FROM THE EDITOR
My father was a small-town pharmacist, and he always told us that vitamins beyond what our bodies need are excreted out of our systems. So why now, many decades later, is that commonsense lesson so little known and heeded? Billons of dollars are spent on unneeded and worthless megavitamin therapy, and the craze continues. In our cover story, medical researcher Reynold Spector examines this situation, especially regarding irrational use of megavitamins C and E. A noted clinical pharmacologist and former research scientist into the inner workings of the blood-brain and blood–cerebrospinal fluid barriers, Spector is in a good position to judge the misinformation and misrepresentations about megavitamin therapy.
He acknowledges that there are certain rare cases where extra doses of vitamins C and E are needed, but in general the mass use of taking megavitamin doses for those who don’t require them is an “unwise and wasteful” practice. It has much in common with other forms of so-called alternative medicine.