Safe and Effective Natural Remedy for the Flu: Over the Counter Hydrogen Peroxide

by Paul Fassa

Early in January 2018, a 69 year old Health Impact News reader emailed us with a natural tip on how to beat the common cold and flu effectively and safely. He wrote that he has avoided cold and flu episodes for a dozen years, while avoiding flu shots, using what some would call a flu-hack because it is unique and easy to administer.

He would grab a dropper full of over-the-counter (OTC) hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and place a few drops into his slightly aching left ear, (where he receives his first early warning). He would let it “fizz” until it stopped and then be free from the worry of being bedridden for a few days, all the while avoiding a potentially greater threat than the flu, the flu-shot.At first I questioned the efficacy of this method, but when I investigated further using the link he had provided–the Cancer Tutor–the information I found there satisfied my need for further corroboration.

I also discovered even more hydrogen peroxide applications!

Cancer Tutor Corroboration with a Short History

Cancer Tutor mentions who started this approach, back in 1928, Dr. Richard Simmons, M.D.

He hypothesized that pathogenic flu and cold microbes enter through the ears and breed within the inner ear, potentially spreading through the ear canals into the body and other organs. This wasn’t embraced by the medical field at the time.

Cancer Tutor’s information also mentions that Dr. Simmons’ hypothesis was applied successfully 10 years later when German researchers discovered that H2O2 ear solutions did work effectively on colds and flu symptoms.

Cancer Tutor advises doing what Frank does in both ears until either the bubbling or stinging or both stop, at the first hint of coming down with flu type illnesses.

Cancer Tutor also offered the following:

“To cure the flu you’ll need to repeat this process two or more times at one or two hours intervals until there is no more bubbling when putting H.P. [hydrogen peroxide] in ear(s).”

Using hydrogen peroxide to fight the flu is also promoted by Dr. Mercola.

Expanding Hydrogen Peroxide’s Health Applications

The type of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) used is the same inexpensive OTC product you can purchase at any pharmacy. It is hydrogen peroxide in it’s lowest solution, 3.0 or 3.5 percent.

It is not food grade and also contains additives as stabilizers – acetanilide, phenol, sodium stanate and tertrasodium phosphate are often involved in the solution, with possibly some others.

It is O.K. to gargle hydrogen peroxide, just don’t swallow it. Some have also gargled with it at the onset of a cold or flu instead of placing it into their ears, with considerable success. Others use it as a highly effective mouthwash that eliminates only pathogenic microbes while leaving “good” bacteria necessary for digestive functions intact.

Hydrogen peroxide is a selective germicide, not a biocide that destroys all bacteria. This makes it ideal for oral and dental health. Hydrogen peroxide has extra oxygen to offer cells. Most pathogenic microbes are anaerobic. They do well without oxygen, but perish when there is an abundance of it.

It also has a bleaching effect. Good for whitening the enamel while not harming it. So H2O2 is ideal as a mouthwash.

Most commercial mouthwash solutions are alcohol based and are biocides, thus they destroy beneficial bacteria.

Hydrogen peroxide is mixed in water. An imbalance of pathogenic to beneficial bacteria leads to infections beyond the gums, throat, and sinuses. Poor oral/dental health is linked to other health issues, including cardiovascular disease and heart attacks.

There is a faint conspiracy theory that these additives were put there to keep people from benefiting from such an inexpensive treatment that improves so many maladies. This would negatively impact the pharmaceutical industry’s profits from a myriad of OTC cold and flu remedies.

Fortunately, now there is also 3% food grade hydrogen peroxide available. It’s not as cheap and not as accessible. This is a recent development. At one time the only food grade H2O2 was at the 35 percent level.

Then 17% and 12% levels became available, still too caustic to use without diluting. But now 3% has become easier to get. This eliminates the need to further dilute the highly caustic 35% levels of hydrogen peroxide. It is available online from different sources. Just make sure it’s food grade!

Though a chiropractor displays using regular OTC cheap H2O2, I think it’s wiser to use the food grade hydrogen peroxide.

Pharmaceutical Options: Tamiflu Good for the Flu or a Scam?

Tamiflu sells for around $100 or more for just enough to last one bout of the flu. It allegedly manages to ameliorate flu symptoms one day less than it takes most to simply get over it with lots of rest and consuming more than a usual amount of water.

A rash of unusual neurological adverse side effects that caused unusual behaviors in Japanese youths motivated the Japanese government to ban Tamiflu for teenagers. Other dangerous side effects were reported in the UK.

A 2013 article published by Forbes, The Myth of Tamiflu: 5 Things You Should Know, noted:

“Local CBS news affiliate DFW in Dallas, Texas, has reported the story of a 6 year old girl who was given Tamiflu and suffered horrible hallucinations, allegedly trying to kill herself:

A North Texas family says their daughter’s side effects from the popular drug Tamiflu were beyond what they ever could have imagined – and left them saying ‘never again.’

Like so many others, the 6-year-old’s flu diagnosis came with a choice: whether or not to take Tamiflu to speed up the course of the dreaded illness.

The family from Allen, who wants to remain anonymous, says the side effects were stunning: hallucinations, running away from school and an attempt, they believe, to hurt herself.

‘The second story window was open, which is in her bedroom, and she used her desk to climb up onto it, and she was about to jump out the window when my wife came up and grabbed her,’ her father said.

It is written in the fine print …. there’s always a chance of a side effect with any drug. The little girl’s parents say they wish they had known.

‘I don’t think the 16 hours of symptom relief from the flu is worth the possible side effects that we went through,’ her father said.

As is usual with most corporate “mainstream” media stories regarding anything negative about a pharmaceutical product, the report included testimony from a doctor assuring the public that such side effects are very rare, and that the drug is very safe.

But is it?

Here are some comments from the article that were posted:

My nieces’ 53 year old husband took one dose of Tamiflu and died suddenly from respiratory failure. – Sally Baumann Rogers

My husband suffered from hallucinations attributed to Tamiflu last year after he was hospitalized for flu with pneumonia (despite getting a flu shot). He had been prescribed the drug after being discharged from the hospital. We called the pharmacist who was already aware of this as a side effect, as was the doctor who prescribed it. No one had mentioned this fact to us. He discontinued taking it immediately, but this is not a sudden discovery. – Vicki Lore Foley

I almost died from Tamiflu in 2013 after developing TTP, which is rare and almost always fatal blood disorder. For 5 days, in the ICU, I had to have blood transfusions and complete plasma transfer. I barely made it.TTP has a 95% morality rate. The Wisconsin Blood Center (a leading authority) studied my case for months to find a cause. I took Tamiflu and in 36 hours I was deathly ill. The doctors at laying the cause for my sudden illness at the feet of Tamiflu. Don’t take it! It does not help that much. My treatment and hospitalization was $48,000.00 for 5 days. – Allison Wiggins

The hallucinations are more common than 1%. My son had them. It is beyond frightening. “The voices, make them stop!” “Don’t let them hurt me!” Tamiflu is subjecting your child to a real life horror movie. What’s even worse, the hallucinations recurred for weeks following our immediate ceasing of the use of the drug. THIS IS REAL. Japan has banned TamiFlu after several children plunged to their deaths off high rise balconies or stepped into traffic attempting to escape the hallucinations. NEVER, NEVER administer this drug to your child. Tamiflu is not a cure. You’re risking subjecting your child to weeks of nightmarish torture for the convenience of lessening flu symptoms for a couple days. Don’t do it! – Davy Lane

I took that stuff once when I got the flu (after having a flu shot). Ended up vomiting for days and developed pneumonia. – Tracy Christine” 

[more below*]

In 2015 Dr. Mercola also reported how the Cochrane group uncovered previously hidden data showing how Tamiflu is basically a scam.

Flu Statistics Exaggerated to Sell More Flu Shots

Actual text from the CDC website regarding flu deaths.

The dangers of influenza have been exaggerated.

Most fatalities attributed to influenza are from complications that originate as the flu then become pneumonia.  The most vulnerable to these complications are older folks or those with poor immune systems.

CDC statistics are often rigged to create fear and promote flu shots and Tamiflu. Both pharmaceutical prevention vaccines and Tamiflu offer questionable to no efficacy, strange and sometimes debilitating side effects, and they’re both sold at high prices–for a disease described disproportionately dangerous to its reality.

Routinely given out like candy at pharmacies, flu shots are not without known risks. People become paralyzed and even die from the flu shot, as the quarterly Department of Justice (DOJ) reports from the U.S. Vaccine Court illustrate.

Utilizing cheap, safe, hydrogen peroxide is certainly worth trying.

Food Grade Hydrogen Peroxide Can be Effective for Serious Diseases

You can’t buy pure food grade H2O2 at any pharmacy. It can be ordered online at different percentage levels. Anything over 10% is caustic and shouldn’t be ingested.

At that level it is highly caustic and has to be handled carefully to avoid direct skin exposure, it can burn your skin. It has to be carefully handled with gloves to dilute it further, with distilled water only, to make it safe if taken orally.

According to Dr. David Williams:

“A safe three percent solution can be made quite easily by first pouring 1 ounce of 35 percent H2O2 into a pint jar. To this, add 11 ounces of distilled water. This will make 12 ounces of three percent H2O2. Three percent H2O2 has a variety of medicinal uses.”

Of course, 3 percent food grade hydrogen peroxide is now available online, and there are some health food stores that now sell 3 percent food grade hydrogen peroxide.

The main reason holistic doctors manage cancer with mega-dose sodium ascorbate vitamin C is that when 50 to 100 grams of vitamin C is delivered via slow drip IV systems a huge amount enters the blood.

With that vitamin C load in the blood, vitamin C turns from anti-oxidant to oxidizer by creating or increasing the body’s capacity to produce hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). The fizzing or slight burning sensations is from the intense rapid introduction of oxygen into tissue cells.

Adding H2O2 by whatever means can cause the anaerobic cancer cells to be overburdened with oxygen. Then they can no longer survive as cancer cells. They undergo apoptosis or cell suicide. Healthy cells are unaffected.

What does this say about H2O2 itself? Our white blood cells produce H2O2 as their weapon of choice, and they are among the first wave of antibodies in pursuit of pathogens and cancer cells.

Slow drip IV hydrogen peroxide is a great way to overwhelm cancer cells with the oxygen that they cannot survive in. Hydrogen peroxide at the right solution levels can be delivered intravenously by qualified medical practitioners.

Consuming it orally or nebulizing it and breathing it in is very do-able if one is without appropriate medical supervision for IV infusions of hydrogen peroxide. Success with either may be dependent on the degree or stage of illness and one’s own immune system.

—

It’s a particularly nasty flu season, right – what should we do??

Last week, a student in my daughter’s elementary school died. An apparently healthy, active, and vital 10-year old child suddenly departed. Despite an initial announcement of “cause unknown,” the administrators followed up with a suddenly clear pronouncement that he died “from the flu.” Looking beyond the fact that now even school administrators feel entitled to give clinical advice (“if you haven’t yet received your flu shot, please do”), I was interested to see that this child’s flu vaccine status was not mentioned. I wondered if he had received the flu shot or taken Tamiflu – especially since both have been associated with sudden death in the pediatric population.

It’s a “deadly” flu season, and the pharmaceutically-funded media would have you believe that you must head on over to CVS and get your flu shot to make it through the year. And if the flu shot doesn’t work – even the CDC estimates its effectiveness around 39% – well then, just head to your doctor and get treated with Tamiflu!

But is it really that simple? Is it possible that we are bumping up against the glass ceiling of the Simple Solution for Sickness? Many of us are rolling our eyes at the “10% off your shopping order!” flu shot incentives, and our sniffles don’t send us running to the doctor for antibiotics “just in case.” As our own memories tell a different story from the scary stories on TV (wait…the chicken pox and the flu are deadly? Mom, Dad…didn’t you both have Measlesand live to tell the tale?), we are becoming less and less susceptible to fabricated lore. We are harder to scare into action. We are beginning to accept that the magic pill is a fantasy, and that this crisis of confidence in our medical system is no small hurdle to overcome. It is an initiation into a new belief system.

I believe that this initiation begins with information and understanding. This understanding leads to informed choices. These empowered choices lead to a new experience of trust in your body and in the natural world.

Let’s bring this back to earth with an example. Let’s look at the Simple Solution for the flu: Tamiflu.

Conventional medicine tells us that you can pull one thread of the spider web without impacting the whole design. So, is it possible that Tamiflu can enter your system, kill those nasty flu germs, and quietly exit without harming any innocents?

What is Tamiflu, and how does it work?

Tamiflu (oseltamivir) is prescription medication that is FDA-approved for anyone 2 weeks of age and older. It is designed to prevent the influenza virus from replicating and invading other cells. The pharmaceutical company that developed Tamiflu, Roche (also called Hoffmann–LaRoche), claims that Tamiflu can protect against getting the flu and reduce the severity of flu symptoms. Roche cites studies like a 1999 article in JAMA, in which authors write that Tamiflu “…provided significant antiviral, biochemical, and clinical effects in experimental human influenza virus infection. Prophylactic administration either once or twice daily completely protected against viral recovery in the upper respiratory tract and against infection-associated respiratory tract illness.”

Well that sounds good, right? In 1999, Roche presented this study, along with two clinical trials involving 1,358 patients, to an FDA committee of medical advisors – but the committee declined to approve Tamiflu due to a lack of convincing data.

Let’s dive a bit deeper to see if the data are indeed unconvincing (the full-text of this article is free!). This study involved 117 young adults (median age was 21), split into several groups that ranged from 11 to 64 subjects. Any scientist or statistician will immediately warn you that those group sizes (called sample sizes) are too small to draw statistically significant conclusions. With that in mind, let’s continue unpacking this study…

To measure the prophylactic effects of Tamiflu, researchers gave 12 people a placebo pill, and they gave 21 people various doses of Tamiflu before they stuck influenza virus into their noses. Flu-like symptoms were measured after viral inoculation, and people who had received Tamiflu were rated to exhibit lower symptom scores. From this experiment (based on a paltry 33 subjects), researchers concluded that Tamiflu indeed protects against getting the flu.

Next, to determine if Tamiflu reduced the severity of flu symptoms, researchers infected 80 people with the influenza virus (again in their noses). They gave Tamiflu to 56 people and a placebo to the rest. Then, researchers washed out people’s noses and measured the number of virus particles in their mucus. They reported that Tamiflu treatment reduced the number of viral copies in people’s nasal passages.

Quantifying the number of viral particles in people’s noses – after the flu virus was stuck into people’s noses – does not tell us anything about how the flu virus is spreading throughout the body. Anyway, for whatever reasons (you can use your imagination), FDA administrators overruled the medical expert committee’s suggestion and approved Tamiflu in October 1999. But the FDA hedged a bit and required the drugmaker to issue the following statement:

Tamiflu has not been proven to have a positive impact on the potential consequences (such as hospitalizations, mortality, or economic impact) of seasonal, avian, or pandemic influenza.

Since its FDA approval, clinical trials touting the effectiveness of Tamiflu have been published – though a look at the authors and footnotes of these studies may give you pause. For example, Penelope Ward, MD has authored dozens of scientific studies that support Tamiflu, including the 1999 JAMA study we just deconstructed, a 2001 JAMA study with similar methods and conclusions, and an oft-cited 1999 study in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) entitled ‘Use of the Selective Oral Neuraminidase Inhibitor Oseltamivir to Prevent Influenza’ – and she served as the Head of Clinical Development for Hoffman-LaRoche. Actually, let’s look at the footnote of the 1999 NEJM study:

Interesting…

Overall, it appears that all the studies that support the efficacy of Tamiflu are funded by the pharmaceutical companies that stand to profit from its sales.

Fortunately, a group of unbiased medical experts at the US Cochrane Center re-analyzed data from 20 clinical trials like these, reporting their results in a 2009 BMJ article. Their meta-analysis showed that there was no significant evidence that Tamiflu reduced influenza symptoms or complications – the only possible positive association was that Tamiflu might decrease the length of time people exhibited symptoms by a few hours. Further, the reanalysis found that Tamiflu increased nausea.

As an interesting aside, Cochrane Center researchers noted that it took years-long concerted efforts to obtain clinical data from drugmakers. Along these lines, investigative articles published in The Atlantic in 2009 and 2013 suggest that political and financial motivations (to the tune of billions of dollars) underpin this Tamiflu delusion.

So where does this leave us? Perhaps Tamiflu doesn’t work that well, but is there any harm in taking it anyway, just to be safe?

Is Tamiflu safe?

A 2007 scientific report suggests that Tamiflu is in fact exceedingly dangerous. In the 6 years that Tamiflu was marketed in Japan, the Japanese Ministry of Health Labour and Welfare received 1377 reports of adverse reactions. Approximately half of these reactions were serious neuropsychiatric cases, including delirium, convulsions, and encephalitis. Eighty deaths were reported, and 71 were considered to be directly related to Tamiflu. Two of the most alarming deaths were suicides by 14-year-old teens on Tamiflu.

A 2011 Japanese study found that those diagnosed with influenza had an almost six fold increased risk of deteriorating and dying within twelve hours of receiving Tamiflu.

They conclude:

These data suggest Tamiflu use could induce sudden deterioration leading to death especially within 12 hours of prescription. These findings are consistent with sudden deaths observed in a series of animal toxicity studies, several reported case series and the results of prospective cohort studies. From “the precautionary principle” the potential harm of Tamiflu should be taken into account and further detailed studies should be conducted.

As such, Japanese authorities have advised against Tamiflu for adolescents, and the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (the UK’s version of the FDA) recommends against Tamiflu as a preventative strategy in healthy people. Yet, American agencies like the CDC and FDA continue to push Tamiflu in spite of its documented side effects of hallucinations.

Several recent news stories have highlighted these side effects of Tamiflu. For example, on January 15, 2018 a 6-year-old Texan girl took Tamiflu, hallucinated, and tried to jump out of a window. About a week later, another Texan child, this time a two-year-old boy, suffered from hallucinations that caused him to repeatedly slap his mother.

In a news article from January 24, 2018, the mother of a five-year-old girl who experienced severe hallucinations and seizure-like symptoms stated, “The flu is bad, it’s horrible, you feel helpless your child’s sick…I would take that a hundred times over the reaction she had to the Tamiflu.” Perhaps most telling is an article in Time entitled ‘Tamiflu Made My Kid Hallucinate. I Think the Flu is Preferable to Delirium.’

Very sadly, a 6-year old girl named Emily Muth from North Carolina died this week – three days after being given Tamiflu. According to her mother, Emily suffered from labored breathing (a known side effect of Tamiflu) right before her tragic passing.

Unfortunately, Tamiflu is neither safe nor effective. I hope that presenting the terrible experiences of the children and families mentioned in this article will serve as a warning to prevent more tragedies.

Fighting won’t win this fight

When you understand that the preschool analogy of foreign invaders (germs) fighting your inner soldiers (immune system) has been rendered obsolete by our awareness of the microbiome (including the virome!), and the poetic reality that we are made up of the very organisms we thought that we were fighting…well, then pharmaceutical medicine seems something like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

This is when you can graduate to a deeper sense that illness is purposeful, that the body recalibrates through fever, and that we are simply here to support the body’s innate wisdom…the less fear, the better.

There are many evidence-based tools for supporting your body’s detoxification process including vitamins A and D, herbs like ginseng, elderberry, and ginger, and food-derived compounds like AHCC and beta glucan, and, my favorite in this case, homeopathy (Oscillococcinum). Take the cue to stop, rest, and just be – while your body does its wise work.