IV Vitamin C: Top 7 Most Common COMPLICATIONS

Have you ever thought about using intravenous vitamin C for a health concern, but you were concerned about potential safety? Maybe you spoke with a healthcare provider and they don't do intravenous vitamin C, but they heard some bad stories about it, et cetera. What's really going on with intravenous vitamin C? How safe is it? And how do you stay even safer if you are going to do intravenous vitamin C? Welcome to my YouTube channel. I'm Dr. A, and I get into all things integrative medicine, naturopathic medicine, and how that relates to cancer and chronic illness. So let's dive into this vitamin C safety. We're going to do more than one about this because it's a very broad topic, but this is the big one, and it's 7 of the top complications that can happen with IV vitamin C and how to minimize those or eliminate them. So I want to go through the list quickly first and then dive into it a little bit. First complication, very common, vein irritation. Putting an IV in, almost all IVs cause some vein irritation. Vitamin C can do that too. Dehydration, headaches, increased urination, stress on your kidneys, immune activation, which happens a fair amount, and then post-IV fatigue. So those are the big 7. Now, In medicine, whenever you do any treatment, but especially an interventional treatment like IV vitamin C, and especially when you're using high doses of IV vitamin C, you want to do everything you can in 2 main areas to make the procedure as safe as possible. One is history screening and laboratory analysis of your patient, and then the other is administering the IV in the best way physiologically and biochemically for that patient so that they experience minimal to no side effects. Now, this is an area that I actually helped to oversee as part of a National Institute of Health in the United States funded research project working with human research on integrative cancer therapies. And the intravenous vitamin C and other intravenous therapies were under my purview inside of the study. So what I can say is after doing IV vitamin C for 3 decades, and I've got a colleague I collaborate with who's done it for 4+ decades. Between the two of us, we have administered and monitored and ordered well in excess of 100,000 high-dose vitamin C IVs. And with very, very few exceptions, we have not seen a lot of side effects from that, especially in modern times. So how do we avoid these big 7 or even worse types of side effects? Well, the first thing we have to think about is physiologically, are There are people who shouldn't get high-dose vitamin C, which is an oxidative treatment. Well, people with an enzyme deficiency, which you inherit, called glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase enzyme, so G6PD enzyme, if they're deficient in that, they cannot have high-dose vitamin C. Why? Because they would have hemolysis, which is their red blood cells exploding essentially, which is obviously very bad for you and can trigger hemolytic uremic syndrome and many other bad things, including death. Including death. So, the first test that you should have done before you do high-dose vitamin C is a G6PD level. We usually, we order a quantitative, gives us a number, and it tells us whether you're in the normal range or not. So, normal or high, those are okay. Low, it's not okay. Now, this is a deeper topic, but basically, that's a go/no-go. Number 2, big deal, is because the kidneys, after I put an IV in you, have to deal with all the IV fluid, and IV vitamin C is no different, The kidneys get a lot of stress initially while the body's processing the IV vitamin C. So we want to be very clear about how good or bad your kidney function is. So in our research project, in our outpatient clinical projects, we have a rule around where the kidney function cutoff is, where we would still do intravenous vitamin C, or we would either lower the dose or not do it. Very similar to how you handle other drugs that have potential kidney stress. Now, in normal patients where they have good hydration and good kidney function, you can give them high-dose vitamin C and it's a temporary strain on their kidneys, but it doesn't hurt their kidneys. So there's 2 different things there: strain and damage. Okay, if the kidneys know how to function and the person's hydrated enough and they're functioning well, the strain is very temporary and it goes away. The other, the third area that we look at that's very critical is your minerals, your electrolyte balance in the blood. What we During that research project and since then, I and our group presented newer formulas for high-dose vitamin C that are electrolyte balanced so that as the vitamin C goes in, the body and the kidney especially have the easiest time moving the vitamin C around the body. The electrolytes don't shift around and you come out with a less side effect-driven protocol. Okay. Those protocols and the presentations we've done at the Society for Integrative Oncology, they're published in a couple of places, are available. We'll put a link to them in the description box because they're not secret. They're quite simple to work with. So proper screening, number one. So we're gonna check G6PD enzyme, kidney functions, electrolytes, and then the basics such as liver functions and some of the other blood chemistries. Now, why do I talk about those? Because we started saying, well, there's 7 complication areas to look at, but have there ever been worse complications than those 7 that we talked about? As I said, I've been doing this a very long time. I collaborate with many of the people who do a lot of IV vitamin C research, et cetera. And so it would be nice if there was some sort of publication that looked at bad events that might happen. And so this publication I'm about to share with you is one that I share with The oncologists I work with, the patients, et cetera, to say there are 5 bad adverse events that have been recorded in the research, and all 5, 100% of them could have been avoided by what I just told you, which is what? Proper history, proper screening laboratory tests so you're not doing high-dose vitamin C on the wrong people, and appropriate administration of the chemistry of the high-dose vitamin C. Now, I will put the citation down in the description box, but This is the paper, and it's intravenous vitamin C use by practitioners and adverse events. So a lot of it focuses on the number of IVs given and then the bad adverse events. So adverse event is anything that shouldn't have happened or we didn't want to happen, et cetera. This particular paper, when it was published, looked at a sample of over 20,000 patients, so pretty big sample, all of whom got high-dose vitamin C. What I wanna focus on from it is Table 5, which is high-grade adverse events. So lower-grade adverse events would be my vein gets irritated, I get a headache, dehydrated, something like that. Those are low-grade adverse events because they're usually self-limited. High-grade adverse events is it might put me in the hospital, I might need other medical intervention, etc. And the end of the story on all 5 of these is if these 5 patients would have undergone the screening that I just told you about— so proper history, proper labs, labs that we outlined, and then the intervention is the best chemistry balance that we can get for high-dose vitamin C, none of these 5 patients would've had the negative outcomes because they would not have been given high-dose vitamin C. So the real punchline there is the only people who had high-grade adverse events out of 20,000 patients were people who should have never gotten it in the first place. And what were the things? It was the 2 big ones. 2 people had G6PD enzyme deficiency. They should never have gotten it. And the other 3 had kidney issues. Kidneys weren't functioning. They should have never gotten high-dose vitamin C. So of the 20,000 patients, you only had 5 that had high-grade adverse events. And by proper screening, we could have avoided all 5 of those. You have a very, very safe IV protocol that can be done. So again, the common things are due to The action of putting fluid into the vein, the dehydrating nature of high-dose vitamin C, and the temporary stress on the kidneys, not long-term stress, but temporary stress on the kidneys. The one that we often— people scratch their head about is post-IV vitamin C fatigue. And that really often comes from either immune activation. Vitamin C creates a— high-dose vitamin C creates a chemistry that triggers a lot of immune cytokines, immune chemistry downstream. So we've had people where they didn't realize they had a chronic infection. They get high-dose vitamin C and temporarily they get flu-like symptoms because they're actually fighting with a bug, right? So that's one reason that that can happen. Now, the other thing is more of a laboratory issue with high-dose vitamin C that you need to be aware of. And that is if you get your blood drawn after you have a high-dose vitamin C for your blood sugar, it'll be, you know, whatever your blood sugar is. But if you use a finger stick or most of the continuous glucose monitors, those are simpler than the blood draw kind of blood sugar. And the monitors— most of the monitors see just a piece of chemistry, which is a ring, and they call all the rings glucose. Well, glucose to these devices, your finger stick or your continuous glucose monitor, glucose and the vitamin C ring look the same. So you have to be very careful if you're reliant on a blood sugar monitor after vitamin C is infused in you. You'll False elevation. Your blood sugar doesn't go up, but you have a false elevation because the monitor's not working. It's reading too high. Okay? So if you do rely on a glucose monitor for dosing insulin, et cetera, you really have to work that out with the physician who's in charge of your high-dose vitamin C as to whether or not they want to do it and how they're going to monitor you. If you're a very brittle diabetic and that's the only way you can sort things out, I've never recommended doing that. If you're just on a continuous glucose monitor for other health reasons, just tracking what you eat and your sugars, but You're not dosing insulin. Just know that your numbers are going to go up and it'll be false elevation. We're going to have some other videos in this series because you can see that high-dose vitamin C has a lot of directions that can go. But the 2 big ones that we're going to work on, one would be specifically why would we think of using high-dose vitamin C in cancer patients and how does that interact with chemotherapy or not? And then the other one digs deeper into the idea of kidney effect from high-dose vitamin C and the big topic of oxalate generation, which oxalates, calcium oxalate kidney stones, the most common type of kidney stone. How often does that happen, etc.? How do we get around it with high-dose vitamin C? And that'll be its own video. So both of those are coming, and depending on what order we do these in, we might link them up there, but we'll probably have a vitamin C playlist on the YouTube channel as well. Thank you very much, and if you like this video, check out these other videos we're going to link here. We give you a lot of options, and also, as I said, go to the YouTube channel. Check out our playlists as we get deeper into these things, and I try and do Q&As where I answer your questions periodically as we go through. I'm Dr. A, and I'll see you on the next video.