How We Use High-Dose Vitamin C

What everyone else is missing about this crucial vitamin

This post is adapted from my upcoming book, “The End of Autoimmunity.” If you appreciate my work, please support this Substack by upgrading to a paid subscription or purchase supplements from our online supplement store.

Excerpt from my upcoming book, The End of Autoimmunity

Why We Use Vitamin C

Vitamin C is incredible. Since the early days of vitamin C research, this has been obvious. Frederick Klenner, MD, used vitamin C and thiamine to treat polio back in the mid-1900’s. Linus Pauling, PhD, and Ewan Cameron, MD, used it to treat advanced cancer in the United Kingdom. Paul Marik, MD and Pierre Kory, MD made their reputations (at least in part) for their pioneering research on vitamin C in emergency and intensive care medicine. Doctors all over the world use vitamin C every day in private clinics. Patients rave about the benefits and come back for infusion after infusion.

Why doesn’t the conventional medical community use vitamin C? The reality is that vitamin C is so effective that it poses a major threat to drug sales. With over a trillion dollars in revenue and a larger political lobby than any other industry, the pharmaceutical industry will stop at nothing to keep vitamin C from getting the credit that it is due.

We use vitamin C because it works.

Fred’s Story

Fred came to see us from Delaware. He had been struggling with back pain, diabetes, and his weight for years. His back pain was so severe that he was planning on having surgery.

Back surgeries usually fail. This does not stop the back surgery industry from taking advantage of patients year after year. They start with one surgery and invariably come back for more over a period of years or decades. Many books have been written on the true causes of back pain and the failures of back surgery. Most surgery can be avoided with mind-body medicine and proper diet and exercise.

The Paradox of Mind-Body Medicine

Fred needed a solution to his back pain. I recommended vitamin C to him as a matter of course, not thinking that it would have any impact on his back pain. To my surprise, he reported a few weeks later that it had reduced his back pain from an 8 out of 10 to a 2 out of ten. I was floored. This is why we recommend vitamin C to every patient, often in their first appointment.

The Autoimmune Connection Repair Deficit

Vitamin C is vital to repair and regeneration at many levels of our biology. It is also one of the nutrients most depleted by modern diets, lifestyles, and environments. It is one of the first victims of modern food processing. This means that we need more of it and get less of it than ever before in history.

Without adequate vitamin C, we cannot generate connective tissue (collagen), we cannot eliminate old, defective, or even cancerous cells, and we cannot generate the hormones and neurotransmitters we need to fuel repair of our bodies. Without vitamin C, we fall apart quickly. Vitamin C is one of the most important nutrients we need to overcome repair deficit in autoimmunity.

Vitamin C was first used by Frederick Klenner, MD to treat polio in the mid-1900’s. Klenner used injectable vitamin C and would administer it regularly in high doses until completely curing his patients. We do not have data on what his cure rates were, but given how dismal the prognosis of polio was at the time, we can conclude that any success was better than conventional treatment.

Vitamin C is something we recommend to all of our patients with autoimmunity. I caution you against using vitamin C you find elsewhere. I know what we use works, because my patients get great results with it. Our patients and staff have used many brands of vitamin C over the years, and nothing compares to what we use now.

You can purchase Dr. Stillman’s Vitamin C here.

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Addressing the Myths About Vitamin C

Despite the clear benefits of vitamin C, there are plenty of people who fail to appreciate it.

The vitamin C fear-mongers will say things like

“It’ll give you kidney stones.”
“Synthetic vitamin C ruins copper metabolism.”
“Only natural vitamin C can be used by the body.”

Sadly, I am sure that this is true when it comes to inferior brands of vitamin C. We have procured the best product available thanks to an abundance of time, effort, and money spent on comparing products in clinical practice.

My patients are my best teachers and they tell me that our vitamin C works wonders for them. It is our best selling supplement within the practice.

Vitamin C is one of our most potent tools for creating wellness. It is also one of the most abused and misunderstood. I believe this has led to a widespread lack of appreciation for vitamin C.

That is why we have a clearly defined High-Dose Vitamin C Protocol at our practice.

The High Dose Vitamin C Protocol

Your body has a limited capacity to absorb vitamin C from your gut. At a high enough dose, vitamin C will cause diarrhea.

We recommend vitamin C as our first treatment for constipation. We recommend a daily dose that keeps stools soft, but still formed, with at least one bowel movement daily.

In all cases, we start by determining what the patient’s need for vitamin C is. Most patients can tolerate a few teaspoons of vitamin C daily (some tolerate less than this, for the record). Some patients can tolerate dozens of teaspoons each day.

Determining Your Need for Vitamin C

Why is there such a wide range of tolerances?

This has to do with the patient’s need for vitamin C. Patients with a greater need for vitamin C can tolerate more. As they replete their body, their need and therefore tolerance of vitamin C declines.

Here is how we determine a patient’s need for vitamin C.

Plan a quiet day at home.
Take a half-teaspoon of vitamin C in four ounces of water when you wake up.
Take another half-teaspoon every twenty minutes thereafter.
Stop when you have a loose bowel movement.

This establishes your “max dose.”

This is important, because this is what we tell our patients to take whenever they have an acute illness.

When We Recommend High-Dose Vitamin C

We recommend this dose to patients for
Acute injury of any kind
Acute infection of any kind
Insect or animal bites or envenomations (spiders, snakes, mosquitos - if it bites you and it hurts or itches, we use vitamin C)
Food poisoning
Intoxication of any kind (alcohol, MSG, poisonous mushrooms, psychoactive chemicals - if it is a poison, vitamin C may be a reasonable antidote)

We have seen vitamin C work wonders in each of these scenarios. We may recommend more than just vitamin C, but vitamin C is where we start. In each of these acute scenarios, the body’s need for vitamin C will be elevated. The body should tolerate more. Patients may report needing dozens more grams during an acute illness. Doses that would normally make them evacuate their bowels are instead easily tolerated.

We recommend daily dosing of vitamin C as a preventative and a treatment measure in autoimmunity. There are situations in which we pause vitamin C, but for the most part I recommend that patients continue it indefinitely. Not long ago, I recommended it for just six weeks. I decided based on experience that a daily dose was best for patients. It is one of very few products that I recommend every day.

Most people tolerate between 10 and 20 grams. I have heard of people tolerating as much as 70 or 80 grams. The higher the tolerance, the greater the need for vitamin C.

Keep track of how much you’ve taken. The quantity that causes a loose stool is the quantity you can tolerate (your bowel tolerance). This is your maximum dose. If you reduce your max dose by 25-30%, that’s how much you should be able to comfortably tolerate every day. I dose it every 12 hours (morning and night).

Again, it’s critical to only use a properly buffered, fully-reacted form of vitamin C. We carefully vet our vitamin C for potency and purity.

Final Thoughts

Vitamin C is a major contributor to the success of our patients and therefore of our practice.

Try our vitamin C today.

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Until next time, be well,

Dr. Stillman

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