Words: Dr Richard FIRSHEIN
Andrew Jenkins was an irrepressibly buoyant six-year-old boy when he first came to see me. He had been to the emergency room [ER] four times in the past year because of his asthma. Like most kids, his favourite foods were pizza, hamburgers, and ice-cream. He was a very finicky eater who wouldn’t go near a vegetable. Andrew was a smart young boy, however, and his condition was causing him great misery. Medications made him shaky; days came when he couldn’t play with his friends, and, worse yet, there were the constant visits to the emergency room with the dreaded injections, poking, and prodding that both parents and child hated.
Although it’s true that children who don’t like vegetables usually have a higher aversion to pills than normal, we were able to start him on 90mg of magnesium, 200mg of vitamin C [a natural antihistamine and free radical quencher], one teaspoon of flaxseed oil [to provide important fatty acids that most asthmatics lack], and 50mcg of selenium [a building block for glutathione reductase, the body’s premier detoxifying enzyme], all to be taken twice a day. You may be surprised that a young boy may need help in detoxifying, but any chronic disease creates free radical damage and inflammation that stress the body’s detoxification system.
I gave Andrew a pulmonary function test, which was critical to see if his airways were obstructed. Another common way for testing breathing capacity is for patients to blow into a tube called a peak flow meter, which registers how forcefully the air is blown out of their lungs. Good lung function should register at least 80 per cent on a pulmonary function test, but Andrew’s numbers were astonishingly low. One test registered below 50 per cent of normal function. He began his nutritional and medical treatments, and when he returned, we redid the tests. The percentages had doubled. His symptoms improved, but on questioning his mother, I learned she had only been able to keep him on the magnesium [180mg a day] and the diet. It took some extra coaxing to get him to comply with the entire programme.
In the three years that I’ve treated him, he’s had only one visit to the emergency room, compared with the four hospitalisations the year before he came to see me. Today, he’s a healthy young boy coping with his asthma. Although his improvement may seem hard to believe, research studies confirm my experience with children. In a study conducted at the University of Florida in Gainesville, severely asthmatic children who were given an infusion of magnesium sulphate all showed sustained clinical improvement afterwards. These children had not responded to steroids, bronchodilator therapy, or other drugs.
Whether magnesium is given to children, or adults, suffering from asthma, it is one of the most effective and natural aids available.
