• While Modern Medicine Casts A Blind Eye At Vitamin Therapy, Million Needlessly Suffer

    Posted June 1, 2013: by Bill Sardi

    Modern medicine doesn’t consider Vicki Oliver’s experience to exist except to explain it away as a possible placebo effect.

    Vicki Oliver, 74-year old resident of Mesquite, Nevada, plagued with years of battling what she was first told was ulcerative colitis and then later by another physician as Crohn’s disease, likely had been dealing with a common vitamin deficiency disease that now plagues modern societies.

    Vicki’s life had been taken over by daily bouts of abdominal cramps followed by urgent trips to the bathroom.  Bowel movements were frequent, up to 20 times a day.  Vicki’s only relief came when she would stop eating altogether.  If she wanted to travel outside her home, she had to forgo food consumption.

    Her doctors all offered the same cook-book medicines: Asacol, prednisone and antibiotics, with no significant relief.

    She heard reporter George Knapp on Coast-To-Coast radio interview me about natural overlooked natural remedies that modern medicine ignores or disregards.  So Vicki attended a seminar I conducted in Las Vegas, hoping she would find some way out of her ordeal.

    She took me aside at the back of the seminar room and discretely inquired if I had any advice about her diagnosed Crohn’s disease.  After spending a few moments quizzing her about symptoms and prior treatment I informed her, while I am not a doctor, that she did not exhibit symptoms consisten with Crohn’s disease, which produces even more acute health problems, and based upon her symptoms she likely had a vitamin B1 deficiency.

    Physicians have forgotten or ignore lessons learned from the past.  Prisoners of war often develop deficiency diseases and one of them is beri beri – the lack of thiamin (vitamin B1).  Beri beri is characterized by the 3-D’s:  diarrhea, dementia, dermatitis.

    In modern societies it is not a lack of vitamin B1 in fortified foods or multivitamins that plagues so many, it is the lack of absorption of vitamin B1.

    In Japan, because of the high prevalence of vitamin B1 deficiency due to overconsumption of alcohol, a fat-soluble form of B1 – benfotiamine (ben-fo-tee-a-mean) — was developed that is more readily absorbed and not washed out of the body as rapidly as water-soluble B1.

    It turns about habitual consumption of coffee, tea, alcohol or refined sugars blocks B1 absorption.  Vicki Oliver enjoyed her iced tea every day.

    Vicki and her husband mulled over whether to try vitamin therapy and abandon her prescribed drugs which had offered her little relief over the years.

    Within 10 days she had experienced significant relief, and within six weeks almost full remission from her symptoms.  She was only visiting the bathroom twice a day.  Life was back to normal.

    Has modern medicine in its proclivity to cast a blind eye at nutritional medicine and its habit of approaching every disease as if it were a drug deficiency, doomed desperate patients to a lifetime of needless suffering?  Irritable bowel affects an estimated 25-45 million Americans, mostly women.

    In the archives of the National Library of Medicine there are no reports found under the search terms “irritable bowel” and “thiamin” but there are published reports linking “diarrhea” and “beri beri”, the vitamin B1 deficiency disease.  Why the disconnect?

    Is modern medicine so inclined to dismiss prevalent vitamin deficiencies that millions now suffer and are given inappropriate medicines that only address symptoms, not a cure?

    There is a sole report (Journal Hospital Medicine, November 2011) entitled “diagnosis by treatment” of physicians at a modern-day hospital, who only after having subjected a 46-year old female patient with recurrent diarrhea to a battery of tests for intestinal parasites, did they suspect vitamin B1 deficiency.  Accompanying heart failure while hospitalized (another sign of B1 deficiency) finally led doctors to think she might be deficient in vitamin B1 and they provided thiamin with rapid resolution of diarrhea and heart failure.

    Of additional interest, Vicki Oliver was also diagnosed with hereditary optic atrophy (shrinkage of the optic nerve), a familial problem that also plagues her daughter.  Optic atrophy has also been linked with a thiamin deficiency.

    Mrs. Oliver coincidentally reports her ophthalmologist now indicates her progressive optic atrophy has been halted and she has actually gained thickness in her optic nerves!  Include the near-blind among the victims of modern medicine’s blindness towards vitamin therapy.

    As for Vicki Oliver, doctors will say there is no double-blind placebo controlled study to prove any of this.  That what she experienced is unproven.

    By the way, a listed side effect for the commonly prescribed drug for irritable bowel (Asacol –(mesalamine) is diarrhea.

    So despite the fact two gastroenterologists and repeated colonoscopies and prescription medicines could not resolve her symptoms, vitamin therapy is of no interest to them.  They won’t even write up her experience as a case report.  ©2013 Bill Sardi, Knowledge of Health, Inc.

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