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On the Danny Roddy Youtube video done on July 30, 2021, Dr. Peat mentions the Shute family and I found this.
archive.macleans.ca
OR THREE YEARS now a Huntsville, Ont., lumber wholesaler named Patrick Mcllroy has been keeping a grim box score. In that time thirty-three of his friends—local residents and summer home owners in that Muskoka resort area—have suffered heart attacks. Twenty of them have recovered, thirteen have died. “The twenty who are alive,” Mcllroy told me, “were treated with Vitamin E. The thirteen who are dead were not treated with Vitamin E.”
Mcllroy takes more than the average layman"« interest in the fate of his friends because he credits Vitamin E with saving his own life, and he has become an enthusiastic missionary for Vitamin E. “I was as near death as a man can be,” he said. “My doctor said there was nothing more he could do for me. I had about twentyfour hours to live when Dr. Wilfrid Shute, vacationing nearby, was called. That was three years ago. Today I’m not only alive, but pretty spry for a man of sixty-four.” By believing that Vitamin E saved his life, and by saying so to others, Mcllroy has taken sides in one of the most violent and baffling controversies in the history of Canadian medicine. The basic battle lines of the controversy are well defined:
On the one hand, Dr. Evan Shute and Dr. Wilfrid Shute of the Shute Institute for Clinical and Laboratory Medicine, London, Ont., claim that Vitamin E administered according to their procedures is an effective treatment for diseases of the heart and blood vessels. They claim that in the last seven years they have treated ten thousand persons with “excellent” to “satisfactory” results in more than three out of four cases. They say they havé collected one hundred and twenty-eight papers published in medical and scientific journals in the United States, Britain, Italy and other countries describing clinical and laboratory tests of Vitamin E which partly err wholly support their findings. The Shutes claim that they offer the full documentation of their methods, experiences and case histories to any doctor or medical group as well as offering for examination and interview all their patients who agree to be examined and questioned.
Many other Canadian doctors, eminently qualified and eminently reputable, either discount the Shutes’ claims for Vitamin E entirely or maintain that the claims have not yet been scientifically proved.
Seven months after the Shutes started to use Vitamin E on their heart patients, they were summoned before the Council of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, the governing body of all physicians practicing in Ontario. The Shutes submitted briefs, case histories and a diary of their experiences with Vitamin E. These documents the council turned over to a committee of six medical professors, two each from the Universities of Western Ontario, Toronto and Queen’s. On the same day the committee made its report:
“On evidence submitted the committee is convinced that Vitamin E has no place in the treatment of cardiovascular (heart and blood vessel) disease.”
Two years later a test was conducted at Toronto
These two doctors claim that a vegetable ex*helps many heart cases and in rr thousand patients. Bui substance has not been i A toyman examines
A BONUS-LENGTH FEATURE
f*.» ».il tltiíii i^WviíU I
doctors say it’s useless, these people are convinced that Vitamin E helped them
.. Of ftfty consecutive patients admitted with various conditions resulting in heart failure, half were given a daily dosage of three*" hundred international units of Vitamin E. The other half were given capsules similar in appearance but containing no active ingredient. When the test had proceeded for seven months a report was issued stating that there was no significant difference in the death rate (five in one group, six in the other;, or process of recovery between the group treated with Vitamin E and the group not so treated.
The Shutes regard the report of the professors to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, and the Toronto General Hospital report, as the reasons why the majority of Canadian ' doctors do not prescribe Vitamin E, why Vitamin E therapy is not taught in Canadian medical schools, and why little research is being done on the effects of Vitamin E in this country. They deny the validity of both reports but meanwhile they claim to he treating more cardiovascular patients every year, with “living proof” of success in more than three out of four cases.
Dr. W. F. Greenwood, who conducted the hospital test, recently stated that he had followed up the patients involved in the test for several months after the report was made public and had “found no reason to modify the original findings.”
Perhaps the strangest fact about the Vitamin E controversy is that seven years after it started it remains current and hot. As this is written, two groups of English doctors are politely calling each other names in the austere columns of The Lancet, the widely known British medical journal, over the question of whether Vil am in E is good for intermittent claudication.
This disease belongs in the vascular branch of cardiovascular diseases. It results in severe crippling pain and weakness in the legs, caused by arteriosclerosis or by spasm of the blood vessels, due to an inadequate supply of blood to the muscles. Dr. A. M. Boyd, professor of surgery of Manchester University, checking a claim made by the Shutes that Vitamin E helped intermittent claudication, formed a team with three medical associates, Dr. R. P. Jepson, Dr. A. H. Ratcliffe and Dr. G. W. H. James, to put Vitamin E to the test.. They published in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery their finding that Vitamin E “is the only substance that has given consistently good results ... of seventy-two patients, twenty-seven were completely relieved and thirty-two were markedly improved.”
Next, Dr. M. Hamilton of St. Mary’s Hospital, London, Dr. G. M. Wilson of the University of Sheffield, and two members of the statistical unit of the Medical Research Council, divided forty-one patients with intermittent claudication into treatment and control groups. One group was given “blank” capsules containing peanut oil, the other got Vitamin E in similar capsules. This medical team reported in The Lancet:
“No appreciable difference was found between tiie response of the two groups. It is concluded that Vitamin E is of no value in the treatment of intermittent claudication.”
Since then both groups have written to The Lancet, Professor Boyd and Co. (a) defending Vitamin E’s efficacy and (b) attacking Dr. Uami1 ton’s “negative methods”; Dr. Hamilton and his associai os (a) attacking Vitamin E and (b) defending their clinical methods.
On the layman’s level, however, it is difficult for a man like Cyril Ford, of 83 Laws Street, Toronto, to agree that “Vitamin E is of no value in the treatment of intermittent claudication.” Ford is a postman, a strapping six feet three inches lall and weighing more than two hundred pounds. Last Christmas was anything but a festive season for Ford; at the time when his bag was heaviest, his legs gave out from intermittent claudication. He was in imminent danger of having to quit his job, since he could scarcely hobble three blocks.
“It was torture,” Ford told me. “I was like a man with one leg three inches shorter than the other. In fact, 1 was completely crippled.”
Mrs. Ford, a former nurse, heard from her sistet,
a Windsor, Ont., nurse, of cases of intermittent claudication she had seen relieved by Vitamin E.
Ford visited the Shutes and was put on Vitamin E, he told me. “Two weeks later the pain was gone,” he added. I spoke to Ford on April 17, a few minutes after his return from an early vacation.
“Day before yesterday,” he told me, “I climbed seven miles up and down through Mammoth Cave, Kentucky—without so much as a twinge of pain.”
Again from the layman’s viewpoint, it might seem a fairly simple matter to determine, once and for all, whether a specific substance checks certain diseases. But hundreds of laboratory and clinical experiments still leave Vitamin E a controversial subject. Recently Distillation Products Industries, manufacturers of basic vitamin materials and a division of Eastman Kodak Co., of Rochester,
N.Y., issued a compilation of all known Vitamin E research throughout the world during 1950 and 1951—some six hundred medical, chemical, pharmacological and veterinary findings. There were forty-five reports on cardiovascular diseases by researchers other than the Shutes, thirty-eight of them wholly or partly favorable to Vitamin E, seven of them derogatory.
It was typical of these reports that while Dr. V. R. O’Connor felt called upon to report in Medical World “twenty-five case histories, illustrative of many others, showing the invariable and sometimes dramatic beneficial effects of Vitamin E treatment of various types of heart disease,” Dr. S. H. Rinzler and his associates, after testing nineteen pairs of patients with chest pains from heart disease, found that “the results fail to indicate benefits of Vitamin E.”
There the baffled layman might well let the matter lie as just another case of “the doctors disagree”—if the dispute were over some rare or obscure disease. But it. happens that the diseases which the Shutes claim to combat, by methods they say any general practitioner could master in a very short time, are the diseases which today kill more people than any other single cause of death. This year forty thousand Canadians will die of cardiovascular diseases. In the past fifteen years cardiovascular diseases have killed, on the average, a thousand more Canadians each year than during the previous year.
Getting By on Less Oxygen
Vitamin E, the subject of this life-or-death controversy, is a highly concentrated vegetable product made by distillation from wheat germ, soy beans, margarine byproducts and other vegetable sources. One carload of raw material is converted into two and one fift h pounds of Vitamin E.
It has one noncontroversial use: It is a fertility agent in fact, it was first known as the fertility vitamin. It is also used by a number of obstetricians against pre-natal complications.
The Shutes’ theory about Vitamin E is this: It is not specifically a heart medication; that is,
Vitamin E has no affinity for the heart as insulin has for the pancreas or iodine for the thyroid gland.
The chief effect of Vitamin E is to reduce the amount of oxygen which the cells and tissues of the body and its organs require for efficient, healthy functioning. Heart diseases happen to be the most dramatic example of the result of oxygen deprivation, and Vitamin E’s effect, simply stated, is to condition the tissues involved so that they are able to function normally, or at any rate to survive, on the greatly reduced amount of oxygen available to them when a coronary clot cuts down the oxygen-bearing blood supply reaching them.
Even more simply stated, it is as though a ma$ suddenly found himself able to obtain only onê meal a month. Normally, he would quickly di* *
of starvation. But if he could find a pill whicn reduced his body’s need for food to one. meal á g¡
month, then his extremely limited food/ wipply would not cause disaster.
In keeping with their theory ^1?:’Vitamin É enables body cells to survive ^gl^ftincüon on à reduced oxygen supply, the investigators claim it is ey of other conditions: burns, wounds, radiation damage, gangrene, ulceration, phlebitis, Buerger’s disease (which atllicted King George VI before his fatal illness), diabetes and its complications, nephritis, eye diseases, psychoses, dementias, post-surgical shock, plastic surgery and post-poliomyelitis. Many other doctors—some of whom have spent a lifetime in heart research —are extremely doubtful that any single substance has such wide “cureall” values.
In the nonmedical field, Lloyd Pereival, well-known Canadian athletic coach, investigator of physical performance factors and lay expert on nutrition, has carried out extensive tests of Vitamin E with results he describes as “quite amazing.”
In spite of official medical disapproval, use of Vitamin E in Canada represents a million-dollar business. Allan A. Webber, the president of
Webber Pharmaceuticals Ltd., Toronto, told me that last year’s sales of all brands of Vitamin E capsules were estimated at one million two hundred thousand dollars. This represents three million to five million doses of the size usually given daily by the Shutes to patients under full treatment for cardiovascular diseases. Before 1946, when the Shutes announced successful treatment of heart cases with Vitamin E, the vitamin was not readily available, Webber said, and sales were negligible. In the past five years sales of Vitamin E capsules have
increased an average of fifteen percent each year. ’There was no way of determining, he added, how much of the vitamin was bought for heart medication.
Since the Shutes had said that they knew of only one doctor in Toronto who publicly approved of Vitamin E therapy, I told Webber that his sales figures sounded as though wholesale self-dosing was being carried out, by the public.
“’That’s not so,” he answered. “The doctors may not speak out about j Vitamin E, but we know that in ¡ ’Toronto f.wenty-eight percent of the doctors in general practice approve of ! it and prescribe it.” He showed me | a survey of eight hundred ’Toronto doctors, made for the company’s own information, in which two hundred anti twenty-eight made comments on Vitamin E ranging from “spectacular” to “if seems to give some heart patients a lift.” A few years ago, Webber added, some of the doctors who now spoke favorably of Vitamin E to the man who made the survey “had thrown him out of their offices when he mentioned Vitamin E.”
I also examined a file of fifteen | hundred orders from doctors in till j parts of Canada for Vitamin E in j quantities ranging from three hundred j to six thousand capsules. But most doctors do not liny their supplies direct j from the manufacturer, Webber said, j ’They order from drug wholesalers or surgical supply houses.
There is evidence that a substantial number of Canadian doctors have not accepted the verdict issued by the committee of medical professors apI pointed by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario — the only verdict from an official medical body in this country that “Vitamin E has no place in the treatment of cardiovascular disease.”
But there is also evidence that the verdict, whether right or wrong, has had the effect of driving Vitamin E “underground ” 1 spoke to some
doctors on the survey list who were willing to confirm their success with Vitamin E but only on a promise that their names would not be used.
I spoke to an eminent physicist, a man largely responsible for a major Canadian contribution to the secret armament of World War Tl. He had personally found in Vitamin E such a source of physical and mental endurance and efficiency that he had expressed the opinion that in a close war Vitamin E supplied to key personnel might actually make the difference between victory and defeat. I asked him if he would tell his story. He thought the matter over and then replied:
“No. 1 would like to, because it is truly remarkable. But somehow the medical profession has managed to give the impression that anyone who believes in Vitamin E is . . . well, slightly in the screwball class. I just don’t feel that I should expose myself to the inevitable comments if 1 speak openly.”
A London manufacturer told me that after long treatment for coronary thrombosis by his own doctor he had collapsed last August. He said that after his doctor had told him Vitamin E would not help he called in the Shutes. “1 find it hard to describe the result,” he said. “A person would have to come back from death to understand. All I can say is that I’m alive, l walk, I drive my car. I’ve got a long way to go yet, but what has happened already is wonderful, wonderful.”
Then he and his wife asked me not to use his name. “There are two doctors in the family connection,” she explained, “and it would distress them very much.”
Senator Arthur W. Roebuck commented last December in the Senate on a personal experience with this aspect of what he described as “the row in the medical profession over Vitamin E.” “There was a case of heart attack in my own family,” Senator Roebuck said, “and two separate people told me that their doctors had told them to use Vitamin E, but not to tell anybody that a medical person had advised it. Well, Vitamin E was used in my house and 1 saw a marked and immediate response to it. The individual 1 have in mind has as a result of it been working for the past year.” The occasion of Senator Roebuck’s comment was a sitting of the Senate Committee on Public Health and Welfare. The matter under review did not directly concern Vitamin E, but Evan Shute was among those who testified, and under questioning by the senators the sitting developed into the nearest approach to a legislative hearing on the I subject yet held. Senator MeCuire asked Shute: “Can you give me any idea of the cause of the prejudice existing among physicians in respect of Vitamin E?” “You are asking one of the most dreadful questions you could ask,” answered Shute. “I am frank enough to give you some of the answers but not all. 1 think that many men spoke too soon, and speaking too soon they can never retract. If a great man or group of men makes a pontifical statement it can hardly retract without losing face.” “Hear, hear,” said Senator Haig, “we all know that.” “Even politicians,” commented Sena tor Euler drily. Only One Invitation Shute told the Senate Committee that before 1946 he had often been invited to address county medical societies, but since the announcement I of Vitamin E heart therapy they had j received only one such invitation, from the Lambton County Society of Sarnia, j Ont. “When this society sent in the usual request for a ten-dollar subsidy for visiting speakers’ expenses to the Ontario Medical Association,” said Shute,“its secretary was told by the secretary of the association that they disapproved of the county society hearing the Shutes and that this grant would not be forthcoming. The secretary of the Lambton County Society asked that this denial be pufc'Tn writing and intimated that the, Shates»¡.would lx* asked to appear in Iwtty Tcsme.' ’The ! grant was but j no letter.” X')* f I )r. Shute» gat { ■ Comma ,i;tho point: • - ás ‘ " be '¿npáwe’h Vitamin E^Më^jgmg Vv..s by the Cana Médical AstadûJ-110111 Journal, rtlt^xoughoThe La agrogflfe siavutive Vritbth medical periecbm1pubiiKhed t aßhute art iules neo . 4-1 •’ ! use of Vijsjani^ R for heart di&2mjgi|i reject** by..the CM A J.Mirnal^^j» six taunt pfTbeing read by THO^BCÍ i’r (An'i-nëeia*!tdtóí jtk» 1a I ement »published as a-su \>plementr$j> article touAert^».fjjaf i hr papel* was rejected because, Iff/was by a ¡ naad for edit to puff .-at K-u.” ; When an U»>|jfcgikt^nadian I'liuation d article by.t,V JrShut.es, thcjHj^^n& the ét^jpjr ^ describing clinical,,^*rf|nd dosage^ : Vitamin E the oj&fô Y itamin E. t bei*jpy bird I in the Journal of ffleA^fipan Medical Association, thd Journal of Obstetric* i and Gynaecology of ti » p ifcjsh Empire, V ci.,
the official organs of t he American College of Physicians and the American College of Surgeons, “and in many other leading journals in the English j language.” Shute told the senators that he and his brother had difficulty in getting other doctors to look at interesting hospital cases. On one occasion a woman developed a phlebitis in the thigh after an operation. Evan Shute put her on Vitamin FI and posted a memo on the hospital notice board: “Mrs. of ward five has consented to permit any physician to watch the progress of her case. She developed a phlebitis in the right thigh this morning and she is getting nothing except Vitamin lí.“ Two doctors of the one hundred and fifty or so in London came to see her j in the five days it took to clear up j her condition, said Shute. He added: “Everyone knows that ordinarily phlebitis cannot he cured in that time.”
The first time the Shutes got an audience of five hundred Canadian doctors before them, at a CM A convention at Ottawa a few years ago, they did not confine themselves to the ; clinical aspects of Vitamin lí therapy. Evan Shute told the doctors: “Some j of our loudest critics are taking Vitaj min lí themselves. Many dispense Vitamin F', but will not sign a prescription for it. Many doctors, returned to practice on Vitamin lí after coronaries disabled them, are ashamed to admit the source of their help, even to their closest friends.”
The Shutes say they have a number of examples of what they call “the private friends but public enemies of Vitamin E.” They say that a doctor who is friendly to them told of sharing a room at a medical convention with a noted Montreal internist who is a bitter critic of the Shutes. One day the Shutes’ friend entered the bathroom, not knowing that his roommate, the internist, was there, j The latter hastily slipped something : into his pocket, but not before if was | recognized as a container of Vitamin Fi j capsules by the other, who said: “Think i nothing of it 1 use the same brand.” '
The Shutes said they learned recently that enough Vitamin lí was being regularly supplied to a certain hospital to provide full doses for sixteen persons daily. 'Thinking that a test might be under way, and being interested in the outcome, they made discreet enquiries. A member of the hospital staff reported to them: “No patients are getting Vitamin lí that’s j the doctors’ personal supply.” Wilfrid Shute said that a represen! tative of a Windsor, Ont., drug supply \ house asked him recently: “How is i it that although London is supposed to be the world capital of Vitamin lí, it’s not sold in the city?” Wilfrid said he answered that of course Vitamin lí was sold in every London drugstore. “Then why is it,” demanded the other, “that so many London doctors send to Windsor to have their orders filled?” 'The Shutes syy that approximately one hundred and eighty doctors and their families, about half of 1 hem Canadian, are under the care of the brothers and receiving Vitamin lí therapy. Hut they add that they can practically count on the fingers of one hand the number of Canadian doctors who have seen fit to support the Shutes and Vitamin lí publicly. A clue to ibis situation was hinted at by a 'Toronto doctor who told me: “If it were possible to separate the Shutes and Vitamin lí, there would probably he no controversy over its use.” Strangely enough, the Shutes agree with that view.
1 “Perhaps,” said Jivun Shute, “the discovery was never to blame—just the discoverers.”
It is true that the .Shutes are probably not the easiest people for medical dignitaries to deal with. Both were wrestling and boxing champions during their student days at the University of Toronto, and they are outspoken, emphatic men. They have been known to raise their voices, to pound tables, to speak somewhat less than diplomatically to unconvinced colleagues.
“As a matter of fact,” Wilfrid Shute says, “we used to be as meek and naive as anybody could wish. But we found out what we were up against, when we recovered from the immediate blast which greeted our first announcement that we had found Vitamin E good for heart disease, we just had to toughen up. If we hadn’t Vitamin E would have been dead and buried long ago. As it is we feel that if we live to be ninety and keep fighting every minute we may yet live to see Vitamin E therapy accepted in Canada for what it is: Canada’s greatest single
contribution to medicine, not excluding insulin.”
The private lives of the Shutes are the reverse of their stormy professional careers. Evan, forty-seven, is an ordained minister of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints. This is not the Mormon church, he is careful to point out, but the original group which remained in the east when the pioneers who were to become the Mormons headed for Utah.
Evan not only preaches regularly, but is a poet and essayist who has published seven volumes under the name Vere Jameson. He was something of an infant prodigy. He had his high-school entrance at nine, and his medical degree at twenty-one.
Wilfrid Shute is forty-five, and is married to Dot Prior, a former swimming champion who represented Canada in two Olympic Games. In conversation with him, the surest way to change the topic from Vitamin E is to mention dogs. He breeds Doberman pinschers, and claims to have one of the three best Doberman kennels on the continent.
The Shutes resent the effect the Vitamin E controversy has had on the private lives of their families. “I have not been called in for consultation on my specialty, obstetrics, since 1946, although 1 was frequently called before,” said Evan Shute. “I can take that—but it hurts me that my wife has not been invited to a medical tea in six years. Seldom does a day pass when Wilfrid or I are not subjected to some sort of insulting remark by other doctors at the hospitals where we have patients. Frankly, the whole thing baffles us. We honestly believe we have something very valuable, and we’re doing our best to give it away to the whole medical profession. We just can’t understand why that makes so many doctors mad at us.”
Evan Shute said that he first encountered Vitamin E in 1933 when he went to London, Ont., to practice. Dr. Earl Watson of Victoria Hospital had read a paper in The Lancet by the Danish researcher, Vogt-Moller, suggesting the use of Vitamin E for the treatment of habitual abortion. Watson prepared an extract of E-rich oil and gave samples to a number of obstetricians, including Shute, to test its efficiency. Shortly afterward Shute was given a Banting Fellowship to investigate what was responsible for poor anchorage of the afterbirth in abortion and miscarriage. He concluded that the condition was due to excess of female sex hormone in the blood, and discovered that Vitamin E appeared to
neutralize the action of the hormone.
The next step, said Shute, was his finding that a high hormone content appeared to delay normal clotting of blood. He suggestftisciO a medical student, Floyd Skeàl prohat he try to produce bleeding agh the tissues and capillaries of >se ;s by injecting female sex hormone. SWhen bleeding was produced, Vitamin E was used in an attempt to correct it, following the previous finding of E’s effect on the hormone. “Vitamin E both cured and prevented bleeding in experimental animals,” said Shute.
Shute and Skelton then sought a human subject with purpura, or bleeding of the skin, mucous membranes and body cavities. They found a patient of Dr. Arthur Vogelsang wit1 a purpura, and with Vogelsang’s cooperation treated him with Vitamin F. The man had not been operated on because he had a severe heart condition.
“A w'eek later,” related Shute, “Dr. Vogelsang made his regular call on the patient and found his bed empty. Ue complained to the nurse that he should be told immediately when a patient of his died. The nurse pointed to the other end of the ward, where the man was helping nurses carry bedpans. 1 turned out that the patient’s heart, condition had been helped more than his purpura.”
Dr. Vogelsang, who says he is “no longer associated with the Shutes or with any institute, clinic, foundation or drug company,” may now be described as a “conservative advocate” of Vitamin E. “As the person who first noted the beneficial effect of Vitamin E on heart disease and Buerger’s disease,” he said, “I can state that many cases of certain types of heart and arterial disorders will respond to proper treatment with E, often in combination with conventional agents.
But this treatment is a form of chemotherapy—the use of a chemical to obtain a therapeutic effect. There is no logical reason to believe that heart or arterial diseases are caused by a dietary deficiency of Vitamin E, and therefore 1 prefer to call the stuff by its chemical name, alphatocopherol. It can l>e dangerous in inexperienced hands, and therefore I deplore publicity which might tempt laymen to start selftreatment with Vitamin E.”
The next patient on whom Vitamin E was tried was Evan Shute’s harber, Roy Rickness, who was also a member of Shute’s church. “He had nothing to lose from a trial of Vitamin E,” recalled Shute, “since his cardiologist had stopped coming to see him and had left some morphine tablets to take when the pain became too severe. His legs were as swollen as they could be. His distress was so great that he could scarcely tolerate the weight of his pyjama top on his chest. He could not lie down but sat up night after night gasping for breath.
Twenty-three days after 1 started him on Vitamin E he was back playing in the London Little Theatre orchestra, working in his shop, and going fishing. When he died in the following year after yet another coronary, the autopsy showed such widespread original damage to his heart that it seemed incredible he could have lived a day.” Dr. Skelton, who worked with the Shutes as an undergraduate, is now practicing in the United States. Dr. Vogelsang remained in private practice when the Shutes formed the institute.
A frequent criticism lodged against the Shutes is that they are probably making a good thing of Vitamin E. The Shutes say that the first step they took after launching Vitamin E therapy was to disqualify themselves from any chance of profiting by it. They organized the Shute Foundation for Medical Research, a nonprofit organization accepted by the federal government as eligible for income-tax rebate for donors of funds. They asked Rev. Canon Quintín Warner, for thirty -five years rector of London’s Cronyn Memorial Anglican Church, to head the foundation. The treasurer is W. S. J. Saunders, retired city treasurer of London. Canon Warner, who said he suffered two heart attacks last year and attributes his recovery “to God and the Shutes,” told me that Evan and Wilfrid Shute are “just two of the twenty-five salaried employees” of the foundation. “They haven’t even got a contract with us as employees,” he added. “We could fire them tomorrow. Instead of Vitamin E being ‘a good thing’ for them, it has cost them a lot of money.
Evan gave up one of the biggest obstetrical practices in western Ontario to work for the foundation. What’s more, he donated all his outstanding fees, amounting to ten thousand dollars, to the foundation. Wilfrid worked for months without salary until the new foundation was on its feet. If there’s one thing the Shutes have, it is complete sincerity and belief in their work. If I were not convinced of that, I wouldn’t be chairman of the foundation.” Other laymen who have supported the Shutes have found themselves in unexpected personal controversy. Gordon L. Cohoon, a Montreal businessman, suffered a coronary attack in 1949 and has not yet recovered from its nonmedical aftermath. “In April 1949, I had a heart attack,” Cohoon related. “I was rushed to hospital in an ambulance and I mentally said farewell to my home. Two of my best friends, Frank Calder, president
of the National Hockey League, and Hon. J. L. Ralston had died of coronaries, and I did not expect to live. At the hospital I was put under twentyfour-hour nursing, and blood tests and electrocard iagrams were taken repeatedly.
“My bill was five hundred and fifty dollars a week, and the only thing I was getting was rest. I remembered reading something about the work of the Shute brothers and Vitamin E, and asked my doctors to give me the treatment. They told me it would not do me any good. Then I decided to go home. Presently I read an item describing good results obtained at Johns Hopkins Hospital with the Shute dosage of Vitamin E. I insisted that my doctor give me Vitamin E, and in a week l started to improve. A few weeks later I was able to go to my office occasionally.”
Cohoon next went to London. The Shutes examined him and increased the dose of Vitamin E. He returned home, and in a month, he said, was well enough to resume business activities where he had left off before the heart attack.
Cohoon said he felt so strongly about what the Shutes had done for him that, as a member of the Montreal Rotary Club, he suggested to the program committee that Dr. Wilfrid Shute be invited to address the club.
“At that time the chairman of the committee was a doctor, a professor of anatomy,” Coboon related. “He turned the suggestion down flatly. He said the Shute Institute was not recognized by the Canadian Medical Association. In January 1952 I went before the committee once more. There was a new chairman, and the committee voted unanimously to invite Dr. Shute to speak on March 25. The Rotary publication with that announcement reached members on March 21. There was a photograph of Dr. Shute, and an announcement that he would speak, in a Montreal newspaper of Saturday, March 22.”
The Doctors Protested
Immediately, Cohoon said, a number of doctor members of Rotary telephoned Rotary President Earl Moore or Harry Pearson, the vice-president, and demanded a special meeting of the board of management. The meeting was attended by a bare quorum of the committee, and the doctors insisted that Shute’s talk be canceled. The committee compromised by agreeing not to allow the speech to be broadcast, as was the usual practice.
“I had been asked to introduce Dr. Shute,” said Cohoon. “On the day before the meeting, some of the Shute opponents put pressure on me not to do so. It was even suggested to my sister that I might have another heart attack. When I had returned from London after visiting the Shutes, the doctor who had been treating me expressed himself as amazed at my improvement. He said he was sold on Vitamin E, and would go on any platform and say so. So now I asked him to sit at the head table at the Shute luncheon. He answered: ‘Heavens, don’t ask me to do that . . . you don’t know medical politics!’
“When Dr. Shute rose to speak, four of the doctors in the Rotary audience pointedly rose and left the room. To their credit, three others remained
and two went up to congratulate ! Dr. Shute on his speech. Having kept the speech off the air, the doctors tried to keep it out of the papers. They telephoned editors of the Montreal 1 Star, then tried to go over their heads to business associates of John MeConI nell, the publisher. What the doctors
did not know was that Mr. McConnell and a number of his staff had benefited from Shute Vitamin E treatments. That fact undoubtedly would not have influenced the Star’s coverage of Dr. Shute’s speech, but in view of the brazen attempt of these doctors to dictate first to a nonpartisan service club and next to a newspaper, the Star ran every word of Dr. Shute’s address.” A few days later the Star published the following editorial:
Montreal’s reputation as a hospitable, courteous and open-minded city suffered, we fear, some damage as a result of the controversy inside the Rotary Club and now outside of it as well over the speech made this week by Dr. Wilfrid Shute. It is not a suitable thing — putting the case mildly—to invite a reputable man to Montreal to make a speech and then to take such steps as can be taken to restrict his audience and subject him to discourtesy. Far better to cancel the invitation altogether.
Dr. Shute’s address was the use of Vitamin E in the treatment of heart disease. This is a topic of great medical controversy, one upon which there arc legitimate differences of opinion. But for some lamentable reason certain medical men feel so strongly that they are prepared to go to great lengths to prevent public discussion of it. This is not only unscientific, it also does no credit to a great and honorable profession which has done so much to push back the frontiers of medical knowledge. The advocates of the treatment in question are neither quacks nor charlatans. and, in a free society, they are entitled to have their say.
The Shute incident here is, unfortunately, not an isolated one in the record and history of medicine. Again and again the restless and enquiring mind has suffered slights and indignities at the hands of men who have refused to open new doors or even to walk through them when they have been opened by others. The life and experience of Pasteur is a striking instance of this form of obscurantism and many other examples of this same kind could be cited. How strange it is that servants of science can so easily forget the basic principles of freedom.
The Shutes do, in fact, say they derive some small comfort from the “slights and indignities” other medical pioneers have suffered. They point to William Harvey, who discovered circulation of the blood but delayed publishing his findings for twelve years because “I not only fear injury to myself from the envy of the few, but I tremble lest mankind at large become my enemy.” They also point to William Jenner who was threatened with expulsion from his medical club because he bored fellow members with talk of a method of immunizing humans against smallpox. 'They recall that colleagues called the man who discovered that mosquitoes carry malaria “Mosquito Manson” and tapped their foreheads significantly.
Referring to what they consider the most enduring of the condemnations of Vitamin E, the committee report to the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Wilfrid Shute now says: “The com-
mittee took our papers out to lunch and returned to say that Vitamin E was no good.”
A Spokesman of the College told me that the council “considered that the committee had given ample consideration to the Shutes’ documents.” He added that “a lot of propaganda is coming out of the Shute Institute.” The minutes of the meeting of the council of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, issued by that body’s registration office at 566 University Avenue, Toronto, give the following account of the meeting on November 13, 1946, as far as it
concerns the Shute enquiry: Council having reconvened at 11 a.m., the following visiting doctors answered the roll call: Dr. Evan V. Shute, London; Dr. W. E. Shute,. Guelph; Dr. E. A. Bartrara F. S. Brien of the Upivi Western Ontario; Dr. Joh and Dr. H. K. Detweilerj versity of Toronto andJMT nell and Dr. G.^Malcoff Queen’s University. *M'After a brief president, Dr. Eval^^^H^ presented certain papêYs regarding the usefulness of Vitlumn E in the treatment of cardiovascular disease. The various papers presented and also a personal diary were left with the College . . . the representatives from the three medical schools retired to consider the papers presented by Dr. Evan Shute . . . Council adjourned at 12 a.m. Council reconvened at 2 p.m. . . . the committee under the chairmanship of Dr. Cameron presented its report which was read by Dr. Bartram as follows: 1. In the papers submitted, Exhibits 9 to 15 inclusive, sufficient evidence to substantiate the given diagnosis is not provided in any of the reported cases. 2. Such evidence as is submitted in many cases would indicate diagnosis to be inaccurate. 3. On evidence submitted the committee is convinced that Vitamin E has no place in the treatment of cardiovascular disease. 4. In view of the publicity aroused by this problem we consider it advisable that an impartial clinical investigation should be conducted. In regard to diagnosis, the Shutes maintain that in ninety percent of their cases they do not make the first diagnosis, that patients usually come to them after seeing one, two or three other doctors, often specialists. In one case a woman passed through the hands of seventeen doctors before reaching the Shutes. All patients seen by the Shutes, they said, are given all recognized diagnostic and treatment procedures—plus Vitamin E. “We particularly object to the ‘inaccurate diagnosis’ charge,” said Wilfrid Shute, “if only on the ground that two of the eases we cited to the committee had previously been diagnosed by members of the committee, and a third had been diagnosed by a university colleague of one of the professors.” Whether those three specific cases were included in the doctors’ finding reported in Item No. 2 is not stated. There was, however, one point in the report which pleased the Shutes: the recommendation that an impartial test be conducted. At the next day’s meeting, the College council voted to forward the Shutes’ documents to the Ontario Department of Health with the request that the question be the subject of an enquiry as to its value. What happened next, the Shutes say, was this: they were informed by the late Hon. Russell Kelley, Ontario Minister of Health, that he had arranged with a prominent Toronto doctor to meet the Shutes at Queen’s Park to arrange the tests. The Shutes came to Toronto and waited with Kelley for the other doctor to arrive. When he did not arrive half an hour after the appointed time, the Minister started telephoning. According to the Shutes, the doctor could not be located at home, at his office, at any hospital or at the university. Nobody at any of those places knew where he was, where he could be reached, or when he was expected. “He had,” said Wilfrid Shute shortly, “disappeared.”
The next time the Shutes were in j Toronto they called on Kelley to ! enquire into the progress of the proposed tost. This time, they say, Kelley replied:
“Two medical officers have warned me that if 1 went through with tiie idea of a test there would lie a line-up of doctors stretching from Queen’s Park to the Toronto waterfront nil demanding mv resignation.”
The Shutes question the Toronto General Hospital test on several grounds. In the first place, they maintain, if it was meant to be a test of tiie Shute method, the Shutes’ method should have been used, or, preferably, t1 . Shutes should have been asked to participate in the test. They maintain that the Toronto General Hospital death rate in these heartfailure cases was higher than the normal death rate, with or without Vitamin E, suggesting “that pci*'.Ie in the last stages of the disease were used in the test.” They claiiil that, in comparison with the hospital’s loss of eleven out of fifty heart-failure patients in seven months, theShute Institute lost thirteen heart-failure cases out of one hundred and ninety-eight in twentyseven months.
in a lest of the Shute Vitamin E method, Dr. Wilfrid Shute suggests, at least half the patients should be “walking cases.” Since more than half the patients in average stages of the disease are able to get around, this would still test Vitamin E on worse1 han-average patients. The Shutes should be allowed to examine the patients and prescribe the initial dose, re-examine them in four weeks and adjust the dose if necessary, he adds.
Both Shutes say these conditions are necessary because a number of factors affect dosage an^l procedures in individual patients. For example, iron intake reduces the efficiency of Vitamin E; a patient receiving insulin ! might be in danger of insulin shock ■ if Vitamin E were administered without warning and supervision, since Vitamin E often greatly reduces the patient’s insulin requirements. Blood 1 pressure is elevated by Vitamin E at I first., and patients with high blood pressure must be launched on Vita¡ min E gradually. A number of other conditions affect the Shutes’ Vitamin E therapy, and none ol these were taken into consideration, they say, in the Toronto test.
Moreover, the patients in that series were given a flat three hundred international units of the vitamin daily, while in the Shutes’ own practice the prescribed amount, j depending on individual ro moments, might vary from one ha id red to six hundred units per day. One of the criticisms made of the Shutes is that Vitamin E i much like Old Doc Wampum’s Se .lo —good for too man', disease. i*he Shutes admit with a smile that it is j almost embarrassing when a research scientist somewhere ia the world comes up with a new disease or condition on which he has got good with *Vitamin E. But they point out that they have no control over the effects of Vitamin E—thai t hey did not for that matter, even discover the stuff themselves—and Uiat they an only j follow where Vitamin E loads. The Shutes’ theory of the action of Vitamin E on coronary i V-'n-n the most lethai member of the heart disease family, is this: A clot forms in an artery near the heart, partially or wholly cutting off the ingredient which all muscles need for coal.mied operation, blood oxygen. Deprived of oxygen, the top layer of cells in the area which depends wholly on the blood supply from that arterv lies and scar tissue is formed to replace them. The poisons generated by * he cells in dying “choke” the next underlying layer of cells, and its oxygen supply becomes inadequate for the carrying ouf of normal or near-normal functions. The A at of the damage is in direct relationship to the tissues’ requirement of oxygen. And that is wher*Vitamin E enters, the Shutes claim.
By reducing, through some unknown means, the amount of oxygen a cell requires for normal function, Vitamin E minimizes the damage caused by oxy gen deprivation. It enables cells to carry on with a smaller supply of oxygen than a Vitamin -Edepriced cell needs, say the Shutes. But Vitamin E is credited by them with ai least two other virtues of interest to the potential heart victim: It hastens the formation of su p pie me n•y B> deprived areas j - ‘„M.* -
body rushes the construction of emergency blo«*d vessels to a danger spot; ir.d Vitamin E dissolves blood clots.
To t housands c/AJanadians who have 10 intention of thinking about their îearts for years to come, another tspecl of Vitamin E will be of absorbng iniercs-1. Vitamin E, according to it least one noted coach and lay «pert on health, seems to have a ^markable effect on athletic perJQuee years ago Lloyd PerTJff Canada’s nationwide and adviser on condition : he Detroit Red Wings
hockey club, put ( he club on Vitando E. It. was three years ago that the Red Wings, admittedly an assortment of very good hockey plav« s, startl'd to mak«* a shambles of the National . Hockey Lf1 ague.
Percival considers able test of Vitamin ! out-on a young won Galasso. The boy condition as “poo| durance, recoverypoor, strength low ¡is most remarkwas that carried 1 be athlete, Pat i rat« d in puerai . uemely lov m from effm > ' * .*ry This was after
three years of athletic training, during which he had reacted the high level
of his extremely modest capacities. After running four hundred and forty yards it took him three hours cad twenty minutes to regain his normal pulse rate. He could do ninetee n feet two and a half inches in running broad jump, averaged G.3 seconds for the fifty-yard sprint., and had to quit a distance run at three quarters of a mile. He was then put on three hundred international units of Vitamin E per day. 1 n two weeks he recovered normal pulse after exertion six times as fast, added seven and üirt>e quarter inches to his broad jump, cut his fifty-yard time to 5.7 seconds, and ran one and two third miles. Instead of his previous reaction of pallor, nans, a, head acne, and extreme discomfort in cla st Galasso declared he felt ‘real good, better than I ever have.” In his next test, hr improved again in every department, and the pattern continued for four muro tests. Then Vitamin E was withdrawn. To prevent any chance of a psychological let-down, he was given capsules which looked the same, but contained no active ingredient. His performance immediately dropped. Back on Vitamin E, it went Cp again. The next time he was deprived of Vitamin E. his performance took a month to deteriorate. When Vitamin E was restored fur two more months, the youth actually went out and won the eastern Canada broad jump with a leap of twenty-one feet ten and three-quarter inches the best broad jump made m Canada in 1951. He ran second in the eastern Canada fifty-yard championship, in the fastest race he had ever run in his life. Last year Galasso now a student al ( jueen’s University, again won the eastern Can ad; broad jump. Tobias Won the Mile Another case that Percival considera remarkable is that, of Charlie Tobias, a member of Percival’s track team “At the 1951 interechobstic track meet at New York 'Tobins couldn't do thing,” said Percival. “He worked hard, tried hard, but he lost weight and his legs became heavy, i cap only describe his performance .-. dismaj. In preparation for the 19)2 me«;ting, Tobias didn’t look any better. Three weeks before we left for New York”T started him on Vitamin K. The result was nothing short of amazingTobias won the mile.” The patient of whom the Shutes are proudest is their own mother. At seventy-two Mrs. Shute senior had severe heart trouble, was unable to walk across a room. She became only second patient te be treated with Vitamin E—and according to them one of the most spectacular. “It was,” she ; ’ like a miracle, i was so much better that 1 ccald do things I hadn’t done for years - -even tend the furnace.” Now seventy-eight, Mrs. Shute is spry and active. “if,” says Evan Shute, ‘giving our mother those additional years of happy and useful life wnc the only results of all that we have gone through—then it has been fully worth it.” Meanwhile the controversy continues unabated. The only thing a layman can certain of is that the opponents of Vitamin E still far outnumber its advocates. A group of heartspecialists, asked for their opinions on Vitamin E, declined to comment for publication on the grounds, as two of them put it. that it was “better to let the claims die down than to answer them.” Medical advisors to the Heart Foundation of Ontario also had no statement to make on Vitamin E. said one «fêtai
THE FIGHT OVER VITAMINE | Maclean's | JUNE 15, 1953
archive.macleans.ca
OR THREE YEARS now a Huntsville, Ont., lumber wholesaler named Patrick Mcllroy has been keeping a grim box score. In that time thirty-three of his friends—local residents and summer home owners in that Muskoka resort area—have suffered heart attacks. Twenty of them have recovered, thirteen have died. “The twenty who are alive,” Mcllroy told me, “were treated with Vitamin E. The thirteen who are dead were not treated with Vitamin E.”
Mcllroy takes more than the average layman"« interest in the fate of his friends because he credits Vitamin E with saving his own life, and he has become an enthusiastic missionary for Vitamin E. “I was as near death as a man can be,” he said. “My doctor said there was nothing more he could do for me. I had about twentyfour hours to live when Dr. Wilfrid Shute, vacationing nearby, was called. That was three years ago. Today I’m not only alive, but pretty spry for a man of sixty-four.” By believing that Vitamin E saved his life, and by saying so to others, Mcllroy has taken sides in one of the most violent and baffling controversies in the history of Canadian medicine. The basic battle lines of the controversy are well defined:
On the one hand, Dr. Evan Shute and Dr. Wilfrid Shute of the Shute Institute for Clinical and Laboratory Medicine, London, Ont., claim that Vitamin E administered according to their procedures is an effective treatment for diseases of the heart and blood vessels. They claim that in the last seven years they have treated ten thousand persons with “excellent” to “satisfactory” results in more than three out of four cases. They say they havé collected one hundred and twenty-eight papers published in medical and scientific journals in the United States, Britain, Italy and other countries describing clinical and laboratory tests of Vitamin E which partly err wholly support their findings. The Shutes claim that they offer the full documentation of their methods, experiences and case histories to any doctor or medical group as well as offering for examination and interview all their patients who agree to be examined and questioned.
Many other Canadian doctors, eminently qualified and eminently reputable, either discount the Shutes’ claims for Vitamin E entirely or maintain that the claims have not yet been scientifically proved.
Seven months after the Shutes started to use Vitamin E on their heart patients, they were summoned before the Council of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, the governing body of all physicians practicing in Ontario. The Shutes submitted briefs, case histories and a diary of their experiences with Vitamin E. These documents the council turned over to a committee of six medical professors, two each from the Universities of Western Ontario, Toronto and Queen’s. On the same day the committee made its report:
“On evidence submitted the committee is convinced that Vitamin E has no place in the treatment of cardiovascular (heart and blood vessel) disease.”
Two years later a test was conducted at Toronto
These two doctors claim that a vegetable ex*helps many heart cases and in rr thousand patients. Bui substance has not been i A toyman examines
A BONUS-LENGTH FEATURE
f*.» ».il tltiíii i^WviíU I
doctors say it’s useless, these people are convinced that Vitamin E helped them
.. Of ftfty consecutive patients admitted with various conditions resulting in heart failure, half were given a daily dosage of three*" hundred international units of Vitamin E. The other half were given capsules similar in appearance but containing no active ingredient. When the test had proceeded for seven months a report was issued stating that there was no significant difference in the death rate (five in one group, six in the other;, or process of recovery between the group treated with Vitamin E and the group not so treated.
The Shutes regard the report of the professors to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, and the Toronto General Hospital report, as the reasons why the majority of Canadian ' doctors do not prescribe Vitamin E, why Vitamin E therapy is not taught in Canadian medical schools, and why little research is being done on the effects of Vitamin E in this country. They deny the validity of both reports but meanwhile they claim to he treating more cardiovascular patients every year, with “living proof” of success in more than three out of four cases.
Dr. W. F. Greenwood, who conducted the hospital test, recently stated that he had followed up the patients involved in the test for several months after the report was made public and had “found no reason to modify the original findings.”
Perhaps the strangest fact about the Vitamin E controversy is that seven years after it started it remains current and hot. As this is written, two groups of English doctors are politely calling each other names in the austere columns of The Lancet, the widely known British medical journal, over the question of whether Vil am in E is good for intermittent claudication.
This disease belongs in the vascular branch of cardiovascular diseases. It results in severe crippling pain and weakness in the legs, caused by arteriosclerosis or by spasm of the blood vessels, due to an inadequate supply of blood to the muscles. Dr. A. M. Boyd, professor of surgery of Manchester University, checking a claim made by the Shutes that Vitamin E helped intermittent claudication, formed a team with three medical associates, Dr. R. P. Jepson, Dr. A. H. Ratcliffe and Dr. G. W. H. James, to put Vitamin E to the test.. They published in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery their finding that Vitamin E “is the only substance that has given consistently good results ... of seventy-two patients, twenty-seven were completely relieved and thirty-two were markedly improved.”
Next, Dr. M. Hamilton of St. Mary’s Hospital, London, Dr. G. M. Wilson of the University of Sheffield, and two members of the statistical unit of the Medical Research Council, divided forty-one patients with intermittent claudication into treatment and control groups. One group was given “blank” capsules containing peanut oil, the other got Vitamin E in similar capsules. This medical team reported in The Lancet:
“No appreciable difference was found between tiie response of the two groups. It is concluded that Vitamin E is of no value in the treatment of intermittent claudication.”
Since then both groups have written to The Lancet, Professor Boyd and Co. (a) defending Vitamin E’s efficacy and (b) attacking Dr. Uami1 ton’s “negative methods”; Dr. Hamilton and his associai os (a) attacking Vitamin E and (b) defending their clinical methods.
On the layman’s level, however, it is difficult for a man like Cyril Ford, of 83 Laws Street, Toronto, to agree that “Vitamin E is of no value in the treatment of intermittent claudication.” Ford is a postman, a strapping six feet three inches lall and weighing more than two hundred pounds. Last Christmas was anything but a festive season for Ford; at the time when his bag was heaviest, his legs gave out from intermittent claudication. He was in imminent danger of having to quit his job, since he could scarcely hobble three blocks.
“It was torture,” Ford told me. “I was like a man with one leg three inches shorter than the other. In fact, 1 was completely crippled.”
Mrs. Ford, a former nurse, heard from her sistet,
a Windsor, Ont., nurse, of cases of intermittent claudication she had seen relieved by Vitamin E.
Ford visited the Shutes and was put on Vitamin E, he told me. “Two weeks later the pain was gone,” he added. I spoke to Ford on April 17, a few minutes after his return from an early vacation.
“Day before yesterday,” he told me, “I climbed seven miles up and down through Mammoth Cave, Kentucky—without so much as a twinge of pain.”
Again from the layman’s viewpoint, it might seem a fairly simple matter to determine, once and for all, whether a specific substance checks certain diseases. But hundreds of laboratory and clinical experiments still leave Vitamin E a controversial subject. Recently Distillation Products Industries, manufacturers of basic vitamin materials and a division of Eastman Kodak Co., of Rochester,
N.Y., issued a compilation of all known Vitamin E research throughout the world during 1950 and 1951—some six hundred medical, chemical, pharmacological and veterinary findings. There were forty-five reports on cardiovascular diseases by researchers other than the Shutes, thirty-eight of them wholly or partly favorable to Vitamin E, seven of them derogatory.
It was typical of these reports that while Dr. V. R. O’Connor felt called upon to report in Medical World “twenty-five case histories, illustrative of many others, showing the invariable and sometimes dramatic beneficial effects of Vitamin E treatment of various types of heart disease,” Dr. S. H. Rinzler and his associates, after testing nineteen pairs of patients with chest pains from heart disease, found that “the results fail to indicate benefits of Vitamin E.”
There the baffled layman might well let the matter lie as just another case of “the doctors disagree”—if the dispute were over some rare or obscure disease. But it. happens that the diseases which the Shutes claim to combat, by methods they say any general practitioner could master in a very short time, are the diseases which today kill more people than any other single cause of death. This year forty thousand Canadians will die of cardiovascular diseases. In the past fifteen years cardiovascular diseases have killed, on the average, a thousand more Canadians each year than during the previous year.
Getting By on Less Oxygen
Vitamin E, the subject of this life-or-death controversy, is a highly concentrated vegetable product made by distillation from wheat germ, soy beans, margarine byproducts and other vegetable sources. One carload of raw material is converted into two and one fift h pounds of Vitamin E.
It has one noncontroversial use: It is a fertility agent in fact, it was first known as the fertility vitamin. It is also used by a number of obstetricians against pre-natal complications.
The Shutes’ theory about Vitamin E is this: It is not specifically a heart medication; that is,
Vitamin E has no affinity for the heart as insulin has for the pancreas or iodine for the thyroid gland.
The chief effect of Vitamin E is to reduce the amount of oxygen which the cells and tissues of the body and its organs require for efficient, healthy functioning. Heart diseases happen to be the most dramatic example of the result of oxygen deprivation, and Vitamin E’s effect, simply stated, is to condition the tissues involved so that they are able to function normally, or at any rate to survive, on the greatly reduced amount of oxygen available to them when a coronary clot cuts down the oxygen-bearing blood supply reaching them.
Even more simply stated, it is as though a ma$ suddenly found himself able to obtain only onê meal a month. Normally, he would quickly di* *
of starvation. But if he could find a pill whicn reduced his body’s need for food to one. meal á g¡
month, then his extremely limited food/ wipply would not cause disaster.
In keeping with their theory ^1?:’Vitamin É enables body cells to survive ^gl^ftincüon on à reduced oxygen supply, the investigators claim it is ey of other conditions: burns, wounds, radiation damage, gangrene, ulceration, phlebitis, Buerger’s disease (which atllicted King George VI before his fatal illness), diabetes and its complications, nephritis, eye diseases, psychoses, dementias, post-surgical shock, plastic surgery and post-poliomyelitis. Many other doctors—some of whom have spent a lifetime in heart research —are extremely doubtful that any single substance has such wide “cureall” values.
In the nonmedical field, Lloyd Pereival, well-known Canadian athletic coach, investigator of physical performance factors and lay expert on nutrition, has carried out extensive tests of Vitamin E with results he describes as “quite amazing.”
In spite of official medical disapproval, use of Vitamin E in Canada represents a million-dollar business. Allan A. Webber, the president of
Webber Pharmaceuticals Ltd., Toronto, told me that last year’s sales of all brands of Vitamin E capsules were estimated at one million two hundred thousand dollars. This represents three million to five million doses of the size usually given daily by the Shutes to patients under full treatment for cardiovascular diseases. Before 1946, when the Shutes announced successful treatment of heart cases with Vitamin E, the vitamin was not readily available, Webber said, and sales were negligible. In the past five years sales of Vitamin E capsules have
increased an average of fifteen percent each year. ’There was no way of determining, he added, how much of the vitamin was bought for heart medication.
Since the Shutes had said that they knew of only one doctor in Toronto who publicly approved of Vitamin E therapy, I told Webber that his sales figures sounded as though wholesale self-dosing was being carried out, by the public.
“’That’s not so,” he answered. “The doctors may not speak out about j Vitamin E, but we know that in ¡ ’Toronto f.wenty-eight percent of the doctors in general practice approve of ! it and prescribe it.” He showed me | a survey of eight hundred ’Toronto doctors, made for the company’s own information, in which two hundred anti twenty-eight made comments on Vitamin E ranging from “spectacular” to “if seems to give some heart patients a lift.” A few years ago, Webber added, some of the doctors who now spoke favorably of Vitamin E to the man who made the survey “had thrown him out of their offices when he mentioned Vitamin E.”
I also examined a file of fifteen | hundred orders from doctors in till j parts of Canada for Vitamin E in j quantities ranging from three hundred j to six thousand capsules. But most doctors do not liny their supplies direct j from the manufacturer, Webber said, j ’They order from drug wholesalers or surgical supply houses.
There is evidence that a substantial number of Canadian doctors have not accepted the verdict issued by the committee of medical professors apI pointed by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario — the only verdict from an official medical body in this country that “Vitamin E has no place in the treatment of cardiovascular disease.”
But there is also evidence that the verdict, whether right or wrong, has had the effect of driving Vitamin E “underground ” 1 spoke to some
doctors on the survey list who were willing to confirm their success with Vitamin E but only on a promise that their names would not be used.
I spoke to an eminent physicist, a man largely responsible for a major Canadian contribution to the secret armament of World War Tl. He had personally found in Vitamin E such a source of physical and mental endurance and efficiency that he had expressed the opinion that in a close war Vitamin E supplied to key personnel might actually make the difference between victory and defeat. I asked him if he would tell his story. He thought the matter over and then replied:
“No. 1 would like to, because it is truly remarkable. But somehow the medical profession has managed to give the impression that anyone who believes in Vitamin E is . . . well, slightly in the screwball class. I just don’t feel that I should expose myself to the inevitable comments if 1 speak openly.”
A London manufacturer told me that after long treatment for coronary thrombosis by his own doctor he had collapsed last August. He said that after his doctor had told him Vitamin E would not help he called in the Shutes. “1 find it hard to describe the result,” he said. “A person would have to come back from death to understand. All I can say is that I’m alive, l walk, I drive my car. I’ve got a long way to go yet, but what has happened already is wonderful, wonderful.”
Then he and his wife asked me not to use his name. “There are two doctors in the family connection,” she explained, “and it would distress them very much.”
Senator Arthur W. Roebuck commented last December in the Senate on a personal experience with this aspect of what he described as “the row in the medical profession over Vitamin E.” “There was a case of heart attack in my own family,” Senator Roebuck said, “and two separate people told me that their doctors had told them to use Vitamin E, but not to tell anybody that a medical person had advised it. Well, Vitamin E was used in my house and 1 saw a marked and immediate response to it. The individual 1 have in mind has as a result of it been working for the past year.” The occasion of Senator Roebuck’s comment was a sitting of the Senate Committee on Public Health and Welfare. The matter under review did not directly concern Vitamin E, but Evan Shute was among those who testified, and under questioning by the senators the sitting developed into the nearest approach to a legislative hearing on the I subject yet held. Senator MeCuire asked Shute: “Can you give me any idea of the cause of the prejudice existing among physicians in respect of Vitamin E?” “You are asking one of the most dreadful questions you could ask,” answered Shute. “I am frank enough to give you some of the answers but not all. 1 think that many men spoke too soon, and speaking too soon they can never retract. If a great man or group of men makes a pontifical statement it can hardly retract without losing face.” “Hear, hear,” said Senator Haig, “we all know that.” “Even politicians,” commented Sena tor Euler drily. Only One Invitation Shute told the Senate Committee that before 1946 he had often been invited to address county medical societies, but since the announcement I of Vitamin E heart therapy they had j received only one such invitation, from the Lambton County Society of Sarnia, j Ont. “When this society sent in the usual request for a ten-dollar subsidy for visiting speakers’ expenses to the Ontario Medical Association,” said Shute,“its secretary was told by the secretary of the association that they disapproved of the county society hearing the Shutes and that this grant would not be forthcoming. The secretary of the Lambton County Society asked that this denial be pufc'Tn writing and intimated that the, Shates»¡.would lx* asked to appear in Iwtty Tcsme.' ’The ! grant was but j no letter.” X')* f I )r. Shute» gat { ■ Comma ,i;tho point: • - ás ‘ " be '¿npáwe’h Vitamin E^Më^jgmg Vv..s by the Cana Médical AstadûJ-110111 Journal, rtlt^xoughoThe La agrogflfe siavutive Vritbth medical periecbm1pubiiKhed t aßhute art iules neo . 4-1 •’ ! use of Vijsjani^ R for heart di&2mjgi|i reject** by..the CM A J.Mirnal^^j» six taunt pfTbeing read by THO^BCÍ i’r (An'i-nëeia*!tdtóí jtk» 1a I ement »published as a-su \>plementr$j> article touAert^».fjjaf i hr papel* was rejected because, Iff/was by a ¡ naad for edit to puff .-at K-u.” ; When an U»>|jfcgikt^nadian I'liuation d article by.t,V JrShut.es, thcjHj^^n& the ét^jpjr ^ describing clinical,,^*rf|nd dosage^ : Vitamin E the oj&fô Y itamin E. t bei*jpy bird I in the Journal of ffleA^fipan Medical Association, thd Journal of Obstetric* i and Gynaecology of ti » p ifcjsh Empire, V ci.,
the official organs of t he American College of Physicians and the American College of Surgeons, “and in many other leading journals in the English j language.” Shute told the senators that he and his brother had difficulty in getting other doctors to look at interesting hospital cases. On one occasion a woman developed a phlebitis in the thigh after an operation. Evan Shute put her on Vitamin FI and posted a memo on the hospital notice board: “Mrs. of ward five has consented to permit any physician to watch the progress of her case. She developed a phlebitis in the right thigh this morning and she is getting nothing except Vitamin lí.“ Two doctors of the one hundred and fifty or so in London came to see her j in the five days it took to clear up j her condition, said Shute. He added: “Everyone knows that ordinarily phlebitis cannot he cured in that time.”
The first time the Shutes got an audience of five hundred Canadian doctors before them, at a CM A convention at Ottawa a few years ago, they did not confine themselves to the ; clinical aspects of Vitamin lí therapy. Evan Shute told the doctors: “Some j of our loudest critics are taking Vitaj min lí themselves. Many dispense Vitamin F', but will not sign a prescription for it. Many doctors, returned to practice on Vitamin lí after coronaries disabled them, are ashamed to admit the source of their help, even to their closest friends.”
The Shutes say they have a number of examples of what they call “the private friends but public enemies of Vitamin E.” They say that a doctor who is friendly to them told of sharing a room at a medical convention with a noted Montreal internist who is a bitter critic of the Shutes. One day the Shutes’ friend entered the bathroom, not knowing that his roommate, the internist, was there, j The latter hastily slipped something : into his pocket, but not before if was | recognized as a container of Vitamin Fi j capsules by the other, who said: “Think i nothing of it 1 use the same brand.” '
The Shutes said they learned recently that enough Vitamin lí was being regularly supplied to a certain hospital to provide full doses for sixteen persons daily. 'Thinking that a test might be under way, and being interested in the outcome, they made discreet enquiries. A member of the hospital staff reported to them: “No patients are getting Vitamin lí that’s j the doctors’ personal supply.” Wilfrid Shute said that a represen! tative of a Windsor, Ont., drug supply \ house asked him recently: “How is i it that although London is supposed to be the world capital of Vitamin lí, it’s not sold in the city?” Wilfrid said he answered that of course Vitamin lí was sold in every London drugstore. “Then why is it,” demanded the other, “that so many London doctors send to Windsor to have their orders filled?” 'The Shutes syy that approximately one hundred and eighty doctors and their families, about half of 1 hem Canadian, are under the care of the brothers and receiving Vitamin lí therapy. Hut they add that they can practically count on the fingers of one hand the number of Canadian doctors who have seen fit to support the Shutes and Vitamin lí publicly. A clue to ibis situation was hinted at by a 'Toronto doctor who told me: “If it were possible to separate the Shutes and Vitamin lí, there would probably he no controversy over its use.” Strangely enough, the Shutes agree with that view.
1 “Perhaps,” said Jivun Shute, “the discovery was never to blame—just the discoverers.”
It is true that the .Shutes are probably not the easiest people for medical dignitaries to deal with. Both were wrestling and boxing champions during their student days at the University of Toronto, and they are outspoken, emphatic men. They have been known to raise their voices, to pound tables, to speak somewhat less than diplomatically to unconvinced colleagues.
“As a matter of fact,” Wilfrid Shute says, “we used to be as meek and naive as anybody could wish. But we found out what we were up against, when we recovered from the immediate blast which greeted our first announcement that we had found Vitamin E good for heart disease, we just had to toughen up. If we hadn’t Vitamin E would have been dead and buried long ago. As it is we feel that if we live to be ninety and keep fighting every minute we may yet live to see Vitamin E therapy accepted in Canada for what it is: Canada’s greatest single
contribution to medicine, not excluding insulin.”
The private lives of the Shutes are the reverse of their stormy professional careers. Evan, forty-seven, is an ordained minister of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints. This is not the Mormon church, he is careful to point out, but the original group which remained in the east when the pioneers who were to become the Mormons headed for Utah.
Evan not only preaches regularly, but is a poet and essayist who has published seven volumes under the name Vere Jameson. He was something of an infant prodigy. He had his high-school entrance at nine, and his medical degree at twenty-one.
Wilfrid Shute is forty-five, and is married to Dot Prior, a former swimming champion who represented Canada in two Olympic Games. In conversation with him, the surest way to change the topic from Vitamin E is to mention dogs. He breeds Doberman pinschers, and claims to have one of the three best Doberman kennels on the continent.
The Shutes resent the effect the Vitamin E controversy has had on the private lives of their families. “I have not been called in for consultation on my specialty, obstetrics, since 1946, although 1 was frequently called before,” said Evan Shute. “I can take that—but it hurts me that my wife has not been invited to a medical tea in six years. Seldom does a day pass when Wilfrid or I are not subjected to some sort of insulting remark by other doctors at the hospitals where we have patients. Frankly, the whole thing baffles us. We honestly believe we have something very valuable, and we’re doing our best to give it away to the whole medical profession. We just can’t understand why that makes so many doctors mad at us.”
Evan Shute said that he first encountered Vitamin E in 1933 when he went to London, Ont., to practice. Dr. Earl Watson of Victoria Hospital had read a paper in The Lancet by the Danish researcher, Vogt-Moller, suggesting the use of Vitamin E for the treatment of habitual abortion. Watson prepared an extract of E-rich oil and gave samples to a number of obstetricians, including Shute, to test its efficiency. Shortly afterward Shute was given a Banting Fellowship to investigate what was responsible for poor anchorage of the afterbirth in abortion and miscarriage. He concluded that the condition was due to excess of female sex hormone in the blood, and discovered that Vitamin E appeared to
neutralize the action of the hormone.
The next step, said Shute, was his finding that a high hormone content appeared to delay normal clotting of blood. He suggestftisciO a medical student, Floyd Skeàl prohat he try to produce bleeding agh the tissues and capillaries of >se ;s by injecting female sex hormone. SWhen bleeding was produced, Vitamin E was used in an attempt to correct it, following the previous finding of E’s effect on the hormone. “Vitamin E both cured and prevented bleeding in experimental animals,” said Shute.
Shute and Skelton then sought a human subject with purpura, or bleeding of the skin, mucous membranes and body cavities. They found a patient of Dr. Arthur Vogelsang wit1 a purpura, and with Vogelsang’s cooperation treated him with Vitamin F. The man had not been operated on because he had a severe heart condition.
“A w'eek later,” related Shute, “Dr. Vogelsang made his regular call on the patient and found his bed empty. Ue complained to the nurse that he should be told immediately when a patient of his died. The nurse pointed to the other end of the ward, where the man was helping nurses carry bedpans. 1 turned out that the patient’s heart, condition had been helped more than his purpura.”
Dr. Vogelsang, who says he is “no longer associated with the Shutes or with any institute, clinic, foundation or drug company,” may now be described as a “conservative advocate” of Vitamin E. “As the person who first noted the beneficial effect of Vitamin E on heart disease and Buerger’s disease,” he said, “I can state that many cases of certain types of heart and arterial disorders will respond to proper treatment with E, often in combination with conventional agents.
But this treatment is a form of chemotherapy—the use of a chemical to obtain a therapeutic effect. There is no logical reason to believe that heart or arterial diseases are caused by a dietary deficiency of Vitamin E, and therefore 1 prefer to call the stuff by its chemical name, alphatocopherol. It can l>e dangerous in inexperienced hands, and therefore I deplore publicity which might tempt laymen to start selftreatment with Vitamin E.”
The next patient on whom Vitamin E was tried was Evan Shute’s harber, Roy Rickness, who was also a member of Shute’s church. “He had nothing to lose from a trial of Vitamin E,” recalled Shute, “since his cardiologist had stopped coming to see him and had left some morphine tablets to take when the pain became too severe. His legs were as swollen as they could be. His distress was so great that he could scarcely tolerate the weight of his pyjama top on his chest. He could not lie down but sat up night after night gasping for breath.
Twenty-three days after 1 started him on Vitamin E he was back playing in the London Little Theatre orchestra, working in his shop, and going fishing. When he died in the following year after yet another coronary, the autopsy showed such widespread original damage to his heart that it seemed incredible he could have lived a day.” Dr. Skelton, who worked with the Shutes as an undergraduate, is now practicing in the United States. Dr. Vogelsang remained in private practice when the Shutes formed the institute.
A frequent criticism lodged against the Shutes is that they are probably making a good thing of Vitamin E. The Shutes say that the first step they took after launching Vitamin E therapy was to disqualify themselves from any chance of profiting by it. They organized the Shute Foundation for Medical Research, a nonprofit organization accepted by the federal government as eligible for income-tax rebate for donors of funds. They asked Rev. Canon Quintín Warner, for thirty -five years rector of London’s Cronyn Memorial Anglican Church, to head the foundation. The treasurer is W. S. J. Saunders, retired city treasurer of London. Canon Warner, who said he suffered two heart attacks last year and attributes his recovery “to God and the Shutes,” told me that Evan and Wilfrid Shute are “just two of the twenty-five salaried employees” of the foundation. “They haven’t even got a contract with us as employees,” he added. “We could fire them tomorrow. Instead of Vitamin E being ‘a good thing’ for them, it has cost them a lot of money.
Evan gave up one of the biggest obstetrical practices in western Ontario to work for the foundation. What’s more, he donated all his outstanding fees, amounting to ten thousand dollars, to the foundation. Wilfrid worked for months without salary until the new foundation was on its feet. If there’s one thing the Shutes have, it is complete sincerity and belief in their work. If I were not convinced of that, I wouldn’t be chairman of the foundation.” Other laymen who have supported the Shutes have found themselves in unexpected personal controversy. Gordon L. Cohoon, a Montreal businessman, suffered a coronary attack in 1949 and has not yet recovered from its nonmedical aftermath. “In April 1949, I had a heart attack,” Cohoon related. “I was rushed to hospital in an ambulance and I mentally said farewell to my home. Two of my best friends, Frank Calder, president
of the National Hockey League, and Hon. J. L. Ralston had died of coronaries, and I did not expect to live. At the hospital I was put under twentyfour-hour nursing, and blood tests and electrocard iagrams were taken repeatedly.
“My bill was five hundred and fifty dollars a week, and the only thing I was getting was rest. I remembered reading something about the work of the Shute brothers and Vitamin E, and asked my doctors to give me the treatment. They told me it would not do me any good. Then I decided to go home. Presently I read an item describing good results obtained at Johns Hopkins Hospital with the Shute dosage of Vitamin E. I insisted that my doctor give me Vitamin E, and in a week l started to improve. A few weeks later I was able to go to my office occasionally.”
Cohoon next went to London. The Shutes examined him and increased the dose of Vitamin E. He returned home, and in a month, he said, was well enough to resume business activities where he had left off before the heart attack.
Cohoon said he felt so strongly about what the Shutes had done for him that, as a member of the Montreal Rotary Club, he suggested to the program committee that Dr. Wilfrid Shute be invited to address the club.
“At that time the chairman of the committee was a doctor, a professor of anatomy,” Coboon related. “He turned the suggestion down flatly. He said the Shute Institute was not recognized by the Canadian Medical Association. In January 1952 I went before the committee once more. There was a new chairman, and the committee voted unanimously to invite Dr. Shute to speak on March 25. The Rotary publication with that announcement reached members on March 21. There was a photograph of Dr. Shute, and an announcement that he would speak, in a Montreal newspaper of Saturday, March 22.”
The Doctors Protested
Immediately, Cohoon said, a number of doctor members of Rotary telephoned Rotary President Earl Moore or Harry Pearson, the vice-president, and demanded a special meeting of the board of management. The meeting was attended by a bare quorum of the committee, and the doctors insisted that Shute’s talk be canceled. The committee compromised by agreeing not to allow the speech to be broadcast, as was the usual practice.
“I had been asked to introduce Dr. Shute,” said Cohoon. “On the day before the meeting, some of the Shute opponents put pressure on me not to do so. It was even suggested to my sister that I might have another heart attack. When I had returned from London after visiting the Shutes, the doctor who had been treating me expressed himself as amazed at my improvement. He said he was sold on Vitamin E, and would go on any platform and say so. So now I asked him to sit at the head table at the Shute luncheon. He answered: ‘Heavens, don’t ask me to do that . . . you don’t know medical politics!’
“When Dr. Shute rose to speak, four of the doctors in the Rotary audience pointedly rose and left the room. To their credit, three others remained
and two went up to congratulate ! Dr. Shute on his speech. Having kept the speech off the air, the doctors tried to keep it out of the papers. They telephoned editors of the Montreal 1 Star, then tried to go over their heads to business associates of John MeConI nell, the publisher. What the doctors
did not know was that Mr. McConnell and a number of his staff had benefited from Shute Vitamin E treatments. That fact undoubtedly would not have influenced the Star’s coverage of Dr. Shute’s speech, but in view of the brazen attempt of these doctors to dictate first to a nonpartisan service club and next to a newspaper, the Star ran every word of Dr. Shute’s address.” A few days later the Star published the following editorial:
Montreal’s reputation as a hospitable, courteous and open-minded city suffered, we fear, some damage as a result of the controversy inside the Rotary Club and now outside of it as well over the speech made this week by Dr. Wilfrid Shute. It is not a suitable thing — putting the case mildly—to invite a reputable man to Montreal to make a speech and then to take such steps as can be taken to restrict his audience and subject him to discourtesy. Far better to cancel the invitation altogether.
Dr. Shute’s address was the use of Vitamin E in the treatment of heart disease. This is a topic of great medical controversy, one upon which there arc legitimate differences of opinion. But for some lamentable reason certain medical men feel so strongly that they are prepared to go to great lengths to prevent public discussion of it. This is not only unscientific, it also does no credit to a great and honorable profession which has done so much to push back the frontiers of medical knowledge. The advocates of the treatment in question are neither quacks nor charlatans. and, in a free society, they are entitled to have their say.
The Shute incident here is, unfortunately, not an isolated one in the record and history of medicine. Again and again the restless and enquiring mind has suffered slights and indignities at the hands of men who have refused to open new doors or even to walk through them when they have been opened by others. The life and experience of Pasteur is a striking instance of this form of obscurantism and many other examples of this same kind could be cited. How strange it is that servants of science can so easily forget the basic principles of freedom.
The Shutes do, in fact, say they derive some small comfort from the “slights and indignities” other medical pioneers have suffered. They point to William Harvey, who discovered circulation of the blood but delayed publishing his findings for twelve years because “I not only fear injury to myself from the envy of the few, but I tremble lest mankind at large become my enemy.” They also point to William Jenner who was threatened with expulsion from his medical club because he bored fellow members with talk of a method of immunizing humans against smallpox. 'They recall that colleagues called the man who discovered that mosquitoes carry malaria “Mosquito Manson” and tapped their foreheads significantly.
Referring to what they consider the most enduring of the condemnations of Vitamin E, the committee report to the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Wilfrid Shute now says: “The com-
mittee took our papers out to lunch and returned to say that Vitamin E was no good.”
A Spokesman of the College told me that the council “considered that the committee had given ample consideration to the Shutes’ documents.” He added that “a lot of propaganda is coming out of the Shute Institute.” The minutes of the meeting of the council of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, issued by that body’s registration office at 566 University Avenue, Toronto, give the following account of the meeting on November 13, 1946, as far as it
concerns the Shute enquiry: Council having reconvened at 11 a.m., the following visiting doctors answered the roll call: Dr. Evan V. Shute, London; Dr. W. E. Shute,. Guelph; Dr. E. A. Bartrara F. S. Brien of the Upivi Western Ontario; Dr. Joh and Dr. H. K. Detweilerj versity of Toronto andJMT nell and Dr. G.^Malcoff Queen’s University. *M'After a brief president, Dr. Eval^^^H^ presented certain papêYs regarding the usefulness of Vitlumn E in the treatment of cardiovascular disease. The various papers presented and also a personal diary were left with the College . . . the representatives from the three medical schools retired to consider the papers presented by Dr. Evan Shute . . . Council adjourned at 12 a.m. Council reconvened at 2 p.m. . . . the committee under the chairmanship of Dr. Cameron presented its report which was read by Dr. Bartram as follows: 1. In the papers submitted, Exhibits 9 to 15 inclusive, sufficient evidence to substantiate the given diagnosis is not provided in any of the reported cases. 2. Such evidence as is submitted in many cases would indicate diagnosis to be inaccurate. 3. On evidence submitted the committee is convinced that Vitamin E has no place in the treatment of cardiovascular disease. 4. In view of the publicity aroused by this problem we consider it advisable that an impartial clinical investigation should be conducted. In regard to diagnosis, the Shutes maintain that in ninety percent of their cases they do not make the first diagnosis, that patients usually come to them after seeing one, two or three other doctors, often specialists. In one case a woman passed through the hands of seventeen doctors before reaching the Shutes. All patients seen by the Shutes, they said, are given all recognized diagnostic and treatment procedures—plus Vitamin E. “We particularly object to the ‘inaccurate diagnosis’ charge,” said Wilfrid Shute, “if only on the ground that two of the eases we cited to the committee had previously been diagnosed by members of the committee, and a third had been diagnosed by a university colleague of one of the professors.” Whether those three specific cases were included in the doctors’ finding reported in Item No. 2 is not stated. There was, however, one point in the report which pleased the Shutes: the recommendation that an impartial test be conducted. At the next day’s meeting, the College council voted to forward the Shutes’ documents to the Ontario Department of Health with the request that the question be the subject of an enquiry as to its value. What happened next, the Shutes say, was this: they were informed by the late Hon. Russell Kelley, Ontario Minister of Health, that he had arranged with a prominent Toronto doctor to meet the Shutes at Queen’s Park to arrange the tests. The Shutes came to Toronto and waited with Kelley for the other doctor to arrive. When he did not arrive half an hour after the appointed time, the Minister started telephoning. According to the Shutes, the doctor could not be located at home, at his office, at any hospital or at the university. Nobody at any of those places knew where he was, where he could be reached, or when he was expected. “He had,” said Wilfrid Shute shortly, “disappeared.”
The next time the Shutes were in j Toronto they called on Kelley to ! enquire into the progress of the proposed tost. This time, they say, Kelley replied:
“Two medical officers have warned me that if 1 went through with tiie idea of a test there would lie a line-up of doctors stretching from Queen’s Park to the Toronto waterfront nil demanding mv resignation.”
The Shutes question the Toronto General Hospital test on several grounds. In the first place, they maintain, if it was meant to be a test of tiie Shute method, the Shutes’ method should have been used, or, preferably, t1 . Shutes should have been asked to participate in the test. They maintain that the Toronto General Hospital death rate in these heartfailure cases was higher than the normal death rate, with or without Vitamin E, suggesting “that pci*'.Ie in the last stages of the disease were used in the test.” They claiiil that, in comparison with the hospital’s loss of eleven out of fifty heart-failure patients in seven months, theShute Institute lost thirteen heart-failure cases out of one hundred and ninety-eight in twentyseven months.
in a lest of the Shute Vitamin E method, Dr. Wilfrid Shute suggests, at least half the patients should be “walking cases.” Since more than half the patients in average stages of the disease are able to get around, this would still test Vitamin E on worse1 han-average patients. The Shutes should be allowed to examine the patients and prescribe the initial dose, re-examine them in four weeks and adjust the dose if necessary, he adds.
Both Shutes say these conditions are necessary because a number of factors affect dosage an^l procedures in individual patients. For example, iron intake reduces the efficiency of Vitamin E; a patient receiving insulin ! might be in danger of insulin shock ■ if Vitamin E were administered without warning and supervision, since Vitamin E often greatly reduces the patient’s insulin requirements. Blood 1 pressure is elevated by Vitamin E at I first., and patients with high blood pressure must be launched on Vita¡ min E gradually. A number of other conditions affect the Shutes’ Vitamin E therapy, and none ol these were taken into consideration, they say, in the Toronto test.
Moreover, the patients in that series were given a flat three hundred international units of the vitamin daily, while in the Shutes’ own practice the prescribed amount, j depending on individual ro moments, might vary from one ha id red to six hundred units per day. One of the criticisms made of the Shutes is that Vitamin E i much like Old Doc Wampum’s Se .lo —good for too man', disease. i*he Shutes admit with a smile that it is j almost embarrassing when a research scientist somewhere ia the world comes up with a new disease or condition on which he has got good with *Vitamin E. But they point out that they have no control over the effects of Vitamin E—thai t hey did not for that matter, even discover the stuff themselves—and Uiat they an only j follow where Vitamin E loads. The Shutes’ theory of the action of Vitamin E on coronary i V-'n-n the most lethai member of the heart disease family, is this: A clot forms in an artery near the heart, partially or wholly cutting off the ingredient which all muscles need for coal.mied operation, blood oxygen. Deprived of oxygen, the top layer of cells in the area which depends wholly on the blood supply from that arterv lies and scar tissue is formed to replace them. The poisons generated by * he cells in dying “choke” the next underlying layer of cells, and its oxygen supply becomes inadequate for the carrying ouf of normal or near-normal functions. The A at of the damage is in direct relationship to the tissues’ requirement of oxygen. And that is wher*Vitamin E enters, the Shutes claim.
By reducing, through some unknown means, the amount of oxygen a cell requires for normal function, Vitamin E minimizes the damage caused by oxy gen deprivation. It enables cells to carry on with a smaller supply of oxygen than a Vitamin -Edepriced cell needs, say the Shutes. But Vitamin E is credited by them with ai least two other virtues of interest to the potential heart victim: It hastens the formation of su p pie me n•y B> deprived areas j - ‘„M.* -
body rushes the construction of emergency blo«*d vessels to a danger spot; ir.d Vitamin E dissolves blood clots.
To t housands c/AJanadians who have 10 intention of thinking about their îearts for years to come, another tspecl of Vitamin E will be of absorbng iniercs-1. Vitamin E, according to it least one noted coach and lay «pert on health, seems to have a ^markable effect on athletic perJQuee years ago Lloyd PerTJff Canada’s nationwide and adviser on condition : he Detroit Red Wings
hockey club, put ( he club on Vitando E. It. was three years ago that the Red Wings, admittedly an assortment of very good hockey plav« s, startl'd to mak«* a shambles of the National . Hockey Lf1 ague.
Percival considers able test of Vitamin ! out-on a young won Galasso. The boy condition as “poo| durance, recoverypoor, strength low ¡is most remarkwas that carried 1 be athlete, Pat i rat« d in puerai . uemely lov m from effm > ' * .*ry This was after
three years of athletic training, during which he had reacted the high level
of his extremely modest capacities. After running four hundred and forty yards it took him three hours cad twenty minutes to regain his normal pulse rate. He could do ninetee n feet two and a half inches in running broad jump, averaged G.3 seconds for the fifty-yard sprint., and had to quit a distance run at three quarters of a mile. He was then put on three hundred international units of Vitamin E per day. 1 n two weeks he recovered normal pulse after exertion six times as fast, added seven and üirt>e quarter inches to his broad jump, cut his fifty-yard time to 5.7 seconds, and ran one and two third miles. Instead of his previous reaction of pallor, nans, a, head acne, and extreme discomfort in cla st Galasso declared he felt ‘real good, better than I ever have.” In his next test, hr improved again in every department, and the pattern continued for four muro tests. Then Vitamin E was withdrawn. To prevent any chance of a psychological let-down, he was given capsules which looked the same, but contained no active ingredient. His performance immediately dropped. Back on Vitamin E, it went Cp again. The next time he was deprived of Vitamin E. his performance took a month to deteriorate. When Vitamin E was restored fur two more months, the youth actually went out and won the eastern Canada broad jump with a leap of twenty-one feet ten and three-quarter inches the best broad jump made m Canada in 1951. He ran second in the eastern Canada fifty-yard championship, in the fastest race he had ever run in his life. Last year Galasso now a student al ( jueen’s University, again won the eastern Can ad; broad jump. Tobias Won the Mile Another case that Percival considera remarkable is that, of Charlie Tobias, a member of Percival’s track team “At the 1951 interechobstic track meet at New York 'Tobins couldn't do thing,” said Percival. “He worked hard, tried hard, but he lost weight and his legs became heavy, i cap only describe his performance .-. dismaj. In preparation for the 19)2 me«;ting, Tobias didn’t look any better. Three weeks before we left for New York”T started him on Vitamin K. The result was nothing short of amazingTobias won the mile.” The patient of whom the Shutes are proudest is their own mother. At seventy-two Mrs. Shute senior had severe heart trouble, was unable to walk across a room. She became only second patient te be treated with Vitamin E—and according to them one of the most spectacular. “It was,” she ; ’ like a miracle, i was so much better that 1 ccald do things I hadn’t done for years - -even tend the furnace.” Now seventy-eight, Mrs. Shute is spry and active. “if,” says Evan Shute, ‘giving our mother those additional years of happy and useful life wnc the only results of all that we have gone through—then it has been fully worth it.” Meanwhile the controversy continues unabated. The only thing a layman can certain of is that the opponents of Vitamin E still far outnumber its advocates. A group of heartspecialists, asked for their opinions on Vitamin E, declined to comment for publication on the grounds, as two of them put it. that it was “better to let the claims die down than to answer them.” Medical advisors to the Heart Foundation of Ontario also had no statement to make on Vitamin E. said one «fêtai
