Using Nutrient Supplements In My Practice
by Murray Susser, MD
I get mixed feelings of joy and concerns when I reflect on my using vitamins to treat my patients over these past four decades.. The joys, of course, come from the thousands of successful cases of patients treated nutritional healing. Included in those numbers were more than a few handfuls of patients who seemed to have miraculous results. These patients were doomed by conventional medicine to spend their remaining time on this Planet, learning to live with crippling pain or debility or just not living long. The reason for the joys present no puzzle. They are quite obviously satisfying the human natural urge to serve others.
The reasons for the concerns are about the same. If this patient responded to nutritional treatment when conventional pharmaceuticals failed, how many more people are out there suffering needlessly? Perhaps the “miraculous cures” would work on them as well.
For example, I use lipotropic nutrients to treat menstrual disorders, cystic breast disease, and, most dramatically, ovarian cysts. I have successfully treated hundreds of women over the years for these conditions. I once treated a patient for a 10 centimeter (4 inch) ovarian cyst (Normal is about 2 centimeters.) which was scheduled for surgery in four days. I gave her large doses of lipotropics (which contained choline, inositol, B6, and methionine. All of these are innocent over-the-counter nutrients with almost no toxicity. Long story short, when the surgeon operated after four days of this therapy, the cyst was gone! He never did believe that the lipotropics had anything to do with it. Better than making the surgery a surprise, I’ve had many of patients over the years who cancelled their ovarian surgery when the follow up ultra sound showed resolution of the abnormal ovary to normal size and texture.
I have also treated many women with cystic breasts of such pain they were in constant agony. That condition also resolves with lipotropic factors within a few weeks usually. Many of these women had suffered for ten or even twenty years, often taking strong pain killers. When so many women in my practice get better in such a short time, it begs the question: how many more women suffer so unnecessarily? Such treatment is simple, safe, and inexpensive.
There are many simple nutritional solutions to medical conditions which seem intractable. I have many cardiac patients who “should have been dead” decades ago if they had followed the conventional medical pathways which did not include nutrition. In the early days of heart transplants, when a patient (I’ll call him “G”) came to my office asking me to help him while he died of heart disease. He had just walked out of Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh PA. He was awaiting a donor heart for transplant. In those early days, the typical heart transplant patient lived about a month — with or without the transplant.
G waited a few weeks and said “to Hell with it.” He would rather die at home, which happened to be near my office. G came to see me to ask for something to comfort him while he died of a heart that was pretty much “shot.” He had two major heart attacks and important parts of his heart now consisted of dysfunctional scar tissue. He was in congestive heart failure with difficulty breathing, walking and eating. He requested Valium or something to keep him comfortable as he dwindled and died. I gave him the standard drugs for this purpose and asked him if he would like to try large doses of Vitamin E. “What have I got to lose?” was his prompt reply. The story then is long with some fascinating twists, but suffice it to say that about a year later, G was playing golf without a cart. He had a caddy but he walked the course and played well.
G did have a scare. The day after Thanksgiving, he paged me with severe lower chest pain. I admitted him to Coronary Care Unit despite his protests that it was his stomach from overeating. Happily he was right his heart had grown strong and functional and painless. By that time he was taking other nutrients such as magnesium, enzymes, omega 3 oils, hawthorn berries, cayenne pepper as well as a broad base of nutritional supplements and a careful diet. There us little doubt in my mind that nutrients saved G’s life when conventional medicine could not.
After four decades of medical nutrition, serving about 30,000 patients, I could tell many case reports of similar power.