Amonst all the whining ricochetting around the hallowed halls of pharmaceutically driven medicine in New Zealand, a couple of points should be logged into the system's hard drive. The first is that the medical profession should stop going on about how irresponsible and dangerous vitamin C is. The second is, by extension, stop the ludicrous, continual attempts via suitably brainwashed report-ersss in the newsmedia, to demonise herbs and supplements.  It seems to me that Medsafe et al, have forgotten that in 2006, at the request of the then Minister of Health, Annette King, the coronial system did a thorough investigation into deaths from alternative medicine, which found just about zilch.  Instead, the finger came right back pointing at the medical system, not the alternative medical system, supplements or herbs.

I know all the well wrung out red herring pleadings about how people using natural treatments are being "deprived" of potentially life saving drug/cut/chemo treatments. But as Dr Wallace Bain clearly pointed out, the other side of that ledger, is that pharmaceutical medicine is way more effective at killing people it never intended to kill, than alternative medicine is, at killing people they never intended to kill, or kill them, by depriving them of the "pharmaceutical system's", astonishingly high ability to maim and kill.

If vitamin C was a killer and maimer, the FDA databases would be chock full of incidences.  USA uses a huge amount of intravenous vitamin C, and being the litigious society they are, if IV vitamin was a maimer and killer, the New Zealand medical system would have ensured that their favourite report-erssss, in all the newspapers, would write lurid details of every possible settlements against the manufacturers as often as possible.

That hasn't happened, because Vitamin C is safe, and concerns about vitamin C are patch protection, hot air..    

The first, very recent, relatively comprehensive analysis of that fact in a medical journal is here.

Pdf  here.