How I became interested in using nutrients to treat disease.
My epiphany came in 1980 when I treated a neurological patient, who had been wheelchair confined for 6 years. For many years, he had been the private patient of the head of the department of neurology at the medical school. This man was incontinent of bowel and bladder and he had an indwelling catheter that resulted in frequent episodes of bladder and kidney infections. It was an episode of pyelonephritis that resulted in his hospitalization where I met him. During my workup, I looked at his blood smear under the microscope and I did not see one normal red blood cell. He had very large red blood cells a condition called macrocytosis. As I worked up his macrocytosis (macrocytosis is frequently caused by either a B12 or folic acid deficiency), both his folic acid and B12 blood levels were normal and he did not have anemia. An allopathic approach would have been to look elsewhere since his lab values were within the normal range. After reading an article that B12 levels did not differentiate between active and inactive forms of vitamin B12. I hypothesized that he may have inactive vitamin B12 so I decided to give him a B12 shot for his macrocytosis. (In medicine, it is standard practice to give one B12 shot a month for a diagnosed case of B12 deficiency).
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