At issue is the therapeutic value of essential nutrients, e.g. vitamins, minerals and amino acids. The medical profession not only claims that these substances have no therapeutic value other than to remedy a specific deficiency, but all other claims are ridiculed. Vital information about the science behind these claims is kept out of your text books. One must assume this is not completely accidental.

After having completed a undergraduate course in Therapeutic Nutrition recently, I have come up with the following checklist to help you spot and thwart subtle BRAIN WASHING that may be aimed your way!

Top Ten Ways to Spot Student Brainwashing

1. Have you been provided with the "HOW TO SPOT A QUACK" checklist in which people whom advocate more than the RDA of a vitamin (i.e. megadoses) are defined a priori as "quacks"?
2. Are most references to therapeutic benefits of vitamins in your class notes, lectures, and text books, accompanied by adjectives such as "questionable", "unproven", or "dubious"? (Contrast this treatment with material on drugs.)
3. Have you read or been told that vitamin C "may" cause kidney stones? (The truth is the opposite, and much has been published on the clinical experience of individual physicians with megadoses of vitamin C. Their experience indicates that large amounts of Vitamin C is in fact preventive of kidney stones. [Cathcart Bowel Tolerance, Medical Hypotheses 7: 1359-1376, 1981] )
4. Have you read or been told that vitamin C destroys vitamin B12? This shoddy experiment, while published in JAMA, was discredited years ago. Even so, some text books still repeat this fiction.
5. Have you read or been told that "vitamin C causes infertility"? (Truth is the opposite)
6. Have you read or been told that "vitamin C makes blood acidic leading to a form of anemia"? (Simply bizarre)
7. Have you read or been told that "vitamin A causes fetal defects"? (The truth is the opposite, by the way. Look closely at the few studies in human beings !)
8. Does your Biochemistry text describe the collagen protein "chemical pathway" but neglect to include the fact that ascorbate (vitamin C) is required and used up during the formation of collagen? The protein collagen provides strength to animal tissue, a function analogous to that performed by cellulose in plants.

   It is hard to maintain the fiction that humans require no more than 60 milligrams of ascorbate in the face of what is known about collagen. (Question: Why do authoritative textbooks ignore all that is known about ascorbate, specifically its role in collagen formation?)

9. Have you been told by your professors (on more than 5 occasions in the same class) that what you are learning is based on "science"?
10. Does your Nutrition Text begin with a large listing (i.e., pages) of names with impressive initials to lend weight to the material in the book?

Final Word to Medical Students

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