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From: kenner@acf4.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.med
Subject: Re: Vitamin B dosage question
Message-ID: <9400001@acf4.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 21-May-84 21:48:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: acf4.9400001
Posted: Mon May 21 21:48:00 1984
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Nf-From: acf4!kenner    May 16 21:48:00 1984

From the Harvard Medical School Health Letter of April 1984:

"We recently reported on the danger of nerve damage when vitamin B6 intake
exceeds 2 grams per day (see The HMS Health Letter, December 1983).  Several
readers have written to ask what is a safe dose of vitamin B6.  Presumably
they mean "How much can I take without hurting myself?".  The answer is not
known.  The recommended daily allowance is about 2mg.  Some recent letters
to the New England Journal of Medicine that appeared in the January 19,
1984, issue suggest that 200mg per day will not cause adverse effects.  But
careful testing for subtle degrees of nerve damage has not been carried out
in persons taking this much b6 over many months.  A reasonable, if
arbitrary, limit for vitamin b6 supplementation might be 50mg a day --
although we really don't know what benefit 48 mg of this dose might have to
off."

The December 1983 article is too long for me to enter but it references the
August 25, 1983 New England Journal of Medicine and concludes by stating:

"Every time The HMS Health Letter runs an article criticizing overuse of
vitamins, we receive a few letters from readers reporting their personal
success with one or another vitamin.  Our response has to be: that isn't
evidence.  With no basis of comparison, we can't be sure that the vitamin
was responsible for the benefit attributed to it.  Until about 150 years
ago, personal experience was given as a justification for the use of
bloodletting to treat pneumonia.  Only when a courageous Paris physician,
Pierre Louis, compared the course of the disease with and without the
treatment did it become apparent that bloodletting was ineffective.  Yet
perfectly intelligent people had followed the practice for centuries because
personal experience told them it worked.  On the basis of "personal
experience" we might still be bleeding patients today."