This has been strongly indicated in the literature and this event obviously takes it over the top. It should be obvious that high doses of vitamin C require no testing whatsoever. The doctors are free to do as they like here because they are specifically not doing harm when using intravenous vitamin C.
Thus this should be universally applied almost overnight. Certainly they are successdfully laying on the publicity.
It is noteworthy that this applies to almost all infectious disorders and it may well be our ultimate defence against many other infectious diseases. It certainly looks to be promoted to the first step in the face of any raging infections right after re hydration. Again no harm can be done.
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A Norfolk doctor found a treatment for sepsis. Now he's trying to get the ICU world to listen.
The patient was dying.
Valerie
Hobbs, 53, was in the throes of sepsis – an infection coursing through
her veins that was causing her blood pressure to tank, her organs to
fail and her breathing to flag.
“When you have a person that young
who’s going to die, you start thinking, ‘What else can we pull out of
the bag?’ ” said Dr. Paul Marik, who was on duty that day in the
intensive care unit of Sentara Norfolk General Hospital.
In this case, he reached for Vitamin C.
Marik,
chief of pulmonary and critical care at Eastern Virginia Medical
School, had recently read medical journal articles involving the
vitamin, and decided to order IV infusions of it, along with
hydrocortisone, a steroid, to reduce inflammation.
Then, he went home.
The
next morning, Hobbs had improved so much she was removed from four
different medications used to boost her blood pressure. Her kidney
function was better. Her breathing eased.
Three days later, she left the ICU.
That was in January 2016. Today, Hobbs is back at her home in Norfolk.
“At first we thought it was a coincidence, that maybe the stars aligned just right and she got lucky,” Marik said.
Ten
days later, another patient, a paraplegic, arrived in the ICU with
sepsis, and Marik prescribed the same thing. That patient improved as
well.
A third patient, a man so sick with pneumonia he was on a ventilator, also received the treatment. The results were the same.
Marik’s response: “What just happened?”
He
suggested changing the protocol for patients who arrived with sepsis.
He also added another ingredient to the concoction: thiamine, which is
Vitamin B.
___
At first, doctors and nurses were skeptical.
Kathi Hudgins, a critical care nurse for 23 years, confesses she doubted Marik’s idea: “I thought it was too simplistic.”
Soon, she was sold.
“We
started having patient after patient have these remarkable results,”
she said. “They’d be at death’s door and 24 to 48 hours later, they had
turned around. We have seen patients walk out of here we didn’t think
would leave. To see them turn around so quickly was nothing short of
amazing.”
They started tracking the numbers, comparing them with patients who came through the ICU with sepsis the previous year.
A study published online in December by CHEST, an American College of Chest Physicians medical journal, revealed the results:
In
47 patients with sepsis treated in Norfolk General’s ICU, four died in
2016, an 8 percent mortality rate. Of those four, none died of sepsis
but rather the conditions that led to sepsis in the first place. The
previous year, 19 of 47 septic patients died, a 40 percent mortality
rate.
Medical residents started calling the concoction “miracle juice.” Marik dubbed it “the cure for sepsis.”
Kurt
Hofelich, Norfolk General’s president, said the protocol is being
rolled out to other ICUs in the health system to validate the findings.
“We
hypothesize that this new treatment will evolve into a national best
practice and a new standard of care for patients with sepsis in an ICU
level of care environment,” Hofelich said in a prepared statement
released today.
Sounds like a game-changer – but hold on.
___
Dr. David Carlbom, an associate professor of pulmonary critical care at the University of Washington, advises caution.
First,
it’s what is called a retrospective study, which means it compares
something at one point in time to a control group further back in time.
Second, the numbers are small.
Third, the cases were all at one hospital.
Those
are called study limitations. The gold standard study is a randomized,
double-blind, placebo-controlled study in which patients with the same
condition are observed in the same period, and health care providers
don’t know who is receiving the treatment or a placebo.
Carlbom said multiple sites would ensure there was nothing particular to Norfolk that was making a difference.
Marik agrees.
He wants there to be a comprehensive study, and
he said that Stanford University has expressed some interest. But he
said it will be difficult to fund because it uses drugs that have been
on the market for decades: “We are curing it for $60. No one will make
any money off it.”
Studies take money, and that money often comes from pharmaceutical companies.
“By
the time it’s done, it could be three years and the number of people
who will die of sepsis by that time will be ginormous,” Marik said.
Hobbs,
who didn’t realize at the time what was going on to treat her ruptured
bile duct, now feels fortunate that Marik tried something out of the
usual box: “It was good because it saved my life.”
___
Sepsis occurs
in more than 1 million people a year in this country, with 28 to 50
percent dying, according to the National Institutes of Health.
The
condition can stem from a variety of different ailments and has an
overwhelming immune response to infection. Natural chemicals released in
the body trigger widespread inflammation, which leads to blood clots
and leaky vessels. That slows blood flow, damaging the organs by
depriving them of nutrients and oxygen.
In the worst cases, blood pressure drops, the heart weakens and the patient goes into septic shock.
The cost to treat sepsis in the United States has been estimated at $20 billion a year in 2011.
Just
as Marik pulled Vitamin C out of his bag to save the woman in January
2016, he pulls out these facts to sell his sepsis treatment to others.
He
believes lives could be saved before a larger study is complete. He’s
been traveling the country trying to find audiences of critical-care
doctors to peddle the idea – Philadelphia, Charlottesville, Long Island,
New York and, earlier this week, Seattle.
He’s gotten significant
pushback from doctors who say it’s unethical to try before larger
studies are done. But he responds that the use is within the limits of
what the Vitamin C pharmaceutical label recommends.
“Half think
it’s cool and half think this is hooey nonsense. When something is too
good to be true, people don’t want to believe it.”
Carlbom said
since sepsis results from a lot of different conditions, it could be
that the combo could help some more than others, and might even be
detrimental to particular ailments.
So he understands why doctors
will wait for more study. But Carlbom, who describes himself as an early
adopter, says he’s started to try it on his own patients.
___
Marik also took
the step of having a researcher examine the idea in the lab. He reached
out to John Catravas, who studies and teaches on the subject of
bioelectrics at Old Dominion University.
Catravas has spent years
researching lung function. Of special interest are the lung’s
endothelial cells, which form the linings of the blood vessels: “When
you have sepsis, the endothelial cells pull away from each other and
allow fluid in the lungs.”
He looked at the effect of the Vitamin C, then the steroid, then the two in combination.
It
wasn’t one or the other that was doing the trick, but both, almost as
though one was holding the door open for the other to do its work in
reducing inflammation.
It was a laboratory finding that supported
what was happening in the clinical setting, which Marik included in the
CHEST publication.
“We can’t both be completely insane,” Marik said.
___
Marik, who was born
and educated in South Africa, is hardly a lightweight in the field. He
has more than two decades of critical-care experience and has authored
400 medical journal articles and four books on critical care.
Still, the prospect of the lives this could save excites him at age 58.
Always
one to use humor in the practice of medicine and life, Marik takes
delight in the story of Ignaz Semmelweis. The Hungarian doctor in the
1840s figured out that doctors doing autopsies were also delivering
babies, and unintentionally infecting patients, leading to high
mortality rates. Midwives who weren’t doing autopsies had much lower
rates.
He advised hand washing with a chlorine solution that acted
as a disinfectant. When interns under his direction did that, their
maternal mortality rates plunged.
But doctors were furious at Semmelweis, who ended up losing his job. The chlorine hand wash was abandoned.
Semmelweis
ended up in a mental institution at age 47, and died there from, by
some accounts, sepsis, which he’d worked so hard to try to prevent in
women giving birth. His simple advice was picked up again when Louis
Pasteur developed the germ theory of disease.
The irony is not lost on Marik:
“People
who have studied sepsis a long time don’t want to believe a simple
solution can work. Hopefully before I die it will be shown to be true.”
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