2 Surveys Show Vitamin C Lowers Painkiller Needs

If you know someone in pain, this could be worth sharing…
A friend is undergoing surgery next Monday and his wife asked if I knew of the effects vitamin C had on reducing the effectiveness of painkillers. I researched the question and found a couple of items of interest. Here they are.
I have published various article on how vitamin C reduced pains for shingles, wrist surgery, and preventing Complex Regional Pain. Now shown to reduce pain after surgery – cut opioid needs.
Can J Anaesth. 2012 Mar 9. [Epub ahead of print]
Effect of vitamin C on morphine use after laparoscopic cholecystectomy: a randomized controlled trial.
Kanazi GE, El-Khatib MF, Yazbeck-Karam VG, Hanna JE, Masri B, Aouad MT. abstract here
On a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial, patients were given 2 g vitamin C or placebo one hour prior to surgery. Vitamin C users had a 29% reduction in opioid needs.
Comment – I would not go a day without vitamin C – seeing as we cannot make it ourselves. Low vitamin C consumption was associated with risk of shingles. Now it looks such that if you ever gets some “trauma” – having vitamin C on board helps…
http://painmuse.org/?p=1801
VITAMIN C (Ascorbic Acid) ANALGESIA
At high intake levels, Vitamin C is known to reduce inflammation and act to as a natural antibiotic and antihistamine. These properties are surprising enough to many, but one of the biggest surprises ever occurred during the 1970’s in Scotland at the Vale of Leven Hospital. There, Ewan Cameron, M.D. was giving ten grams (10,000 milligrams) of vitamin C intravenously each day to terminally ill cancer patients. The study was about vitamin C and cancer, but the unexpected finding was in pain relief.
In Great Britain at the time, it was policy to provide terminal patients with any and all pain relief available, including addictive narcotics such as heroin. The argument was simply that if one were dying anyway, a drug’s analgesic value outweighs any drawbacks such as dependency. Dr. Cameron and Dr. Linus Pauling wrote in Cancer and Vitamin C (1981; revised 1993):
“Cameron and Baird reported (in 1973) that the first five ascorbate-treated patients who had been receiving large doses of morphine or heroin to control pain were taken off these drugs a few days after the treatment with vitamin C was begun, because the vitamin C seemed to diminish the pain to such an extent that the drug was not needed. Moreover, none of these patients asked that the morphine or heroin be given to them- they seemed not to experience any serious withdrawal signs or symptoms.” (page xii)
Any vitamin that approaches the pain relieving power of morphine or heroin must be considered some kind of analgesic indeed. The fact that 13 out of 100 terminally ill cancer patients given vitamin C were still alive and apparently free of cancer after five years is some kind of miracle.
Although quite a lot of vitamin C is needed for results, it is a remarkably safe and rather simple therapy. Additional information will be found in Dr. Cameron’s “Protocol for the Use of Intravenous Vitamin C in the Treatment of Cancer,” ( click here to read it) and in the many vitamin C articles posted at this website (and easily found with a quick website search from the www.doctoryourself.com mainpage.)