QUESTION: I have a patient who feels terrible after receiving HDIVC therapy. If is such a great therapy, why is this person reacting badly?
ANSWER: While not common, these reactions do happen and if they do not abate with dose reduction etc are a reason to discontinue IVC. The potential theoretical reasons we have surmised are as follows:
– Ascorbate cycling co-factor deficit (higher doses of ASC do cause an incredible tax on the ASC-GSH-TOCO recycling system. This can trigger quite a strain and cause the patient to feel very bad.
– As corollary to this if the patient has one of the 8 (or is it 10 now) GST SNP’s then they will ramp up the above recycling system and the slow GST activity causes a back up in downstream glutathione-conjugates (of detox) and they feel horrible.
– Another phenomenon we have seen in these cases is activation of immune response to latent viri (often with a hepatic reservoir) leading to cytokine dumps and lots of such symptoms.
– Beyond these the other people appeared to simply not tolerate the fluid compartment shifts associated with the hypertonic IV’s and we would either have to pre-hydrate them with 0.45 % NS and then give the IVC (often worked).
Additionally if you want to use IVC in one of the low dose strategies with support nutrients those formulas can really correct many of the above issues. Then you may try a dose escalation again if wanting to try a HDIVC approach. The richness and broad nature of our interventions throughout the trial were partly spurred on by the fact that no one agent (IVC included) is tolerated by, appropriate for or useful in particular cases.