http://www.bibliotec...d_potassium.htm
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In order to keep their medical doctors in line, both the FDA and AMA have circulated a number of truly frightening stories about potassium. Most common among them is that the potassium will 'react' with one of a wide range of synthetic pharmaceutical medicines, frequently resulting in death. This is actually true, but it is the poisonous synthetic medicine which causes the lethal cross reaction that kills you, not the natural potassium so essential to your health.
Then there is the even scarier rumor that 'too much' potassium will kill you by stopping your heart from beating, as in the case of a lethal injection execution.
Too much of almost anything will kill you, including simple water and air, especially if applied too quickly or by the incorrect route. When Timothy McVeigh was strapped to a gurney and put to death, the third chemical injected directly into his vein was a 'chaser' containing 50 milliliters of concentrated potassium chloride, which finally stopped his heart. If you are stupid enough to try this at home, you will die just as quickly, and in order to put this deliberate FDA and AMA scare mongering into the proper perspective, it is necessary to explain why.
The normal route for potassium to enter the body is by way of the mouth, either in the form of food, or sometimes as a solution made up of 100% water soluble potassium chloride dissolved in fruit juice.
As the potassium passes through the digestive tract, the cells extract what they need and any excess is then passed out of the body, partly as solid waste, but mostly through the kidneys as urine. It is a perfectly normal biochemical process that the body itself knows how to handle very well, without any outside help from medical doctors. However, if you inject the potassium directly into a vein, you bypass the body's biochemical safety processes and stop the heart.
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It was then that I discovered my medical 'angina' symptoms precisely matched those exhibited by a person suffering from an acute potassium deficiency. This information came as no great surprise. On the face of it, I had uncovered the underlying cause of medical 'angina', the latter credited with the sale of more than a billion dollars worth of synthetic 'patent medicines' every year.
The problem was knowing what to do next. In Australia I was limited to 100-milligram potassium pills from the health food shops, or to a product called "Slow K" available from some pharmacies. Basically Slow K is a slow-release 600-milligram chunk of potassium chloride, which allows a 'non-lethal' dose of potassium to be administered under the direct control of the pill, rather than under the control of its recipient.
The problem here is that all chunks of salt are biochemically "hot', meaning that as the sugar coating wears off the outside of the pill, the chunk of undissolved salt is exposed, and can then come into direct contact with delicate internal tissues. In my casual view, this could easily cause some sort of perforation or an ulcer.
Clearly what I needed was an industrial quantity of potassium in free flowing 100% water soluble form, which would allow me to first dissolve the potassium in water and fruit juice, thereby ensuring that no salt 'hot spots' could later cause problems in my digestive tract.
In the end I settled for a kilogram of AR [Analytical Reagent] grade potassium chloride salt from a chemical warehouse, mercifully not yet under the direct control of the American FDA, or the Australian AMA.
Cost wise this was also a plus, because the whole kilogram set me back a mere US$30.00 including taxes, which is cheap enough when you realize that my potassium chloride purchase contained approximately 620 grams [or 620,000 milligrams] of the same potassium the FDA has restricted to 100-milligrams per dose in the health food shops. You do the math. Pop down to your local health food provider and ask for a quote on 6,200 x 100-milligram potassium supplements. Be ready to write a very large check.
By this stage there was so much pain so often, that I made a personal executive decision to attempt to slowly try to absorb a minimum of 50 grams or 50,000 milligrams of potassium, representing about 1/5th of the 250 grams total that an adult male should contain within his body.
Simple common sense suggested that such an acute deficiency, with the extreme symptoms I was suffering, could hardly be caused by a minor reduction in whole body potassium, and, quite frankly, I also wanted the stop the overwhelming pain before it had a chance to accelerate into a fatal stroke or heart attack.
With this in mind, I dissolved 4 grams [4,000 milligrams] of potassium chloride in water and fruit juice, slowly swallowed the lot, and then kept grimly repeating this process every eight hours. After about five days [or 60,000 milligrams] most of the pain had gone, but I was still incapable of truly coherent thought. It was not until I was well past the 110,000-milligram mark that my faculties truly returned, though by then I was so exhausted I could no longer write or use the computer.
Expressed in the same terms used by the FDA, in ten days I had slowly ingested 68.2 grams of dissolved potassium [68,200 milligrams], or sixty-eight times the maximum quantity permitted under American law. However, it should also be noted that this figure represents only five days of the maximum quantity administered by licensed American doctors to their hypertensive patients during the nineteen forties, before their research funding was mysteriously and abruptly withdrawn.
When viewed in the latter context, my actions do not seem unreasonable.
At the end of the ten day period, all of my 'unstable angina' pain and breathlessness had vanished completely, and along with it most of the 'essential hypertension' that plagued me for more than twenty-five years. Nowadays I take a daily maintenance dose of 2,000 milligrams potassium per day [3,200 milligrams of AR grade potassium chloride salt], plus 200 milligrams of magnesium orotate to minimize losses.
I too take about 2g of elemental potassium ether from citrate or bicarbonate dissolved in water spread through the day, and sprinkle my breakfast eggs with potassium chloride.
