http://holfordwatch.info/2008/11/29/ben-goldacres-rise-of-the-lifestyle-nutritionists-on-radio-4-won-a-norwich-union-medical-journalism-award/

Please post part 2 on here

Pretty please?

““Hickory” certainly reads as if he is Patrick Holford”

Well, I wouldn’t be surprised. Hickory makes statements like:

“I have given my patients high dose vitamin C and seen this for myself on several occasions. I also think it is a tragedy that no-one has been willing to fund a large-scale trial, but I guess there’s no money in this potentially important and inexpensive approach”

1. The power of the anecdote. A Patrick Special

2. Oblivious to medical research out there over the last year:
http://www.jaoa.org/cgi/content/full/107/6/212
and
http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/reprint/174/7/956
and
http://www.emaxhealth.com/83/19681.html

anecdote +
big pharma attack +
oblivious to ‘conventional’ nutrition/medical research in progress
= Hickory Holford

I am puzzled that “hickory” refers to a “benefit” of vitamin C in vitro. I do not really know technical terms in this context, but colloquially, what happens in vitro, usually stays in vitro, and is not a direct benefit to anyone. It needs to be tested out of the test tube or petri dish. Is “benefit” a technical term?

I want to mention again that, when I last checked, the BBC web site provides a less “intrusive” version of authentic RealPlayer, although it does seem to have installed a mesaging system that occasionally pops up with adverts after viewing content. This might be avoided by viewing or listening in the Web page, but I prefer the proper RealPlayer controls. And doesn’t the BBC iPlayer run on Adobe Flash instead?

For Windows and Mac users, Videolan might be the first choice, due to its versatile GUI. Mplayer is excellent software, but emphasizes command line usage, which might not be the inclination of most Windows folks.

P.S.: I would not normally advertise software here, but since the author of the original article remarked about his distaste of Realplayer, I thought mentioning alternatives was okay.

I can exclusively reveal that Hickory is not Patrick Holford. ‘Hickory’ is in fact Rob Halford the queer metalist rock god who was Judas Preist’s lead singer for several decades.

Hickory – please could you return to the Priest. This interest in vitamin C is all well and good, but its obvious that as a metalist you are an expert in British Steel and clearly know nothing about nutrition.

Your brief return to Judas Priest 2005 was just a teaser. We want more of your homo-inspired leather clad antics and less of this ignorant talk about vitamins. Please stick to what you know about and give us ROCK.

Their impeccability is irrelevant. They don’t support the claim that “AZT is … proving less effective than vitamin C” because they’re in vitro studies.

“Hickory” certainly reads as if he is Patrick Holford.

1. Extrapolates from an in vitro finding to clinical claim

2. Deliberately reframes a criticism of the Holford interpretation as a criticism of the study. Goldacre has not criticised the Jariwalla study, he criticised the Holford interpretation, and has been clear on this eg in this Radio 4 programme and in 2005. Classic Holford.

3. “vitamin C, which is non-toxic to cells” direct Holford quote

4. Knows Holford wrote the ONB first in 1998

5. And has the most recent 2007 edition

6. Refers to Jariwalla letter – who would bother?

7. Says it’s a tragedy that nobody will fund trials (Holford works for a pill company, maybe they should?)

Everything about this approach screams Patrick Holford.

Was it from him? Have you checked the IP addresses?

Surely the NHS would save a bomb if they could dole out VitC instead of ARVs? They have a financial incentive to do the trials so there must be some other reason.

Such as it being unethical to deprive patients of a treatment regime that works.

” have given my patients high dose vitamin C and seen this for myself on several occasions”

Hickory – there is a difference between dose administered and amount of Vitamin C that can absorbed. The bioavailability of Vitamin C diminishes as oral dose increases, and plateau’s at oral intake around 200mg. The Vitamin C guru is NOT Professor Patrick, but the ninja researcher Mark Levine. His detailed work on bioavailability of Vitamin C and excretion kinetics is seminal work in this area.
In fact, a recent AJCN summary of nutrients v foods summarises the issues nicely:

http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/87/1/5

Unless Vitamin C is given iv (and yes, Levines group have been awarded grants to investigate Vit C as adjunctive chemo with iv administration) large oral doses of Vitamin C have absolutely no effect on blood levels.

Placebo effect only.

But generates dosh from the vulnerable

Ker-ching!!!

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?orig_db=PubMed&db=pubmed&cmd=Search&term=%22The%20New%20England%20journal%20of%20medicine%22%5BJour%5D%20AND%20317%5Bvolume%5D%20AND%204%5Bissue%5D%20AND%20185%5Bpage%5D%20AND%201987%5Bpdat%5D

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?orig_db=PubMed&db=pubmed&cmd=Search&term=%22European%20journal%20of%20clinical%20investigation%22%5BJour%5D%20AND%2030%5Bvolume%5D%20AND%20905%5Bpage%5D%20AND%202000%5Bpdat%5D

Gimpy – I guess our mysterious “hickory” didn’t say flat out either “I am a doctor” or “..instead of retrovirals”… so hickory (if s/he actually exists) could be a “nutritional therapist” who is recommending Vitamin C to HIV-positive people. Under such circumstances – as we have discussed before – there would be no regulatory system of any kind to prevent him/her doling out the antioxidants.

An interesting issue is whether it would be ethical for an actual doctor treating HIV positive people with standard ARV therapies to encourage the patients to also take megadose vitamin C, N-acetyl-cysteine or similar. I am pretty sure there is not actually a rule that says they can’t, apart from the general understanding that giving things for which there is no evidence-base, and which might have biological actions which haven’t been well-studied, is not really a great idea.

Any infectious disease specialists, or indeed any other sorts of MDs, out there care to enlighten us?

[It is also, of course, clearly possible that people taking ARV therapy take it upon themselves to "add" antioxidants without telling their doctors.]

After your first snipe, Holford admitted that he had referenced the wrong Jariwalla study, and corrected it. I have his 2007 edition of the New Optimum Nutrition Bible in front of me and it does clearly state that these ‘in vitro’ studies on human T-cells show that vitamin C suppresses the HIV virus in both chronically and latently infected cells, while AZT has no significant effect. It is a tragedy that this simple, non-toxic treatment hasn’t been further tested.” There has been, as he points out on his website, one human trial of high dose vitamin C and N-Acetyl Cysteine, the results of which are extremely encouraging and show the kind of reduction in reduced HIV viral load, improved immune cell (CD4) count that the in vitro studies would predict. ((Eur J Clin Invest 30: 905-14, 2000). I have given my patients high dose vitamin C and seen this for myself on several occasions. I also think it is a tragedy that no-one has been willing to fund a large-scale trial, but I guess there’s no money in this potentially important and inexpensive approach. Why can’t you just admit that you were wrong on this one and move on to something more interesting? It’s certainly not a case of bad science.

Anyway, we would be especially interested in a response from Steph to our most recent post. To quote shamelessly from our blog post:

Stephanie, they ignored us. They ignored our careful, detailed, and thorough analysis of the FFTB Child Survey 2007. What do you suggest that we should do?

http://holfordwatch.info/2008/04/02/patrick-holford-responds-to-radio-4-programme-and-misses-the-point-to-be-fair-so-does-stephanie-fox/

To be honest, though, I’m somewhat surprised that Prof Holford of Teesside University to criticisms of the Survey’s literature review by claiming that “The conclusions are based solely on [the Survey] data, and make no reference to any other studies” – at the same time as linking to a PDF of the Survey which has 12 references to other studies clearly visible on page 6.