Letters to the Editor

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, August, 2001

I wondered what the financial outcome would have been had I, 35 years ago, elected not to join GHC, but instead had chosen to invest the equivalent of its premium, say in a mutual fund. If I had spent an average of $50 each month on medical costs, and had my investment fund earned an average income of 12%, I wondered, what would my comparable financial status now be?

The answer was startling. Instead of having spent approximately $200,000 on medical costs, and now be facing the prospect of continuing monthly premiums of $450 and climbing, I would have invested a net total $126,000 into a fund which, today, would show a balance of $1,583,817 - after paying off Dr. Burzynski in full!

Since an average growth rate of 12% would cause an account value to double every six years, the balance in my hypothetical account would have exceeded $6 million, had I launched it at age 26, rather than at my 1966 age of 38! The conclusion seems obvious.

Derek V. Baker

18339 Wallingford Avenue North

Seattle, Washington 98133 USA

Email: baker3d@foxinternet.com

"Zappers" and Rife Technology Not Gimmicks

Editor:

I just noticed the letter from Dr. Yurkovsky in the May issue. To label 'zappers' and Rife technology instruments as 'gimmicks and naive solutions' is kind of a shame. No doubt there are some junk instruments out there but to denigrate Dr. Clarke or Dr. Beck or the many other viable instruments is a disservice and does nothing positive.

Dr. Yurkovsky must imagine that all the many thousands, yes thousands of people being helped by these technologies must all be imagining their health improvements. A powerful placebo effect. I don't think so. Other researchers such as Professor Rochlitz report that the 'Zappers' built to the Beck specifications work very well, particularly with viruses.

Dr. Curt Maxwell

P.O. Box 1075

Winterhaven, California 92283 USA

520-341-7048

Fax 011-526-517-7519

Washing Hair Samples

Editor:

Thank you for the article on hair analysis in the June 2001 issue. In 20 years of practice with over 10,000 patients, hair analysis has proven to be an extremely reliable and useful tool.

I would like to add that the JAMA study actually confirmed the reliability of hair analysis, provided the hair is not washed at the laboratory. In the study, if one looks only at the results of the two laboratories that do not wash the hair, (labs A and E in the study), the reliability is superb. Six of the nine nutrient mineral levels were identical, and the others very close. The correlation is far better than any of the other labs.

Far from discrediting hair analysis, the JAMA study showed that labs that do not wash the hair provide very reliable results. This confirms a 1986 study by Dr. R. LeRoy (J. Orthomol. Med., Vol. 1, #2). He found that 1) washing hair samples with just deionized water removed minerals erratically from sample to sample, 2) the longer hair was washed, the more minerals were washed out, and 3) samples from females lost more minerals than samples from males.

Hair is not "inert" as the author of the Townsend article contends. It is a complex tissue, with secondary, tertiary and quatrenary protein structures. It is known to be 10-15% porous. Women s hair is more porous than men's, which may explain why washing removes more minerals from women's hair.