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From: carter@gatech.UUCP (Carter Bullard)
Newsgroups: net.med
Subject: Re: Unconventional Cancer Therapy  FLAME!!
Message-ID: <11971@gatech.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 11-Feb-85 00:16:54 EST
Article-I.D.: gatech.11971
Posted: Mon Feb 11 00:16:54 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 12-Feb-85 04:56:58 EST
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Organization: School of ICS, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta
Lines: 46

In response to some thing that came onto my terminal:

> Laetrile is one of the less common B vitamins. (I forget which one)

WRONG!!!!! WRONG!!!!! WRONG!!!!!
Laetrile is not a B vitamin.  It never has been, it never will be.
It is classified as a cyano-polysaccaride, that is a sugar that contains
a cyano chemical group.  It is basically cyanide conjugated to a very
large sugar.  B vitamins are not sugars. They never have been and they
never will be.  

I believe that a definition of vitamin is in order.

A vitamin is a substance that you must provide in your diet, without which
you will die.  Not get sick, but die.  That is dead, deceased, past-away,
stiff, rigormortized, left for the vultures, not going to come back again in
this present form, dead.

Did your mother warn you about eating enough peach, prune or apricot pits?
If it was important, she would have said something and I think that staying
alive is one of those things that she would have considered important.  


> Hard to imagine a B vitamin hurting anyone.  (if you get more than
> you need, your body dumps the extra)
> 
I won't even bother to argue whether vitamins can hurt you or not.
It should be obvious that if you can die of too much water, then you
can die from too many vitamins.

> Nutritional type therapys are much better, since they work *with*
> your body, instead of *against* it, as drugs tend to do.

Statements like the one above make me very depressed.  It is based
on what someone read in a book by somebody who got on a talk show and 
who happens to know this doctor who's cool and has had an aunt that had
this lump on her leg that went away when her microwave oven broke down and
swears that running backwards reverses time.

The world is in sad shape. 

-- 
Carter Bullard
ICS, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta GA 30332
CSNet:Carter @ Gatech	ARPA:Carter.Gatech @ CSNet-relay.arpa
uucp:...!{akgua,allegra,amd,ihnp4,hplabs,seismo,ut-ngp}!gatech!carter