Vitamin C in alternative cancer treatment
Out of all the various alternative cancer treatments, Vitamin C is one of them. It has a number of benefits. It is also called L-Ascorbic Acid or ascorbate. Vitamin C is an antioxidant which is used to boost up your blood antioxidant levels.
It plays a great role in human body’s nutrition. It is present in a lot of food items like oranges, broccoli and many other dietary supplements. Use of vitamin C has a wide range of uses like it helps in reducing various chronic diseases like heart diseases. It plays a major role in curing cancer patients to an extent.
The alternative cancer treatments are usually natural products. Similarly, Vitamin C is also present in natural ingredients like grapefruit, papaya, peppers, kale etc. It also plays a major role in making collagen.
The recommended daily intake of vitamin C is 75 mg for women and 90 mg for men but while testing the effectiveness of this vitamin in curing cancer, doctors were injecting a very higher dose of vitamin C into the mice which was a lot more than that what we get from our food or dietary supplements.
The main benefits of Vitamin C are listed below:
- It manages the human blood pressure and decreases the risk of chronic diseases.
- It also reduces gout attacks.
- It has reduced blood uric acid levels and it helps a lot in preventing iron deficiency.
- It also boosts our immunity.
- It has also improved our thinking and memory during our aging process.
Vitamin C has not become the proper cure but it has showed improvements in the health of a cancer patient. It provides quality of life as well as fewer side effects to cancer patients.
There is a specific method in the intake of vitamin C like you can take it either by mouth or through intravenous (IV) infusion i.e. through vein into the bloodstream. But a person should consult his doctor before its intake because sometimes it provides very adverse effects to patients like people having kidney diseases should not use it in higher doses. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have not approved the use of IV high-dose vitamin C as a treatment for cancer.
Since 1950’s after the studies of William J. McCormick, vitamin C has proved a great candidate for treatment of cancer. He observed that cancer patients present a very low level of vitamin C in their blood and featured scurvy like symptoms and he thought of the possibility that vitamin C might protect patient from cancer by increasing collagen. A lot of reports on this topic have shown that certain concentrations of vitamin C selectively kill cancer cells and decrease the growth rate of a number of human tumors.
But still to some extent, the use of vitamin C does not clearly exhibits cancer cells. We cannot call it the actual ‘antitumor’. And the major reason for this problem is that high dose administration in cancer patients has not showed clear antitumor activity. And this reason is further discussed because there is no clear information regarding the interaction between cancer cells and vitamins C.