In this episode of Medicine Health, Dr. Paul Anderson reviews the role of intravenous (IV) vitamin C in cancer treatment. He explains how high‑dose IV vitamin C achieves plasma concentrations far beyond oral dosing, creating a pro‑oxidant peroxide surge that selectively harms catalase‑deficient cancer cells while normal cells, rich in catalase, neutralize the peroxide and benefit from antioxidant support. Dr. Anderson addresses common concerns that vitamin C might antagonize chemotherapy, citing research that overwhelmingly shows synergy or neutral interaction, especially when administered at high doses that act as pro‑oxidants. He outlines the clinical protocol used in an NIH‑funded human integrative oncology trial: doses typically >25 g (often 50–75 g) given twice weekly for 8 weeks, with reassessment after ~15–20 infusions using imaging, tumor markers, and physical exams. He also discusses lower‑dose (5–10 g) studies that focus on quality‑of‑life improvements in late‑stage cancer patients. Patient response appears linked more to immune competence than tumor type, and while not universally effective, a reasonable subset of patients experience improved quality of life, reduced treatment side effects, and occasional remissions after completing the treatment course. The episode concludes by emphasizing the growing human‑based evidence, the safety and supportive role of IV vitamin C, and encourages viewers to subscribe for future installments.
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Good day. Welcome to Medicine Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me, I'm Dr. Paul. And today in our series on vitamin C, we want to talk about vitamin C and cancer, sometimes considered a controversial topic, sometimes considered kind of an interesting topic, and sometimes not considered at all. So I want to go back and just think about We hear about the use of vitamin C in cancer, both pro and con, and I want to kind of go through that quickly. The other thing that we hear about sometimes is intravenous vitamin C, or IV, putting it right in your vein and maybe a large dose, right? So why would this come up to be possibly useful in cancer care? What are the issues around it? And what do we know about it? Now, just for a tiny bit of background, in the past about 10 years ago, I was involved in a 5-year human research trial that was funded by the National Institutes of Health here in the United States. And the portion I was in charge of was the intravenous therapy in integrative oncology portion. That means we did a lot of intravenous vitamin C. We did a whole bunch of other IV therapies for patients in the integrative oncology clinic. Now, one of the things to keep in mind with all of that is that vitamin C is an extremely useful thing, especially intravenous vitamin C, while you're undergoing cancer care or recovering from cancer therapy, et cetera. And it is very useful, but it only does what it does, and it doesn't do what it doesn't do, obviously. First installment, we talked about basic vitamin C biology. Well, when you get to intravenous vitamin C, you've got a different set of pharmacology going on. And so what happens is rather than taking it by mouth where your GI tract is the limiting factor to absorbing it, so you get diarrhea, put it into the vein, you can raise the blood levels very quickly. And what you will have happen is that your plasma levels of vitamin C go up. And then they stay elevated for a number of hours inside of your vascular system. That allows that higher level of ascorbate to be delivered downstream to your cells. And one of the cool things in cancer is many cancer cells are low in enzymes such as catalase, Uh, that can, uh, break down peroxide. Well, vitamin C is a— at high dose of IV vitamin C is able to create a peroxide surge outside of your cells. So if it's your normal human cells, you've got lots of catalase, it'll break down into the peroxide and they'll just use the vitamin C as an antioxidant support. Which is really important to remember. So it does 2 different things, one around weaker cancer cells and the other around your normal cells. So it's a good treatment for your normal cells. High doses of vitamin C in catalase-deficient cancer cells can create peroxide that can't be dealt with. Then the immune system will see that the cancer cell has been sort of injured or wounded. And the immune system may go and try and clean it up. It's a way to draw the immune system in there. Now there's other things that high-dose vitamin C does as well as a number of other mechanisms, but that's sort of the famous one there. Now people often ask, can I get this level of vitamin C just taking it orally? And the answer is generally no, you really can't get to levels that would be oxidative pro-oxidant by taking it orally. Mostly with oral or low-dose IV vitamin C, you're going to get antioxidant capacity. But the pro-oxidant capacity does work in a reasonable manner in many people. And because there's multiple mechanisms of why vitamin C might help you when you have cancer, the primary one of peroxide surge being an oxidant and harming the cancer cell, But then its collateral effect, where the normal cells dismutate the peroxide and take up the vitamin C just for their own strength and health, is win— sort of win-win, because your immune system gets maybe attracted to the cancer and your normal cells are helped. This is why often we will use intravenous vitamin C right alongside standard cancer therapy treatments, and people will have less side effects. and all of that, but still get all the effect of their cancer treatments. And so that's an important thing to consider as well. But that brings up another one of the concerns around intravenous vitamin C, and that is, well, you know, my oncologist told me that I shouldn't do IV vitamin C because it's an antioxidant and it will make the chemotherapy not work. Well, here's the thing about that. There's a couple of issues going on there. One is that's sort of a traditional thought, but the other is that if you look at a review of vitamin C used alongside of chemotherapy in the medical research, what you find is with almost no exceptions— there's a couple where there's a little bit of timing involved— but basically with almost no exceptions, vitamin C in the research only shows positive benefit or synergy. And back when we were doing this human research, I had to collate a lot of this, and I wrote a summary of all this for the oncologists that we were teaming up with because they, they just had never seen that there was any research around that. But indeed there is. So that's a very important thing to remember. The next thing to remember is We think of vitamin C as an antioxidant because that's what it is biologically at normal low doses. And if you take it orally, it's probably going to be an antioxidant. And a lot of chemotherapies have a pro-oxidative effect. But when you give the vitamin C at these high doses, you get an initial pro-oxidant. So it's not antioxidant anymore, it's pro-oxidant. So it's actually swimming in the same direction. chemically speaking, as some of the other chemotherapies. So you're getting a benefit of some synergy with your standard treatment and cell protection to your normal cells, remember, because they can use it as a nutrient and as a support. Now, people will often ask, because, you know, I was involved in this research and it was with humans and it was interventional, meaning we gave these treatments to people, Did it work? What did it do? And so I want to just briefly mention a couple of things about that. The first thing is that initially we thought, well, if we start keeping track of different tumor types and vitamin C infusions, we might see a pattern where X tumor type is better off with vitamin C and Y and Z tumor types are not affected by it. Generally speaking, we didn't see that, and I believe the reason is is that vitamin C, instead of being like a standard cytotoxic chemotherapy, it's going to go in and it's going to cause cell damage to both your normal cells and your cancer cells. Instead of being a global cytotoxic agent. This is a bimodal agent where it only— if it's going to harm anything, it only harms the cancer cell. It supports your cells. But really, the way that it harms the cancer cell has to do with how well your immune system is working. So the pattern that I believe that we saw really was it's not so much the tumor type, it's, is your body prepared and ready to deal with the effect that the vitamin C is going to do at the cellular level, and that's really, really important to keep in mind. And so one of the things we found out statistically was we really couldn't tell if there was going to be a positive or no effect from vitamin C until somebody had done at least about 15 intravenous treatments, and usually 2 a week. And as I say, we'd ramp the dose up to get into this range where you could potentially get some oxidation, et cetera. So a person would have to commit to a certain amount of treatment, usually about 8 weeks or twice a week. And then we would reassess. And the assessment would be whatever their markers were that we were following. It might have been imaging. It might have been physical exam. It might have been tumor markers. It might have been some other things. Or all of the above. And so we would look there. Now there's another effect in cancer with vitamin C that we see, and it's been published at least 3 times, and that is vitamin C as an adjunct to quality of life in late-stage or end-stage cancer. And so in those studies, what they're looking at is not so much, you know, do we move the needle on bashing down the cancer or, you know, that sort of thing. What they looked at was, did it improve quality of life measurements? You think, well, how do you measure that? Well, vitamin C can be measured, its effect can be measured using standardized quality of life surveys that you give the patient each time they come in. You track them over time, and that's what they did indeed in these these studies that have been published. So those studies tended to be at lower doses of vitamin C. So high-dose vitamin C is usually above 25 grams, 25,000 milligrams. Most people at high dose are getting 50 or 75 grams. The quality of life studies are, you know, between 5 grams and 10 grams, so much, much lower, more in the antioxidant area. So it's a really good utility tool to support during your cancer treatment process because it also protects your normal cells, helps with quality of life, etc. And really, as compared to the old sort of, you know, things that one might say about vitamin C and cancer and the They might say, well, it's an antioxidant, so it's going to kill the chemo. That— it doesn't really work out that way. That's just sort of— it looks good on paper, but it doesn't really work out in that manner. So as we wrap up here, we just got a couple of minutes left. I just want to kind of restate vitamin C and cancer. There's more research that's human-based research coming out, number one. Number two, it is generally helpful with quality of life and cell protection for your normal cells. Number 3, the concerns about it causing an interference with chemotherapy are greatly overstated. And in almost all of the research looking at vitamin C and chemotherapy effect, what we see is synergy and/or collaboration, not inhibition. And then finally, it can be a very good tool overall to use. Through the cancer process, whether or not you're getting standard of care or not. We had a few people in the research study who failed standard of care treatment, or maybe they were just too far gone in the cancer and the oncologist just believed it would just be more pain and suffering than really it was worth. And so they would come and often do vitamin C with us, intravenous vitamin C. And we had many of them where not only their quality of life improved, but also their cancer would go into remission and other positive things would happen. Now I do want to make it really clear this doesn't happen for everybody, but because it doesn't happen for everybody doesn't mean it doesn't happen for a reasonable number of people. And generally speaking, if you can get over to, as I said, about about 15, 16 treatments to 20 treatments and then reassess. That's the time you can decide, is this really worthwhile doing or not? Okay, I'm Dr. Paul Anderson for Medicine and Health. Please like, share, subscribe, do notifications, because sometimes on the algorithm we get shuffled over to somewhere else and you may not know what we're doing. But we really appreciate all of the new subscribers, and if you're listening to this, We're on almost all of the pod burners, so Medicine Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. We also have a YouTube channel where we put the videos of these, and then we also have this that we run live on Facebook when I do the original recording. So thank you again. I will see you all for the next installment.
