The Medical Emperor and the missing clothes

By Jerome Burne

It’s rapidly becoming a truism that the virus has been shining a light in some dark places that we all sort of knew about – massive wage inequality, zero-hours contracts, privatisation in the name of market efficiency and drug medicine treating symptoms not causes – but we preferred to look the other way. It’s going to be harder to do that in the future.

The virus not only made pharma medicine’s limitations painfully clear – a lack of safe and effective antiviral drugs and none that could improve the immune response, but it has also highlighted the remarkable sophistication of the nutritional approach, which mainstream medicine essentially ignores. I’ll come to that shortly. 

 In recent posts (do check them out if you have time) I’ve set out the case for using vitamin C as a cheap and safe ally in cutting the risk of infection and improving survival rates. Its central role in the immune response is a strong clue that it should be useful, but the NHS practitioners have shown zero interest in using it. This is despite reports from American clinical care experts who have so far treated over 100 patients and found it can dramatically cut deaths and length of stay in ICUs and/or on ventilation. 

The experience of USA clinicians along with others in Italy and Korea was sparked by reports of success with massive doses in China but this has all this has fallen on deaf ears in the UK, despite a desperate need to protect the elderly and frontline workers and to do something, anything that had even a chance of bringing down the UK’s alarmingly high death rates among Covid 19 ICU patients. (more…)