Natural Emergency & Intensive Care Medicines

Sodium Bicarbonate and Magnesium

Emergency Room Medicines for Chronic and Acute Diseases.

The secrets of emergency room and intensive care medicine holds the key to the safe practice of medicine on children who suffer from acute disorders that must be addressed quickly. Magnesium salts, sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), iodine, selenium and vitamin C are concentrated nutritional medicinals that have been used in the most dire of medical circumstances either by intramuscular (IM) injection or intravenous feed. But are these substances really medicines?

One reader wrote:

Dr. Sircus, you list the following: “Magnesium chloride, sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), selenium, sulfur, iodine, glutathione and vitamin C in your most recent post and then claim, “Every one of the above medicines can be used to great advantage.” Since when are the minerals selenium, sulfur, iodine classified as “medicines”—or glutathione, which is made naturally in the human body? People think of medicines as the poisons produced by the pharmaceutical professions and minerals, vitamins, etc. as natural substances provided by God. Could you please explain your use of the word “medicines” in the same context with vitamins and minerals?

The very reason I named my medical approach “Natural Allopathic Medicine” answers this question. Very few doctors will get on the horn and tell everyone how wonderful magnesium salts are in the emergency room because it is a substance taken directly from the sea. Legally if you inject magnesium salts or administer them intravenously, they are considered a medicine and you need a medical license to perform such procedures. Magnesium is used as a medicine because it is a medicine, though we could call it a medicinal. Magnesium chloride actually is a concentrate of seawater, which itself makes a great emergency room medicine.

During World War II, Navy doctors would use seawater for blood transfusions when blood supplies ran out and many lives were saved.

We create medicines when we concentrate things in nature. Pharmaceutical companies concentrate synthetic substances, which does not work out very well for patients in the end. Natural Allopathic Medicine concentrates elements from nature that are proven by scientists to offer powerful healing without toxic side effects. One cannot say that about any pharmaceutical for even aspirin kills 15,000 a year in the United States alone.

The core of the protocol presented in Treatment Essentials redefines the way emergency room, intensive care and even hospice care should be practiced with a profile of highly proven fast-acting, safe, concentrated and injectable nutritional medicines. At home these same medicinals taken orally or used transdermally (topically) will save the day when all else fails.

Deep within the heart of western medicine is a wisdom and power that is deliberately stymied by medical authorities and the pharmaceutical companies that stand behind them. Inside the emergency room and intensive care wards, where many believe some of the most accurate medicine is practiced, are common but extraordinarily safe and effective substances that save lives every day. Interesting no one has thought to harness these medical super weapons against chronic disease or cancer.

Sodium bicarbonate, simple old baking soda, is a prime example of the type of medicine I am talking about. It is used every day in every good hospital of the world because it is safe, effective and does a medical job no other substance can do.

In the emergency room medicines have to be safe while delivering an instant lifesaving burst of healing power. Obviously if they are safe and strong enough for emergency situations they are going to help us with chronic diseases and acute ones as well.

“This is about a patient with advanced prostate cancer, metastasized throughout groin. Thought you might like to know. Tuesday afternoon I attended a patient of mine in the oncology ward here in a Melbourne hospital. In my bag of tricks were your universal medicines and hope in my heart, as the patient was bed bound, writhing in uncontrollable pain and in and out of consciousness. He was given 2 weeks to live. I have attended him 3 times daily to make sure that he received the protocol. Last night he was up watching politics on television, IV drip removed, almost full feeling back in legs, walking around during day etc.”
– Andrew Matheson

Sodium bicarbonate, a common emergency room medicine, acts as a powerful, natural and safe antifungal agent, which when combined with iodine, covers the entire spectrum of microbial organisms. The efficacy of sodium bicarbonate against certain bacteria and fungi has been documented but its role as a disinfectant against viruses is not generally known. Sodium bicarbonate at concentrations of 5% and above was found to be effective with 99.99% reduction of viral titers on food contact surfaces within a contact time of 1 min.

[1]Sodium bicarbonate, potassium chloride, and calcium
chloride are used to maintain pH and electrolytes
within normal values in intensive care units.

When the nervous system is injured, the brain produces self-protective molecules in an attempt to halt damage. Following injury, the death of nerve cells occurs over a prolonged period of many hours or days, which provides a “window” for therapeutic intervention.

Research suggests that administering sodium bicarbonate in intravenous (IV) form can significantly improve pH and Pco2 in children with life-threatening asthma. Respiratory distress and level of consciousness both improved after the administration of sodium bicarbonate[2]  

Sodium Bicarbonate Injection: USP is administered by the intravenous route. In cardiac arrest, a rapid intravenous dose of one to two 50 mL vials (44.6 to 100 mEq) may be given initially and continued at a rate of 50 mL (44.6 to 50 mEq) every 5 to 10 minutes if necessary (as indicated by arterial pH and blood gas monitoring) to reverse the acidosis. Caution should be observed in emergencies where very rapid infusion of large quantities of bicarbonate is indicated. Bicarbonate solutions are hypertonic and may produce an undesirable rise in plasma sodium concentration in the process of correcting the metabolic acidosis. In cardiac arrest, however, the risks from acidosis exceed those of hypernatremia.

Two minutes after intubation, premature ventricular contractions, ventricular fibrillation, bradycardia, and finally cardiac arrest were recognized. An increase of serum potassium from 3.19 to 8.64 mmol/L was observed in arterial blood. The patient was immediately resuscitated with chest compressions, intravenous adrenaline, atropine, lidocaine, and sodium bicarbonate.[3]

Magnesium Chloride – Fast Acting Life Saving Medicine

I became known in the world of medicine first with my writings on magnesium. My book Transdermal Magnesium Therapy put me on the medical map literally changing the way many were practicing medicine.

The use of magnesium chloride is the practice of concentrated nutritional medicine. It’s the process of taking a nutritional element in dosages not possible with dietary intake, and this nutritional medicine is being practiced every day in hospitals, ICUs and emergency rooms.

Magnesium chloride can be administered orally, transdermally or intravenously. Intramuscular injection is also possible but can be painful. Oral administration of a daily dose of more than 50 mmol can cause vomiting and diarrhea. In anesthesia and intensive care, the preferred administration route is IV.

When magnesium is used to correct a magnesium deficit, the objective is to restore normal serum concentrations, in which case a slow infusion of up to 10 gm/day is appropriate. When replacing magnesium via the IV route, approximately half of the dose is retained by the body while the remainder is excreted in the urine. The low retention rate is due to the slow uptake of magnesium by cells and decreased magnesium reabsorption by the kidneys in response to the delivery of a large concentration of magnesium.[4]

In my essay Avoiding Heart Disease & Strokes I explain more of the necessity for magnesium in heart disease and how doctors are neglecting to embrace this important mineral resulting in a significant lack of success over the past decade in treating heart failure.

The last decade has seen only very small incremental improvements or benefits with newer drug therapies in the treatment of heart failure.

And in my essay Magnesium Shortage I explore the contrast between new drugs being formulated to treat atrial fibrillation with the effective use of magnesium in emergency situations and include a stunning account of an emergency room doctor, treating someone with atrial fibrillation which was resolved with magnesium sulfate.

In the past months the Nutritional Magnesium Association has shared the important points of a new literature review verifying the monumental importance of magnesium in heart disease.

Noted research scientist and author Andrea Rosanoff, PhD, who conducted the comprehensive review, which has been ongoing for over 10 years, and which builds upon the work begun by Mildred Seelig, MD, who studied the relationship of magnesium to cardiovascular disease for over 40 years, says, “These numerous studies have found low magnesium to be associated with all known cardiovascular risk factors, such as cholesterol and high blood pressure, arterial plaque build-up (atherogenesis), hardening of the arteries and the calcification of soft tissues. This means we have been chasing our tails all of these years going after cholesterol and the high saturated-fat diet, when the true culprit was and still is low magnesium.”

According to Dr. Rosanoff, “By 1957 low magnesium was shown to be, strongly, convincingly, a cause of atherogenesis and the calcification of soft tissues. But this research was widely and immediately ignored as cholesterol and the high saturated-fat diet became the culprits to fight.

“Ever since this early ‘wrong turn,” states Rosanoff, “more and more peer-reviewed research has shown that low magnesium[5] is associated with all known cardiovascular risk factors, such as cholesterol and high blood pressure.

“Additionally, after decades of rising dietary calcium intake not balanced with rising dietary magnesium intake, and a population wherein a majority of US adults are not getting their daily magnesium requirement, dietary calcium-to-magnesium ratios are on the rise, and studies are showing that calcium supplements not balanced with magnesium increase the risk of heart disease,” says Rosanoff.

Magnesium should be taken for all conditions of the heart except for when the blood pressure is too low or the threat of kidney failure is present. Since there is no drug that can substitute for magnesium it is indicated for the majority of heart patients particularly in its chloride form. This is the definitive medicine for both the prevention and treatment of heart disease.

A recent Cochrane Review updating their 2009 conclusions on measures taken during cardiac surgeries to prevent post-operative atrial fibrillation or   supraventricular tachycardia  looked at one hundred and eighteen studies with 138 treatment groups and 17,364 participants. Fifty-seven of these studies were included in the original version of this review while 61 were added, including 27 on interventions that were not considered in the original version. Interventions evaluated included amiodarone, beta-blockers, sotalol, magnesium, atrial pacing and posterior pericardiotomy. The use of magnesium preventively showed a reduction in the rate of atrial fibrillation, a decrease in the length of hospital stay and cost of hospital treatment and a possible decrease in the rate of stroke.[6]

Magnesium chloride has remained number one in my protocol but sodium bicarbonate runs right behind it in terms of usefulness and power of effect.