The thing is the magnesium is like the vitamin C orally. You take too much, too quick, you get the asthmatic diarrhea and the loose bowels. So you're probably never going to take enough magnesium if you take a one single dose a day rather than spreading it out. Because if you spread it out, you can get a lot more in without causing the loose bowel Lisa: That’s why you get the diarrhea. So go to that point but just before diarrhea and then have this intermittently throughout the day. You mentioned iron as being a new—essential nutrient but a toxic and higher doses. I'm a little bit concerned because I have suffered with anemia my entire athletic career so I've been an extreme endurance athlete. and I've taken a lot of Iron. Have I done myself damage? Dr Levy: No, you do a lot of aerobic and you do a lot of sweating. And the one study they show way back then was, roughly 50% of young, athletic men and women in different schools in different sports, were able to push them themselves into an iron deficiency anemia by the end of their athletic season. Which it just reflects how much iron you can lose in your sweat. So without looking at your ferritin levels, I would say statistically speaking, unless you just took a ton of iron, you're probably still in a nice low range of iron because of the fact that sweating is part of your lifestyle.  But you should never supplement iron unless you have, got an anemia. But an iron deficiency anemia. Which is not just any old anemia, it has to be an anemia, secondary to iron deficiency, which has a characteristic morphology, what's called hypochromic and microcytic. Tiny, tiny, blood—tiny blood cells with small amounts of hemoglobin inside, that's an iron deficiency anemia. And then you only take enough iron to get your blood level back to normal because you don't want your ferritin going above say 35, 25, 30 or so. Lisa: Wow. Okay, so mine in my mind is always, you know, hovered around the 10 to 12. And it's always been good. Dr Levy: But, the 10 to 12 probably indicates that your anemia was iron deficient. So, just without knowing about detail, it sounds like you're minimal and taking the iron was appropriate for your particular condition. Lisa: Yeah, because I was constantly as an athlete, of course, my ability to carry oxygen, with my hemoglobin being low. And my, iron deficiency, it was always a problem for a competitive athlete, because you just couldn't have the lungs or the ability to carry enough oxygen. Okay, and iodine, is there a danger? Because I've heard Dr Brownstein talk about the essential nature of iodine. If someone has Hashimoto’s, is that a caveat for having iodine though? Because I gave my mother iodine, and she has Hashimoto's. Dr Levy: I can't get a yay or nay on that. I'm not really an expert on that particular thing. So, my inclination is, it's still fine to take the iodine, but I don't have a sophisticated level of knowledge on that. So I don't want to give you an absolute—it's important though, with thyroiditis, inflammation, autoimmune, all autoimmune comes from oral infections. Lisa: Oh, okay. Dr Levy: So the teeth, the gums, the sinuses and the tonsils. In one way or another, with your thyroid gland draining all the garbage in your mouth. It's like a toxin screen for everything that's in your mouth. Lisa: Okay, so get your mouth cleaned up, get your hydrogen peroxide, get your teeth looked at, all that sort of stuff. When we’re going to our dentist, who isn't Hal Huggins? What are we asking them to look for apart from amalgam fillings being removed? That's an obvious one. But so I've got root canals. Have I got an issue there? You know, what are we looking for? Is it something that they've put into it? I haven't read Dr Huggins book. Dr Levy: Well, first of all, 100% of root canals are infected. They're all infected, okay? Because they take out the nerve and the blood supply. So there's no way the body can keep the tooth sterile up there, that's just not a possibility. And this has been documented with toxicological studies and over a 5,000 consecutive extracted root canals that Dr Haley—Dr Boyd Haley—and Dr Huggins did.  Now if your thyroid status is perfect, if your supplementation is perfect, if your CRP is perfect, well below one, like below point five. And interval change shows that the level of infection in your root canal is not changing, they can be of inconsequential impact on your health, but that's a really small percentage. And we're talking about a perfect reverse T3 T3 ratio. Because when that gets out of balance, infections metastasize, just like cancer metastasized. The title of my book Hidden Epidemic, the subtitle is, Silent Oral Infections Cause Most Heart Attacks and Breast Cancers. Lisa: Okay, yeah. Dr Levy: So you send me an email, I'll send you the e-book on there. Because what you need is a 3D Cone Beam examination of the mouth. Because many times even other teeth can be affected but do not hurt. Lisa: That's got me really concerned because I got a really, you know, got a whole lot of implants too. Dr Levy: That's where the 3D would be important too, because it could tell you whether the implants are stable or infected. Lisa: Okay. Wow. So people, Hidden Epidemic get that book as well. You've got a lot of readings after this episode. Dr Thomas Leavy, you've been absolutely amazing. I really just thank you and honor you for your work, the passion you bring, the compassion that you bring, it's phenomenal. And I just wish there were more people like you on the planet. So thank you, so, so much for everything. Dr Levy: You've done a lot of passion in this too. So... Lisa: I do. Dr Levy: We're doing it together. Lisa: Yeah,I'll put my two cents and make a difference in this world. And hopefully we can make it a better place for people.  So if people want to reach out to Dr Levy, in his website and his email, we'll put in the show notes website is peakenergy.com. Go and get those books Curing the Incurable, The Magnesium Reversing Disease, Death by Calcium, Primal Panacea, The Toxic Tooth. There's so many, there's 11, I can't say them. You probably can't say them. Go and get some of them. Start reading, start learning, start educating yourself, and take responsibility for your health. Any last words Dr Levy? Dr Levy: Well, we touched upon it earlier, but just that people realize, it is difficult, I know when you're sick, you're frightened. You don't want to be thinking a lot. You just want to put yourself in the hands of somebody and let them take off with it. All I could say is that's a mistake. You got to collect yourself. Deal with your emotions. Talk to some family and good friends. Start your own research track and be the captain of your health care. Lisa: Love it. And that is everything that I believe in and stand for in a nutshell. Take as much control as your heart can. Even if you're not a doctor, even if you don't have a background, we have access through things like this podcast to get the best information and be proactive in your health. Be preventative, not the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. And if you are in deep trouble, make sure you are vigilant. Make sure you ask questions. And if you get pushed back from the doctors, find another doctor, if you can.  Okay, Dr Levy, thank you so much for your time. It's been absolutely amazing. Dr Levy: Very good. Thank you for having me, Lisa. That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review, and share with your friends. And head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com. The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.

This week Lisa sits down with Major League Baseball Player/ Ironman Athlete and Business Coach Andy Neary to discover  how Andy has taken the habits and rituals he used to compete in professional baseball and Ironman racing to help business professionals EXCEL IN BUSINESS AND LIFE.   When you mix discipline with accountability, you create massive action! The work you put in when no one is watching is the key to professional success.   Andy's Bio Andy Neary is a former Professional Baseball Player, a two-time Ironman finisher, Business Coach, and Founder of the Complete Game coaching program.   Andy's mission is to help business professionals build the mindset, habits, and rituals "off the field" that lead to all-star performance on it. It's about developing a #majorleaguemindset.   As an undersized athlete, Andy's ability to master the daily habits and rituals helped him far exceed expectations on the Pitcher's mound. He attributes all the work he put in when no one was watching, to his successful college career and the opportunity to pitch at baseball's highest level. With discipline and accountability anything is possible. Completing an Ironman race is one of the most grueling tasks on the planet. Swimming 2.4 miles, biking 112 miles, and running a marathon (26.2 miles) in one race, requires a clear mind and high-performing body.   To "show up" on race day, one must put in consistent daily work on the bike, the road, and in the pool. Andy attributes his success in Ironman competitions to the same daily habits and rituals he applied to his professional baseball career.   You can find out more about Andy and his work at www.andyneary.com      We would like to thank our sponsors for this show:   For more information on Lisa Tamati's programs, books and documentaries please visit www.lisatamati.com   For Lisa's online run training coaching go to https://www.lisatamati.com/pag... Join hundreds of athletes from all over the world and all levels smashing their running goals while staying healthy in mind and body.   Lisa's Epigenetics Testing Program https://www.lisatamati.com/pag... measurement and lifestyle stress data, that can all be captured from the comfort of your own home   For Lisa's Mental Toughness online course visit: https://www.lisatamati.com/pag...   Lisa's third book has just been released. It's titled "Relentless - How A Mother And Daughter Defied The Odds" Visit: https://relentlessbook.lisatam... for more Information   ABOUT THE BOOK: When extreme endurance athlete, Lisa Tamati, was confronted with the hardest challenge of her life, she fought with everything she had. Her beloved mother, Isobel, had suffered a huge aneurysm and stroke and was left with massive brain damage; she was like a baby in a woman's body. The prognosis was dire. There was very little hope that she would ever have any quality of life again. But Lisa is a fighter and stubborn. She absolutely refused to accept the words of the medical fraternity and instead decided that she was going to get her mother back or die trying. This book tells of the horrors, despair, hope, love, and incredible experiences and insights of that journey. It shares the difficulties of going against a medical system that has major problems and limitations. Amongst the darkest times were moments of great laughter and joy. Relentless will not only take the reader on a journey from despair to hope and joy, but it also provides information on the treatments used, expert advice and key principles to overcoming obstacles and winning in all of life's challenges. It will inspire and guide anyone who wants to achieve their goals in life, overcome massive obstacles or limiting beliefs. It's for those who are facing terrible odds, for those who can't see light at the end of the tunnel. It's about courage, self-belief, and mental toughness. And it's also about vulnerability... it's real, raw, and genuine. This is not just a story about the love and dedication between a mother and a daughter. It is about beating the odds, never giving up hope, doing whatever it takes, and what it means to go 'all in'. Isobel's miraculous recovery is a true tale of what can be accomplished when love is the motivating factor and when being relentless is the only option.   We are happy to announce that Pushing The Limits rated as one of the top 200 podcast shows globally for Health and fitness.  **If you like this week's podcast, we would love you to give us a rating and review if you could. That really, really helps to show get more exposure on iTunes** The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.

In this weeks episode Lisa sits down to talk with Joe Cohen serial entrepreneur, biohacker, genetics expert and founder of Self Decode a genetic testing website, Lab Test Analyzer and SelfHacked.com   They dive deep into DNA and what it can teach us about ourselves and how to use the latest in scientific information about our genes to improve our daily lives, prevent disease and improve our health.   If you are not knowledgeable about your specific genes you are just guessing in everything that affects your health. From your diet to supplements, to exercise to mood and behaviour influences, to gut health to detox abilities to cardiovascular health, even through to medications.  This world is not a "one size fits all" and having such an approach can never help us optimise our lives, our performance and health.   Learn how you can discover what your genes are doing and how to interpret them using the fantastic program and tools Joe and his team of scientists have put together.   You can find out more at https://selfdecode.com/?a_aid=lisatamati and use the code Lisa10 at checkout and if you want help with your results and implementing a personalised approach to your health visit Lisa and her team at www.lisatamati.com or email support@lisatamati.com for details on working with them.     We would like to thank our sponsors for this show:   For more information on Lisa Tamati's programs, books and documentaries please visit www.lisatamati.com   For Lisa's online run training coaching go to https://www.lisatamati.com/pag... Join hundreds of athletes from all over the world and all levels smashing their running goals while staying healthy in mind and body.   Lisa's Epigenetics Testing Program https://www.lisatamati.com/pag... measurement and lifestyle stress data, that can all be captured from the comfort of your own home   For Lisa's Mental Toughness online course visit: https://www.lisatamati.com/pag...   Lisa's third book has just been released. It's titled "Relentless - How A Mother And Daughter Defied The Odds" Visit: https://relentlessbook.lisatam... for more Information   ABOUT THE BOOK: When extreme endurance athlete, Lisa Tamati, was confronted with the hardest challenge of her life, she fought with everything she had. Her beloved mother, Isobel, had suffered a huge aneurysm and stroke and was left with massive brain damage; she was like a baby in a woman's body. The prognosis was dire. There was very little hope that she would ever have any quality of life again. But Lisa is a fighter and stubborn. She absolutely refused to accept the words of the medical fraternity and instead decided that she was going to get her mother back or die trying. This book tells of the horrors, despair, hope, love, and incredible experiences and insights of that journey. It shares the difficulties of going against a medical system that has major problems and limitations. Amongst the darkest times were moments of great laughter and joy. Relentless will not only take the reader on a journey from despair to hope and joy, but it also provides information on the treatments used, expert advice and key principles to overcoming obstacles and winning in all of life's challenges. It will inspire and guide anyone who wants to achieve their goals in life, overcome massive obstacles or limiting beliefs. It's for those who are facing terrible odds, for those who can't see light at the end of the tunnel. It's about courage, self-belief, and mental toughness. And it's also about vulnerability... it's real, raw, and genuine. This is not just a story about the love and dedication between a mother and a daughter. It is about beating the odds, never giving up hope, doing whatever it takes, and what it means to go 'all in'. Isobel's miraculous recovery is a true tale of what can be accomplished when love is the motivating factor and when being relentless is the only option.   We are happy to announce that Pushing The Limits rated as one of the top 200 podcast shows globally for Health and fitness.  **If you like this week's podcast, we would love you to give us a rating and review if you could. That really, really helps to show get more exposure on iTunes** The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.

Wouldn't it be great if your body came with a user manual?   Which foods should you eat, and which ones should you avoid?   When, and how often should you be eating?   What type of exercise does your body respond best to, and when is it best to exercise?   Discover the social interactions that will energize you and uncover your natural gifts and talents.   These are just some of the questions you'll uncover the answers to in the Epigenetics Testing Program along with many others.   There's a good reason why epigenetics is being hailed as the "future of personalised health", as it unlocks the user manual you'll wish you'd been born with! No more guesswork. The program, developed by an international team of independent doctors, researchers, and technology programmers for over 15 years, uses a powerful epigenetics analysis platform informed by 100% evidenced-based medical research. The platform uses over 500 algorithms and 10,000 data points per user, to analyze body measurement and lifestyle stress data, that can all be captured from the comfort of your own home.   In this episode Lisa and Neil discuss how they use the program to help people optimise their health, performance and well-being. For more information on the epigenetics health program visit https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/ or to join Lisa and Neil on their next live epigenetics webinar register at https://epigenetics.lisatamati.com/   We would like to thank our sponsors for this show:   For more information on Lisa Tamati's programs, books and documentaries please visit www.lisatamati.com   For Lisa's online run training coaching go to https://www.lisatamati.com/pag... Join hundreds of athletes from all over the world and all levels smashing their running goals while staying healthy in mind and body.   Lisa's Epigenetics Testing Program https://www.lisatamati.com/pag... measurement and lifestyle stress data, that can all be captured from the comfort of your own home   For Lisa's Mental Toughness online course visit: https://www.lisatamati.com/pag...   Lisa's third book has just been released. It's titled "Relentless - How A Mother And Daughter Defied The Odds" Visit: https://relentlessbook.lisatam... for more Information   ABOUT THE BOOK: When extreme endurance athlete, Lisa Tamati, was confronted with the hardest challenge of her life, she fought with everything she had. Her beloved mother, Isobel, had suffered a huge aneurysm and stroke and was left with massive brain damage; she was like a baby in a woman's body. The prognosis was dire. There was very little hope that she would ever have any quality of life again. But Lisa is a fighter and stubborn. She absolutely refused to accept the words of the medical fraternity and instead decided that she was going to get her mother back or die trying. This book tells of the horrors, despair, hope, love, and incredible experiences and insights of that journey. It shares the difficulties of going against a medical system that has major problems and limitations. Amongst the darkest times were moments of great laughter and joy. Relentless will not only take the reader on a journey from despair to hope and joy, but it also provides information on the treatments used, expert advice and key principles to overcoming obstacles and winning in all of life's challenges. It will inspire and guide anyone who wants to achieve their goals in life, overcome massive obstacles or limiting beliefs. It's for those who are facing terrible odds, for those who can't see light at the end of the tunnel. It's about courage, self-belief, and mental toughness. And it's also about vulnerability... it's real, raw, and genuine. This is not just a story about the love and dedication between a mother and a daughter. It is about beating the odds, never giving up hope, doing whatever it takes, and what it means to go 'all in'. Isobel's miraculous recovery is a true tale of what can be accomplished when love is the motivating factor and when being relentless is the only option.   We are happy to announce that Pushing The Limits rated as one of the top 200 podcast shows globally for Health and fitness.  **If you like this week's podcast, we would love you to give us a rating and review if you could. That really, really helps to show get more exposure on iTunes** The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.

In this interview Lisa sits down with one of the most successful running coaches in America Jason Fitzgerald of Strength Running. Jason is a USATF certified coach and he and Lisa whose running training philosophies collide get deep into the weeds about what makes up a good running program, how to listen to your body, why mindset is so important and how strength and mobility work is an integral part of running success.   Jason has a wealth of knowledge and with a PB in the marathon of 2:39 he also walks the talk. www.strengthrunning.com and check out his blog on common mindset mistakes: https://strengthrunning.com/2020/06/mindset-traps-mental-self-sabotage/     About Jason: Jason Fitzgerald is the host  host of the Strength Running Podcast and the founder of Strength Running, an award-winning running blog with hundreds of thousands of monthly readers. A 2:39 marathoner and USATF-certified coach, he's coached thousands of endurance athletes to faster finishing times and fewer injuries with his results-oriented coaching philosophy. He's the winner of the 2011 Morraine Hills Half Marathon, 2012 Maryland Warrior Dash, and the 2013 Potomac River Run Marathon. During his collegiate career, he was a member of the 2002 National Championship-qualifying cross-country team and a top ten finisher in the steeplechase at the 2006 New England Championships. Jason is a member of the Greatist Expert Network, a speaker for industry conferences and major brands like Anheuser-Busch, and an instructor at adult fitness retreats and running camps. His work has been featured in the Washington Post, Runner's World, Health Magazine, Lifehacker, The Huffington Post, and other major media.  He lives in Denver, Colorado where you can find him trail running in the nearby Flatirons or at the playground with his wife and three children.   We would like to thank our sponsors for this show: For more information on Lisa Tamati's programs, books and documentaries please visit www.lisatamati.com   For Lisa's online run training coaching go to https://www.lisatamati.com/pag... Join hundreds of athletes from all over the world and all levels smashing their running goals while staying healthy in mind and body.   Lisa's Epigenetics Testing Program https://www.lisatamati.com/pag... measurement and lifestyle stress data, that can all be captured from the comfort of your own home   For Lisa's Mental Toughness online course visit: https://www.lisatamati.com/pag...   Lisa's third book has just been released. It's titled "Relentless - How A Mother And Daughter Defied The Odds" Visit: https://relentlessbook.lisatam... for more Information   ABOUT THE BOOK: When extreme endurance athlete, Lisa Tamati, was confronted with the hardest challenge of her life, she fought with everything she had. Her beloved mother, Isobel, had suffered a huge aneurysm and stroke and was left with massive brain damage; she was like a baby in a woman's body. The prognosis was dire. There was very little hope that she would ever have any quality of life again. But Lisa is a fighter and stubborn. She absolutely refused to accept the words of the medical fraternity and instead decided that she was going to get her mother back or die trying. This book tells of the horrors, despair, hope, love, and incredible experiences and insights of that journey. It shares the difficulties of going against a medical system that has major problems and limitations. Amongst the darkest times were moments of great laughter and joy. Relentless will not only take the reader on a journey from despair to hope and joy, but it also provides information on the treatments used, expert advice and key principles to overcoming obstacles and winning in all of life's challenges. It will inspire and guide anyone who wants to achieve their goals in life, overcome massive obstacles or limiting beliefs. It's for those who are facing terrible odds, for those who can't see light at the end of the tunnel. It's about courage, self-belief, and mental toughness. And it's also about vulnerability... it's real, raw, and genuine. This is not just a story about the love and dedication between a mother and a daughter. It is about beating the odds, never giving up hope, doing whatever it takes, and what it means to go 'all in'. Isobel's miraculous recovery is a true tale of what can be accomplished when love is the motivating factor and when being relentless is the only option.   We are happy to announce that Pushing The Limits rated as one of the top 200 podcast shows globally for Health and fitness.  **If you like this week's podcast, we would love you to give us a rating and review if you could. That really, really helps to show get more exposure on iTunes** The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.

Recently Lisa had her own DNA tested doing a comprehensive Genome report and Hormone report - testing offered by The DNA Company (www.thednacompany.com) and in this episode Dr Mansoor explains Lisa's genomic results and the implications for her health.    The depth of the normal report means they only got to touch on a few of the gene results but the full comprehensive genomic report covers areas like:   Cardiovascular health Mood and behaviour genes Methylation genes  Metabolism genes Hormones   The insights garnered from these reports can help you avoid the possible major problems that could be coming your way if you aren't aware of them.   This information is by no means fatalistic or deterministic but rather to empower the individual to be aware of where certain risk factors lie and how you implement the diet, lifestyle and exercises changes required to avoid problems further down the track.   Hormone Report with The DNA Company If you would like to have your hormone test done, understand your genetics in regards to your hormones and would like to then have these interpreted by Lisa, please go to this link to get the test done. Lisa will then contact you once the DNA has been processed to have a consultation. Please note the consultation will take an hour and will cost $190, which is extra to the actual report. The Report can be purchased here: https://www.mydnacompany.com/products/lisa-tamati-and-the-dna-company-female-male-hormone-profile Please note The DNA Company is based in Canada and this price is in Canadian dollars. It may take up to 6 weeks depending on where you are located in the world for your results to get back to you. For any questions, please email lisa@lisatamati.com.     WHAT IS FUNCTIONAL GENOMICS? Functional genomics is the study of how our genome interacts with the world around us. Because it's not just about where you come from. It's about where you can go. Through a simple sample of your saliva, The Dna company are able to extract the information they need to provide you with a customized health report. To order a report contact support@lisatamati.com to arrange testing today.   We would like to thank our sponsors for this show: For more information on Lisa Tamati's programs, books and documentaries please visit www.lisatamati.com   For Lisa's online run training coaching go to https://www.lisatamati.com/pag... Join hundreds of athletes from all over the world and all levels smashing their running goals while staying healthy in mind and body.   Lisa's Epigenetics Testing Program https://www.lisatamati.com/pag... measurement and lifestyle stress data, that can all be captured from the comfort of your own home   For Lisa's Mental Toughness online course visit: https://www.lisatamati.com/pag... Lisa's third book has just been released. It's titled "Relentless - How A Mother And Daughter Defied The Odds"   Visit: https://relentlessbook.lisatam... for more Information   ABOUT THE BOOK: When extreme endurance athlete, Lisa Tamati, was confronted with the hardest challenge of her life, she fought with everything she had. Her beloved mother, Isobel, had suffered a huge aneurysm and stroke and was left with massive brain damage; she was like a baby in a woman's body. The prognosis was dire. There was very little hope that she would ever have any quality of life again. But Lisa is a fighter and stubborn. She absolutely refused to accept the words of the medical fraternity and instead decided that she was going to get her mother back or die trying. This book tells of the horrors, despair, hope, love, and incredible experiences and insights of that journey. It shares the difficulties of going against a medical system that has major problems and limitations. Amongst the darkest times were moments of great laughter and joy. Relentless will not only take the reader on a journey from despair to hope and joy, but it also provides information on the treatments used, expert advice and key principles to overcoming obstacles and winning in all of life's challenges. It will inspire and guide anyone who wants to achieve their goals in life, overcome massive obstacles or limiting beliefs. It's for those who are facing terrible odds, for those who can't see light at the end of the tunnel. It's about courage, self-belief, and mental toughness. And it's also about vulnerability... it's real, raw, and genuine. This is not just a story about the love and dedication between a mother and a daughter. It is about beating the odds, never giving up hope, doing whatever it takes, and what it means to go 'all in'. Isobel's miraculous recovery is a true tale of what can be accomplished when love is the motivating factor and when being relentless is the only option.   We are happy to announce that Pushing The Limits rated as one of the top 200 podcast shows globally for Health and fitness.  **If you like this week's podcast, we would love you to give us a rating and review if you could. That really, really helps to show get more exposure on iTunes**

This week Lisa shares her insights into what Heavy metal poisoning is. It is the accumulation of various heavy metals in your body. Environmental and industrial factors expose you to high levels of heavy metals every day, including the foods you eat and air you breathe. Some of these metals — such as zinc, copper, and iron — are good for you in small amounts. But overexposure can lead to heavy metal poisoning over time.  Heavy Metals damage our bodies and brains in so many ways and none of us living in this toxic soup environment of our world is immune to it's effects so what can we do to support our bodies in detoxifying from things like Mercury, Arsenic, Lead, Cadmium, Thallium and co. In this webinar Lisa shares her heavy metal detox methods and what you need to be careful about. Symptoms of heavy metal toxicity vary depending on the type of metal you're overexposed to. Mercury, lead, arsenic and cadmium are some of the more common overexposed metals. Acute symptoms associated with these metals include: headaches abdominal pain and cramping nausea vomiting diarrhea fatigue difficulty breathing In more severe cases of chronic heavy metal poisoning, you may experience symptoms including: burning and tingling sensations chronic infections brain fog visual disturbances insomnia paralysis   This Webinar was developed as part of Lisa's new Brain Optimisation course.   We would like to thank our sponsors for this show:   For more information on Lisa Tamati's programs, books and documentaries please visit www.lisatamati.com   For Lisa's online run training coaching go to https://www.lisatamati.com/pag... Join hundreds of athletes from all over the world and all levels smashing their running goals while staying healthy in mind and body.   Lisa's Epigenetics Testing Program https://www.lisatamati.com/pag... measurement and lifestyle stress data, that can all be captured from the comfort of your own home   For Lisa's Mental Toughness online course visit: https://www.lisatamati.com/pag... Lisa's third book has just been released. It's titled "Relentless - How A Mother And Daughter Defied The Odds"   Visit: https://relentlessbook.lisatam... for more Information   ABOUT THE BOOK: When extreme endurance athlete, Lisa Tamati, was confronted with the hardest challenge of her life, she fought with everything she had. Her beloved mother, Isobel, had suffered a huge aneurysm and stroke and was left with massive brain damage; she was like a baby in a woman's body. The prognosis was dire. There was very little hope that she would ever have any quality of life again. But Lisa is a fighter and stubborn. She absolutely refused to accept the words of the medical fraternity and instead decided that she was going to get her mother back or die trying. This book tells of the horrors, despair, hope, love, and incredible experiences and insights of that journey. It shares the difficulties of going against a medical system that has major problems and limitations. Amongst the darkest times were moments of great laughter and joy. Relentless will not only take the reader on a journey from despair to hope and joy, but it also provides information on the treatments used, expert advice and key principles to overcoming obstacles and winning in all of life's challenges. It will inspire and guide anyone who wants to achieve their goals in life, overcome massive obstacles or limiting beliefs. It's for those who are facing terrible odds, for those who can't see light at the end of the tunnel. It's about courage, self-belief, and mental toughness. And it's also about vulnerability... it's real, raw, and genuine. This is not just a story about the love and dedication between a mother and a daughter. It is about beating the odds, never giving up hope, doing whatever it takes, and what it means to go 'all in'. Isobel's miraculous recovery is a true tale of what can be accomplished when love is the motivating factor and when being relentless is the only option.   We are happy to announce that Pushing The Limits rated as one of the top 200 podcast shows globally for Health and fitness.  **If you like this week's podcast, we would love you to give us a rating and review if you could. That really, really helps to show get more exposure on iTunes** The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.

In this interview Lisa and Dr Wayne delve deep into  what Prolotherapy is and how it can be used with joint, tendon and ligament problems, what Prolozone is, what Ozone therapy is,  it's mechanisms of actions and much more.   With nearly 30 years experience Dr McCarthy has used these therapies on thousands of patients and teachers other doctors and medical specialists in these therapies.  You can find out more at https://waipunaturalhealth.co.nz/   Prolotherapy & Prolozone therapy Prolotherapy is a non-invasive, cost-effective solution to many problems associated with the wear and tear of joints and back problems.    Especially effective with knee and shoulder damage and lower back issues. An injection of dextrose and lidocaine are used to perform prolotherapy.  The injection is given into damaged tissue (ligaments and tendons) which causes it to inflame and then heal.  In the healing process more strength is added to bony connections.   Ligaments hold joints firmly so they move in correct alignment.  Tendons attach muscles to bones. Tearing of ligaments and tendons off bones causes sloppy joint movement and pain. Prolozone involves injecting ozone into the painful or inflamed areas, similar to prolotherapy. Once repaired non-surgically with prolotherapy, muscles can then strengthen around the joint.  Once the joint is strong, it remains so unless another accidental injury occurs. Prolotherapy increases circulation and nutrients that help tissue repair itself.  This collagen strengthening technique can be used for all joint injuries, old or new.   Ozone Therapy  What might it do for you? Essentially ozone restores oxygen saturation to the body's tissues. With any form of illness the oxygen levels drop and if they get depressed 40% below normal cancer is encouraged to grow. Low oxygen signals fatigue, usually becoming chronic. The oxidative (Life Force) power of the body is reduced and metabolism goes down to a less efficient level. Conversely, when the oxygen saturation is returned to normal there is a strong chance of recovery of normal physiological function i.e.: A return to better health. Ozone therapy is unsurpassed as a method of oxygenation and is a cousin of hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Six treatments are required to receive the ozone effect and as metabolism improves vastly resulting benefits are very long lasting.   Using the body's own inherent self-healing properties to regenerate tissue in the body. Ancient systems of medicine such as acupuncture and manipulative medicine have tapped into this capability to varying degrees by enhancing blood flow, nerve conduction and oxygenation to areas that need to be healed. As our understanding of the body's own mechanisms for healing has matured, we have developed new techniques with a more robust healing potential. In the field of Musculoskeletal Medicine, Prolotherapy, using a concentrated Dextrose (corn sugar) solution injected at the area requiring regeneration, can initiate the healing response. The first phase of healing is inflammation, where the blood flow to the area is increased bringing white blood cells to clean up the area and platelets with growth factors to stimulate stem cells to regenerate tissue. The next evolution of Prolotherapy involves isolating the growth factors found in platelets and white blood cells in the blood and injecting them directly into the area to be healed. This is called Platelet Rich Plasma. Platelet Rich Plasma can be used to stimulate regeneration of muscles, tendons, ligaments, and cartilage, and it can also be used for a variety of aesthetic conditions like hair regrowth, facial regeneration and scars. Dr.Wayne McCarthy N.D. is a Naturopathic Physician. Wayne's background is as a practicing Naturopath in New Zealand until moving to the U.S.A in 1989, where he furthered his education and training by going to a private medical school in Oregon called National College of Naturopathic Medicine. After graduation Wayne was licensed as a primary care physician in Hawaii where he practiced for 15 years. Wayne is registered with NZNMA, and certified by Natural Health Practitioners of New Zealand in Naturopathy, Nutrition and Herbal Medicine. Email Wayne, Waipu Clinic: 09 432 1325 Websites https://waipunaturalhealth.co.nz/ and https://nehc.co.nz/   We would like to thank our sponsors for this show:   For more information on Lisa Tamati's programs, books and documentaries please visit www.lisatamati.com   For Lisa's online run training coaching go to https://www.lisatamati.com/page/running/ Join hundreds of athletes from all over the world and all levels smashing their running goals while staying healthy in mind and body.   Lisa's Epigenetics Testing Program https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics/ measurement and lifestyle stress data, that can all be captured from the comfort of your own home   For Lisa's Mental Toughness online course visit: https://www.lisatamati.com/page/mindsetu-mindset-university/   Lisa's third book has just been released. It's titled "Relentless - How A Mother And Daughter Defied The Odds" Visit: https://relentlessbook.lisatamati.com/ for more Information   ABOUT THE BOOK: When extreme endurance athlete, Lisa Tamati, was confronted with the hardest challenge of her life, she fought with everything she had. Her beloved mother, Isobel, had suffered a huge aneurysm and stroke and was left with massive brain damage; she was like a baby in a woman's body. The prognosis was dire. There was very little hope that she would ever have any quality of life again. But Lisa is a fighter and stubborn. She absolutely refused to accept the words of the medical fraternity and instead decided that she was going to get her mother back or die trying. This book tells of the horrors, despair, hope, love, and incredible experiences and insights of that journey. It shares the difficulties of going against a medical system that has major problems and limitations. Amongst the darkest times were moments of great laughter and joy. Relentless will not only take the reader on a journey from despair to hope and joy, but it also provides information on the treatments used, expert advice and key principles to overcoming obstacles and winning in all of life's challenges. It will inspire and guide anyone who wants to achieve their goals in life, overcome massive obstacles or limiting beliefs. It's for those who are facing terrible odds, for those who can't see light at the end of the tunnel. It's about courage, self-belief, and mental toughness. And it's also about vulnerability... it's real, raw, and genuine. This is not just a story about the love and dedication between a mother and a daughter. It is about beating the odds, never giving up hope, doing whatever it takes, and what it means to go 'all in'. Isobel's miraculous recovery is a true tale of what can be accomplished when love is the motivating factor and when being relentless is the only option.   Here's What NY Times Best Selling author and Nobel Prize Winner Author says of The Book: "There is nothing more powerful than overcoming physical illness when doctors don't have answers and the odds are stacked against you. This is a fiercely inspiring journey of a mother and daughter that never give up. It's a powerful example for all of us." —Dr. Bill Andrews, Nobel Prize Winner, author of Curing Aging and Telomere Lengthening. "A hero is someone that refuses to let anything stand in her way, and Lisa Tamati is such an individual. Faced with the insurmountable challenge of bringing her ailing mother back to health, Lisa harnessed a deeper strength to overcome impossible odds. Her story is gritty, genuine and raw, but ultimately uplifting and endearing. If you want to harness the power of hope and conviction to overcome the obstacles in your life, Lisa's inspiring story will show you the path." —Dean Karnazes, New York Times best selling author and Extreme Endurance Athlete.   We are happy to announce that Pushing The Limits rated as one of the top 200 podcast shows globally for Health and fitness.  **If you like this week's podcast, we would love you to give us a rating and review if you could. That really, really helps to show get more exposure on iTunes**   Transcript of the Podcast:   Speaker 1: (00:01) Welcome to pushing the limits. The show that helps you reach your full potential with your host. Lisa Tamati brought to you by Lisatamati.com Speaker 2: (00:13) Today, I have the wonderful Dr Wayne McCarthy, who is a Naturopathic physician primary care physician up in Whangarei in New Zealand and works at the Waipu health center. He is a specialist once again, in ozone therapy. We've done a couple of episodes on ozone, but Dr. Mccarthy uses ozone in a couple of different ways, as well as the standard practices. And he shares today a little bit about Prolozone. He also talks about prolotherapy, which is all about fixing a joint and ligament and tendon damage. So if you're struggling with an injury that you can't fix, you want to tune into this episode. We also talk about his approach to natural health and how long he's been doing ozone therapy, all the things that he's studied around the world. So a really great episode, especially off the back of last week with dr. Speaker 2: (01:10) Tim Ewer, who I head on another integrative medical specialists. And you know, I think between the two of them, these two doctors both in New Zealand are absolutely fantastic people to be listening to and finding out about more. So I hope you enjoy this interview with dr. Wayne McCarthy. Who's given up a Sunday morning to do this with us. So I was very, very lucky. Before we hit over to dr. Wayne just want to remind you, my book relentless is now out and available. It's available in bookstores throughout New Zealand. It's also available internationally on Amazon, on audio books or the audio book platforms as a Kindle, as an ebook, pretty much you name it, it's out there. You can find it on my website at lisatamati.com. Also. It's yeah, it's been out there for a few weeks and now that we were at a COVID, if you want to just pop into your local bookstore or store, if you're in New Zealand, you can do that. Speaker 2: (02:04) And just a reminder, too, that every couple of weeks we're holding a live webinar about epigenetics health program. This is all about utilizing your genes and understanding your genes and how to optimize your genes for your, for your optimum health, from nutrition, right through to your social environment, your work environment. This is absolutely powerful wellness program that we're using in the corporate setting. It's also very good for individuals, for athletes wanting optimum performance, as it covers off every area from your nutrition, your exercise, right through to your how your brain works, your dominant hormones and neurotransmitters, your it's, everything, everything is covered covered on this. It's a really a amazing program that we're delighted to be able to deliver your, you you can join us for that live webinar, which we're holding pretty much every second week the moment you can find out when the next one is at epigenetics.lisatamati.com. Okay. EPIGENETICS.Lisatamati.com if you want to find out anymore. Speaker 2: (03:12) Let me know. And as always, if you enjoy the show, please give us a rating and review because that really helps the show get exposure. And on that point, I just want to thank you all for those who have listened to have done ratings or have done reviews, because we're now ranked as one of the top 200 podcasts globally for in the health and fitness genre. So I'm really, really appreciative. It's a combination of five years of hard work, and we're really, really stoked to be in that top 200. So thank you to everyone who has done a rating and review or share this with your friends and made that happen. Now over to the show with Dr. Wayne McCarthy. Speaker 3: (03:54) Well, hi everyone. Lisa Tamati here at pushing the limits. Fantastic to have you back again. I am sitting with a lovely day, Dr. Wayne McCarthy, who is sitting up near Whangarei who is the a founder of the Waipu natural health, and also is a doctorate, the natural environmental health clinic. Welcome to the show dr. Wayne. Speaker 4: (04:19) Good morning, Lisa. Nice to be here with you. Speaker 3: (04:22) It's fantastic. I've Sunday morning, no less cutting into your family time. So I really, really appreciate you coming on the show today, but we had a fantastic discussion yesterday. So I've been really, really excited to talk to dr. Wayne today and to share some of his insights and some of the work that he's doing in his clinics. Dr. Wayne, Can you give us a little bit of a background on, on who you are and what you do? Speaker 4: (04:49) I'm in New Zealand, I started life as a natural path osteopath. I went to Speaker 3: (04:58) The Speaker 4: (04:59) Natural therapies college in Ellis Lee, and then after five years in practice, I went to America and got an opportunity to go to national college of naturopathic medicine in Portland, Oregon, where I trained and studied and also taught. And then I got licensed as a naturopathic doctor in state of Hawaii where I practiced for 15 years. Wow. so in America we call primary care doctors, but we're working as a GP would work here in New Zealand. Speaker 3: (05:35) hmm. Speaker 4: (05:36) During that study at a national college of naturopathic medicine. I met James Hutton who was a year ahead of me as a student, but he was the understudy of dr. William Tesco. Now William Tesco was a naturopathic medical doctor. One of the first doctors to come to America from Germany. He was an ozone doctor. He wrote the first papers on bio oxidation. And I think of bio oxidation as the life force, if you want to sort of give it a lay term. And he was the understudy of Dr. Tesco. So he was telling me about ozone while I was at medical school. And then when I graduated, he taught me how to do ozone therapy. From that time forward, ozone therapy became my main therapy and I just, it's what I do with every person I treat. And that's how I got the name, dr. Ozone back then, 25 years later, I got an opportunity to go and train with in Russia. Speaker 4: (06:39) Initially Novgorod 500 K's East of Moscow with professor oly and professor Claudia of consortia Kovar, the mother and father of those own therapy and Russia. Now, the important thing about Russia is that they've been using ozone for decades in their hospital system, across all their medical specialties, oncology, gynecology, obstetrics, neurology, dermatology, pain, medicine, burns, and many other areas, neurology. So they've had the, they've done the most research of any country in the, in the world. And I trained with them for two weeks. It was one on one and I had a, a Russian lady Eugenia, Shasta Kober. Who's my interpreter. And I'm still in touch with her. We communicate regularly. She sends me information on Russian research. I collaborate with then two years ago, I went and trained with dr. Adriana Schwarz in Honduras, but she also works out in Madrid. She's the president of the international medical ozone Federation and the secretary for the international scientific committee on ozone therapy of which I'm a member. And our mandate is to improve and update the Madrid declaration, which is the world standard on how to use ozone medically. Speaker 3: (08:12) Fantastic. Okay. So ozone therapy my listeners have heard a little bit about ozone therapy at all, but you are, you know, dr. Ozone, as you say, in New Zealand, you've been practicing this for over 30 years. Speaker 4: (08:27) I've been practicing for 27 years since 1993 Speaker 3: (08:33) In the law. I want to go into some of the therapies that you use and what's actually happening with the ozone. Like I know that you said to me yesterday, you're trying to get it into the mainstream and New Zealand. How, how has that looking Speaker 4: (08:48) It's already starting to happen because we have GPS around the country starting to pick up train with us and use ozone therapy because I'm, I'm in Amer the Australasian integrated medicines association. And basically these are like-minded doctors, GPS mostly, but there are natural paths in there as well. So we're really having to greater the medical and the naturopathic through this association. And there's a lot of holistic medical doctors. And so this is sort of my clan. And if you will pick up my only naturopathic doctor in New Zealand, there might be some others, but really, I think I'm the only one just by the mere fact that nobody else has gone and trained in America where I did. Yep, exactly. Okay. So this is great because it means ozone. It is it's hopefully going to be accepted into the mainstream soon because in 12 countries where ozone has been regularized, and we believe we have all the documentation to go to our ministry of health and say, here's a new therapy. Speaker 4: (10:00) We want you to regulate it. They would look at all the work we've done and they'd go, well, you haven't left much for us to do this already. Self-Regulated, you've done a really good job. We know, yeah, you've really done the race. Now we can start to train other people. So I've trained two natural cats that now work with me. But they've upgraded to be ozone experts. All the ozone therapies are done intravenously or by injection. So it's always needles, but it's a feel good therapy. It leaves people with an overwhelming sense of wellbeing. And the primary function of it is to saturate the body with oxygen. This will do several things. It will improve athletic performance by giving the athlete the five to 8% endurance advantage, which means that it prolongs the time of maximum anaerobic output before you hit the wall and I've worked with triathletes and the iron man in Hawaii, and I've worked with many other athletes would chop those canoeists Walker, armor, paddlers people who are doing tennis, some of our out Ines players and New Zealand and swimmers. Speaker 4: (11:29) And of course you work with every form of illness that comes our way. We do see quite a few people that have various forms of cancers and the primary cause of cancer, doctor Otto Warburg won two Nobel prizes. And he proved that the primary cause of cancer is a lack of oxygen. The tissues, wow. Though, the respiratory enzymes have been toxified and therefore the body cannot process oxygen. So what we do is we saturate the body with oxygen, removing the prime cause of all cancers. So that's all I really want to say about that. That's the rationale we don't, we don't actually treat diseases. You support health. We treat people when we treat people and we're just pushing them toward greater health by restoring their bio oxidate of capacity in the body. As you know, the main cause of a lot of underlying the underlying cause of most chronic diseases is a chronic inflammation, which is free radical damage, ozone reverses, free, radical damage. Speaker 4: (12:51) Wow. So that's the key point of it. And it also, so it's oxygen is three and it's we talked briefly yesterday about it being a relation of hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which is also increasing the amount of oxygen getting to tissues. That's right. So hyperbaric oxygen, H202, which is hydrogen peroxide, vitamin C therapy, high dose intravenous and ozone therapy, intravenous they're all in a family called bio oxidate of therapies and hyperbaric oxygen. We use it it, that is better for central nervous system injuries, brain damaged spinal cord ozone is better on infection and improving circulation. So they have some overlap. I've chosen to do exclusively ozone therapy for the fact that it's cheaper to administer. It's a lot more readily available and it's a lot more versatile because I can treat the blood with it, but I can also inject it into joints or I can inject it into pain and pain is shortage of oxygen in the body. Speaker 4: (14:10) What we've learned as ozone therapists, where we inject those own pain will go really. So I can just sort of go into a little bit of that on the sports or athletics side, I feel like we'll sort of go, well, I'll start with the ozone therapy. So where does pain in the muscles? We can inject those zone and saturate those tissues with oxygen that will remove the lactic acid. And the athletes will have a faster recovery from their training and we saturate the blood and the body so that the is processing oxygen much more efficiently, which gives us a higher prolong, physical energy output during sports, the international Olympic committee. I have read their documentation on blood doping and, and how we can't cheat. You know, we're not, we're not supposed to cheat. So their ruling basically is ozone could be used for a medical purpose with an athlete during times when they're training. Speaker 4: (15:24) Yes, that's legal to treat an athlete, just cry to a competition would be considered cheating a bit. Not that you could really pick it up, cause I don't think it's terrible in the body. However, they could see that the the saturation of oxygen and their blood would be very high. It would be a bit like a altitude training. Yes. Blood doping or altitude training. It has a very similar effect, which is athletes could do ozone therapy and their training periods to recover from training. But we just wouldn't do it within sort of three or four days before an athletic event. And no one can hear enough. Okay. So how does it increase? Like what is the mechanism by which it increases the oxygen carrying capacity of the red blood cells. Now I understand from the Realogy, Oh, the red blood cell increases the, what would you call it? The pivot, the flexibility of, of the red blood cell is that correct? Speaker 4: (16:33) Makes the red cells more pliable, more slippery, more flexible. So they can squeeze through the small cappelary and get to even the hardest to reach tissues. So if you've got damaged or inflamed tissues yeah, that's right. Any kind of injury where you've got inflammation, swelling, pain. Mmm. We save limbs from amputation with those own. Wow. Because we restore a good blood flow. Also the red cell, we increase a enzyme on the red cell called two, three di phospho glycerides two to three DPG. We call it what that does is it weakens the bond between hemoglobin and oxygen. What this means is blood flowing through the lungs will still pick up at school compliment of oxygen, but it will release it to the tissues a lot more easily. It's like a, it's like a wind that's blowing into the tissues rather than having to pull the oxygen off the red cell with osmosis, trying to use energy to tug it off. Speaker 4: (17:48) The blood's just good sort of way more freely. And in this way we saturate the body with oxygen. I believe it's the only way of doing it. Unless you have a hyperbaric chamber and this would be a really powerful combination I can see. So it's, it's pushing, it's basically pushing the oxygen into the tissues as opposed to it having to be pulled. Now, like as someone like that, I'm an athlete. Mmm. I've had problems constantly with anemia and not enough red blood cells. Mmm. And getting enough oxygen carrying capacity to work the muscles. Does it help with that? Or is that, it's just that that's an independent thing because number of blood cells, no, I'll speak to that issue, Lisa, because we see people that are me anemic often kicks, you know, they're wasting away. Yep. They've got bone marrow suppression, not producing enough red cells or white cells or just whatever it might be. Speaker 4: (18:46) But when we treat with the, when we treat the blood where those zone, where rejuvenating the bone marrow. Wow. And so the bone marrow starts to produce, what's called super gifted red cells. And that's actually the scientific term, super gifted. So real knife gifted, dr. Bilio Bachi Theo CCI. He wrote the book ozone, a new medical drug. And I work with dr. Adriana Schwarz, who was Dr. Bachi Sort of Lieutenant right hand person, you know, his protege really. And she's now leading the charge around the world, promoting ozone therapy, God gives excellent courses. Where was I going with this? You were talking about the Realogy and the, the, the really bad cells, the red blood cells coming out of the bone marrow are called super gifted, which means they're more resistant to oxidative stress and they're better at delivering oxygen around the body. Speaker 4: (19:53) So even when we've stopped and ozone, even though we've done a course of, let's say six to eight ozone therapies, let's say we're treating a person for a condition after six to eight ozone therapies. We've usually established a healthy bone marrow production of red cells overcome anemia. Wow. And the person is starting to feel a lot more energetic and the overnights will last for six months in the body. So they just have to realize ozone is a very reactive molecule. So when we're treating blood, the ozone has reacted with the red cell within nanoseconds, it's gone, it's undetectable and it becomes a nose annoyed. It becomes a nose denied, which is a weaker form of ozone. Or we have a it's more durable and they last six months, wow. Are there for after we finished the course of those own therapy, the patient basically to put it sort of bluntly gets their money's worth during the six to eight treatments. Cause they feel great. And their blood work's usually improving. However, over the next six months, they will be continued improvements even though we've stopped the treatment because the theology of the body has improved. We've blown all the cobwebs out of the bio oxidate of pathways or the hundreds of enzymatic pathways in the body, such that the biochemistry is now working perfectly or optimally. And remember oxygen is the primary, primary nutrients for optimum health. Absolutely. Speaker 4: (21:42) It's used at every step of every chemical reaction in the body. And we see that the underlying reason for chronic illness is the body is not processing oxygen. Speaker 3: (21:56) It's just what you see. And this isn't, Oh, well, I'll just take a big, deep breath of air. And then there I go, I've got my oxygen back. It's a little bit more complicated than that. Isn't it? Speaker 4: (22:06) No, not really. I'd say that people breathe easier. They feel normal again, and they've recovered a healthy metabolism. Speaker 3: (22:14) But when I say like we don't take my SPO two sets here at senior level, I'm at 98, 99%. So I'm like, Oh, well my oxygen's okay. I don't need extra oxygen support, but I know with like with hyperbaric, I can get a heck of a lot more like up to 12 times the amount of oxygen and the right and the right. Speaker 4: (22:37) Yeah. So what's happening there. Lisa is, you're measuring the SPO2 of the blood. You're measuring the oxygen saturation of the red cells and the blood. And they may be 98 or 99%. However, when we treat somebody we'll often see that 98 or 99% straight after the treatment has dropped down to 95 or 93%, where's all the oxygen gone. We've just poured it into the blood. Where's it gone? Speaker 4: (23:11) Well, it's absorbed into the tissues of the body that were desperate for it. And that were low in oxygen. And it's this way that we saturate then very quickly that oxygen level return back up to 99. We know the course of ozone treatment is complete. When a patient comes in they're 98 or 99%, we treat them and the blood is still 98 or 99 cent. It didn't drop. Therefore that tells us the body is saturated. Blood is saturated. They now have what we call the effect and they will stay self saturated at a very optimal level for a very long time. Speaker 3: (23:53) Wow. So if, if I want to, you know, like I'm definitely coming to see you, doc, Dwayne, I'm going to bring my mum. Then we're going to get some treatments as soon as I can get up to away. It's a long way away. But w H w over what period of time would, would, it would a person who's traveling to see you? How many, like the six to eight is required? How many do they need sort of back the team they get back to back. Speaker 4: (24:19) So over a period, what we do, people that come from South Ireland or Australia or Singapore or overseas, we get people from everywhere. We ask them to come and stay in the Waipu area, and then we'll treat them nearly every day for about a week. Wow. Okay, great. Yup. And we see a lot of chronic conditions where everything else basically is filed. And so therefore we treat people every day. We start with a very low dose of ozone because we're working in millions of a gram. We work between zero and 80 micrograms, which is zero to 80 millions of a gram of Bozon middle of, of oxygen ozone and the syringe. So we're working with micro dosages, but we've got equipment that we can dial up. Yep. 1000000Th of a gram. Speaker 3: (25:15) Yup. Speaker 4: (25:16) And so we can do one or two or three or up to 80. So we start with very low concentrations. And over the course of the treatment, we build it up to a maximum. So we might go up to maximum for us would be 80 micrograms. And then we drop it off again, the last several treatments back down to about 20 micrograms. So we vary the concentration and the dose in this way, we will, we will be constantly building up the antioxidant capacity or the antioxidant reserve capacity in the body so that that body can now tolerate a higher level of ozone. And so we can build the dose up like that. And that's how we, that's how we pull people up very quickly because we keep increasing their antioxidant capacity. As we increase the dose of those zones, then we drop down at the end, but we leave them with a seriously improved antioxidant capacity, which means we leave them with a permanent or very longterm ability to overcome chronic oxidative stress and or free radical damage. Speaker 3: (26:26) Okay. So then, then if you wanted to stick, say other oxidative therapies or vitamin C infusions or other things that would have more of an effect, or even even supplementation with antioxidants or good food would have a better effect on the body. Speaker 4: (26:40) So we do do that at Northland environmental health Center where I work with Damien Wojciech and we do high dose vitamin C therapy there, he goes up to 200 grams. Wow. And he does culation therapy and high dose vitamin C therapy as well as being a general practitioner. So collation therapy, some patients come in and they have, you know, vitamin C one day ozone the next vitamin C ozone like that. Wow. Yup. Yup. That's a very good protocol. Fantastic. And he does collation therapy, which is heavy metal detox thing. So I'm hoping I can get him on the podcast as well. That would be fabulous. He's a, that's an area that I think a lot of us need to understand as well. The heavy metal detoxing. Yeah. Dr. Wayne. I wanted to pivot a little bit and go into prolotherapy. We discussed prolotherapy and I was really excited to hear about this yesterday. Speaker 4: (27:42) There's something I haven't really being aware of. Can you explain what prolotherapy is? Okay. So we're leaving ozone therapy. Now ozone is for general health improved performance of our bodies. And just before we do leave ozone, go back to it a little bit, but we leave the topic and we're going to prolotherapy, which is proliferance therapy. This is now musculoskeletal. We look, we're talking now about injuries, physical injuries to the joints. Fabulous. What were you gonna say? I was just going to say with the ozone, cause we, we haven't touched on the, the they at home remedies, but we have talked about them in the past. I'd like to address this issue because it's an important one. Two years ago, we formed the ozone therapy association of New Zealand and we're taking applications now. And mostly for doctors we have some nurses, some natural paths. Speaker 4: (28:53) But we've also opened it up because we know that there's a lot of people in New Zealand who are practicing those own using what we call lay methods. You use that term it's respectfully used and they're doing all kinds of variations. There can be insufflation of the colon, vaginal insufflation air, insufflation cupping, limb bagging, whole body bagging. There's the hocket, which is the ozone steam sauna. Hmm. Which is actually a very good treatment. And ozone can be used in facial treatments and for beauty therapy with beauty therapists. So what we're looking to do is to regularize the practice of ozone and New Zealand so that these can all have access to a professional body, guide them on safe and effective methods to use at whatever level they're trained. We're inclusive, include everyone that's doing ozone. So that patients, athletes, the interested people who want those zone, I can get it throughout New Zealand, just depending on what their needs might be. Speaker 4: (30:09) So quite often what will happen is people will come to us. We'll do the intravenous methods. And then where do you live? Right. You're in Palmerston North. Okay. So let's see, who do we have in Palmerston North? Well, we have people using cockpit, which is the ozone steam cabinet, and we have people doing installations. And so on where the ozone gas is put either into the rectum or the colon very simple, safe, easy to use method or vaginally or other topical way, or you should make ozone oil for rubbing on the skin for dermatological conditions. You can make those, the naked water. You can breathe it. Yep. We also use ozone generators that we get from Kim sex and violence. Speaker 4: (30:57) She provides really nice equipment that we can use for ozonating the clinic meeting, any building remove smells or toxic odors and that sort of thing. And so when we were gearing up for the recent epidemic, yes, we were. Ozonating our doctors and nurses and our staff. I was receiving intravenous vitamin C. This is for our protection. And the clinics were being ozonated every morning at 3:00 AM automatically. Yep. With Kim's can Sexton's machines. Fantastic. And therefore we knew we were coming into a sanitized environment and then we treated one suspect that COVID patient. And then we saturated that room with those own immediately afterwards, it was off clinic. It was outside in the carport, the old sauna room. And so we knew that room was now sanitized. So if we had another COVID patient, we'd be able to go into that room, be sanitized. We were safe wearing our PPE, but we can deliver the treatment. Speaker 4: (32:03) Fantastic. And we will get up for that. So, and this has been like, just to briefly touch on the Corona situation. There is now proven studies coming out of Spain. The ozone is affecting the client of ours. Yes. There have been clinical trials in China and Spain and the conclusion at the moment. It hasn't all been gone into print yet. I don't think we ever, because we're working with doc date around and Schwartz, she was on the front lines and Spain treating COVID and the reports coming back, or that ozone was effective phenomenally. And what that meant was patients were recovering within 24 to 48 hours after one to two ozone treatments, they were fully recovering. And I think 98% of the patients that were in serious enough conditions that they were going to be put on ventilators. 98% of them did not need to have ventilation. Speaker 4: (33:06) Wow. Which is a good thing because nine out of 10 people who get ventilated die. Yeah. It's not really an effective therapy for COVID, but ozone proved to be very effective. We know this because we've been treating all viral conditions since since day one, really a hundred years with it's a hundred years with research and ozone. Now I have to say, it's not the only thing that will do that. High dose vitamin C will do that. I've heard an India homeopathy was very effective. And if you read the journal of the New Zealand journal of natural medicine, I don't know if you know of that, but the New Zealand journal of natural medicine, there's lots of articles in there on other useful natural therapies. And they all work pretty good. So actually there's a plethora of effective treatments that we can use against this horrible thing. That's why we weren't afraid to treat people because we knew we were safe. Speaker 3: (34:13) Yup. Yup. And I had dr. Rob dr. Rowan on last week and it's talking about Ebola and his getting shut down, unfortunately. But Speaker 4: (34:26) That's right. He went to him and Howard Robbins stopped. The Rowans went to Sierra Leoni and they were invited there by the minister of health. They treated doctors that had got Ebola. Some of them opted for the ozone, all the ones that are all the ones that said yes to ozone therapy, survive all the ones that denied it and said, no, I don't want it. They all died. Speaker 3: (34:53) And then he was shut down. Unfortunately, Speaker 4: (34:55) When he got shot down, you can't be using effective therapy. Speaker 3: (34:58) No, it might mitigate the drug sales. We can't have that comment. Right. Moving right along. Let's talk about therapies, prolotherapy. Cause this is a very, Speaker 4: (35:14) Yeah. Sorry. I don't want to confuse everyone. So everyone on the side. Yup. We're on a different topic. We're now looking at joint pain. I'm very excited about Prolotherapy because it will effectively treat all musculoskeletal injuries. It will, it is an effective treatment for all sporting injuries. And it's permanent. This is amazing when you've done product therapy, you'll no longer have knee pain, back pain. Retruding disc pain, low back pain, ankle, elbow, rotator cuff, you know, anything like that, anything where the ligaments tendons are involved in the is involved. That's right. So let's just talk about knees. Cause we see a lot of those. So what we do is somebody comes in, they've had a knee injury, the body is healed, but the injury doesn't go away. It keeps flaring up when we strain that joint. And it's because the ligaments and all the tendons or the cartilage have thinned, you know, if you could imagine stretching a thick, rubber band over a rock and then just tapping it with something sharp or happen, then that rubber will just split. Speaker 4: (36:36) It'll still be in tech, but not as strong. Think of your ligaments like that. Now you've got a little bit of a slop in the joint and that's what causes pain. And it's what grinds away the cartilage. So what we can do now is we can do prolotherapy, which is proliferant therapy. And we inject a thick solution of dextrose. So it's a sugar, but it's hypertonic, which means it's extra thick, especially compared to the body fluids. So when we inject that into a ligament, it will stimulate the fibroblasts to create more ligament. Yep. What that means is we thicken and then shorten and tighten that ligament that returns the joint back into its normal alignment. Cause that's what the ligaments do. They hold the joints in the alignment for the movement that joint has to me. Yep. And so we had this week or Lex ligaments, they've stretched, they've torn off the bone partially and it's always easy to find. Speaker 4: (37:47) You can just poke on them. They do it. And people jump you inject bet spot. And what will happen is new ligament will grow over a three week period and return 50 to 80% of the strength. Wow. Then we need to repeat it a month later. Again, you'll get 50 to 80% improvement. So after generally two or three treatments, we've got a hundred percent improvement. Wow. At that point it's permanent and you'd no longer have that injury. You no longer have a weakness there. Your mind can let go of the doubt of your ability to use that learning in a maximum athletic, competitive sort of attitude. So you get your confidence back and your athletic performance is not hindered by chronic injuries. And so we treat a lot of athletes and we keep the top people in the game and young, young athletes sometimes in their teens, cause we work with some calm, competitive swimmers and they, you know, they pushing their bodies to the max, pushing the limits. As you say, they get these tears. Now that would, that would slow the down their training. And of course, if you have a week off training, it takes three weeks to get back to where you were, where you had the injury. So you lose five or six weeks really out of your, out of your schedule with product therapy, we can keep those athletes performing without pain. And this is something so simple as, as dextrose. Speaker 3: (39:30) This is so is this like reconstructive therapy? I had a, Speaker 4: (39:34) Yeah, yeah. It's called injection reconstruction therapy. Cause I had a, Speaker 3: (39:41) A boyfriend back in my early twenties who had a very bad ankle injury and he had to go to America for, we construct a therapy. It was called Speaker 4: (39:50) Yes. Will be injection reconstruction therapy probably mean it is an American technique. Yep, yep. I did learn it there. Yup. Speaker 3: (40:00) And the body's own reaction and info. This is where information is so interesting. Isn't it? Because inflammation, when we, when we cause an injury to the site we've deliberately actually causing and introducing something that's gonna irritate and cause injury. And it sends the body's a body starts to send fiber blast to actually make it stronger. So we're using a game just like with the ozone and with hyperbaric, we're using the body's own resources at the end of this. Right. Speaker 4: (40:27) Which is where natural path. So we're, we're always working with the body's own natural healing abilities. And with those own and product therapy, we feel like we can get maximum advantage there. Yup. So we also get a lot of patients often in their forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, even eighties and nineties who have health conditions and the generative joints it's often called osteoarthritis, which I believe most people think if they're told they have osteoarthritis, they get this idea in their mind that it's something to do with their bones. Yes. Is that your take on that? Yeah. I would say it's inflammation. Speaker 4: (41:19) Yeah. Most people would say it's bones. They think it's bones and we think we're bones as well. It's my bones, they're old and they're down and so on and nothing really too much you can do for bones. Well, we, we don't take that point of view. We see osteoarthritis as joint inflammation, so it'll always be the soft tissue, the ligaments, the cartilage and the tin. And we can repair all of those now. Yeah. So by injecting product therapy into a knee joint, for example, we can reconstitute the cartilage. And so we take people with bone on bone. Wow. And we can, we can thicken that Cartlidge enough that it takes the pain away and on x-ray we'll see an increase in the lower back, you know, like a lot of us, me included, I've got like four different set of basically go on by nonbinary, very close to being bone on bone. Speaker 4: (42:17) Okay. So I'll come at this from two angles. Number one, where you've got a bulging disc, the surgeons have told us, and we've known this since the 1950s, is that the ligaments on the posterior aspect of the vertebra or the vertebrae, you mind those posterial ligaments, the inter spinus and supraspinous ligament, usually a weak and stretched. And so one of the vertebra has moved forward slightly and it's put pressure on the disc and pushed it out, all that space in between the, when a disc protrudes, the chances are that it might impinge on one of the major nerves coming out of your back and going either down your bottom or to your internal organs. So what we do there is we prolotherapy the ligaments on the backbone that we'll tighten those up and it'll pull that vertebra back into its correct alignment, thereby taking pressure off the bulging disc. Speaker 4: (43:31) Wow. Then we have two ways that we can treat that bulging disc. We can either inject those zone down the spine in the muscles, running down the spine as close to the disc, as we did go and inject ozone, it only takes a few minutes. It's 98% effective for joints for bulging disc 98% effective. That's where you expect to win with bulging discs every time it's insane. And sometimes we can go in through the quarter, which is a little opening at the base of the sacrum. And it allows us to go into the spinal cord. I know this sounds risky, but actually it's a very safe procedure and we can inject those own into the quarter Aquinas. Which thing goes, the ozone travels up the spine to about thoracic that are bred number 10. Speaker 3: (44:35) Yup. Speaker 4: (44:36) Mmm. Which means it travels all the way up the lumbar spine and into the first few discs of the thoracic spine is where the ribs start and 98% effective for reducing bulging discs. So we prevent a lot of surgeries. Speaker 3: (44:55) This is what I mean, this is what, Speaker 4: (44:58) Mmm. Speaker 3: (44:59) Surprises me that, you know, this isn't more known and it isn't out there. And I did know of this 20, like I said, 20, 30 years ago, but this was an option and I've never seen it come back or, you know, proliferate and then people know about prolotherapy and certainly not Prolozone this is good. This is definitely going to help people avoid having to have surgery. And, and, and you'd think this would be well, let's try this first. It would be a great approach. Why isn't this right throughout everywhere? Why, why isn't every doctor offering this or is it a very specialized difficult thing? Speaker 4: (45:36) You know, I can only relate to it in terms of my own personal history. You know, I went and trained in Oregon and I learned things that are not taught here in New Zealand. One of them was the other one product therapy and actually put product therapy in its basic form was actually taught to me by a osteopathic surgeon. I'm just trying to think of his name now. I'll dr. Wilson. I think it was, he was a Harley street physician. He was doing it back in the day. And so we learned some of that often in, there was a famous New Zealand doctor called dr. Only who went and did product therapy and he was doing it in Mexico. So a lot of Americans would go down to Mexico. A lot of Gridiron athletes would get prolotherapy injections. So I heard about him and it turns out he was in New Zealand. Then when I came back 14 years ago to New Zealand, I trained with dr. Ken or Speaker 4: (46:45) Which he dr. Ken or at that time was I think, 92 years old, gosh, and still practicing and Remuera. Wow. And and I still liaise with Fraser Berlin, who was his nephew and doctor, or he was sort of a phrase, a Burling was dr. All's sort of protege if you will. And so he treats a phrase that treats a lot of people that have, and I always get this name wrong, but yeah. Disease, which is a, I think I've pronounced that. Right. It's an odd one. So sometimes I mispronounce it. Anyway that's a generalized disease where ligaments just sort of dissolve. So it's a serious condition. There's about eight or 900 people in New Zealand. Well, he's treating all of them with prolotherapy and it's the best thing they've ever had. So he's another doctor, great work there with prolotherapy. He uses stronger prolotherapy agents than I do. Speaker 4: (47:55) He uses if the NOLA mean and Tetra or sulfate, I believe which is a stronger tightening agent, but you know, we're natural paths. We like to stay with the more natural methods I have used other substances like fish oils, sodium moral weights. You can use those in eyes, blood, you can use vitamin B 12, you can do strong ozone and do the prolotherapy with strong ozone. That's what they call pro Prolozone. But I use dextrose, I use dextrose and I treat the ligaments and then we inject those own around them. And we usually put ozone into the, into the joint. Wow, this is this is incredible. And I think you probably going to be inundated with people wanting to come and see you because it got to be I didn't have a life outside of, and so, you know, I had to train other people. Speaker 4: (48:57) Yeah. I could have time to smell the roses or, and buy things. Exactly. Cause yeah, I mean, you're obviously very, very passionate about helping people and getting the most out of your time. And I mean like just, just you giving up your Sunday morning and spending an hour with me yesterday too on the phone, just so's what sort of a person I had dedicated you are to, to this. And I think that that's just absolutely fantastic. And to have someone with this sort of knowledge and background, a very different approach to what we're perhaps used to seeing here is exciting for me because I can see this is great changes happening. And Amer I think is going to be the, the association for integrative medicine, I think is going to be a fantastic thing. I'm, I'm trying to I want him to become a member. Speaker 4: (49:53) I think it's a, that's the things that are coming down the line now. Pretty exciting aren't they? Oh, they are. And what's happening is doctors and therapists sort of the lines of demarcation are breaking down. Yes. Because it becomes more, not about the doctor. Well, the practitioner it's really about the patient and what are we going to do to help the patient. Yep. And that's because we're all coming from that angle. Yep. We just always looking to, with people of conscience and we're doing the best work we can to recover the health of our population. We use all methods that we think can work and ozone and prolotherapy have enough scientific research behind them. We, we, we can explain in detail exactly why they do work. Yep. And this is, this is just brilliant. And so critics of which, you know, usually I just people that don't know, they just don't know about it. Speaker 4: (50:54) We've been, we've had critics. Mmm. Yeah. We've had mid safe and ministry of health. Everyone's investigated us. And yeah, we provided them with dr. Work, you know, we've provided the scientific literature. Yup. That proves what we're doing is safe, efficient, effective. And and this isn't like, this is really become a family is critical and many of them become active supporters. So we can turn a critic into an active supporter just through education. Gosh, that would be great because I do, I do find in the, you know, the, the straight laced allopathic medicine is still so blinkered. Certainly in my experience and I can say this cause I'm a non-licensed nonmedical professional. It has been very, very frustrating in my own, you know, with my own family's health with my mom's journey, for example. And, and I, and this is one of the reasons why I do the show because I want to create change in movement. And it's not all about pharma pharmacology. It's not all about just surgery. Those are great. And let's look at those, but let's look at the other sides of the coin in trying to connect fantastic people and share this education worth the public. I mean, last week I had Dr. Tim Ewer. Speaker 4: (52:23) I know he's fantastic. And he was on the show last week. And again, he too has had, you know, I know issues okay. The, the, the approaches that he takes, I mean, there's a reason why there's such a mess of waiting lists. And so many people wanting to see people like you because it's not being offered. Unfortunately, you know, dr. Terms down, down South, you're way up North, it's hard for a lot of people. If this was this sort of thing was available. And every time we'd have a lot less people, we would, and we'd save our country, billions in healthcare costs, but really you'd have a happier population being able to work to their full potential rather than have their abilities curtailed because of pain. Really. you asked me why aren't more doctors doing it. I think what's happened is ligaments and tendons have really just basically, I'm going to use the word overlooked. Speaker 4: (53:24) I think doctors are really just overlooked. They'll treat organs and muscles and such but ligaments, well, what, what are you going to do for ligaments? Well, we don't, you can't do anything for ligaments. So we won't put too much attention there cause we can't do anything for it. Yup. Yup. Well, the gap that is the gap in the system where we've come in with product therapy, that's our specialty. We treat ligaments, but all chronic injuries are ligament based. And so our typical patient has been to acupuncturist, osteopath, chiropractor, orthopedic surgeon, GP, soft tissue therapists, CMA, if they've done everything. And when we start to hear that history, it confirms for us, this is great. It's telling us it's a ligament problem. Or yep. Then when we investigate, by the way, all those therapies are very helpful. But if they don't resolve the issue, we know it's a ligament problem. Speaker 4: (54:26) So then we do our injections and the pain goes away. People recover the function of their alum and they ask, how come I never heard about this before? How come no one's ever told me about this? And I said, but we have told you about it. And now we've treated you, what's the issue. You know, people find things when they look for them, but this is, I just wish it was, you know, and this is why the show's important. And this will have a small portion of people that were here at, and hopefully the people that go come to you will also share their experiences, but it's a very slow process to get it out to the, the 98% of other people who are unfortunately unaware of it. I mean, yeah, deep into all of this sort of stuff. Zealand, we only have what, two degrees of separation here. Speaker 4: (55:18) So the work that I'm doing, I know is sprayed right throughout New Zealand, because lots and lots and lots of people have now heard about it. So I've been doing it for 14 years here. And so within New Zealand, most people that have these types of problems, my, my past patients usually we'll tell them to come and they have at least have a look at this therapy. And so I think we have New Zealand pretty well covered. Yeah. This show maybe more people might even think about prolotherapy is that yes, it's needles. Yes. It's injections, but you know what? It only takes a minute or two. But when I start working on a joint within a minute or three, I'm usually completely finished with that area. Fantastic. And then they've got lifelong strength back and it's, you know, $300. Yeah. As opposed to a surgery or continual care that costs over years, many thousands of dollars and especially avoidance surgeries, which can be very expensive. Speaker 4: (56:31) We prevent a lot of knee replacements. We get people that have had knee replacements or joint replacements where it hasn't worked perfectly. They're still in pain. So, you know, you hear, you do hear a lot of horror stories, but I also hear a lot of people that have had joint replacement that they're very happy with. So I'm not sort of a critical of it, but if you've had a joint replacement, you're still in pain consider product therapy because he taught me. And so the doctor can, or that we can do product therapy around a joint replacement and it still works very, very well surprisingly, but it does. Speaker 3: (57:12) Yep. Fantastic. I mean, I, it makes sense to me. You know, so I think, you know, dr. Wayne we've covered quite a lot of territory today. We we've done, I was on therapy, a little bit of the background, what it's doing now, how it works, we've gone into prolotherapy and even into Prolozone therapy. Speaker 4: (57:32) Yeah. Prolozone is doing prolotherapy, but just using strong ozone irritating and you just inject the gas. Cause I was owns always a guest. We inject strong ozone into the ligament using the product therapy, needling technique. Mmm. Because just the needle itself going in and out through the ligament creates the ligament, the bikings use fish phones and they would just prolotherapy a ligament with fishbone. Oh, sounds terrific. Shot. And it would create new ligament by us doing a little injection at the end of it. We of course maximize the effect. Mmm. Speaker 3: (58:13) Well, if you think about it, anything that causes a rotation, the body seems more stuff there to fix it. Speaker 4: (58:19) Mmm. You know, Speaker 3: (58:21) So dr. Wayne, I want to say thank you very, very much for your time today. I really appreciate it on a Sunday morning. We can people find you and we're, you know, where's the best place to connect with you and come and see you. Speaker 4: (58:34) You can look up waipu natural health, waipu natural health. So we're in Northland or they can look up dr. Ozone doc, T O R O Z one, So doctorozone1@gmail.com contact the Northland environmental health center in camo. And we do all these therapies there. Speaker 3: (59:05) Fantastic. And I would love an introduction to dr. Damien Wojciech at some stage. That would be really fantastic. Speaker 4: (59:13) I'll share with them that while I did this podcast. Yeah. And I can put you in touch with them. Speaker 3: (59:18) Sounds brilliant. Dr. Wayne, thank you so much for your time. I really, really appreciate the work, the passion, the education that you've invested in all of this and bringing this to New Zealand that's really, really appreciate it. Thank you, Lisa. Thanks for the opportunity of sharing it with our people. Oh, it's fantastic. Speaker 1: (59:36) That's it. This week for pushing the limits, be sure to write review and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com. The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.