Letter from the publisher

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients,  May, 2005  by Jonathan Collin

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It is not often that I walk away from a medical meeting with the certainty that here is information I can use, tinker with, worry about, and imagine the possibilities. The Society for Orthomolecular Health-Medicine (OHM), run by Richard Kunin, MD and Richard Huemer, MD holds a scientific meeting in February each year in San Francisco. This year's meeting focused on heart disease and inflammation and Lyme Disease and its diagnostic and therapeutic controversies. Too often a medical convention can bog down in a plethora of frankly boring meetings with too much verbiage and too little take-home information. The OHM meeting this February was first-rate and lived up to expectations. The speakers had that rare synchronicity where the talks moved along like a well-written novel, one speech building on the next, examining the complexities of inflammation and heart disease in the first half, then like a visit to the wild, wild West, taking on Lyme Disease with all of its connections. The conference was held in a funky San Francisco hotel on Van Ness Avenue, called Cathedral Hill; the auditorium was overflowing with doctors and Lyme Disease patient advocates (and patients) from the San Francisco Bay area. I liked the nitty-gritty atmosphere of the meeting--Kunin and Huemer provided just the milieu for lively debates among the speakers and the doctors in the audience. If every alternative medicine meeting could meet and function like this San Francisco event, I think we would see renewed vitality in many dysfunctioning alternative medicine groups who are losing memberships. Lest I forget, a DVD of the entire series of lecture notes is available from OHM. Recordings of the actual spoken lectures are only available on cassette tape or CD from PAR (Professional Audio Recording). For further information contact OHM by email: SOHMA@aol.com or fax 415-346-2519.

Dr. Richard Kunin's lecture reminded me that when everything else is forgotten, we need to remember that our roots in alternative medicine remain deeply embedded in biochemistry. We need to always think of the basic chemistry involved in the aging process. While we hear in some settings that the problem is hormonal, that we seem to have a deficiency of human growth hormone and sex hormones (an issue which seemed to be of moderate concern mid-March on Capitol Hill with an august group of baseball players), Kunin was much more concerned with methyl groups and the process of methylation. We all banter about homocysteine but we ignore the fact that excess homocysteine is a failure of the metabolic pathways of methylation, transulfuration and the folate cycle. Kunin outlined the methylation system under regulation by at least 11 enzyme systems which are subject to mutation in the aging process and inhibition by chemical agents. Kunin reported an experiment conducted by Chambers and MacGregor: 17 patients were studied for change in brachial artery blood flow using ultrasound following treatment with (1) oral methionine (100 mg/kg), (2) oral methionine preceded by vitamin C (1 g/day, for 1 week), or (3) placebo. Plasma homocysteine increased and flow-mediated dilation fell after methionine supplementation. On the other hand, vitamin C did not affect the rise in homocysteine but did improve the flow-mediated dilation. Chambers and MacGregor concluded that elevation in homocysteine was associated with "an acute impairment of vascular endothelial function that could be prevented by pretreatment with vitamin C." Kunin further noted that the ingestion of methionine capable of elevating the homocysteine was "obtainable in a hearty animal protein meal" that one routinely eats. Reference: Chambers JC, MacGregor A, et al., Demonstration of rapid onset vascular endothelial dysfunction after hyperhomocysteinemia: an effect reversible with vitamin C therapy. Circulation 1999;99:1156-1160.

Garry Gordon, MD tantalized the audience with a theory that genomic dysfunction played a vital role in creating inflammation in the vascular system. He presented a paper that demonstrated RNA supplemental support changed lipid levels with essentially no change in diet or lifestyle. Further, Gordon postulated that difficulties in chelating toxic elements was related to deficiencies in RNA production by the body. Gordon demonstrated changes in pre- and post-chelation patients given RNA supplementation. His theory of why RNA deficiencies exist and supplementation is required is discussed further in this issue of the TLfDP.

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Perhaps the major take-away from the OHM conference was opined by Lida Mattman, PhD. Her discussion was featured in the program about Lyme Disease. Mattman's work on stealth organisms as an underlying cause of inflammation has been well-recognized by workers who study patients with darkfield microscopy. However, Mattman's lecture about blood being parasitized by a variety of microorganisms including the Borrelia species associated with Lyme Disease was vividly demonstrated using special staining techniques of blood. Mattman was harshly critical of medical microbiology departments that do not make the effort to study blood routinely with fluorescent staining techniques. She stated that without such techniques, blood cell inclusions are missed outright; Borrelia organism involvement is completely missed. Mattman postulated that we have a pandemic of Borrelia and Borrelia-associated disease that is not being diagnosed because physicians and microbiology departments refuse to study blood with proper albeit special staining techniques. One is left wondering if the source of much of the inflammation we see in cardiovascular disease, as measured by C-Reactive protein, for example, is the product of hidden infection such as Borrelia which is not diagnosed.