Dr. Henry Turkel's book, part 2: His goal

You can view the first post covering Dr. Turkel's book here.

Shortly after Dr. Turkel started working with patients who had DS, he attempted something new.

On page 6 he writes,

Beginning in 1959, I attempted to obtain New Drug Approval from the Food and Drug Administration

This attempt would not be without extreme challenges and misfortunes. But, before we get into the detail of that, let's look at a little history first.

A foreword in the book by Bernard Rimland, Ph.D. shares some insightful information to show where Dr. Turkel was coming from.

1. Dr. Turkel, by training a chemist as well as a physician, a man who had already proven himself as a creative innovator by developing a surgical instrument credited with saving hundreds of thousands of lives, developed a treatment (the "U" Series consisting of certain vitamins, minerals and drugs) which he asserts can greatly improve the physical and mental functioning of children with Down's syndrome (sic). He does not assert that it will cure Down's syndrome (sic), but only that it will improve the child's condition, in somewhat the same sense that insulin can greatly improve the health and lengthen the life span of diabetics without changing the genetic or biochemical defect that causes illness.

The goal of Dr. Turkel is the same then as it is now for any doctor who is advocating the use of targeted nutritional intervention. Dr. Turkel was, in a way, before his time, in attempting to help children with Down syndrome in an age where they were typically put away in institutions. Because Dr. Turkel did start to use TNI of sorts so many years ago, you would think more people would be accepting of it now, but that is often not the case.

Dr. Rimland continues,

2. He not only asserts that the "U" series will help these children, he documents it with copious objective evidence. He presents serial photographs, x-rays, and growth curves showing the child before treatment and dramatically illustrating the child's progress at repeated points during the treatment. This evidence is published in books and journals and is clearly visible and understandable even to the layman. No one has questioned the authenticity of this evidence.

This is extremely interesting to me, in that people did see what Dr. Turkel's U Series was able to do in helping people with Down syndrome. Yet, as will be seen as we go through this book, many people admantly opposed this treatment, for no clear reason.

Bernard Rimland goes on,

3. There are no competing treatments. For the most part, children with Down's syndrome (sic) have a completely bleak future. Their mental and physical abilities are so low as to preclude most of them from functioning in society. Their health is usually very poor. Parents are frequently urged to institutionalize these children and forget they ever existed. Thus, the "treatment of choice," with which the Turkel treatment must be compared, is to ignore these children, to offer no treatment, to assign them to oblivion.

4. The Turkel treatment is harmless. Even those who are opposed to it, irrational though their opposition may be, do not deny this. It has been used on thousands of Down's syndrome (sic) children throughout the world, children in frail-to-terrible health, with no harm reported.

This is still true today. The targeted nutritional intervention that people use today is harmless. Yet, there are a few who want to say that it has the potential to cause all sorts of damage, as I shared here and in this post.

Because vitamins & medications have been used in people with Down syndrome for over half a century, where is the evidence that it causes harm? Dr. Turkel wasn't shown it. And it has yet to be shown. I don't believe it can be shown, because overall it doesn't cause harm.

In Dr. Turkel's first chapter in his book, on page 11, he states,

Parents of an infant with Down syndrome want to know everything possible about this condition, but first and foremost, they want to know how they can help their own child. Some parents have been told that their child would disrupt family life. Some have even been advised to withhold surgery needed to save the infant's life. ....

When they come to my clinic, parents are given new hope regarding their child's potential, which, with or without treatment, was probably not nearly as bleak as some doctors predict. Misinformed parents have come in tears. One mother was told that all Down syndrome children develop leukemia, sooner or later. Parents have been told that their child will never walk, talk, or be toilet trained. With rare exceptions, the child will accomplish all of these skills and more, even without medical intervention.

Society has come quite a ways from Dr. Turkel's days. But, they still have a very long way to go. We were given quite a bleak picture of what my brother would be like after he was born and that was just 6 years ago! Today, parents aren't told to shut away their children, but they are encouraged to terminate them. It's so sad.

Dr. Turkel's goal with his U Series was to help children with Down syndrome. It's much the same as the goal of Nutrivene today. The difference though is that Dr. Turkel was working "in the dark", so to speak, because he didn't have the knowledge we now have to show what causes Down syndrome.

This concludes the second post of Dr. Turkel's book. Stay tuned for more!



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