Robert Cathcart
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Robert F. Cathcart III (1932 - present) is a Los Altos, California-based physician and leading proponent of orthomolecular medicine, specifically megavitamin dosing of vitamin C. A prominent figure in alternative medicine, Cathcart pioneered the concept of dosing vitamin C to bowel tolerance to maximize vitamin C levels without intravenous administration. He has reported clinical successes using massive vitamin C in treating influenza, hepatitis, mononucleosis, bacterial infection, yeast infections, stress, for recovery from burns, surgery and back pain. He also reports success treating herpes, arthritis and scarlet fever. He advocates massive vitamin C as potential treatments for avian flu, ebola virus, polio, irritable bowel syndrome, West Nile virus, Santa Clara flu, encephalitis, SARS, hemorrhagic fever, cancer, and avian flu. Cathcart also questions the prevalence of shaken baby syndrome, suggesting misdiagnosed vitamin C deficiency in agreement with Prof. C. A. B. Clemetson of Tulane Medical School.[1][2]
Cathcart has espoused a theory of disease symptoms based on free radical damage as part of his explanation of vitamin C's action in viral and other diseases. Trained as an orthopedic surgeon, he patented and pioneered an advanced hip joint earlier in his career, where he began using larger doses of vitamin C to speed post surgical recovery. Cathcart's current practice focuses on allergy treatments, environmental medicine, infectious disease, and orthomolecular medicine. In 2002 he was recognized by the Society for Orthomolecular Health-Medicine as recipient of the Linus Pauling Award.
While conventional physicians have claimed usages over 200 miligrams daily as "large", with brief experimentation at 1 to 4 grams per day, Cathcart considers this totally inadequate for the effective treatment of disease. Following on from earlier research by Fred R. Klenner and Abram Hoffer, Cathcart has used doses of 20 to 300 grams (0.66 pounds) of vitamin C per day in the treatment of disease, where oral dosage and bowel tolerance roughly indicate the free radical severity of the disease. He describes these as massive doses of oral ascorbate to separate them from the "small" gram level nutritional megadoses by conventional standards. The systematically maximized size of the oral doses proposed by Cathcart distinguishes him from several other earlier orthomolecular physicians, although Linus Pauling gradually increased his recommended intake as time and evidence accumulated.
Cathcart proposed the bowel tolerance technique to determine an individual's requirements for vitamin C. Then he essentially inverted the free radical theory of disease to propose ascorbate as a unique treatment. According to the free radical theory, disease is closely associated with and may even require oxidation and associated free radicals to damage tissues. Cathcart hypothesised that massive doses of ascorbate would transport free high energy electrons into diseased tissue to quench the free radical damage. This explanation has been recently extended by Steve Hickey and Hilary Roberts as the dynamic flow model for the action of vitamin C.
[edit] References
- ^ Is it Shaken Baby, or Barlows Disease Variant?
- ^ Caffey Revisited: A Commentary on the Origin of Shaken Baby Syndrome
- Hickey, Steve; Roberts, Hilary (May, 2004) Ascorbate: The Science of Vitamin C, Lulu Press, Inc. ISBN 1-4116-0724-4
