June 9, 1984 Dear

Perry,

I asked Wayne martin to send you the material he had on

the infamous Flagyl rat. Instead he sent me the enclosed two

pages from same (which is Sen. Kennedy’s 1975 hearings on

the FDA etc.) (title page is overside), with the following com-

ment: “... over 200 rats were used. One male rat — Control

No. CM21 - developed breast cancer. The FDA claimed that

this rat was a female and also that it had gotten Flagyl. In the

end Searle made their case. The one out of over 200 rats to

turn up with breast cancer was indeed a male and a control. If

you want to wade through the entire l,350 pages, I will mail

them to you.”

I expect that you don’t want Wayne to fork out for all that

postage. But the two pages should give an adequate idea of

what went on; and if not, the title page gives you the reference.

Thank you for the info copy of the Bingham-Chapdelaine

correspondence. I note that acanthamoebae have slipped into

the RD picture while I wasn’t looking, so I await future en-

lightenment. As for the American College of Electic Physicians,

surely the word is eclectic. “Electic” would have to be

someone’s neologism, and there would be no point in the coin-

age when simply adding a C produces a long-established word

meaning exactly what they are trying to convey.

Your remarks on cortisone and on your own intraneural

injections suggest that it is time for me to tell you about my

left knee, so 1 will. I have had osteoarthritis (known, that is)

for 23 years, manifesting itself in the following sequence: neck,

hands, left hip, left knee. I lived on aspirin and Indocin until

early 1978, when a piece in the Saturday Review by Norman

Cousins prompted me to give high-dose Vitamin C a secret trial

(I was a complete skeptic, and didn’t want to look like a fool if

the stuff didn’t work}. Reading between the lines, I picked 10

grams per day as a large dose; being a total neophyte and na-

ive, I had to feel my way in the dark. On the 4th day the im-

provement was so marked that I experimentally dropped Indocin

and did not miss it at all. In time I experimentally dropped

aspirin for a week; it was a miserable week, and I went back on

aspirin thankfully. Some time later I read (Chemtech, Feb. 1978)

an interview with Robert F. Cathcart III, M.D., an orthopedic-

surgeon-turned-G.P. who had discovered the bowel-tolerance

phenomenon: i.e., that instead of being a nuisance side effect

encountered by some people taking larger-than-vitamin-like

doses of ascorbic acid, diarrhea is a God-given indicator that

any person has taken more than he can absorb, and therefore

more than he needs, at any given time. Having learned how to

establish my needed intake, I quickly found that on about 30

grams per day I was without pain and essentially without dis-

comfort. That was in May of 1978. From that time I have never

taken an aspirin or other pain killer and have needed none.

(Which is not to say that I have never had discomfort since, but

rather that when I have it, either more C will help or nothing

will help.)

Wanting to know what was the rationale, if any, behind

this dramatic relief (and freeing from synthetic drugs), and also

why my doctor didn’t know about it (I having previously been

a leading exponent of the If-it’s-any-good-my-doctor-will-tell-

me-about-it school of thought), I began to read and correspond

intensively. In the ensuing six years I have learned that there

are at least two ways in which C encompasses the relief of

arthritic (or any inflammatory) painn: (1) By competitively

inhibiting the enzyme phosphodiesterase, it protects the

cyclonucleotide cyclic AMP and thus makes more of the latter

available to mediate the production of cortisone — which be-

ing home-made, does not have the undesirable side effects of

the synthetic steroids; and (2) by maximizing the conversion

of dietary linoleic acid into prostaglandin E-1 it minimizes the

alternate pathway of conversion into PGE-2, which among other

things governs the inflammatory process. (Aspirin and the

prescription anti-inflammatory drugs are prostaglandin

blockers, but they do so rather indiscriminately, so that in sup-

pressing the semi-Bad Guy E-2 they also tend to suppress the

super Good Guy E-1. Since E-l, among other things, governs

the production of T-lymphocytes, this accounts for the fact that

these drugs depress the immune system.) (E-2 is by no means

all bad, so it should not be suppressed totally. It is involved in

protecting the stomach against ulceration, which explains why

the PG blockers so often cause ulcers. One RD patient was —

before I got to her — on Motrin, and had to have emergency

surgery for a perforated ulcer. She later got the anti-amoebic

treatment from Dr. Plagenhoef, and is now free of RD.)

And, of course, I learned about the essential role of ascor-

bic acid in the manufacture, maintenance, repair, and replace-

ment of collagen. And this brings us to my left knee. In April

of 1980 I read a piece (Greenwood, J., On Osteoarthritis, the

“Wear and Tear” Disease: Can Vitamin C Help? Executive

Health 16, 7. April 1980) by a Houston neurosurgeon who has

used relatively high-dose C on his back patients since the early

1960s (“as much as 10 grams a day”) and claims thereby to

have saved many from back surgery by restoring disc integrity.

In this paper he strongly hinted, without actually saying it, that

OA patients in whom cartilage erosion and defensive calci-

fication of the bone end had not progressed too far might look

forward over the long haul to complete repair of cartilage. I

was skeptical, because at this time I had been on C. 30g/day of

C for two years, and as far as I could see there had been no

change for the better in any of the affected joints. The test was

simple: how did the joint respond to hot water? All of my af-

fected joints were still responding very gratefully indeed, in-

dicating the inflammation was still present, even though rarely

painful. But a year and a half later, in the fall of 1981, I low-

ered myself into a hot tub one morning, sank low enough to

immerse my neck, and then, as was my custom, rolled over on

my left side to immerse my left knee, No response from the

knee. Holy cow! thought I, what gives? That knee doesn’t seem

to care whether it’s in hot water or not. So I rolled over on the

right side to test the response of my non-arthritic right knee.

Same as the left. My goodness, thought I, can Greenwood be

right? As soon as I got out of the tub and dried off I tried some

deep knee bends, of which I had previously been able to do,

painfully, a maximum of one. I did 25, and only stopped be-

cause both knees were protesting equally. Well! I said nothing

to anyone, not even my wife, for three months, to make sure

that it had not been some sort of freak occurrence. Now 2-1/2

years la ter, I can say with absolute assurance that that knee has

been restored to absolute normality. (Six months later I wrote

to Greenwood, detailing my experience and suggesting that if

he had used Cathcart’s Indicator to establish dosage, which in

some patients would have meant going beyond 10g/day, some

of his “failures” might have been successes. He now uses

Cathcart’s Indicator.)

It is probably significant that my left knee was the last

joint to become arthritic, and was the one that had bothered me

least.

It appears to me that Pybus’ treatment is designed to inter-

rupt a source of stress on the knee long enough to allow nutri-