Glutathione D-Day: June 8
The FDA is once again threatening personalized medicines, this time glutathione, a crucial antioxidant.
Action Alert!
Your ability to use personalized glutathione, an antioxidant that is essential to life, is in jeopardy. An FDA committee that has already voted to ban many natural medicines is meeting soon (June 8th) to decide whether compounding pharmacies can continue to make glutathione in any form, including IVs, inhaled forms, suppositories, and nasal sprays. Glutathione helps patients with a wide variety of ailments, including liver disease, cancer, stroke, and autism. We must let the FDA and the committee know that patients need this treatment.
A glutathione ban would be a disaster. It has many medical applications and there is no commercially available glutathione drug, so a ban would mean no more glutathione in these forms. Glutathione is used widely by integrative experts for a variety of conditions because of its role in reducing oxidative stress—an imbalance between free radicals and antioxidants in the body.
Glutathione’s usefulness is backed by dozens of studies for a multitude of conditions:
· Cancer treatment. Glutathione helps reduce the side effects of chemotherapy.
· Parkinson’s Disease. Glutathione treatment has been shown to improve symptoms in Parkinson’s patients. This is likely because these patients are commonly deficient in glutathione.
· Pulmonary disease. One review concluded that glutathione inhalation therapy is an effective treatment for a variety of pulmonary diseases and respiratory conditions.
Other studies further support glutathione for these purposes.
· Immune enhancement. Not only is glutathione key in reducing oxidative stress, it is also essential to proper immune function as a signaling molecule. This is one of the reasons glutathione can help patients with diseases like tuberculosis.
· Autism Spectrum Disorder. Autistic patients are known to suffer from oxidative stress, inflammation, and immune system dysfunction. These physiological issues can lead to emotional and behavioral disturbances. Studies have demonstrated glutathione’s ability to help autistic patients.
· COVID-19. Research has shown that COVID patients have increased oxidative stress and glutathione deficiency. Glutathione deficiency has been shown to play a major role in COVID-19 mortality.