My other Passion: Glyconutrients
The following article helps explain why.
The Healing of A Healer
One of world's leading physicians says that glyconutrients help save his life and should become a part of the nation's standard of medical care.
By Joseph Green-Bishop
Copyright 2004
Dr. Benjamin Solomon Carson Sr., the world famous director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore has risen to the very top of the medical profession. Three years ago, Time Magazine and CNN named him one of the top twenty doctors in America. In 1987 he was the lead surgeon in the twenty-two hour operation that separated the heads of the Binder Siamese twins from Germany. It was the first such operation in which both twins survived.
But in the summer of 2003 Dr. Carson was diagnosed with prostate cancer and despite three decades of saving the lives of others, he came face to face with the staggering possibility of his own death. "It was a shock," said Dr. Carson, a professor of neurosurgery, oncology, plastic surgery and pediatrics at Johns Hopkins. "I had been living a healthy lifestyle and getting regular check-ups. But I had high grade cancer in a very aggressive form."
And yet, at fifty-three years of age, Dr. Carson was not ready to leave his wife, Candy, and their three sons behind. And with the same strength and determination that his mother, Sonya Carson, imparted to him and his brother while she raised them alone in inner city neighborhoods in Detroit and Boston, he sought an answer that would continue his life.
"I had a friend who was diagnosed with cancer who was given three months to live," said Dr. Carson in his Johns Hopkins office."He changed his diet and pursued proper nutrition. He was still around and doing well. As a result I started to look at nutritional supplements."
The father of one of Dr. Carson's patients told him about a ten-year-old company based in Coppell, Texas which had secured world-wide patent rights to a food supplement known as a glyconutrient. The parent suggested to Dr. Carson that he contact them.
After contacting the company, Dr. Carson was surprised by the amount of science they provided. "I was impressed that they did not make any wild medical claims," he said. The majority of their science pointed to how glyconutrients supported the body's normal functions of regeneration and repair.
Dr. Carson then contacted Dr. Reg McDaniel, an authority in glyconutrients and medical director of Manna-Relief Inc., an Arlington, Texas based charity that makes glyconutrients available to medically fragile children around the world. Dr. McDaniel, who had studied the health benefits of glyconutrients for two decades, shared his experiences with Dr. Carson.
"The science made sense to me," Dr. Carson said. "God gave us (in plants) what we need to remain healthy," he said. "In today's world our food chain is depleted of nutrients and our environment has helped destroy what God gave us."
Through dietary supplementation, one of the most significant doctors in the history of medicine decided to support his immune system with glyconutrients. And almost immediately he saw an abatement in his condition.
"I had been experiencing some urinary tract problems. The problems went away within four weeks after I started taking the glyconutrients," he said. "I began to think that I did not need to have surgery or any other type of treatment. I seriously considered not having any type of procedure. I thought I could beat the cancer by supporting my body through glyconutritional supplementation."
Dr. Carson said his decision to have a medical procedure resulted from his concern for those people who might neglect traditional medical procedures because they had learned of his personal experience with supplements.
"It had gotten out that I had prostate cancer," said the high-profile doctor. "I knew that other people with my condition might not have been as religious about taking the supplements as I had been."
Dr. Carson was told that his recovery after the surgery would be arduous and that he would not be able to return to work for six weeks. "Because of my experience with glyconutrients I was able to return to work in three weeks," he said.
He continues to take the supplements and suggests that others who are concerned with optimal health take them. "I do not see glyconutrients as unnatural," he said. "I see them as complementary to traditional medicine. Dietary supplements should become an integral part of heath care in this country."
A voracious reader of medical and scientific literature, Dr. Carson said that he concurred with an article in the February 2003 issue of Technology Review, a publication associated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that named glycomics as "one of ten emerging technologies that will change the world."
"There is a growing trend by consumers to want to blend traditional and complementary medicines," stated Dr. Carson.
He said that it was significant that the National Institutes of Health had granted millions of dollars to researchers to investigate alternative and complementary medicines. "The day is coming when the science will be behind them."
In 1998, The United States Congress appropriated $50 million to support the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, which was established by the National Institutes of Health to investigate alternatives and complementary medical practices and their impact on health care in America.
Researchers at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center have reportedly identified a plant substance that they say has effectively destroyed cancer cells in test tube experiments. Recognizing that the vast majority of prescription drugs originally came from plants, they have said that it is not inconceivable that a cure for cancer can be found in nature.
Nearly thirty years ago, Dr. Roger J. Williams, a professor at the University of Texas in Austin and the first biochemist to become president of the American Chemical Society, authored a book entitled Nutrition Against Disease. "The human body heals itself and nutrition provides the resources to accomplish the task," Dr. Williams wrote."A proper diet could prevent catastrophic illnesses such as cancer, alcoholism, heart disease, birth defects, stroke and mental illness."
Dr. Williams postulated that there was a direct result between diet and obesity, that a proper diet would prolong life. He also wrote about the relationship between arthritis and nutrition.
In the April 1995 issue of the Harvard Health Letter, which was devoted to "cancer-fighting foods," Dr. Tim Byers, an epidemiologist, said "there's an explosion of compelling and consistent data associating diets rich in fruits and vegetables with a lower cancer risk."
"Analysis of data from twenty-three epidemiologic studies found that a diet rich in vegetables and grains slashed colon cancer risk by 40 percent," the authors wrote. "All in all, at least 200 epidemiologic studies from around the world have found a link between a plant-rich diet and a lower risk for many types of tumors."
Dr. Carson stated that a growing number of consumers were demanding the use of supplements in conjunction with traditional medical treatments, despite strong opposition. "Medicine has become a significant business," he said, "and there are a lot of people who invest a lot of money into drug development who are not going to look at these things (glyconutrients) in a friendly manner."
Dr. Carson is among a growing legion of high profile medical professionals in this country and around the world who have embraced glyconutritionals. Many of them have had personal experiences with the nutrients or have seen what they have described as "miraculous" changes in their patients who have used them.
There were nights when Dr. Alex Omelchuk, a noted Canadian physician and scientist, wished that he were dead. The victim of a massive aneurysm in 1987, the pains in his head were so intense that there were times when he thought that his head was about to explode. Nightly, for nearly twelve years, he had to take hydrocodene to sleep comfortably.
"Only ten percent of the people survive the stroke that I experienced," said Dr. Omelchuk, the former chief of staff at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton, Canada. "I was one of the lucky ones."
After recovering from a ten-hour surgery, Dr. Omelchuk was not able to walk or talk. He was unable to teach or practice medicine and his brain capacity was reduced by 30 percent. "I was told by my physicians that I should accept my condition and that I would have to be on pain medication for the rest of my life."
Saddled with a quality of life as dismal as a bad cold on an endless winter night, Dr. Omelchuk often sat in his living room chair thinking of those days when he presided over meetings as president of the Alberta chapter of the College of Family Physicians of Canada. "My constant companions were my wife, Orissa, and my pain," said Dr. Omelchuk. "I tried massage, acupuncture, every type of pain pill that I could get a doctor to give me and, in the end, nothing seemed to work. I was hopeless. I was alive but my quality of life was poor," said Dr. Omelchuk, who was listed in the International Who's Who of Medicine the same year that he had the aneurysm.
Dr. Omelchuk was introduced to glyconutrients during a conversation with a colleague who noticed that he was always fatigued and suggested that they might help him. "I was skeptical," he said. "None of the best physicians in the country were able to help me. I had been told to accept my fate. Yet, we were desperate so I read everything that I could find about glyconutrients. My wife suggested that we try them."
Dr. Omelchuk said that four months after he began taking glyconutrients the crippling pain disappeared. "For the first time in twelve years I was able to sleep without waking up in the middle of the night," he said. "My thinking was clear and I did not have to take any medication."
His recovery did not make sense to him. It contravened what his doctors had told him, his own medical training, and everything that he had learned and experienced in the more than quarter of a century that he had been a physician.
"I read a paper that was written by scientists at the University of Calgary in 1998 that showed brain cell regeneration in laboratory rats. I began to look at other studies. There is research that suggests that stem cells that migrate to the brain undergo a transformation that result in functional brain cells. The brain has a capacity to set up new pathways of communication," he said.
Dr. Omelchuk believes that there is a direct relationship between the regeneration of his brain cells and the glyconutritionals that he used. "Medical researchers told me after my stroke that I had lost thirty percent of my brain capacity," he said. "I had myself tested after I had been talking the supplements and was told that all of my mental faculties were normal. My verbal capacity is in the 97th percentile. I have my life back! Glyconutritionals are responsible for my recovery and for the quality of life that I am able to share with my wife today."
Neither his medical training nor his medical teaching or practice was complemented with education in nutrition, Dr. Omelchuk said. "Some members of the medical community are admitting on a daily basis that our food chain is depleted and that the only way that we are going to get the essential nutrients that our bodies need is through supplementation," he said.
"Glyconutritionals could be one of the greatest nutritional discoveries of the 20th century," he said. "Unfortunately, physicians and many others in the field of health care know very little or nothing about them, even though there is abundant peer-reviewed scientific validation as to their efficacy in supporting the body's normal functions of recovery from chronic diseased conditions."
Hearing about the support of glyconutrients from such noted physicians as Dr. Carson and Dr. Omelchuk has elated Dr. McDaniel, a former of chief of staff at the Dallas Forth Worth Medical Center. "Over the years I have been astounded with the improvements in the health conditions of people, especially children, who have taken glyconutrients," said Dr. Reg McDaniel, who also serves as the medical director of the Fisher Institute for Medical Research in Grand Prairie, Texas. "I have seen quality of life improvements in people with diabetes, HIV-AIDS, heart disease, asthma, autism, allergies, Downs Syndrome and a number of other conditions. Many of these people saw little or no improvement through the use of their prescription drugs."
McDaniel said that during the last twenty years there have been amazing discoveries in glyconutritional research. "One study showed that people who added glyconutrients to their diets developed stems cells from their own bone marrow that resulted in the migration of the cells into damaged organs. Medical scientists concluded that these new cells replaced damaged or diseased ones."
McDaniel, a founder of the newly organized WMS international research foundation, said that he and other scientists will expand the testing of glyconutrients globally in an effort to add to the science behind the technology of glyconutritionals. "We intend to record and document responses to glyconutrients that will assist visionary members of the scientific and medical communities in their efforts to make this crucial technology available to all people," said Dr. McDaniel.
Voted physician of the year by his peers in 1990, Dr. McDaniel understands the skepticism of the medical community to complementary approaches to medicines.
"Most of us never received any nutritional training in medical school and that is compounded by the fact that many nutritional products have little or no science to support their claims. But glyconutrient research is quickly raising the bar of credibility."
As a recognized scientific authority on the potential of glyconutrients, Dr. McDaniel was invited to testify at the Congressional Hearing on Bio-Terrorism on Capitol Hill in 2001. "There is overwhelming evidence that suggests that the human body may be capable, through its normal physiology, of healing itself from almost any malady," Dr. McDaniel said. "I have been in medicine for more than 40 years and I have never been as optimistic as I am today that we will meet the needs of tens of millions of people who lead desperate lives due to chronic illnesses."
