Hacker News Reader

This has been debunked extensively, eg: http://www.yalescientific.org/2015/03/mythbusters-does-vitam... https://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/pauling.h...

That 'debunking' is silly really, as mentioned studies used radically lower doses (even that is understatement).

Anyway, I never had common cold since I started following Pauling protocol (more precisely, never longer then a single day of mild discomfort). Its 10 years now. Taking 5-10g daily and when I sense it coming doing bowel tolerance which usually ends up somewhere between 20-50g. Before I started doing this I had it 3-5 times a year lasting usually 2 weeks.

It works equally effective for my daughter.

Keep in mind that you need to be on lowish carb if you want C to be effective due to the fact that one of the transporters (GLUT4) is shared with glucose. Timing is also crucial, taking it to late and it doesn't help much, it must be started on first signs of illness.

I wonder why people love to hate vitamin C vs common cold that much given that C is cheaper then water, you don't have side effects and the worst thing that can happen is that it will not do anything for you. Comparably, nobody hates 8 glasses of water per day even tho there is 0 proof that you should do more then your body asks of you. Because, you know... its just water.

One of the things that people often forget is that even if C does not stop common cold, it sure as hell makes complications less probable. Some of those can turn to chronic disease, such as arthritis.

Oh really - It has been proven that it does not work for me personally exactly as i wrote?

I didn’t see the researcher team coming through my door...

I didn’t say it works for everyone, but only report how it turns out for me.

Interesting that some find a personal report enough reason to downvote...

How do we know the research you point at is not sponsored by those with an interest in selling more expensive stuff?

You are getting downvoted because pseudomedicine, including the idea that Vitamin C cures diseases, causes real harm. Low-information patients reject proven therapies in favour of quackery and make their ailments worse, ultimately leading to higher costs for all of society.

"It may not work for everyone but it works for me" is a fallacy – if you run a 50/50 blind study on yourself for the next 30 colds you catch, controlling for factors like season, air quality, stress levels, sleep, and nutrition, and you still find that Vitamin C consistently cuts your colds in half, then we'll believe you. Otherwise, stop pushing misinformation.

Strong argumentation... with just a few logical errors...

Unless you can prove what I wrote didn’t happen to me, i can as well insult you of pushing misinformation about what happened to me and what not.

I talk about personal experience and clearly mark it as such.

And then, i didnt know this is a forum of „low-information patients“ - but i start to believe it...

Furthermore it has been said in the article that there is no verified cure for colds. Insofar even if someone would refuse to take other non-verified, more expensive medications because of my report, it wouldn’t do harm. It’s just changing one unverified cure against another.

do i talk about cancer? No. It’s about colds.

Believing only in studies will not help you at all - many studies have been proven to be false for many different reasons and later detected errors. Just happened for cancer studies of multiple decades!

So with your randomly selected criteria there‘s still many things that can be wrong, and the same goes for all studies that prove Vitamin C helps and those that prove it doesn’t. You forgot age, for example... 30 colds is at least 3, at my current rate rather 10-15 years... a lot changes in a body. I can be weaker due age, or fitter due more sports etc...

So i believe only in what works for me, and i report about it personally with clear marking that it’s just that, personal experience.

And i didn‘t recommend anything to anyone else.

Also, i said that success rate is just 2/3. THAT would have been a good point to attack my idea that Vitamin C helps - because it is actually a low rate.

While we discuss this, a lot of money is spend for other cures of cold that equally has no proof of working. But this is accepted... you might be better off trying to stop big pharma for advertising anything as a cure for cold instead of insulting me for telling personal experiences.

What makes you think it was the Vitamin C that prevented the cold? It could as easily have been your belief in the Vitamin C cure that prevented the colds.

It could.

Who knows if there was actually Vitamin C contained in what i bought?

But my experience still exists.

I took that stuff that has been sold to me as Vit C and had a lot less to suffer. Didn’t spend a lot of money, and didn’t have a lot of risk involved.

So what?

I tried other remedies before - as well ones that were organical stuff recommended by someone ( ginger tea for example which some believe in is helping a lot - but not myself ) as well as commercial products. I believed or at least hoped they‘d help in each case. But only this did with some - and i say 66% is not great, just some - reproducability.

With Herpes it‘s 100% were in my personal experience it removes a lot if suffering and bad feeling for days.

My point wasn't to deny your experience, only to comment that even for your specific experience it's impossible to be so confident as to state it was Vitamin C that prevented illnesses.

I'm happy you found something that works for you, but the certainty you ascribe to causes is not justified by the evidence.

Thanks ;)

yes sure, it can be many things - and a repeatability of 2 in 3 is not very much... just some.

It can also be that as the original article mentions there are many causes for a bad cold, that my system worked only with a part of them.

I just get a bit upset with (some other) people saying my personal experience isn't a properly conducted study - it sure isn't.

At the same time, these studies fail every day, in the end they are all just statistics, which can be forged, lead to wrong assumptions, or just be flawed in a failure criterion not being thought of until now - like, oh, 30,000 cancer studies... http://www.sciencealert.com/more-than-30-000-scientific-stud...

But I'm not even talking about cancer - and I sure would defintely rather try fighting cancer with a "western medicine" approach that has some reasonable success rate and never recommend anyone diagnosed with such trying to treat that thing with a spoon of Vitamin C everyday...

The yale article doesn't mention the exact doses for which it has been tested, only once it says "high", but in the other experiments just says "supplements" - so it's unclear what exactly has been found out about exactly the doses I wrote about.

The other talks about 1g daily as prevention. I talk about 3x1g as treatment when symptoms start to appear until they are gone.

Different things.

And again, I don't say my own experience is a scientificly proven thing working generally, just a personal report and maybe a thing worth trying for the curious instead of throwing a lot of bucks in other treatments.

I think theres a lot of (financial) interest in suppressing that the thing I wrote about works for more than just me - and there's not much to be gained for me personally if writing about this will help others too... so, what's your motivation trying to supress me in reporting my experience?

Don't bother. The history repeats. There was the same thing with vitamin C and cancer with everybody citing Moertel's studies that debunked the protocol and it just happened that something people reiterated for more then 30 years got debunked itself:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2981594/

For herpes simplex on the lips try a large dose of L-Lysine (6mg or more on day 1, followed by 2mg a day for a week), in all cases over the past 5 years for me this completely prevents the blisters and sore developing.

Yeah, and I've found L-Lysine does jack shit for my cold sores.

Even better is vitamin C + zinc.

Might be for some / in some situations. My „experiments“ worked without zinc so far. But maybe i should try it next time and see if it helps to get a success rate closer to 100 instead of just ~70%

The thing is as with Vitamin C, most supermarket products just have low doses. So to get an effect i recommend getting pure and high dosed preparates of both, each by itself.

I don't think you should use a very large dose of zinc. There's actually research on this, you could look it up. E.g., [1,2].

Some OTC products already contain vitC and zinc in proper amounts, e.g. Sambucol (not affiliated).

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc_and_the_common_cold

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23775705

Might be better to talk about concrete numbers instead of "low/high/very large" doses :)

I would not take zinc in the same numbers as Vitamin C - but exactly therefor eI said I would take them apart, because, at least in the German and Spanish Market, you have combination preparates with 80mg Vitramin C and 5mg of Zinc - to achieve the effects I observed in myself you'd need 3x10 of these for the Vitamin C amount, whioch would be a lot of zinc which I would not recommend and have no experience with and no knowledge about the risks.

The articles seem to not agree in doses and helpfulness - one says it must be >= 75mg to actually do something, another that even 90+ mg doesn't do anything. And I believe to remember that already from 25mg/day you can get strange effects in the belly as side effects...