By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: Dr. Royal Lee recalls numerous “miracle drugs” of his day that turned out to harmful or even lethal to many in the population. (With pharmaceutical-related deaths in America numbering in the tens to hundreds of thousands today, this practice has continued unabated.) It is the “cooperation with natural constructive forces” that brings health, Dr. Lee writes, not “drug or poison therapy by which the cell activities are subjected to new and unknown reactions with new and unknown end or side results that…undermine the future welfare of the patient.” This simple, sensible approach, Lee says, is the basis of his Vitamin Products Company, which provided complete, natural vitamins in the form of whole-food supplements. Lee also specifies some of the constituents of the natural vitamin C complex, which in addition to ascorbic acid includes an antihemorrhagic factor, a thrombin synthesis factor, a blood-oxygen factor, and a connective-tissue-integrity factor. From the Vitamin Products Company, circa 1940.
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It is cooperation with natural constructive forces [that promotes healing], not drug or poison therapy, by which the cell activities are subjected to new and unknown reactions with new and unknown end or side results that are not desired or may undermine the future welfare of the patient.
We are thinking of the endless array of “wonder drugs” that for fifty years have been announced with the successively boundless enthusiasm of the high-pressure salesman and retired as successively with great silence after the shortcomings are determined by guinea pig tests on the entire population.
From Salvarsan to the sulfa drugs, we now are getting back to nature by using fungus extracts. Next we will again discover that the best remedy for even syphilis is a vitamin from plant source, [such as the product] Eli Lilly was selling in 1898 as Succus Alterans, not knowing that it was a potent from of vitamin C and not knowing that deydration and dispensing in CO2-filled bottles was a simple way to deliver it to the consumer intact.
Every untested product sold before its effects were known has reaped a toll of crippled and disabled victims. Who recalls the wonder arthritis remedy acetylcholine, which promptly stopped the pains but caused death of the victim in six months by the hypertension and arteriosclerosis that inevitably supervened? Or the obesity patients who developed cataracts from dinitrophenol and tried to collect damages from all concerned? Who realizes today that streptomycin causes deafness and loss of balancing sense by its destruction of ear innervation?
Once a physician has a few experiences of that category, he becomes far easier to approach with the philosophy of using physiological remedies instead of experimenting with the teachings of the “poison cult.” Let us have the guts to face the facts. The patient needs our best judgment to help get him back on the road to health.
What other therapy instead of drugs can be used with results? All the members of the medical profession have prescribed diets to help the patient recover. Let’s [then] look at the subject of diets made up from the foods we purchase in the typical grocery store. Natural foods, we will agree, are the best type. “Natural food” simply means food that still has in it the natural vitamins, enzymes, and minerals that nature put there.
Eighty percent of the food consumed by the average American has had [these elements] all taken out. For example, white sugar is probably the worst food in the American diet. It is so bad that not even a worm will eat it. You never saw a worm in white sugar, and you never will. Raw sugar is a natural food. White sugar is just like raw sugar except all the vitamins and minerals have been removed.
What then can be done when our food is so devitalized? A natural vitamin complex is the only logical answer. [Unfortunately] vitamins, just like food, can be made synthetically and contain only part of the true nutritional picture.
We at the Vitamin Products Company have been concentrating natural vitamin complexes from natural foods for the past 25 years. The results obtain from the use of our products have been outstanding. A natural vitamin complex is a group of associated principles of synergistic nature; if the complex is taken apart, it apparently is no longer capable of producing its normal nutritional and metabolic effect.
For instance, vitamin C is a complex containing at least five factors: 1) ascorbic acid, usually in the natural form (bound to a protein) 2) the antihemmorhagic factor, vitamin P 3) the K group, which promotes thrombin synthesis in the liver 4) the vitamin J group, which increases the oxygen-carrying power of the blood, and 5) certain enzymes that seem to act as ascorbic acid activators.
We now know it is a bad practice to overdose with any of these [factors] without the others. For instance, the P factors prepare serum calcium to promote coagulation or connective tissue formation (such as in the creation of bone matrix), while the K supplies the thrombin to be coagulated. Vitamin P alone in appreciable amounts may aggravate a latent deficiency of K and precipitate characteristic reactions of thrombin deficiency.
Our vitamin C has always carried a potent quota of all these factors. It always relieves hemorrhagic states due to deficiency. But how many physicians have tried ascorbic acid for this purpose to their dismay?
Ascorbic acid cannot possibly produce the result, for it is a crystalline, “pure” synthetic, devoid of synergists. And since hemorrhagic reactions are part and parcel of scurvy lesions, synthetic vitamin C cannot possibly cure scurvy in its entirety. Therefore, we feel it is not honest to use the name “vitamin C” for ascorbic acid. That term should be reserved for the vitamin C complex.
Dr. Szent-Gyorgi, who received the Nobel prize for his work with ascorbic acid, found that natural vitamin C in its complex form would clear up hemmorhagic conditions in fourteen days, whereas ascorbic acid was useless for the purpose.
Why not investigate natural methods of curing disease? Why endanger the patient with high-powered drugs? Look to nature for the best results.
For further information on natural vitamin concentrates, write to us, and we will gladly send further information.
By Dr. Royal Lee. Vitamin Products Company, Form VH-654, circa 1940.
VH–654
Vitamin Products
Milwaukee 3, Wisconsin
