023 Nutritional Therapies Ignored [4 August 2009]

The title of the book “Every Second Child” by Archie Kalokerinos refers to the 50% infant mortality rate that plagued some Australian aborigine populations in the 1960’s.

Kalokerinos, a medical doctor working in the Collarenebri district in the Australian Outback, found the Aborigine children there suffering from malnutrition caused by their switch to a “civilized” diet (white bread, jam and sausage). Combined with a lack of immunity to European diseases, the children were dying from simple upper respiratory viral infections – what we refer to as the common cold.

Kalokerinos diagnosed infant scurvy, and discovered that with a vitamin C injection, the infants rapidly recovered. He also observed that if a child was immunized while suffering from a cold, it was almost always fatal. Despite this discovery, the immunization program continued – without the vitamin C injections – and the children continued to die.

Most of the book deals with the author’s battle with skepticism, ridicule and outright hostility in trying to share his findings with the Australian medical establishment. The story is heartbreaking to read, even more so to realize that the situation is by no means an exception.

Another example, coincidentally also dealing with Vitamin C, is the successful treatment of poliomyelitis by Dr. Frederick R. Klenner of Reidsville, North Carolina. He used intravenous Vitamin C in massive doses with the 60 cases that he dealt with in his rural district during the polio epidemic of 1948. All of these cases were successful with no lasting effects. For example, two brothers that he treated completely recovered from polio and went on to become high school and college athletic stars, while their sister treated by another physician wore braces for the rest of her life.

Dr. Klenner presented a paper describing his treatment of polio with Vitamin C at the same symposium that the Salk vaccine was first announced. The vaccine attracted all the media and medical attention and Klenner’s discovery remains forgotten in some medical archive.

Why share these stories? I want to convey two ideas:

1) that there are effective and safe nutritional therapies (Abram Hoffer’s work with schizophrenia is another that comes to mind); and

2) that there is tremendous resistance to their adoption into modern health care. This resistance has little to do with science and too much with politics and economics. I see signs that this is improving, but it is frustratingly slow.

This article is intended for educational purposes only; for medical advice consult your licensed health practitioner.