My husband recently went to a specialty store to purchase a replacement part for our travel trailer. He marveled at how the people running the shop obviously for many years knew what part he needed based on the year and make of the trailer without even looking it up! He commented that he would rather pay a little bit more and get the best information rather than pay less initially and get the wrong information that would lead to many future heartaches. Sounds like the difference between naturopathic doctors and the medical information the public is getting from the media or their medical doctors. Patients can come to me and ask my medical opinion of the last 21 years and get a good all round explanation or they can take to heart what the evening news says about the latest nutrient to be on the chopping block! Case in point is L-arginine. While listening to the morning CBC radio news last week I heard that patients taking L-arginine who had had a recent heart attack were at an increased risk of mortality! That got my attention as I am sure it got yours so now I have a retort to that report and I have a retort to most of the others too but I would be writing 24 hours a day to keep up with it all!

A colleague, Dr. Alan Miller, recently wrote an article “Bad Medicine or Bad Reportage” available in full at www.thorne.com writing about the research in the last 6 months published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) or the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in an attempt to belittle alternative medicine. In his article he summarizes the following:

The L-arginine study came out in JAMA January 4th 2006 on 153 patients who has just had a heart attack. These patients were given L-arginine (not the time released form and do you know that the effect of L-arginine is used up within about 30 minutes if it is not time released?) at doses between 3-9 grams dailly to be taken for six months. Six patients taking the L-arginine died during the trial and this made the researchers conclude it was due to the L-arginine. Well one died after having another heart attack, one died of sepsis so he had to have been very sick, 2 died at home cause not known and one died 4 months later, having stopped the arginine 3 weeks prior. The deaths were not statistically significant and this number of deaths can happen after an MI happen even with no treatment. So the L-arginine was not the cause. The researchers could not prove that the patients in the study actually absorbed the L-arginine. But still deaths make headlines and incorrectly so: “Say no to L-arginine for heart failure.” The study had nothing to do with heart failure! Now that you know about the facts behind the study are you still afraid of trying it? Numerous studies have shown L-arginine to improve the health of blood vessels, lower blood pressure and increase blood flow to the heart and throughout the body. It is wrong for the researchers to believe a nutrient like L-arginine will reverse in just six months a severe long-term disease process and the resultant damage after a heart attack but this is what they were trying to prove.

In the typical biased slant of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), an article published in the July 6th edition bashes vitamin E once again. In the latest report from the Women’s Health Study – a long-term analysis of the health of female health-care professionals that has been ongoing since 1992 – the authors state that women who took 600 I.U. natural source vitamin E (alpha-tocopherol) every other day for 10 years had no reduction in major cardiovascular events (heart attack, stroke) or incidence of cancer during the trial. However, vitamin E supplementation DID result in “decreased cardiovascular mortality in healthy women.” This result is a significant finding and should have been emphasized in the article’s conclusion. Instead of stating that women who took vitamin E for 10 years had a 24-percent reduction in risk of dying from cardiovascular disease (which was buried in paragraph four), the authors concluded, “These data do not support recommending vitamin E supplementation for cardiovascular disease or cancer prevention among healthy women.” Even though their data can substantiate their conclusion regarding cancer, the beneficial cardiovascular data is very important and highly significant, and should have been emphasized. The bottom line should have read – vitamin E supplementation has not been shown to be harmful for healthy human beings, and decreases the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.

There have been over 9 similar studies since the beginning of the year speaking against low fat diets; heart disease and cancer; saw palmetto and enlarged prostates; calcium and vitamin D and fracture risk and preventing colon cancer; and glucosamine and chondroitin in the treatment of osteoarthritis.