tom@felix.UUCP (05/11/84)
I remember seeing something mentioned a while back about harmful
levels of the Vitamin B family. I recently caught a t.v. news
brief on the same topic about potentially harmful levels of
water soluble vitamine B. What's the scoop? Can anyone recommend
a recent book on the subject?
--
From Felix-the-Vax, (the wonderful, wonderful Vax),
{decvax,ucbvax}!trwrb!felix!tomdonch@teklabs.UUCP (Don Chitwood) (05/14/84)
I take bitamin B-6 and magnesium to prevent kidneystone formation. The quantity given in the prescription my doc gave me was about 125 mg of B-6. I had a stone after that, saw another doctor who was of a holistic, nutrition-oriented bent, and she recommended 100 mg doses 3 times daily. After several weeks of that dosage, I developed low level but continuous headaches. After I finally made the connection on the headaches (but no kidney stones in two years), I have reduced to 50 mg 3 times daily. No headaches. This last doctor said that massive doses (in males) of, say, 1000mg could result in permanent nerve damage. Females have different needs for B-6 according to her, but I don't know any details. As for other members of the B family, I couldn't say. Let us know what you find. Don Chitwood teklabs/donch Tektronix, Inc.
rjb@akgua.UUCP (R.J. Brown [Bob]) (05/18/84)
The HMS people ought to realize that life is not quite
like they would choose it. Every decision a person
makes about his/her life cannot be based on a double-
blind statistically valid study of the effects of X.
We make choices based on anecdotal evidence lots of
times. They trot out "blood letting" and blame it
on the Non-scientific community when in fact the
Medical people were te big proponents of blood letting
not the regular folks. Accumulated along with some
ineffective and sometimes harmful treatments folk
medicine has generally passed along to us useful
treatments that are not harmful or fatal. It has been
the Medical Community that has frequently repeated horror
stories about folk medicine and tried to manipulate the
public mind into thinking that these 3 sigma conditions
were the norm. Simply stated, most real bad folk medicine
practices did not survive because the patients/doctors
learned the "hard way".
"Boy that makes me feel better"
"Just think, Now I won't have to punch out a doctor!"
Bob Brown {...clyde!akgua!rjb}
AT&T Technologies, Inc.............. Norcross, Ga
(404) 447-3784 ... Cornet 583-3784kenner@acf4.UUCP (05/22/84)
From the Harvard Medical School Health Letter of April 1984: "We recently reported on the danger of nerve damage when vitamin B6 intake exceeds 2 grams per day (see The HMS Health Letter, December 1983). Several readers have written to ask what is a safe dose of vitamin B6. Presumably they mean "How much can I take without hurting myself?". The answer is not known. The recommended daily allowance is about 2mg. Some recent letters to the New England Journal of Medicine that appeared in the January 19, 1984, issue suggest that 200mg per day will not cause adverse effects. But careful testing for subtle degrees of nerve damage has not been carried out in persons taking this much b6 over many months. A reasonable, if arbitrary, limit for vitamin b6 supplementation might be 50mg a day -- although we really don't know what benefit 48 mg of this dose might have to off." The December 1983 article is too long for me to enter but it references the August 25, 1983 New England Journal of Medicine and concludes by stating: "Every time The HMS Health Letter runs an article criticizing overuse of vitamins, we receive a few letters from readers reporting their personal success with one or another vitamin. Our response has to be: that isn't evidence. With no basis of comparison, we can't be sure that the vitamin was responsible for the benefit attributed to it. Until about 150 years ago, personal experience was given as a justification for the use of bloodletting to treat pneumonia. Only when a courageous Paris physician, Pierre Louis, compared the course of the disease with and without the treatment did it become apparent that bloodletting was ineffective. Yet perfectly intelligent people had followed the practice for centuries because personal experience told them it worked. On the basis of "personal experience" we might still be bleeding patients today."