The main purpose of this post is to share a simple health hack that can stop most viruses within 24 hours, whether they be cold, herpes, shingles, or even a chimeric bioweapon associated with the philanthropathy of an anonymous evil overlord (you really aren’t so anonymous anymore, Bill Gates). It also can resolve most urinary tract infections and many inflamed prostates in the same time-frame. And I suspect it’s magic doesn’t end there, though my personal experience does. The earlier you start treatment, the higher your odds of complete success, and the sooner you will restore your health.
Dosage & Caveats
Your actual dosage for this simple hack may differ from mine. I’m male, currently 68 years old, 5 feet 11 inches tall (180 cm) and weigh 170 pounds (77 kg). That gives you four variables to consider for why you might need to tweak my dosage recommendation, so that it works best for you. And there are many more variables that could be even more important to consider.
I know that people are genetically screened before getting IV infusions of Vitamin C, to determine if they have a particular single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP). (SNPs are specific genetic mutations. We all have gobs of them that make us unique.) This one particular SNP can mean that you may not react well to such treatment. I have NOT heard that people with this particular SNP have any problem taking over-the-counter Vitamin C tablets, but I’m not a know-it-all, so I could be wrong on that. I kinda doubt it, though. But then I probably take more (well-informed) risks than the average person.
Vitamin C is incredibly safe and effective for the vast majority of people. The main potential issue is bowel tolerance. If I take 1 gram (1,000 mg) of Vitamin C, I have no problems. If I take 2 grams of Vitamin C, I can get loose stools. If I’m foolish enough to take 3 grams of Vitamin C all at once, I’ll probably be shitting my brains out. Your tolerance may be different. The only way to know for certain is to be willing to experiment, but that’s probably not necessary. I suspect most adults who don’t have a sensitive bowel can tolerate a 1 gram dose. If that is too much for you, try 1/2 gram (500 mg) tablets. For kids, there are 125 mg Vitamin C gummies. It’s probably not a good idea to test your kid’s bowel tolerance, since you know who will be dealing with the aftermath. It’s best to stick with 125 mg for kids.
What Type?
A lot of people get wrapped around the axle about what sort of Vitamin C to use. I’m a huge fan of Dr. Thomas Levy. In his book, Stop America’s #1 Killer (2015), he states that the vast majority of the equally vast research on Vitamin C has used simple ascorbic acid - the cheap stuff. If you want to blow extra money on liposomal forms of C, or something that claims to be natural, or has “co-factors,” or some other fancy hoo-haws, be my guest. It’ll probably work, too. And if you believe that it will work better, I suspect you are right. I firmly believe in the placebo effect. If it is safe and gets us healthy, who cares how that happens?1
By the way, in Dr. Levy’s book, he claims that coronary artery disease is caused by a mild, chronic version of scurvy (the Vitamin C deficiency). He posits that we have a chronic insufficiency of this vital nutrient, which slowly leads to damage in your blood vessels, and eventually leads to clots that are responsible for somewhere around 19% of fatal heart attacks (and NOT virtually all heart attacks, as your doctor will tell you). If your doc has you on a statin, Levy’s book, and another by Malcolm Kendrick,2 is well worth a read, since there is an 80% chance it isn’t doing you any good (and there’s close to a 100% chance of unwanted side effects). You can find cheap copies of the former on eBay, if it isn’t in your local library. The Kendrick book is a bit newer and is more expensive.
Dr. Levy also has an earlier book on Vitamin C, Curing the Incurable: Vitamin C, Infectious Diseases and Toxins (2011). I haven’t read it. For all I know, he came up with my hack before I did. I’m sure one or more of the 8 billion people with whom we share our planet had figured this out long before I did. But if they did and had spread the word, I never got the memo. This post is for all the others who likewise got overlooked.
I buy my Vitamin C at the local Walmart. Currently it sells for $11.88 for 500 tablets. With our local sales tax, that’s about 2.5 cents each. I always have at least 1,000 tablets in my prepper supplies, because in an emergency it is too important to go without. And the tablets last forever, despite what the expiration date might imply (this is probably not true of the gummies).
Herpes
Just last week, I started feeling a herpes outbreak starting on my upper lip. It felt tingly, and within an hour I could start to feel the swelling increase as the infection spread. I got that typical feeling of impending gloom: “Oh, no! Here we go again!” Next stop: the dreaded skin eruptions, followed by a few days of pain and the possibility of public shame and humiliation.
At first, I decided to just put a little DMSO on it, because I use that stuff on pretty much everything. As an afterthought, I sprayed a little 3% food grade hydrogen peroxide on it, both outside and inside the lip, since viruses hate the stuff. Then I thought to myself, “Hey! This IS just a virus!” So I employed my hack:
1 gram of Vitamin C per hour until the problem is resolved.
I started to feel the herpes outbreak around 11 am, and started taking Vitamin C around noon. By 6 pm, the swelling was gone and the problem was pretty much over. I continued my hourly dose of C until bedtime.
If you ever ignore herpes to the point where you get an eruption, you’ll want to apply some cornstarch to it. It’ll dry that thing out, which it hates. And keep doing 1 gram of C per hour. Better late than never.
[NOTE: The second time I started to have a herpes outbreak on my upper lip, I sprayed 3% food grade hydrogen peroxide on the inside of my lip and took the hourly Vitamin C. And it worked. I now feel that a better strategy would be to swish a bit of hydrogen peroxide on the inside of the mouth where the eruption is starting. That will likely be more effective at shutting things down. It is still worth doing hourly Vitamin C, just to be sure. Since this event started in the evening, I took one gram every half hour, hoping to quell the problem before bedtime, which it did.]
Problems Peeing
Nearly every guy my age has experienced times when the thunderous torrent of our youth, which we used to unleash upon the porcelain God in the bathroom, has gone AWOL. You’re standing there, seemingly forever, and all you can muster is a feeble little squirt-gun stream. It’s like trying to push the contents of a giant syringe through a tiny little needle: it takes a lot of time and effort. And it never gets the job done. So, in very short order, you’re back at it again. Often there is a simple fix:
1 gram of Vitamin C every hour until the problem is resolved.
Every time I’ve done this, by the end of the day, I’m back peeing like a racehorse (and that feels sooo good!).
Personally, I wonder what percentage of prostate issues could be completely avoided with this simple, inexpensive hack? How many PSA would come back normal? How many DREs (digital rectal exams) could be avoided?
And this is a subject very near and dear to me, as my wife, a former nurse, was once dubbed the unofficial Prostate Queen of Seattle. As she puts it, “All men ever talk about is peeing, pooping and getting it up!” Could this simple hack eliminate the first part of that triad of manly laments?
For most men, prostate cancer is very slow growing (this wasn’t the case for the father of the doctor she worked for, which is why he spent a lifetime looking for a way to cure it). Those with slow growing cancer, if they pretty much leave it alone (to the extent that symptoms allow them to), will end up dying of something else before their prostate cancer gets them. We’ve had far too many friends rely upon their doctor’s recommendations, usually for surgery and radiation, without asking my wife to freely share her years of experience on the topic. Many of them ended up incontinent or impotent as a result of treatment. Delaying surgery for even one year would have given each of them an additional year with a higher quality of life. Who wouldn’t want that? If you get a prostate cancer diagnosis, and it is leaning toward being slow growing, DO NOT PANIC. Take the time to do some research. Anytime you talk to a surgeon, his recommendation will almost always be to cut you open: to a hammer, everything looks like a nail!
Shingles
The fear-mongers of the world would have us believe that vaccines are the answer to everything. And anyone who has seen anyone suffer from shingles will be highly motivated to avoid having the same experience, so a shingles vaccine would certainly seem to be the lesser of those two evils. Or is it really just a binary option? Is there an Option C?
My wife started to have a shingles outbreak about five years ago. The first thing she did was spray some hydrogen peroxide on it (warning: THINK TWICE about doing this if you have a lot of eruptions, as it can be very painful, though it probably will help curb the infection). She followed that up with frequency specific microcurrent treatment (FSM) at our function med doc’s office.3 Problem solved. At the time, Vitamin C wasn’t on our radar screen.
Because shingles in a virus, if it were to happen to me in the future, I would take:
1 gram of Vitamin C every hour until the problem is resolved.
And I’d so some topical hydrogen peroxide when the problem first becomes apparent, since it and C work by essentially the same mechanism - oxidation. The former works from the outside, the latter from the inside.
Because I’ve never tried this, I don’t know for certain that it will work. But personally, I’d be willing to bet the farm on it. Those who are more risk-averse than me may not be willing to take that chance. That’s your choice. But anytime I see a fearful message aimed at me, what I hear is someone trying to manipulate me, and not for altruistic reasons. It’s up to each of us to understand the motivations behind the recommendations we hear, in order to inform our efforts at figuring out who can be trusted. Truth sustains life. You can figure out what the flip side of that is.
Urinary Tract Infections
A urinary tract infection (UTI) is nothing to sneeze at. I’ve been passionate about genealogy for about 15 years, and I’ve seen more than my share of death certificates. One common cause of death is pyelonephritis, a kidney infection, which usually starts with a UTI. According to a past family doctor of mine, it’s a particularly common cause of death in little old ladies.
Last summer, I had a UTI, so I walked a quarter mile to our neighborhood doc-in-the-box (urgent care). We had a chat, and I managed to coax out an unwilling sample. The doc came back with a prescription for Cipro, a fluoroquinalone antibiotic. What she didn’t tell me, was the Cipro comes with a black box warning stating that it can cause tendon rupture! Often enough that it requires a BLACK BOX WARNING! And this can happen AFTER you stop taking it!4,5 My mind boggles at how you start with killing bacteria and end up with tendon rupture as a common side effect! Clearly, the dudes who think they are smarter than Mother Nature aren’t!
I went back and asked for something different, and was told that with my strain of bad guys, it was pretty much the only option. Not being armed with sufficient knowledge to challenge her assertion, I begrudgingly went home and did as I was told.
That’s one doctor (added to my ever-growing list) whom I will never, ever trust again. Flouroquinolones are bad news. Just ask Dr. Google about floxing. Fortunately for me, I have none of the many known side effects. And hopefully they won’t sneak up on me at some point in the future.
A few weeks later, the UTI starts coming back. I thought to myself, “Yeah, great drug, doc! That’s the one, alright!” I wasn’t willing to play Russian (allopathic?) roulette again with Cipro, and further increase my odds of being left with a debilitating injury that I may need to personally finance for the rest of my life!6
In the meantime, I had discussed the problem with my functional medicine doctor. He had said that for women, they insufflate the bladder with ozone (another big-time oxidizer) to clear things up in a hurry. Insufflation literally means blowing gas (in this case ozone) into your urine-filled bladder: the gas kills the bad bugs. Guess how the gas gets there? Think of the shortest route from the outside to the inside.
He’d never done this on a male before, but in theory it was possible. He didn’t describe the process, but I instantly visualized an overly stiff, oversized catheter and an unhappy, feminist nurse, with cold hands, a chip on her shoulder, an evil smirk and what seemed like far too little glycerine for the task at hand. Hopefully there was another option.
So, if ozone will work on a UTI (and ozone is a very potent oxidizer), would Vitamin C (also a potent oxidizer) do the same thing, even if taken orally? To find out, I took:
1 gram of Vitamin C every hour until the problem was resolved.
It worked like magic. The symptoms were completely resolved within 24 hours. Since this had been a recent recurrence of a past problem, I decided to take 4 grams of Vitamin C daily for another week, just to be safe. Now if I think I might be having a symptom, I load up on C for the day.
I suspect this will work for 90% of people, 90% of the time. If you try this, and it doesn’t resolve within a day or so, don’t mess around. See a doc (preferably one who will treat you with ozone gas). You don’t want to let things get out of hand and end up with pyelonephritis!
Surgery
Before I had dental surgery to remove a molar, and before my wife had surgery to replace her hip, we both had infusions of 20 grams of Vitamin C. And we did the same thing afterward. We did this to accelerate healing and greatly reduce the risk of a either a pre- or post-operative infection. Which means it likely also greatly reduced the chances of contracting something really, really nasty like MRSA.
In my case, doing so was standard procedure with my biologic dentist (which is generally a dentist who follows the teachings of Dr. Hal Huggins). Insurance often won’t reimburse for this, but it’s worth the extra expense, if you can afford it.
In my wife’s case, her MD was not enlightened about the benefits of Vitamin C, though I’m not at all certain that Medicare would have covered it if he was. So we paid out of pocket for the infusion at our functional medicine doctor’s office. We also opted for an infusion of Myer’s Cocktail prior to surgery (Vitamin C, magnesium, calcium, B Vitamins and more). There was a fair sized cohort who all got their hips replaced on the same day. She ended up needing less pain medication, got off pain meds sooner and healed faster and more completely than the others in her group. By far. It was money well spent.
IV Vitamin C is more expensive, since you have the sterile supplies that are needed, plus a specialist to administer it. If I couldn’t afford that, I’d take:
1 gram of Vitamin C every hour, every day for at least a week before and after surgery.
But be sure to let your surgeon know of your plans. My wife did so for her hip surgery, and my feeble recollection was that the only caveat was to stop the Vitamin C at least a week before the surgery. I suspect all docs now ask for a list of your supplements and prescriptions, so they’ll instruct you on how to amend your supplements before they carve you open.
I recall reading somewhere (probably in Levy’s book) that when IV Vitamin C was given pre- and post-surgery, it greatly decreased the number of complications and greatly reduced the risk of death.
If “healthcare” was actually practiced in this country (and the word wasn’t just a twisted euphemism), Vitamin C infusions would be standard before and after all surgeries. But then there’d be fewer complications to be attended to (by physicians), and recovery would require fewer follow-up visits (with the surgeon or their staff). Meaning eventually insurance wouldn’t be as willing to pay as much for his/her services: which is your basic financial disincentive.
Air Travel
Ever since COVID, when air travel was restricted in order to manipulate people into agreeing to an experimental gene therapy that had never been successfully tested in animals, I’ve pretty much lost my desire to fly on an airplane. But at some point, I suspect someone that I love will die, and it may be the only realistic option for me to pay my respects.
I’ve been on enough flights in the past to know that, particularly at certain times of the year, flying seems to greatly enhance the chances of catching a bug of some sort. If ever fly again, I plan to take:
1 gram of Vitamin C every hour, starting upon waking on the day of the flight, and continuing for at least two hours after landing at my destination.
I’d opt for gummies here, carried in a small ziplock bag. If you bring tablets, you’ll need a bottle of water to wash them down. You don’t want TSA thinking that your bottle of water is part of your personal bomb-making kit. Life is a whole lot easier if you don’t make the TSA people paranoid.
If traveling far enough to experience jet lag, I also plan to go outside in the daylight as soon as possible after landing, and find a place to stand barefoot in damp grass for around 15 minutes or so. Doing so should reset my circadian rhythm and greatly minimize any effects of jet lag.7 If you can’t find grass, any natural surface with direct contact to the earth will do, though it will work better if it is damp.
Too Much C?
If you are wondering whether you should be worried about taking too much Vitamin C, I suspect those questions are answered in Dr. Levy’s book. I can relate that while in my doctor’s infusion clinic, I met a man who had managed to successfully beat back his cancer diagnosis without the barbaric cut, burn and poison protocol imposed by mainstream oncologists. Vitamin C infusions were a big part of his treatment, and he told me he returns twice per year for 75 gram IV infusions, to give him peace of mind that it won’t return. That is a very BIG IV bag, which is infused over an hour or two! It’s also nearly five times the maximum amount that I am recommending - spread over a period of 24 hours - for acute situations.
Conclusion
Vitamin C gets used up by the body very quickly, which is why frequent dosing is the key to allowing it to fully work it’s magic. There is nothing magic about spacing the dosing an hour apart. I’ve done it every half hour with no problem. But at some point, taking it too frequently will get you back to the bowel tolerance issue.
If you take 1 gram of Vitamin C every waking hour, you’ll ingest about 16 grams in a day, which will set you back a whopping 40 cents! And how much would the gasoline or Uber cost to get yourself to and from your doctor’s office?
Get yourself some little containers that can hold at least a couple dozen tablets. Stick one in your car, your camper, your office, your purse, etc. At the first sign of a problem, start taking Vitamin C. If the person next to you starts to sniffle or sneeze, offer them one. 90% of the time, your problem will resolve within 24 hours.
Or don’t do that, and in a day or two you’ll be calling to schedule time with your doctor, who’ll be too busy with other patients to see you until next month (if you’re lucky). Which means a trip to urgent care or the ER, where you’ll wait endlessly and be exposed to all the other crud that the people waiting there have dragged in off the street. And you’ll be charged a nice co-pay for the experience.
The bottom line is that you need to learn to listen to what your body is telling you. If early on you can have the presence of mind to realize what is starting to happen, you can nearly always head things off at the pass with:
1 gram of Vitamin C every hour until the problem is resolved.
The above advice, when started early in the disease process, should see full resolution in a day or two. If you get a late start, you should at least see some sort of improvement in that time-frame. If you aren’t seeing improvement within 24 hours, keep it in the back of your mind that you may need to seek a different solution to your particular problem. Vitamin C will generally work 90% of the time, but very few things work all the time.8
Postscript
It is Dr. Andreas Kalcker who deserves all of the credit for me stumbling upon my Vitamin C hack. His basic protocol for using chlorine dioxide consists of sipping water containing a diluted chlorine dioxide mix, more or less continuously throughout the day. The rationale being that chlorine dioxide is rapidly utilized by the body, and that small continual doses are more effective than one large dose.
This same strategy also works with things like iodine supplementation. A couple of drops several times per day tends to be more effective than a dropperful all at once.
Likewise, if you are using hydrogen peroxide to resolve a wound or skin issue, more frequent application will speed things along, as long as you listen to your body. For an open wound, you can do too much, too often, or use too strong a concentration. I mostly use 3% food grade hydrogen peroxide, but bring out the 12% (and would use 35% if it were still available) for a patch of actinic keratoses that will flare up on top of my head once in a while.
If you have any interest in a short, easy-to-read book about oxidative therapies other than Vitamin C, hydrogen peroxide and ozone (or to learn a little more about those three), I would recommend The One-Minute Cure: The Secret to Healing Virtually All Disease by Madison Cavanaugh (2021).
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BEWARE OF THE BENEVOLENCE OF BILLIONAIRES:
Most billionaires become such by exploiting you, not by thinking of your best interests. Viewing the world through this lens may literally save your life!
Disclaimer #1: I write about my personal experiences, and what works for me may not work for you. I have no healthcare training, but I’ve been reading passionately on healthcare since being diagnosed with melanoma in early 2004 (which gave me a 50% chance of being alive by 2009, and the odds were not supposed to improve thereafter). I beat those odds by gaining my own education from published researchers, rather than relying upon my dermatologist’s education (which is more geared toward understanding how to maximize how much insurance will reimburse him for his time). If you are on any sort of prescription medication, ALWAYS check with your doctor before trying any substance that could interact with them. Or, better yet, ALWAYS take responsibility for your own chronic health problems!
Disclaimer #2: I call Vitamin C a “slayer of viruses” not because I necessarily believe in viruses, but because it’s a construct that most people do believe in. It’s not worth going down the rabbit hole on whether viruses exist, when the point of this article is simply to share an easy hack that can resolve symptoms often attributed to viruses.
Revision History:
2025 Apr 11 - Added a sentence and citation to the second paragraph in the section about Urinary Tract Infections.
2025 Apr 11 - Added a NOTE at the end of the Herpes section.
2025 Apr 11 - Revised the first paragraph of the Conclusions section.
2025 Apr 14 - Added a footnote (Heying) to the second paragraph in the Urinary Tract Infections section.
It is worth reading Dr. Bruce Lipton’s The Biology of Belief (2016) to better understand how your beliefs can impact your health.
The Clot Thickens: The enduring Mystery of Heart Disease (2021). This book is based upon Dr. Malcolm Kendrick’s decades of research, and I really love his writing style! Statins work by reducing blood cholesterol, and your brain is mostly composed of cholesterol. Wouldn’t reducing the amount of cholesterol that your body produces be bad for your brain? In a country with an epidemic of Alzheimer’s disease? I’m just asking? I would recommend that everyone does their own research on this topic, rather than relying upon your doctor’s outdated advice.
See The Resonance Effect: How Frequency Specific Microcurrent is Changing Medicine (2017) by Carolyn Mackin.
Combating Biofilms (2014) by James Schaller, MD, page 107 (regarding quinolones, a class of drugs that includes Cipro).
See Heather Heying’s post The Achilles Heel of Antibiotics for her personal account of the consequences of using Cipro.
There’s the old analogy at work again - that relying upon an MD can at times be like hiring an arsonist to run the fire department!
Earthing: The Most Important Health Discovery Ever! (second edition, 2014) by Clinton Ober, Dr. Stephen T. Sinatra and Martin Zucker, page 105.
This is the Pareto Principle at work.
oops!
Great article, thanks! I use nebulized 3% hydrogen peroxide per an article I read a few years ago by Dr Mercola. I will link it here for you to check out, it’s free to read but you’ll need a free subscription. I nebulize hydrogen peroxide and do the Vit C every hour to kill whatever is going on, it works a treat, and it’s natural and low cost. Win, win. https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2023/10/08/vitamin-c-dosage-for-viral-infection.aspx