In my six years practicing in Manhattan, plus the forty two years here in Hudson, I have found that nutrition plays a very significant role in treating many eye infirmities.

My Medical Experience

I feel that I was fortunate in having the quality of training that I received. After graduating from Manitoba Medical College in Winnipeg, I practiced seven years in general practice on the Canadian prairie and then went to London where I joined a group of about seventy five doctors taking a course in ophthalmology from Sir John Parsons, the leading ophthalmologist in England. After a couple of months they asked me to become a house surgeon in the Westminster branch of Moorefield's Eye Hospital, which is oldest and generally considered to be the most progressive and outstanding eye hospital in the world.

During my first thirty years of practice in Hudson I was the only ophthalmologist practicing in five different counties. Now there are six or seven right here in Hudson besides someone in Catskill and Reinbeck to the south and other places.

Ophthalmology

Ophthalmology is the term used by the medical profession for the study of eyes, the treatment of eye diseases, the study of its anatomy and its association with the brain and nervous system. It is estimated that it requires a third of one's brain to operate the eyes. It is the organ of sight, that is, it lets us know that there is light instead of darkness. The source of all light, of course, is the sun. Only 10% of the sun's rays produce visible light (i.e. 90% of the rays are invisible, such as heat, and ultraviolet). When the beam of the sun's rays enters the eye it passes through front surface of the eye called the cornea. Then, four millimeters deeper, through the lens, and then right through to the back of the eye where we find the retina, which is similar to the film in a camera. The normal retina contains many photo-electric cells that we call the "rods" and "cones". The rods are sensitive to dim lights (like at night) and are scattered away from the center of the retina (which is called the macular or spot). Around the macula are clustered the cones within a diameter of about seven millimeters. Within that circle of seven millimeters it is estimated that we have half a million photo electric cells sensitive to bright light and colors. Each cone and each rod has to be connected by wires which we call nerves. These clusters of nerves pass back to the brain. A half a million of these little wires from the macular area of the brain carry a small section of the view that you are looking at. It is like a jigsaw puzzle with a half a million pieces. The brain has to sort them out and make it into a picture then send it back to the eye again through a separate set of nerves to form a picture to be projected by the eye.

Nature has given us a fairly efficient technological instrument. From the time the beam of the sun passes through the eye to the retina, and the half million cones send the jigsaw picture back to the brain through a half a million little nerves, and the brain sorts out that jigsaw puzzle, and refers it back to the eye, the whole process takes three tenths of a second. In addition, the eye has to have other nerves. For example, when a bright light shines, the pupils have to contract and in dull light they have to open up.

The optical system is connected with the rest of the brain so that when we see a certain object, say a dog, the word dog is referred from our ears, or we see a picture of a dog in our mind. All of this requires millions of little nerves working all of the time.

The nerves in our body run at a very low voltage. They estimate that the nerves operate on six one millionth of a volt. Each nerve has to have three layers of insulation using fat. Every cubic millimeter of our body is supplied by these nerves. A cubic millimeter of muscle, anywhere in your body, requires four sets of nerves from the brain in order to function. When you bend your knee, it requires a stimulation of your muscle cells on the back of your leg above your knee to contract and at the same time the muscles in the front of your leg attached to your knee cap have to expand. That is just two sets of nerves. It also needs a set of nerves that are required by the proprioceptive sense, which you probably have never heard of, but it is a very important thing. When we test people for syphilis, we have them touch their nose with their index finger with their eyes shut. In other words, they have to know where their arm is. In one form of syphilis you lose this ability, that is your proprioceptive system is injured.

In addition to that, you have to have a sensory nerve, the same as a pain nerve. This is what keeps your muscles alive. When you develop polio there is a destruction of the nerves from the front side of your spinal cord. That is the part that gives us sensation so that we can feel pain. You wonder why a muscle has to feel pain. It so happens that if the sensory pain nerve is cut off to the muscle, as it is in polio, the muscle cells die. It's not paralysed, it just degenerates.

They tell us that the body is carefully and wonderfully made. The amazing thing is that this electrical system, in the most the of us, keeps functioning for a lifetime unless something happens, such a stroke which cuts off part of the brain due to a blocked artery or a hemorrhage.

Ophthalmology is a vast subject. The most famous book was written by a scotsman named Sir Stuart Duke Elder consisting of fifteen volumes costing fifty dollars each, with nothing in it about surgery. This gives you an idea about how many things can go wrong with our eyes. Our very capable legislators, of course, have not been well versed in this subject. Many have the belief that there is nothing to it other than selling a pair of glasses or doing a cataract operation. They see no reason to have to go to a medical college and learn about how the body is made and to spend two or three years in an eye hospital learning about ophthalmology. As a result, they license people called "optometrists" who possess very little knowledge about the eyes yet advertise that they offer complete eye service. The enormity of their lack of knowledge is sometimes quite amazing.

Problems With "Modern" Ophthalmology

You would think from the advertisements that they have in the local paper that ophthalmology was entirely a surgical specialty. This all appears to be the result of President Johnson's act in 1966 of tacking the fees for eye surgery onto Medicare so that the surgeons now are paid $2,000 or more (whether the patient has the money or not) for performing a cataract extraction, the fee being higher if an interocular lens in implanted. I discontinued doing cataract extractions in 1974 because I had so few patients that required surgery after my medical treatment which consists of taking a tablespoon full of Icelandic cod liver oil each morning, a reliable B and C tablet, refraining from smoking, eating whole wheat bread and getting plenty of vinegar. Many patients are having extractions performed on perfectly useful eyes. At the age of eighty six and a half I have known for about fifteen years that I was developing cataracts (they were more advanced in my right eye. I am continuing to practice, however, and I can read the finest print without glasses and I can also see distances without glasses. I am unable to explain it except that it must have been in the developing cataracts that nature has a way of making up for the loss of vision. It is not unusual for anyone of the local ophthalmologists to perform ten or fifteen extractions in a week working in Hudson, Catskill or Reinbeck. Without the handsome fees that they charge for their office practice, their poor wives would have to struggle along and go shopping, maybe buying a second Mercedes on twenty to thirty thousand dollars per week... too bad. Too bad it is for the taxpayer.

It appears to me that ophthalmologists in this country are not too adequately trained. An ophthalmologist is supposed to have an M.D. from a qualified medical college. Then spend three years in an eye hospital studying ophthalmology. Here in New York, Albany Medical Center has resident ophthalmologists who spend perhaps three years there studying ophthalmology, but it is not an eye hospital. As a result, they don't get an awful lot more training than they would get by hanging around the average ophthalmologist's office. One of the local doctors, for instance, is absolutely incapable of doing a simple refraction to get people glasses.

The Benefits of Nutrition

Soon after beginning practice in ophthalmology in Manhattan I found that nutrition could play a very important role in the treatment of many eye conditions. Beginning in January of 1939, I practiced in the offices of Dr. David A. Webster, the surgeon director of the Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital. I was on the surgical staff of the Manhattan and St. Luke's Hospital where we attended outpatient clinics on alternate afternoons. When I moved to Hudson six years later, Ms. Malone, who had recorded the attendance of the doctors in the outpatient clinic, informed me that I had spent twice as many hours in the clinic as any other doctor. One of the hospital rules was that a doctor would lose his operating room privilege if he failed to serve in the outpatient clinic. So nearly all to the other fellows spent as little time as they could get away with in the outpatient clinics. It didn't concern me to any great extent. I enjoyed working in the clinic and actually learned a lot about ophthalmology while there. For example, I first learned their that vitamins could be a big factor in treating iritis, also called uveitis.

While working in the outpatient clinics I saw a Black girl named Kissy who was age 15 (but who looked age 9) and had a right shrunken blind eye. When asked what had happened to her eye she said "it had lumps on it just like my left on now has". I said "what did they do". She said "they gave me drops, but the eye just went blind". I made a diagnosis of phlyctenular keratitis as also seen on the white of her eye. I had read some place that cod liver oil was a good treatment for this. The girl got some oil in the pharmacy. It was amazing how in few days those lumps had disappeared. In addition, she kept coming to me, she, almost overnight began to look like a fifteen year old girl (she had looked nine). This was 1941, she got a job at $90 per week in war factory, which was good money in those days.

In the forty-nine years since I first started practice in New York City, my belief in the role of nutrition and vitamins in the therapeutics of treating eye diseases has been confirmed. In fact, I have come to believe that my discoveries are perhaps the biggest advance in the treatment of eye disease in the past century or more.

As can be seen from the paragraphs below, I have discovered that intravenous injections of vitamins B and C can cure a great many eye diseases, principally herpes ulcers of the cornea. In addition, it is a 100% cure for uveitis, that is iritis, diabetic retinopathy, and diabetic abscesses of the feet. It also cures recurrent erosion of the cornea and acute attacks of glaucoma where the tension in an eye that is being treated with drops suddenly goes quite high. It has brought the pressure down to normal or below normal in every case that it has been tried on. It is also effective against chronic inflammation of the lids (leperitis) which, after injections, did not require an operation and were cured.

They tell us that vitamins B complex and C are produced synthetically in the lower intestine if the contents of the colon has a PH for acidity. The most remarkable fact noticed in treating eye diseases with intravenous vitamins B and C is the small amount that it takes. We are said to have about ten quarts of blood in our body. An injection of Solu B contains about ten milligrams of vitamin B2 (riboflavin). When mixed in with the blood that equals about one part per million. It seems like an impossible fact that injecting one millionth of our blood volume with a vitamin can have any effect, especially when our colon is producing vitamin B when our bowel contents are acidic. One factor that tends to maintain lower bowel acidity is the consumption of raw, unpasteurized milk which contains (no matter what mammal it is taken from) a bacteria called the lactic acid bacillus (lacto bacillus acididofolus). In modern society we almost insist that everyone drink pasteurized milk because the pasteurizing (i.e. heating the milk to 140 degrees) kills bacteria. They say that in doing so that you kill the bacteria for tuberculosis, ungulen fever, and typhoid. However, in the 62 years that I have been practicing medicine I have yet to see a case of typhoid fever. While I was a "municipal" doctor in Saskatchewan nobody drank pasteurized milk. Practically all of my patients were farmers who drank milk directly from their own cows. During the six years that I practiced there there was not a single case of diabetes (i.e. urinary sugar) from the 4000 people in my district. Nowadays, in the age of universal pasteurization, almost everyone you meet has friends that are suffering from diabetes. They question then is why are we pasteurizing milk. They have not have a case of ungulen fever in New York State for years and every cow in the state is checked twice a year for tuberculosis.

I am led to believe that these types of injections of vitamins B and C in curing these diseases are the greatest discovery in ophthalmology. Taking these same vitamins orally has no effect on the diseases mentioned. This would seem to indicate that in passing through the stomach certain elements in the vitamin capsules is destroyed. I am led to believe that it is the riboflavin (vitamin B2).

Iritis, also called uveitis is almost as important as cataracts because it causes a great deal of blindness and the treatment that the medical profession uses has side effects that are worse than the actual disease in many cases. I have been able for the last forty years, however, to cure every case of iritis as well as many other types of eye conditions with intravenous injections of vitamins B and C. There is something about injections that make them effective compared to taking vitamins orally. Giving the same ingredients in tablet form has no effect in nearly all cases. It would appear that some elements in the B and C injection are lost passing through the digestive tract, so only a fraction of the ingredients that are in a pill reach the blood.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have take these injectable vitamins off of the market. It came in a double ampule with vitamins B complex and C in powder in one part and separated by a rubber plunger from a solution. By pressing on the one end of the ampule, the rubber stopper between the dry powder and the solution moved down and the solution mixed with and dissolved the powder. It was called Solu-B. Almost every doctor in the country was familiar with it. The FDA took it off the market claiming that it was "ineffectual". I had been injecting Solu-B or similar vitamin combinations intravenously and intermuscularly for the last fifty years since I first arrived in New York. I have found them to be most effective, and in many instances, almost miraculous.

Perhaps one reason the FDA took these products off of the market is because most doctors would only give it added to the intravenous solution that patients were getting at a bedside from a jar suspended from above and not giving it directly into the vein as I have been doing. A common side effect of such vitamin injections is to cause the face to flush with some dizziness, sometimes patients even faint. I, however, have given in the neighborhood of fifteen thousand such injections and that is the only minor side effect that I have observed.

I have found that vitamin B and C cures iritis, also called uveitis in which one eye can become quite painful. The back of the iris becomes adherent to the front of the lens. This union between the iris and the lens at the back of it can become complete around the pupil so that the fluid in the eye cannot circulate from the posterior chamber under the iris into the anterior chamber so that a condition called iris bombe occurs. This is very painful and intense glaucoma occurs and an iridectomy has to be performed. But when the iris is entirely stuck down to the lens it is very difficult to do an iridectomy. To make a diagnosis the use of a corneal microscope, also called a slit lamp, is required. I throws an intense narrow beam of light into the eye at any angle from right to left. This narrow beam of light is in the form of a slit, that is a narrow beam vertical. The width can be regulated and also the intensity of the light. The slit can also be reduced to a simple spot. The fluid in the anterior chamber is optically active, that is the beam of light directed into the eye can not be seen in the anterior chamber. If there is an inflammation of iritis, however, the anterior chamber is cloudy and the streak of light shows up in a manner similar to the way that a movie projector in a smokey theater shows up in the air. In this cloudy beam, if the active iritis is present, small white specs illuminated by the light are seen. They float up and down and across and can be different sizes with different apparent consistency. They are actually white blood cells and they are called KP or keratic precipitates. Their presence indicates an acute inflammation in the anterior segment of the eye which is red and painful. The adhesions that are formed between the posterior surface of the iris and anterior surface of the lens are called "adhesions". In the eye world the are called synechia, producing iris bombe which is a disastrous condition and many eyes are lost as a result.

Soon after I began practicing in New York City in 1939, I discovered that the best treatment for iritis was intravenous injections of vitamins B and C. Usually one injection cures iritis. Even vitamins taken by mouth helped. There is nothing about this treatment in any of the literature. Iritis is commonly treated with Prednisone, a steroid. It reduces symptoms but does not cure and has side effects when given internally such as gaining 40-60 lbs weight. The side effects are, in some cases, worse than the disease and, in any case. the iritis seldom is cured.

Iritis can rapidly develop acute glaucoma with quite high inter-ocular tensions. An iridectomy, that is, cutting a whole in the iris, is the recommended. My simple treatment, however, relieves every case of iritis.

Also, since I have been in Hudson I have cured a condition know as Hypopyon which is actually pus in the anterior chamber of the eye. Each time it cleared up on one intravenous shot of vitamins B and C.

I have also cured acute attacks of glaucoma with vitamin injections. That is, a patient is being treated with drops for glaucoma and during the night he suddenly has a very painful eye. I have had tensions up to 85 which were brought down to normal with one intravenous shot of Solu B.

Vitamin injections cure herpes simplex ulcers of the cornea. (also called dendritic ulcers). In spite of all the great advances in surgery and anti viral drops over one hundred thousand eyes are lost in the United States each year from herpes ulcers. One of the projects of the Lion's Club is sight saving. The principal way of saving sight they believe is corneal transplants. They use a donor from a recent fatality. The cornea is removed from the eye of the deceased and a button the same size is removed from the scars from the eyes of the patient who has had the herpes ulcer. The cornea is then transplanted. Statistics tell us that 80% of the corneal transplants performed are on eyes that have previously suffered from herpes simplex ulcers which have dense scars that corneal transplants are required to give them pure vision if the transplant takes. These operations have become pretty efficient and most of them are successful, but still, a good many are not. Herpes simplex ulcers of the cornea are not easily cured. In fact, they have to be treated for months with different anti-viral drops and so on. I discovered soon after I began my practice in New York fifty years ago that intravenous injections of Solu-B, or some similar B and C combination, cured 100% of the corneal ulcers caused by herpes simplex leaving only very faint and almost invisible scars. In the many herpes ulcer cases that I have treated in the past fifty years, there has never been one that has required a corneal transplant. In fact, one patient, who still comes to me after 35 years has had 13 herpes simplex ulcers on his left cornea, yet, in his 70's now, he is still able to operate a snowplow in the catskill mountains, an occupation that requires good eye sight and extremely fast reflexes.

I have sent reports to eye journals in London, Canada, and the United States regarding my innovative treatment of corneal ulcers. Every one of them has turned down my offer to present a paper. The reason is that they did not know what I was talking about. This a new and entirely different approach to the treatment of ulcers. None of them could believe that a single intravenous injection of vitamins could cure an ulcer of the eye. In spite of the corneal transplants and prolonged treatment with anti-viral drops, many thousands of eyes are lost every year in the United States due to herpes simplex ulcers. In 1960, the Ophthalmological Society of Great Britain invited me to present a paper at their annual convention in London on the treatment of herpes ulcers of the cornea. None of the distinguished eye doctors from all over the world on the floor of the Royal Society asked questions or discussed the subject and to this day the medical profession both in Great Britain and America do not attach any importance in general to the treatment of eye diseases with vitamins. I have not found a single word in the medical journals on the subject.

Another eye condition that responds miraculously to intravenous injections of vitamins B and C is called "recurrent erosion of the cornea". Without these injections it is an almost incurrable condition in that it responds very poorly to any other treatment. A young carpenter, a son in law of the secretary of our Lion's Club, had a recurrent erosion, very painful, and his eye was intensely red and the whole cornea was one big erosion just the same as if it was an ulcer. I gave him an intravenous injection of outdated Solu B and the next day the eye was completely healed and he went to work and had no trouble with the eye in the two or three years since then. My usual treatment for recurrent erosion is removing the loose epithelium with a cotton swab, instillation of 1% atropine and 1% yellow oxide of mercury ointment, a snug patch and an I.V. injection of vitamins B and C (the same to be taken orally each day), and cod liver oil before breakfast. Cauterizing with phenol is very seldom indicated.

Intravenous vitamin B and C also cure episcleritis in which one eye is intensely red and irritable. This condition responds within one day to an intravenous shot of Solu B or something similar. It appears to be associated with stress. I had a handsome young priest from a catholic church across the river in Athens with intense episcleritis and it responded right away. But then I got the story from him that the local kids had set his church on fire and burned it down. This was the stress, I believe, that caused him to have episcerlitis.

There is a condition called trigeminal neuritis. The trigeminal ganglion, situated somewhere near the ear, is the center that controls the pain nerves in the face. There are three parts to it. One part supplies the forehead, one the cheek region, and the other the jaw. The first symptom is pain which can be very intense in the region of the ear. The pain tends to subside then a herpes like eruption develops on that side of the face which eventually clears up. The sensation of pain or touch, however, is largely lost in area that is affected. I have found that an intravenous or intermuscular injection of Solu B or something similar, cures every case no matter what stage you catch it in even if it is just the pain to begin with (which is called tic douloureux). In one eighty five year old lady the injection cured her pain and cleared up the eruption in her face. She developed a pain in the area but after the injection it disappeared and the feelings of touch and pain returned to that area. There is nothing in the literature about this and apparently no one else has discovered this simple treatment.

Vitamins also seem to be an effective treatment of arthritis. My most interesting patient was a retired executive in his late seventies who had agonizing arthritis. He could hardly walk for the pain in his ankles and his legs. He also had iritis in his left eye. We cured the iritis with a couple of shots of Solu B. He took the cod liver oil on a regular basis. Within a few months his arthritis had completely disappeared. He is now able to climb ladders and put his own storm windows on. He looks much better and feels fine.

Since the Food and Drug Administration has taken Solu B off the market we have no Vitamin B or C injectables available. I managed to get some Baroca C from Canada, but it comes in half strength at five times the price.

As far as I can ascertain, very few doctors ever order vitamins. The American Medical Association states that they are complete waste of money and that you can get all of the vitamins that you need in your food through a balanced diet, whatever that is.

So here we have these conditions: herpes simplex ulcers, recurrent erosion of the cornea, episcerlitis, and iritis which are very serious eye diseases, all controlled intravenous injection of vitamins. Not another doctor in the world, as far as I can tell, is using it. So it is actually must be one of the greatest advances in the history of ophthalmology. But here I have been practicing 62 years, and I can't be around much longer, and it is pity that so many hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of eyes are being lost every year in the world for the want of this simple treatment.

The big reason, it seems, why the profession discontinued giving intravenous vitamins Solu B was the fear of being sued for malpractice. When it is being administered the patient should be in a chair which can be reclined so that the patient becomes more or less on the horizontal. After the injection, the patients notice that their face feels hot and tingly and they feel a little bit faint. In the reclining position they are asked to breath deeply but not for too long because you can be over oxygenated. Smelling salts also help. A certain number of even the biggest and huskiest men faint. But as they stay reclined, they have all returned to normal. In my short fifty years of practice I have administered in the neighborhood of 15,000 intravenous and intermuscular injections of Solu B and similar solutions.

The Treatment of Diabetes

Diabetic blindness (diabetic retinopathy) is becoming the greatest cause of blindness besides the millions of people who are dying in the world each year on account of diabetes.

For the six years that I practiced in Saskatchewan I was the "municipal doctor", that is, I took care of 4,000 people in the municipality for a salary of $12.50 per day out of which I built my house and office, supplied the car in the summer time and paid a teamster to drive me with his horses and his sleigh in the winter. No pasteurized milk was available at that time. The fact remains, however, that in those six years actually taking care of about 6,000 people because outside of my municipality two or three thousand used to drift in because there was no doctor for a long way to the south and to the west. In the six years there were actually just two cases of diabetes both of which occurred outside of my territory. I tested everybody for diabetes. Both of these cases were in a state of diabetic coma. One of these patients lived 56 miles away across the prairie. The story that I got over the telephone was that he was "sort of dizzy". When I arrived after driving on trails across the prairie, he was unconscious and lying on the ground. You might think that it was difficult making a diagnosis. Well it is, usually, but I just happened to smell the breath of this gentleman and smelled just like acetone. He had acidosis (diabetic coma). The treatment was to give him an intravenous solution of glucose and saline and insulin. So I asked the family to jump in their Model T Ford and drive like crazy 90 miles to Regina where I had called them and told them to be ready for a diabetic coma. His family got him to the hospital on time and he recovered completely. Incidentally, when I sent a bill for this 112 mile trip (56 miles each way), they said "what did you do? You didn't do anything, all you did was smell his breath and send him to the hospital". Now I should have gotten something, shouldn't I for saving his life, however, that is the way one practices medicine on the prairie.

Ask any of your friends if they know of anyone with diabetes and almost all of them will say "yes, lots of them". But on the prairie where they drank nothing but raw unpasteurized milk, if they drank milk at all, in six years there were just two cases of diabetes from 6,000 people. It seems obvious that if they allowed people to drink raw unpasteurized milk they would do away with an awful lot of diabetes. You see, unpasteurized milk has bacteria that produce vitamin B in your intestines after you drink it. These bacteria are very beneficial. It is all part of nature's plan to provide additional protection to young infants through their mother's milk. These vitamin B producing bacteria, of course, are killed during the pasteurization process.

Injections of Solu B can reduce and actually cure diabetic retinopathy. I had one case where a gentleman of 68 whose eye sight had been reduced to the point where he was unable to find his way out of my examining room because of the hemorrhages in both eyes. I was able to get a telephone call through to his medical doctor in Allentown Pennsylvania, two or three hundred miles away, and asked him to give my friend an intravenous injection of Solu B twice a week. "What the hell will that do?" was the answer. My response was to tell him "well, he's nearly blind and we don't know of anything else that will help and this won't do him any harm, and I wish that you would give it to him". So he says, "well, alright, I'll give it". In about three weeks or so my friend with the retinitis drove up from Allentown all by himself without any difficulty. The hemorrhages in his retina were disappearing. The intravenous injection were continued. He also took vitamin pills containing the same formula by mouth. A few months later, while visiting his son in Catskill, he developed what is known as insulin shock. He had been taking 40 units of insulin daily for the past 20 years. We reduced the injection from 40 to 20 units and he still had shock so he cut out the insulin all together and he went along with no symptoms of diabetes. In fact, unbelievably, we had cured a case of real diabetes. Insulin does not cure diabetes it just prolongs life a while. Every diabetic dies with his diabetes no matter what they do with pills or insulin.

I have also cured two cases of abscesses in the feet due to diabetes with intravenous shots of solu B. One 72 year old lady, who had been prepared to have her foot amputated the next morning in the hospital, was cured by three injections of B complex and C vitamins.

Whenever I have presented a paper on this subject, the reply always comes back that it is impossible and that I am a screwball or a crackpot or just a quack doctor and nothing has happened.

Cod Liver Oil

For the past twelve years or so, we have been dispensing LYSI Icelandic Cod Liver Oil by the ton. It sort of sells itself. We have had many dramatic cures with it and people feel much better in general.

In my third year in medical college a recently trained young pediatrician informed us that convulsions in children, mostly little boys, was cured immediately by administering a few drops of cod liver oil. Because the little fellow was suffering from rickets, which is a deficiency in calcium. There normally is plenty of calcium in the diet. But one is unable to assimilate this calcium if there is an absence of vitamin D. The best source of vitamin D is cod liver oil by mouth. The first day eye was in private practice I saved the lives of two little boys who were twins in the final stages of convulsions by a few drops of cod liver oil between the spasms of the convulsions. They were cured in less than a half an hour. I therefore began prescribing cod liver oil even before I graduated. When I became a "municipal" doctor in 1930 I used to buy large quantities of Newfoundland cod liver oil. The birth rate was fairly high and so half the 4,000 population of my district were boys and girls 14 years of age and under. I have continued administering cod liver oil since that time. I have noticed that if people take cod liver oil regularly very few develop cataracts, hair didn't turn grey, and they didn't lose hair, and they were in better health generally. One of my patients at the age of 86 operates a 33 sail boat. He sees 20/25ths in his left eye and operating a sail boat requires great skill and observation. I have yet to meet a single doctor who prescribes cod liver oil to his patients. Last summer a gentleman who claims that he was from the Department of Health in Albany called and me and told me that cod liver oil does not cure colds in children (in one of my advertisements for cod liver oil I had mentioned that it does). In my 62 years in the practice of medicine, outside of Saskatchewan, I have never met a doctor who prescribed cod liver oil. Well I wonder who did the research to make the claim that cod liver oil does not cure colds in children. As for myself, at the age of 89, I don't need eye glasses to operate this tape recorder. I can see perfectly except on the chart I don't see better than 20/30ths in my left eye and in my right eye I see about 20/40ths and I have had a bit of a cataract for 15 or 20 years in both eyes. I read perfectly well without glasses. My son gave me a pair of +2 readers and it makes a slight difference but cataracts do a funny thing, they introduce a system of par focal so that you can see both distances and near without glasses.

As can be seen, I have been able to treat many eye infirmities with nutrition. In addition, I have been able to control cataracts. For this I suggest that they take a table spoon of cod liver oil each morning before breakfast and a reliable B and C tablet, quit smoking, and eat whole wheat bread. We now, suddenly, hear a lot about fish oil and its Omega 3 which controls cholesterol and reduces the risk of heart attacks. I have been dispensing the best cod liver oil to my patients, off and on, since 1926.

Cataracts, one of the greatest causes of blindness, is most prevalent in countries where there is extreme poverty such as India, Ethiopia, and third world countries, suggesting that nutrition perhaps is a factor in the cause. I have found that administering Icelandic cod liver oil and a reliable vitamin B and C pill, refraining from tobacco, eating oatmeal regularly and always eating whole wheat bread that practically all cataracts are arrested in their progress. Under this program when the number of patients requiring an operation was down to 4 or 5 a year, I decided to quit doing cataracts in 1974.

Ophthalmologists consider cataracts to be an entirely surgical condition. From my experience in solo practice I have found that many patients with lens opacities respond to vitamins taken by mouth. The progress of the cataract is arrested and vision, in a fair percentage, is actually improved.

The average patient, when informed for the first time that he or she has a cataract, becomes quite alarmed and asks "what can be done?" The usual reply is, "we will observe it from time to time and when it is 'ripe' we will do an extraction on the worst eye". A better diet, taking vitamins and avoiding tobacco is seldom stressed. It would appear that lens opacities could be a nutritional problem.

I performed my last cataract extraction operation in 1974, not because I was getting too old but because I ran out of patients with cataracts. I found that LYSI cod liver oil and Beminal vitamins by Aryst (vitamins B and C) arrested all cataracts.

Treatment for AIDS

As noted above, intravenous shots of vitamins B and C are effective in combating herpes virus. It is now established that the disease called AIDS is caused by a virus. Since I have cured thousands of ulcers of the eye and uveitis and other infections including diabetic retinitis, and diabetic abscesses of the feet, that this injection must be an antiviral agent. The new disease, AIDS, is caused by a virus so the only logical treatment that I can think of is giving the intravenous injections of B and C which are now unobtainable because the Food and Drug Administration has taken them off of the market (I presently obtain Beroca C in Canada). If it works, of course, it should be one of the most sensational discoveries of the century.

I have never had a patient who was suffering from AIDS. In order to test my theory, I would recommend the following treatment:

1. Intravenous injection of Solu B daily. When giving an intravenous injection of Solu B, have the patient lie down or sit in a reclining chair. Using a 5cc syringe and a #23 disposable needle inject the solution into the vein, slowly. Then keep the patient lying or sitting for 15 minutes. Should they complain of "butterflies" in the stomach or feel dizzy, tip the chair back so as to lower the head. Fan the head gently and have them take a few deep breaths.

2. One teaspoon of LYSI Icelandic Cod Liver Oil daily.

3. One Beminal 500 tablet (Ayerst) daily.

4. One Vitamin E capsule (400 units by Wilson and Wolfer) daily.

5. About 6 teaspoonfuls of clear white vinegar daily.

6. Drink raw unpasteurized milk where available (also, oatmeal and whole wheat bread.

7. Avoid penicillin or other antibiotics.

8. Avoid steroids

About 15 years ago, I noticed that my urine had the appearance of skim milk. I went up to the, "plumbers", or I should say, urologists in Albany and, after $300 worth of tests, they informed me that they thought that I had cystitis. Now that is marvelous, what else the heck could it have been. They gave me some new kind of high powered penicillin to take 250 mgs four times a day. After ten days the pus was pretty well gone but not quite, so that was the course in penicillin. Three days later the pus was back again. Now a little bell rang in the back of my feeble mind where 50 years ago, when I was in general practice on the prairie, a patient had cystitis. I gave him some cod liver oil and it got better. So I took three tablespoons of Upjohns Super D Cod Liver Oil and the puss has been absent ever since. I have subsequently found out that Upjohns Super D was actually cod liver oil from Iceland that we sell now as LYSI cod liver oil.

Modern Hip Surgery

After I had recovered pretty well from the pin in my left hip, I had a lot of severe pain in my right groin. So they said that it must be a hernia. Actually there wasn't any hernia, but they operated anyway. After the operation I was still having pains and one of the doctors in the group said "if I had done a hernia and it hurt that much this much later, I'd leave town". They went back and took a better X-Ray and found that my right hip joint was just rotting away. So they put me in the Albany Medical Center and the hip joint specialists did what they call prosthesis, that is they cut my femur off about half way down and put in its place a stainless steel replacement. They scraped out the diseased bone around the hip joint and put plastic in it and made an artificial socket then fitted the stainless steel artificial femur. That hip has been fine ever since with no more pain. So I got an extra operation thrown in, a hernia which I didn't have, but now I have a real hernia, on the left side, but I am getting tired of having operations.