From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Subject: Re: Collapse Of Orthodox Medicine
Date: 05 May 1997
Newsgroups: sci.med

In <5kjlct$60q@news0-alterdial.uu.net> Joan Redken <redken@total.com>
writes:

>J. Redken
>*****Your better of going to see a biochemist than most doctors*****


   You're better off seeing a doctor who knows a lot of biochemistry
(you can, if you look, find docs who have Ph.D.s in biochem).

    The problem with biochemists is that they "prescribe" stuff
according to theory which is far from practice, and not enough is
really known (yet) about fundamental biology to do that (something any
good biochemist knows).  It's just too complicated.  You can have Linus
Pauling sure that taking vitamin C and alpha tocopherol will lengthen
your life, but that's according to a really simplistic theory.  In
practice (animals studies) vitamin E doesn't do that.  In humans, it
may lengthen life by decreasing cardiovascular disease, but then again
it may not (we don't know, yet).  And Pauling's theories didn't tell
him that gamma tocopherol, which isn't present to a large extent in
supplements, does things that alpha doesn't (like sop up
peroxynitrite).  And taking the alpha decreases your gamma.  Wups.  A
biochemist could not have predicted any of that from the "free radical
theory"-- it's all direct experimental data from physiology and
medicine.

     If you want to see the kind of screwups biochemists make, consider
Pearson and Shaw's recommendations in 1983 that smokers make their
habit safer by taking beta carotene.  Wups.

                                      Steve Harris, M.D.