Chapter 7 – The Natural Pain Reliever They Don’t Want You to Know About

An Opinion

by Owen Fonorow – Vitamin C Foundation

The number of people who experience chronic pain in their daily lives increases as the population ages. This pain equals profit for the drug industry, which sells an astounding number of pain relieving drugs such as Tylenol® or the Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs (NSAIDS) such as Aspirin®. What most people don’t know is that most of this pain and suffering is caused because our bodies are making a reduced amount of a natural hormone. This hormone is essential, without it humans would only live a day or two.

Many people, and most doctors,  do not know that a simple and natural bio-identical hormone replacement would relieve the pain in millions of people who experience symptoms ranging from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, asthma, polymyalgia rheumatica (PMR) and other conditions mislabeled as “autoimmune” diseases. This kind of hormone replacement would relieve the pain from any disorder with symptoms caused by inflammation.

Small so-called physiological dosages of this natural hormone have been clinically effective in treating other conditions such as chronic allergies, various autoimmune disorders, ovarian dysfunction and infertility, gonadal dysfunction, allergic rhinitis, hyperthyroidism and diffuse goiter, chronic thyroiditis and diabetes mellitus, functional hypoglycemia, hirsutism, acne, and chronic cystic mastitis.

Taking this hormone is surprisingly safe, despite the fact that most medical doctors will tell you it is the most dangerous drug that they can prescribe.  Unlike Tylenol®, which sends thousands to the emergency rooms with liver failure caused by glutathione depletion every year; or aspirin, which damages tissues in the stomach causing ulcer-like lesions, there are no adverse side effects of this natural adrenal-produced pain relieving hormone. This is true at the safe physiologic doses that are ideally produced daily by our adrenal glands. Yet a deliberate campaign to steer doctors away from prescribing the hormone exists.

Part of the fear of this hormone is that like cholesterol, vitamin D, and other similar substances; this adrenal hormone happens to have a specific chemical configuration that makes it a steroid.

Like vitamin C, this essential hormone is inexpensive and threatens the profits of the drug industry. This hormone is one of several produced in every human body by the adrenal glands. Its discovery in 1949 garnered a Nobel Prize in medicine for the Mayo Clinic in 1950.

The adrenal glands also have among the highest concentrations of vitamin C of any tissues in the human body. Sometimes vitamin C can ‘wake up’ the adrenals, and thus persons supplementing vitamin C experience pain relief simply by taking high-dose vitamin C. One theory as to why vitamin C may have such a profound effect on the common cold is that higher dosages allow the adrenals to make more cortisol.

Cortisol, The Natural Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory

 “That cortisone and cortisol are normal hormones of the adrenal cortix implies that in physiologic dosages they must be safe” – William Mck Jefferies, Safe Uses of Cortisol.

Author’s Personal Story:

During the summer of 2012, about one year after my brother and business partner Mike Till Sr. died, I developed a pain in my back and a shortness of breath that persisted. When I finally saw a doctor, my primary care physician suggested that I go to the emergency room. I was admitted for very low blood pressure. From an ultrasound, they determined that I had fluid in the pericardium, a sac that surrounds the heart. This fluid made it harder for my heart to beat. After an immediate surgical procedure to drain the fluid, I remained in intensive care for 10 days. A team of specialists tried to determine what was wrong. These experts suspected that I had a serious infection, but they could not culture any organism.

Before this episode, I had waited for a long time before seeing the doctor. I tolerated the pain in my back and shortness of breath. Around 30 days after I was discharged from the hospital, the same symptoms appeared again and this time I immediately went to the ER. Again, I was put into intensive care while another team of five specialists tried to figure out what was wrong, again suspecting that I had an infection. None was found. Having no idea what was wrong with me, I began documenting this experience at the Vitamin C Foundation’s online forum.

I spent another 10 days in intensive care, the second 10 day-stay in the span of two months, and one of the more brilliant specialists decided to try some “high powered” IV steroids; which I was told would elevate my blood sugar rapidly. Completely ignorant of steroids and cortisol, I resisted and asked my primary care doctor for intravenous vitamin C (IV/C) instead, and she ordered the IV/C at the hospital. However, as Dr. Levy points out in his book Primal Panacea, no hospital in the United States at that time utilized intravenous vitamin C. In my case, the pharmacy wasn’t equipped, so I never received the vitamin C intravenously at the hospital and was discharged.

On exit from the hospital the second time, my primary doctor prescribed a methyl prednisilone (steroid pak). She hoped that these steroids would keep me out of the hospital for a third time. Like everybody else, I was afraid to take “steroids.”

(Note: This primary care doctor, the one who ordered the IV/C, was let go from her practice about two months later. Dr. Levy had worried that this might happen, but I was desperate.)

Outside of the hospital, I immediately had a series of ever increasing vitamin C infusions, and may have reached 200 grams per session. I hoped and believed that it could cure whatever was ailing me; however vitamin C could not cure me.  My ailment, general pain and malaise resembling Rheumatoid Arthritis, was not caused by an infection after all. I later learned that I had a serious adrenal hormone deficiency. The hormone that I wasn’t making enough of is the Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory cortisol.

When the intravenous vitamin C didn’t work, and with ever-increasing pain all over my body, I began taking the methyl prednisone pills that my primary care physician had prescribed. They worked, and quite fast. I started taking 8 mg of methyl prednisilone (a concentrated form of cortisol, a drug on the order of prednisone) and was “cured.”

After this experience, I started reading about cortisol and scary effects of too much, as many authors characterize cortisol as the “stress” hormone, which it is because under stress we need and produce more. Eventually, I saw a reference to a book, SAFE USES OF CORTISOL, 3rd edition, by William Mck Jefferies, MD. This important book helped me to understand what was wrong and how to correct it.

“Cortisol is the only essential hormone,” Jefferies begins his book by telling his readers. We can do without every other hormone for long periods, but if we are without cortisol, even for a single day or two, we die. What this means is that all of us are making some amount of cortisol, and we make more during the day and less during the night during sleep when levels of melatonin are high. However, if our adrenal glands are not able to make a sufficient supply (i.e., the amount the brain is currently demanding), the result is pain. Ever increasing pain occurs in the tissues that are deprived of this steroidal anti-inflammatory.

My body wasn’t making enough of my own cortisol. In Jefferies’ book, he discusses the bio-identical version of cortisol, hydrocortisone. I learned that the 8 mg of methyl prednisione I was taking was almost a total replacement dosage, as if my adrenal function had completely shut down. (Note that the dosage of hydrocortisone is different from the prednisone. The bio-identical hydrocortisone replacement dosage is something like 4 to 5 times that or 35 to 40 mg.)

At the higher dosage, my blood sugar began to rise, so I had to cut back. Eventually, I was able to lower the dosage to about 2 mg of methyl prednisilone without chronic pain, which is roughly equivalent to 10 mg of hydrocortisone.

From this experience, I learned that most of the chronic pain suffered by humanity is caused by an adrenal malfunction that leads to less cortisol than the body requires. I also learned that today’s doctors are misinformed that so-called glutocorticoids (e.g.,  cortisol/prednisone/methyl prednisilone) are the most dangerous drugs in their medicinal arsenal. I found it almost impossible to get a long-term prescription for a “natural hormone” that kept me out of a wheelchair and that I attribute to saving my life.

My mother spent most of her life in pain after she was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis. Her search for pain relief led her to Linus Pauling’s book on vitamin C; and the rest, as they say, is history. For her, vitamin C was the only substance that helped mitigate her pain, other than one cortisone shot she received at the Mayo Clinic. Had my mother known what I now know, her life would have been pain free, and I would probably know nothing about vitamin C.

Does Cortisol Harm or Enhance Immunity?

“We now know that the influenza virus attacks the human body by impairing the production of adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), which, in turn, impairs the production of cortisol, the only hormone that is absolutely essential for life.” – William Mck Jefferies,

Medical doctors are taught to be cautious of prescribing Cortisol-like steroids because of their negative effect on immunity. From my own experience, I now believe that doctors are trained incorrectly. This is yet another example where medical doctors are steered away from a lower cost alternative to newer, more expensive prescription drugs.

According to world expert endocrinologist William Mck Jefferies, MD,

“Concern regarding the occurrence of respiratory illness in such patients was enhanced by the knowledge that large doses of glucocorticoids (prednisone, hydrocortisone, etc.) could impair resistance to infection while masking the symptoms.

It was, therefore, a finding of some surprise and considerable relief that years passed with patients consistently reporting that they had either no common cold or only very mild attacks. Most of these patients had no symptoms even suggestive of such disorders; but when symptom did occur, a prompt increase in the replacement dosage of glucocorticoid was often followed by a disappearance of the symptoms with recurrence when the dosage was returned to maintenance levels. During this time, other members of the patient’s families seemed to have the usual quota of respiratory illnesses, to the absence of such illness in the patients could not be attributed to lack of exposure to the viruses.

An additional reassuring observation was that when patients with adrenal insufficiency developed respiratory infections, the increase in dosage of replacement gluccorticoid did not cause an increase in complicating bacterial infections such as sinusitis or bronchitis, and unless a bacterial complication developed, antibiotic therapy was not necessary” (Jefferies, pg 127 and 128).

The possibility that cortisol might enhance resistance to infection was so contrary to the well-known effect of its impairment that it was initially considered with skepticism. Yet, a review of the medical literature revealed an impressive amount of evidence that physiological amounts of glucotrticoid (e.g., cortisol) can have a protective effect against infection.

What Cured my Gerd?

Vitamin C is a threat to the profitability of medicine. It is available without prescription, so medical doctors are deliberately made ignorant. They are not informed about any of the existing research or made aware of this essential substance’s medical potential.

Cortisol is different because it is only available via prescription.  It is also essential and poses a threat to the profitability of the drug industry, particularly the over-the-counter pain reliever industry.     Even though cortisol is a natural, bio-identical hormone (as hydrocortisone) it is only available through medical doctors.   In my opinion, medical doctors have been deliberately misinformed about the supposed dangers of “steroids” because a lack of cortisol in the human body creates a huge number of doctor visits.

Chapter 6 – A Report from the Twilight Zone

Chapter 8 – The 100-Year-Old, 100% Effective Cure for Cancer (coming soon)