Rebekah Kelley: Welcome to the Humanized podcast, all about personalizing your health. I’m your host, Rebekah Kelley, and today we’ll be discussing Raising the Bar on Standard of Care, with Dr. Mignonne Mary. Before I introduce Dr. Mary, I want to remind everyone to subscribe and get all of our variety of casts in audio, video and transcription at HumanizedHealth.com. I’d also like to thank our lead sponsor, Village Green Apothecary, at MyVillageGreen.com.

A little bit about Dr. Mignonne Mary. She’s the founder and medical director of The Remedy Room, which is a continuation of the legacy of her father, Dr. Charles C. Mary, Jr., a pioneer in the field of IV vitamin therapy. Dr. Mary’s passion for the benefits of infusion therapy began with her father and have since developed through years of her own practice and continued education. Today, Dr. Mary’s clinic focuses on treating the whole person and not just symptoms, health promotion and disease prevention. The Mary family’s innovative approach to wellness and recovery has changed thousands of people’s lives and continues to grow each year. Dr. Mary currently practices internal medicine out of The Remedy Room, with an emphasis on nutrition and integrative medicine to use the best that every field of thought has to offer.

Dr. Mary, thank you so much for being here with us.

Mignonne Mary: Thanks Rebekah, I appreciate it.

Rebekah Kelley: So that’s quite a legacy, right? And I really… you’re here to tell us about your story and how you got where you are right now. Please, we want to hear it all.

Mignonne Mary: Okay. So, I’m from New Orleans. I graduated from LSU Medical School in internal medicine, and I come from a family of physicians. My father, at a very young age was one of the youngest directors of a state hospital, of Charity Hospital. And, very, very smart. A lot of people have told me he was born ahead of his time. And so when he left the hospital and started in private practice, he was aware that in the ’70s, there really hadn’t been much advancement in the treatment of cancer. And so he started looking into other therapies and was in a meeting and met a doctor named Fred Klenner, who was also a pioneer in the use of IV vitamin C and was using IV vitamin C during the polio epidemic and having great success. So he starts using it, and Dr. Klenner challenges him to start using it for the next time he has a patient with Epstein-Barr or mononucleosis. And at that time, as the universe sends you things, you need, not necessarily you want… he sees three patients and starts to get them well. This is mono that usually take kids out and college kids out for a whole semester, and within 2 or 3 days, these people are saying they want a burger and they want to get back to life. So my dad progresses and starts using it for other viral illnesses, such as hepatitis and then eventually HIV. And then certainly to support the patients during their time with cancer.

Then, fast forward. So he’s using it in the office and it’s just my normal life to see patients getting IV therapy in an office setting. And honestly, I did think that everybody just did that. You know, I thought when I got out of med school, that that’s how it would be. I didn’t realize what an anomaly it is until now.

And so he’s using IV vitamin C and mega-doses, high doses in the office setting, preventing people from getting to the hospital, and then in the hospital setting as well, and getting great results.

When I was in high school, my dad developed colorectal cancer, was not expected to live. He went around the world and found some other doctors, but in the meantime started using high doses of vitamin C for himself. And when they resected the piece of his colon, there was nothing there. There was no tumor. So, he has his own experience. And so that just continued to forge us forward, we knew what we were seeing and we knew the experiences we were having were incredible. You know, stories of people with esophageal cancer, who, when you irradiate an area, it scars it and it causes a lot of damage and swelling. And usually those guys do not have a very good diet because they can’t eat. And on the last day of his radiation, this patient’s eating burgers and feeling great.

So, you know, the proof is in the pudding. Our patients find when they’re in the therapies with other patients, they have more color. Their quality of life is certainly improved. And so we don’t make any claims that we’re curing cancer. We couldn’t certainly do that, but we can say that we support the body system while it is having a large impact from other things such as radiation, chemo and surgery, and we’re supporting the cells during this time of trauma and stress. And in that, we’re bridging the body so that it can heal itself because, back to what we know – we’re energetic beings, our bodies can heal. It’s just that we need to get out of the way.

And so, fast forward that – my older brother is also an internist and he starts using vitamin C in his office, in the Mary Clinic. And then, so as time progressed, I opened up The Remedy Room. And instead of having an office with one room, because through the years, this IV room is getting bigger and bigger, and so I said, well, I’m just going to flip the model and I’ll have the whole thing be an IV room, and the offices on the side will be to evaluate the patients and talk to them and teach them.

We spend a large portion of our time helping to support patients with chronic disease, whether that’s cancer or not. And then we go all the way to the other side, which is supporting patients with nutritional care to help them with whatever – whether it’s an ergogenic aid for sports, whether they’re just run down and fatigued – because we know that vitamin C, we cannot make vitamin C in our own cells, so we need to supply it from the outside and take it in with our food. Well, we know that most of us have been eating a Standard American Diet, which certainly is not going to provide enough vitamin C to help fight off any infections, and so we need to supplement. And then sometimes that supplementation needs to go even higher. And with the IV doses, the reason why IV vitamin C is so powerful is because you can get exponential doses inside the cell. You skip the GI tract so you don’t have any worry or trouble with any kind of loose bowels that might happen from oral dosing, and you are really quenching this free radical damage that happens when you have inflammation.

All disease is basically oxidative reduction and you’re donating and receiving electrons. And so this powerful, natural nutrient that is provided for us, it’s almost too good to be true. And so I think that’s part of the resistance of, “it can’t possibly be all those things.”

And so we talked earlier about how much of your life is our experiences, things that people told you and that you learned, or that you have seen and experienced for yourself. And so I grew up watching people get well, and now I’m taking care of those patients and have the luxury of being able to watch and have these patients get well in front of me and under my care. So it’s really not… we don’t go to work here. We really have the most fun because it’s really incredible to watch someone turn around and feel so much better. And, everything isn’t just in the same day, let’s be realistic here, and it didn’t take us a day to get sick.

But my goal is to help share this information of the power of vitamin C. The dose is dependent on the amount of inflammation that’s in the body. It’s something that’s non-toxic, it’s very inexpensive. It’s here for our use and I see a future that it becomes standard of care and that it’s used from the moment we walk into the hospital until we get out sooner, because of it.

So, I’ve had my dad’s experience and he lives next door to me. I still confer with him. I talk to him every day, and I really do have an incredible life, and my journey here is a lot different than a lot of other doctors who have been dismayed by conventional medicine and dismayed by this system. I do think there’s a place for both. The words that we use around this type of medicine seem to always polarize, and it’s really an all-encompassing [approach], as you brought up in the beginning, it’s really about treating the whole patient. And so that includes the mental health, giving people hope instead of destroying their hopes and dreams, and letting them know that once you can change your thoughts, and we support the mechanical side or the chemical side by donating those electrons, you can start to feel better. And it’s just sort of that merry-go-round of getting better and improving every single day.

So, I kind of got vague there, but the power of vitamin C is so strong and the resistance that we feel – if we could let go of our past. I don’t know why it’s so unbelievable for people, if all they need to do is come here and sit on the couch and watch what happens.

And so we’re having really good success with viral illnesses, as you can imagine. We’ve treated hundreds of patients. What they’re recognizing is that it isn’t going to be solved in one treatment, but that with 2 or 3 days of supporting the system, you give their body that little leg up and then it does its job.

Rebekah Kelley: That’s really an amazing story about the Marys. Thank you so much for sharing with us.

Mignonne Mary: Thank you.

Rebekah Kelley: Dr. Mignonne Mary can be found at www.TheRemedyRoom.com. I’m going to spell that. That’s T-H-E-R-E-M-E-D-Y-R-O-O-M.com. Let me remind you to subscribe and get access to all Humanized videos, podcasts and transcriptions from all of our thought leaders on personalized health at HumanizedHealth.com.