Some Random Tidbits on H2O2
You would think that extra inspired oxygen, which is almost routine in hospitals with se verely ill patients, would enhance hydrogen peroxide therapy and, therefore, oxygen consumption. After all, peroxide converts to oxygen, so more oxygen should be even better.
It doesn't seem to work that way, and the oxygen by nasal cannula or face mask may be doing more harm than good. It seems to interfere with the "respiratory burst" that we told you about (page 18).1 If the peroxide can't convert to oxygen through the respiratory burst, then you will have a net loss of oxygen to the tissues. That's why patients on nasal oxygen must take off the oxygen during intravenous peroxide therapy.
People drink coffee in the morning because it makes them feel good. But it's not just caffeine that gives the boost. Roasting coffee beans gives them a hydrogen peroxide generating system.2 Prepared in the usual manner, coffee will produce 750 micrograms of H2O2 . The longer it sits, the more peroxide it produces for up to 24 hours! (I always said coffee wasn't so bad.)
Peroxide may be the greatest breakthrough we've ever had for brain tumors. Surgery destroys brain tissue, and chemotherapy for brain neoplasms is just plain quackery. Neuroblastoma cells, a virulent brain cancer, were inhibited by H2O2 in lab experiments.3
Researchers have found that, for some reason, the addition of copper to peroxide increases the lethality of peroxide on bacteria by 3,000-fold.4 It would be interesting to give a little copper with peroxide in a case of severe infection. We'll try it.
Fluorescent light has an adverse effect on human tissues exposed to peroxide.5 I doubt that the fluorescent lights in a treatment room would be close enough to the infusion bottles being used to cause any problem.
An indication that peroxide therapy may help leukemia patients is the work of Maallen and Fletcher. They found that patients with leukemia had a 70 percent reduction in H2O2 production by their white blood cells.6 Maybe cancer is a peroxide deficiency.
If you can't afford the time and money for the intravenous peroxide treatment for your cold, try this procedure: Put four ounces of 35 percent peroxide in a gallon of water. Run a cold humidifier in your bedroom all night with this mixture. My informant says that your cold will be gone in the morning.
I would consider it negligence at best and malpractice at worst not to use hydrogen peroxide in urinary drainage bags following surgery. Catheters in the bladder are notorious for causing infection. The bacteria multiply in the drainage bag and migrate up the tube into the bladder. This bacterial invasion can lead to many complications, including bacteremia and death.
Studies have shown that the addition of 30 milliliters of three percent H2O2 to the collection bag will keep the urine bacteria-free for eight hours.7 If you are facing surgery and will need a catheter, encourage your doctor to order peroxide for the collection bag.
Schlegel proved beyond a doubt that you can oxygenate with hydrogen peroxide. He put some micro-organisms under a 100 percent nitrogen environment. This exclusion of oxygen ordinarily would lead to a quick death. But he bubbled in H2O2 , and the organisms lived just as normally as cells in a natural environment.8
Contradictory reports continue to be published. An article in Infection & Immunity (June 1985)9 concluded that peroxide infusions in rabbits didn't have any effect on infection. Hydrogen peroxide doesn't work at all to protect the heart of rats. In fact, it does more harm than good. (But who cares?)
It just shows you how rat experiments can be misleading. Makes you wonder how many good things may have been put aside because they didn't work in rats. On the other hand, some things that work just fine in rats turn out to be lethal to people, like the great AZT experiment on AIDS. It works great on animals but drives humans crazy—then they die.
Hydrogen peroxide has led the way, but modern science may have produced something even better. The Japanese have invented a blood substitute called Flusol that may replace H2O2 therapy. Flusol is being used experimentally for cancer radiation therapy in place of peroxide.
DMSO has long been an interest of mine, so I was delighted to find some research that combined DMSO with H2O2 in the treatment of cardiovascular disease. Baylor University was again the pioneer institution.10
The Baylor investigators found that DMSO, combined with peroxide, worked better in protecting the heart from blockage (heart attack) than using peroxide alone. Their statistics weren't all that convincing, but the experiment was. Eight of the nine pigs survived the heart attack with H2O2 treatment alone, and eight of nine also survived when DMSO was added to the peroxide. But when the heart muscle was examined under the microscope, the combined DMSO-H2O2 treatment group showed significantly less damage to the heart muscle.
One reason interest in H2O2 as a therapeutic agent waned is because animal experiments were often negative or contradictory. Dr. Lorencz, from the University of Chicago, for instance, found that intravenous peroxide therapy didn't add oxygen to the system in dogs, rats, and roosters. That's why you have to be very careful in projecting animal results to humans.
Humans, cats, and horses respond well to H2O2 because their blood contains catalase, the enzyme necessary to convert H2O2 into water and oxygen. (Your pet goat won't respond to peroxide. Neither will your pet chicken, but your pet fish will.)
Lorencz reasoned that hydrogen peroxide should be safer than intravenous oxygen because, since the hydrogen peroxide is in solution, molecules of it are widely separated from each other by water. The bubbles, he surmised, would be minute and very unlikely to cause a dangerous gas embolism.
First, Lorencz experimented by putting peroxide in beakers of human, cat, dog, rabbit, chicken, and rat blood. In all of the animals except the chicken and the dog, the blood with peroxide added retained the bright red color of oxygen-rich blood. As was expected, the dog and chicken blood remained dark, indicating low oxygen content. The peroxide in the dog and chicken blood had not broken down into oxygen and water because there was none of the enzyme, catalase, present to decompose the H2O2 .
Lorencz made another important observation, which I can verify from the frightening experience of a colleague of mine. Dr. Lorencz found that there is a large variation in the susceptibility of various animal species to bubble formation (embolization) from the oxygen of hydrogen peroxide given intravenously. Lorencz also found that there is a considerable variation within the same species, including man.
My colleague, Dr. X, will attest to that. Dr. X was treating a very prominent person with ozone intravenously. Ozone, O3 , is another way to deliver oxygen to the tissues. But bubbling, i.e., emboli, is more likely to occur with this type of therapy. The patient went into convulsions halfway through the treatment.
Can you imagine my friend's consternation at seeing this famous woman having a fit in his office? He immediately instituted proper emergency care, and she quickly recovered without harm.
And the great news here is that she was not really in danger, even though she had a seizure. Lorencz found that even if animals were driven to a serious stage of collapse with peroxide, just discontinuing the therapy was all the treatment they needed. He reported rapid and complete recovery... even at near terminal stages, when the treatment was discontinued. That's because the oxygen bubbles dissolve very rapidly. The doctor may die of a fright-induced stroke, but the patient will be okay.
Now that hydrogen peroxide is replacing ozone therapy, convulsions simply don't occur.
Ozone had its place and may still have uses in surgery. A Dr. Wolfe used it during World War I for infected shrapnel wounds by placing a silk bag over the infected tissue and pumping ozone into it. His good results were reported in the German medical journals of the '20s.
Siderova's research in 194411 proved that peroxide infusions work remarkably well against cyanide poisoning. So H2O2 eliminates another expensive and cumbersome hyperbaric oxygen therapy. But the hyperbaric oxygen chamber still has its place. Carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning, effectively treated by hyperbaric oxygen, is not treatable by peroxide. Dr. Farr says that he's not convinced peroxide won't work in CO-poisoning.
Dr. Lorencz then tried to treat various forms of chemical toxic shock with peroxide. It didn't work. Also, he reported, severe blood loss didn't respond to hydrogen peroxide therapy. But remember, this research was done on cats. Humans carry around a lot of catalase enzyme, and it might work on humans dying from hemorrhage. I think it would work, and it should be tried in emergency situations. With the present problem of blood transfusions and AIDS, anything reasonable should be tried.
Hydrogen Peroxide and the Food Revolution
A lot of farmers (and people who make their living from farmers) are doing a lot of hand-wringing about the farmer's plight. You wouldn't expect hydrogen peroxide to have anything to do with helping the farmer, but it's going to help the smart ones.
It has been discovered that corn cobs, straw, plant stalks, and other vegetable waste can be made into edible animal feed by treatment with hydrogen peroxide. Just imagine—a pile of useless corn stalks and weeds turned into animal feed. This will drastically reduce the cost of beef, milk, and other animal products. The straw or other waste is simply soaked in H2O2 for a few hours, and presto-food. The H2O2 makes the straw digestible and nutritionally enhanced. It's just as good or better than corn, which is expensive.
People who worry about population explosion and starvation are ecstatic about turning waste into food to feed the starving millions. They are wrong, of course. First, the population explosion is largely a media event and a myth. Second, starvation is not caused by lack of food. Starvation is caused by a lack of freedom. You rarely see people starving in a free country.
Anyway, there's a lot more to the peroxide-food story. But you get the idea. It's a momentous advance in food technology.
Before Cooking Fish,
Give it a Hydrogen Peroxide Bath
The Consumers Union did a study of sanitary conditions and the state of the fish supply at markets around the U.S. What they found was far worse than a threedayold dead fish and they raised a stink about it all the way to Washington.
From Consumer Reports: "Nearly half the fish we tested was contaminated by bacteria from human or animal feces... for nearly 25 percent of our samples the bacteria count exceeded the upper limits of our test methods."
In all, half the fish was found to be rotten or "semirotten" and so unfit for human consumption. Consumer Reports added sardonically: "When bacteria counts hit ten million (colonies per gram) or more, fish should be headed for the grave rather than the dinner plate."
Perhaps rotten is too harsh an indictment here. Much of the bacteria is surface contamination and can be removed by wiping the surface of the fish carefully after rinsing in three percent hydrogen peroxide.12
The Water You Drink
Back in the 1970's, people didn't worry about their water. They trusted the water company. And, after all, motor oil is motor oil and water is water. It may taste like it came out of your swimming pool, but it wouldn't hurt you. That was contemporary logic. People trusted chemicals.
I had been warning people in Florida, where I practiced at the time, that they shouldn't drink the municipal water. Research had shown that chlorine causes cancer. The chlorine reacts chemically with organic (plant and animal) materials to form cancer-causing products called trihalomethanes.
In Douglas County, Georgia, the water has so much chlorine in it that the county warned people not to use it in their swimming pools until it was treated. But they didn't tell them not to drink it.
If your water comes from rivers or reservoirs (and most of it does) rather than wells, the problem is even worse. This surface water reacts with chlorine to form chloroform, a highly carcinogenic substance.
I told people about this on my nutrition radio program. The medical profession didn't take kindly to a doctor alarming people about their water. They said I was irresponsible and just trying to get some attention (I was innocent of charge one and guilty of charge two).
Less than six weeks after I dropped the cancer bombshell on my radio listeners, the front-page headline in the Miami Herald read: Chlorine in water linked to cancer. I didn't get an apology from the medical society.
Belle Glade, Florida is a peculiar place. It's not the end of the world, but you can see it from there. They have heat, humidity, mosquitoes, roaches, flies, gnats, rattle–snakes, water moccasins, a high incidence of AIDS, and a very high level of trihalomethanes from the lousy water they take from Lake Okeechobee. Not your basic paradise.
Is it a coincidence that they have the highest per capita incidence of AIDS in the country and also the highest level of trihalomethanes in their water?
Hydrogen peroxide to the rescue. Emery Industries of Cincinnati, Ohio is installing its first major ozone treatment system in Belle Glade. Ozone is O3 . It breaks down into water and oxygen (H2O2 and O2 ) just like hydrogen peroxide.
The Europeans were way ahead of us on ozone. Now the European companies are moving into the U.S. market. With all our technology, you wonder how we could be so far behind Europe in water technology and water nutrition. Ozone not only kills bacteria, but it also destroys viruses and parasites. Instead of causing a bad smell and taste, like chlorine, it removes all odors and taste. Are Europeans smarter than us? They certainly are when it comes to water.
Ozonized water won't be therapeutic and nutritious like lithia water, but it will beat distilled water for your coffee and soup.13
Jump-Starting Your Thyroid Gland
The rise in body temperature during peroxide therapy undoubtedly reflects stimulation of the thyroid gland, as well as stimulation of the immune system. We monitor the effectiveness of thyroid hormone by periodically checking the body temperature. As the thyroid starts working, the temperature slowly rises. It usually takes about eight weeks to see the effect and measure a temperature rise of a few tenths of a degree.
But with the peroxide therapy, a full degree temperature change occurs in about 15 minutes instead of eight weeks.
Because of this dramatic change, we now recommend to our patients starting on thyroid that they jump-start for quicker and more effective treatment. One or two intravenous H2O2 treatments will usually suffice.
Peptic Ulcer Is Catching
The very idea that an ulcer might be contagious would have been preposterous a few years ago, but we now know that it's possible. It's also possible that you got it from something you ate or drank. If you are an "oldtimer" with my newsletter, you heard about this discovery in these pages three years ago (long before medical students were being taught about it).
The culprit is a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori which likes to set up housekeeping in the stomach and the duodenum, the area that joins the stomach to the small intestine. It's choosey about its neighborhood and won't live in the small or large intestine—probably a racial thing. (Would you want to live with billions of E coli bacteria?) H pylori has a spiral shape and a screw-like motion that enables it to burrow into the mucous gel of the stomach and set up residence on the stomach lining. The body cannot throw off the invader, so you have it for life if it's not treated.
The treatment recommended today by the experts is a trial of bismuth subsalicylate (Pepto-Bismol) which, if you care, is approved by the FDA for ulcer therapy. If this doesn't work—and it only works about 25 percent of the time—then the antibiotic metronidazole (Flagyl) is added to the program. The doctors using this mode of therapy admit that they don't know if the combined treatment, which is effective about 80 percent of the time, is due to killing the H pylori bacteria or due to some curative effect on the stomach lining. (I recommend trying some cabbage juice for the pain. It might just surprise you.)
If the infectious origin of peptic ulcer is proven, and it's not totally settled at this time, it will have a tremendous impact on medical thinking regarding many presently puzzling diseases. Is rheumatoid arthritis an infection? What about multiple sclerosis, arteriosclerosis, and even schizophrenia? Karl Rosenow, one of the finest medical minds of the mid-20th century, presented evidence 50 years ago that rheumatoid arthritis is indeed an infectious process. He was ignored, of course.
Dr. Richard A. Root, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, remarked "I think that infectious agents may be important in many diseases in which they were once thought to play no role."
The lining of the stomach has always been one of those mysterious areas of medicine that makes us marvel at how smart the Architect of the Universe really is. (I'd like to hear the evolutionists explain how the stomach "learned" not to devour itself.) A remarkable balancing act goes on in the mucosa, or lining, of the stomach and duodenum. A mucous is secreted to protect the deeper tissues from the harmful effects of acid, which is also produced by the stomach. Most of the acid (and pepsin) is neutralized at the surface, but acid that does penetrate is neutralized by bicarbonate, which is produced by stomach cells. It's a very delicate balancing act between producing acid and then producing mucous, bicarbonate, and prostaglandins to protect itself.
Prostaglandins play a role in this protective mechanism, but how they do this is not understood. Scientists have demonstrated that mild irritants can protect the stomach lining from the corrosive effects of strong irritants without the presence of prostaglandins.
It is conventional wisdom that excess acid is responsible for the formation of peptic ulcer, but acid, a normal con