[karoe]

It s come down to this-- I have a real sensitive gut and I can't tolerate many supplements, least of all vitamin C. Vitamin C is a key nutrient to build the intestinal mucosa; I also have adrenal fatigue and it's the number one recommended supplement to support adrenal recovery. Catch 22 here....if I could take the C, I could improve both the gut and adrenals...but I can't take the C in oral form. I feel like a lunatic asking around all week and I've gotten no answers....any comments? Doesn't IV vitamins seem like a no-brainer for someone with gut issues?

My integrative med doctor is giving me an Rx for injectable B vitamins, but the C has to go into the bloodstream. And it has to be made up fresh.

 

[BQ]

It may be a no brainer... but..I can't imagine how much that would cost. Will your insurance cover that? I hope so. Does your medical team think you are deficient in Vitman C?Seems a bit extreme to me.. but too bad you cannot handle ANY food form or any supplement form. Like I would be tempted to take whatever I needed to (like imodium) to get enough Vitamin C. Good luck with this.

 

[karoe]

There are clinics that offer intravenous vitamins, but you have to be a patient there. Okay, that's one option. I know exactly how much it costs at one, $100-$150 per application. There are outpatient infusion centers at nearly every major hospital for cancer patients, and others......there is one, 5 minutes from my house, but they specialize in CHEMO, and looked at me wierd when I asked if they do nutritional therapy. This is not rocket science...it's a fairly simple thing and it makes perfect sense. It makes medical professionals balk when they hear the request because of the quack factor....lots of info on the internet about curing cancer, for instance, with mega doses of Vitamin C. I'm not asking for a mega dose. Please comment if you have had any experience with this........Does insurance pay? LOL. I have long since abandoned basing my healing decisions on what insurance pays for!

 

[karoe]

the vitamin C irritates my gut wall (as do other things), causing it to narrow, which is really painful. It's not your garden variety type of constipation

 

[Kathleen M.]

Is is something a holistic doctor might do?http://www.holisticmedicine.org/displaycom...ubarticlenbr=49 finds the doctor I know socially around here I would ask if I wanted that kind of thing.a lot of holistic medicine doctors will do things most allopathic doctors consider quackery, so it might be one option if there is one in your area that is an MD but does holistic stuff.

 

[karoe]

thanks for your note, Kathleen-- yes my doc is an integrative medicine physician so she is open to all that but as a solo practitioner, she doesn't have the capacity to do that stuff (give a drip that may take a few hours) in her office.....I suppose I will eventually find a way to get this. My real Q here to the board is hasn't anyone thought to try this? I am feeling better and better after dx - ing and getting rid of ascaris, (DNA PCR test), 2 solid years of good probiotics, eating foods that form a good substrate for the proper bacteria, killing bad guys with a two week elemental diet.....but the adrenal thing is still dogging me and they are still having to do extra work from the remaining gut issues. Doc feels its just a "negative feedback loop" we have to break. I need the vit c for the adrenals and the gut lining, but can't take it orallly....certainly I'm not the only one who has thought of this.......your gut is not going to get better until you get the right combination of stuff going, and if it can't absorb vitamins, nutrients etc........where are you? Is IV nutrition more common in Chrons?

 

[karoe]

So, nobody has done this? Seems like an ideal way to get vitamins into the body if the GI is not working right....

 

[Kathleen M.]

Generally people with IBS (and even the IBDs) absorb enough nutrients from food they really don't need IV infusions to get nutrition.Even with vitamin C (and a lot of treatments like to megadose it) the doses that cause diarrhea and even a lot of time the lowest dose you get in a pill is way higher than the minimum you need to maintain normal health. A lot of vitamins are like drugs if you take enough of them, but the amounts you need to just live tend to be fairly easy to get from food every day. Some are harder than others, but most people even with GI problems are not severely deficient in any of the essential nutrients we have to get from food.It really doesn't take that much vitamin C to prevent scurvy.

 

[karoe]

I almost disagree with you.

Vitamin C has been proven to help healing in multiple body systems. I need extra help in the problem areas of Intestinal Mucosa and Adrenal Glands. I think once those prolems have been resolved and I can actually eat things like peppers, fruit other than apples etc., I will be delighted to get my Vit C from food. Favorite resources for information for me are Listen to Your Gut, by Jini Patel Thompson (she has a website) and Adrenal Fatigue the 21st Century Disease, by Dr. James Wilson, also has a website. Their advice and experience have already helped me a great deal, and I recommend these resources to anyone with IBS, IBD, Chrons, Fatigue and Adrenal Issues. I feel much better than I did five years ago.

 

[Kathleen M.]

Then you (or these doctors) are using vitamin C as if it were a drug to cause a specific response in a particular body system.No one needs 2000 miligrams a day to keep from getting scurvy. No one gets that much from food alone.An orange has 70 miligrams which is enough to keep you from getting scurvy if you ate one every day. I can't imagine someone eating 14 to 70 oranges a day. Even if that was the only thing you had available to eat. However that is the amount of vitamin C a lot of people take for reasons other than avoiding scurvy.It is like using niacin to reduce cholesterol. You take it at doses no human needs to avoid a deficiency disease and you take it at high enough doses to cause side effects in some people. If you take enough vitamin C everyone gets diarrhea. Some people get that at 500 mgs some not until they get above 5,000 but eventually everyone takes more than they can tolerate. However most people can deal with getting 70 mgs in their diet and most people do it without any problem, unless they really muck up the diet like the kid at my college who refused to eat any fruit or vegetable once Mom wasn't there. Took forever for the student health doctors to figure out he has scurvy because it is so easy to avoid if you have any access to fresh food.I'm not saying mega-doses of vitamin C cannot be used for things, but the doses needed for anything other than basic health are extremely high compared to your basic needs. If the dose you take is causing more damage than help, than that dose is too high for you.First rule of toxicology. The dose makes the poison. Some people have different doses where even the most essential of nutrients becomes toxic for them. Just because your body needs it, does not mean something is safe at all doses, especially for some people.