From Aging: Cause & Cure, pages 105–106

While the fact of healing is very good news, the rate of healing is still sobering. … It took Noah roughly 12 years of saturation dosing to reverse 1 year of physiological agedness.

It is clearly not a good idea to allow MePA deficiency disease to progress at all. This is most clearly seen by considering the case of the elderly. While proper dosing with MePA puts one immediately on the road to better health, an elderly person still has a significant probability of dying of complications arising from MePA deficiency disease lesions (of a heart attack, for example) while waiting for those lesions slowly to heal.

Dietary supplementation with vitamin MePA will be helpful to an individual’s health no matter how elderly that person may be. But how elderly can a person be, when MePA supplementation begins, and still hope to realize a significant increase in longevity?

This is analogous to the question, “How far gone can a person be with scurvy and still hope to be rescued from death by beginning dietary supplementation with vitamin C?”

Scurvy heals fairly rapidly (days). Not so aging. Aging heals very slowly (decades). For this reason, it is to be expected that a person has a better chance of surviving an advanced case of scurvy than an advanced case of aging.

We have much yet to learn about how best to treat the very aged. It seems probable that they should be administered a larger than normal dose of MePA for some period of time. So far, we can only guess at this. We continue to exert maximum effort in the laboratory, even as I write, to remove the guesswork and better elucidate optimum dose regimens. What is most clear at this stage is that, for the elderly, not a day is to be lost in beginning dietary supplementation with vitamin MePA.

Following are two, illustrative, real life cases.

Case 1: Anonymous; January 13, 2018

This testimonial needs to be anonymous, because it involves family members who have not given me permission to identify them in this context. It would be easy to keep this all to myself, of course, but it may be both helpful and important to others to share some of my thoughts and recent experience related to the use of Dr. Aardsma’s MePA Dietary Supplement (MePA for short).

Last fall, my centenarian father was living in a private residence with my youngest sister, her mother, and other members of her family. Dad was doing reasonably well there while undergoing palliative care. I went to visit him there on October 23, 2017. He was no longer able to read and had even lost interest in watching television by then. Since I was hoping that I could persuade him to try MePA, I read aloud to him from my copy of Dr. Aardsma’s book, Aging: Cause & Cure. It was a bit difficult for Dad to stay awake.

At one point while I was reading, his wife came in and made it plain that she was against the idea of trying MePA. She didn’t believe it would do anything at all. I left that same afternoon without any encouragement to keep trying to change her mind. A few days later though, I had an online discussion with her about her idea that aging is not a disease and that ever since the Fall of Adam, aging and dying have been a part of God’s plan for replacing elderly people with younger people. I tried to make some points in the discussion that may be helpful to others facing a similar decision about whether to offer MePA to an elderly loved one.

Genesis tells the story of the Fall in chapter 3. In verse 3, Eve recalls the warning mentioned in Gen. 2:17 about death, not aging, being the punishment for disobedience. The serpent contradicted her in verse 4, but there is no more direct mention of death in the chapter, not counting the part where God told Adam he would return to dust, to the ground from which he had been taken, in verse 19. Adam later paid this penalty as reported in Gen. 5:5, which tells us that he died. (Rom. 5:12 explains that sin entered the world through just one man, Adam, “and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned.”) However, there is an indirect suggestion right in chapter 3 that Adam would work and eat plants that the ground produced by the sweat of his brow “all the days” of his life (3:17-19). This suggests to me that no noticeable aging was involved, because a physiologically elderly man is not likely to be capable of sweaty work in a field.

We are not told what the typical human life span was after the Fall, but seven men lived to be at least 900 years old (Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Jared, Methuselah, and Noah). Mahalalel almost made this list, living to be 895 years old. The age at death is stated for only one other man who lived before the Flood, namely Lamech, who reached the age of 777. We are not told the physical condition of any of these men during the last few years of their life. One hint that they might have still been quite vigorous, even when they were hundreds of years old, is the report in Gen. 5:32 that Noah was 500 years old when he became the father of three sons. I conclude from this that what we call “aging” may have become noticeable only after the Flood, when life spans began to decline dramatically but not suddenly.

Dr. Aardsma accounts for this pattern with his theory that a vitamin, once available to everyone in the world through ordinary drinking water, gradually became scarce, starting at about the time of the Flood, until practically none of it was left, which led to the modern norm of aging and death from a vitamin deficiency disease many years before we have reached the age of 900, an age once typically enjoyed in good health even after the Fall.

Dad’s wife may have also feared that MePA might leave him in an unnecessarily prolonged state of misery. I explained that this fear ought to be weighed against the hope that his misery would soon be replaced with a better quality of life, more or less as it was for Dr. Aardsma’s mother. If this happened, life would be easier for all of Dad’s caretakers, since he would be able to begin to do more for himself. Of course, nothing is guaranteed. MePA is still an experimental vitamin in the early stages of being tested by human subjects. Tests with mice suggested that it is not toxic, even with a dose rate much higher than what Dr. Aardsma recommends, but a benefit noticed by one subject might not be noticed by every other subject, any more than vitamin C is going to benefit everyone equally.

Someone might think that it is best to leave an elderly person in poor health with a low quality of life, allowing him to die of “old age” as soon as God is ready to take him home, on the theory that it would be against God’s plan to do anything to prolong the process. If this is what you are thinking, please consider how you would feel if you were an elderly person whose caretakers had learned of an opportunity to cure you, inexpensively but perhaps slowly, so that you could walk, read, and take care of yourself again without heavy assistance. Would you say, “No, leave me the way I am now until I die, because this is God’s will for me”?

God has not sentenced everyone to misery at the end of his life, any more than he sentenced Adam to it. Adam had to die eventually. He was not immortal, and not one of us is immortal either, but I have found nothing in God’s Word suggesting that misery in old age is necessarily God’s will. In modern times, many wonderful cures have been developed for diseases that brought an early death to many in the past. We do not refuse to offer those cures on the theory that God must want people to keep dying young from those diseases forever. Notice the prophecy in Is. 65:20, which predicts a time when God will allow people once again to live a life so long that dying at the age of 100 will seem to be a case of dying young, and this new pattern of life will be enjoyed even before the curse of death has been removed.

At the end of October, 2017, my sister informed my siblings and me that Dad was being switched to hospice care, because he had been “declining steadily” and showing signs that his body was giving out. At that point, he was refusing food and “expressing a desire to pass on.” Nevertheless, there was still some hope that he could be cured of a possible infection, allowing a broader recovery of health.

On November 2, a sister in a distant state wrote, “I think it is more about quality of life than quantity. If the vitamin makes the life you have more ‘livable’ I’m all for it.” I wrote back, “… according to the testimony provided by [Dr. Aardsma’s mother], this is exactly what she reported after she started taking the vitamin.” My sister went on to ask, “What does [Dad] have to lose?” It was an excellent question.

My wife, daughter, and two grandchildren went to visit Dad earlier that same day, and they told me that the first thing he said to them was “Vitamin X!” That was the first thing he said to me too, when I visited him on November 3. I came back the next day also. During my two-day visit, all but two of my six siblings were there at one time or another, plus a sister-in-law and one of my daughters. At this point, Dad was eating and drinking again as his health rebounded, but he seldom said anything that was more than just one word. My sister told us that she had asked Dad how he felt in the morning, and his answer was, “Dead.” She asked the same question late in the afternoon, and his answer was, “Alive.” He certainly recognized all of us, seemed to be generally happy, and appreciated our visits and musical performances.

Before I left that evening, I gave a dropper bottle of MePA to a brother who was planning to stay there that night with Dad. I later learned that Dad received two drops of MePA on November 5 and that my sister was planning to continue giving him this dose daily. That first day of taking the vitamin was a relatively good one for Dad. He ate food, drank water well, watched an episode of the Andy Griffith show, talked about it, and recognized Barney Fife. Later, the same brother, who had come back to help care for Dad for several days, told me that Dad had not been receiving any MePA lately but was getting it again and switching to a dose of four drops daily, placed directly into his mouth (not diluted with water) as of November 15.

Two days later, I arrived for another visit, this time with a brother who had not seen Dad in person for years. At this point, Dad was still accepting some fluids by mouth in small quantities, and he clearly recognized us, but he was unable to say anything clearly. The following evening, I saw Dad receive four more drops of MePA, but he had not been awake much at all that day. The following morning, on November 19, 2017, I received a text message reporting that Dad had passed away quietly in his sleep only a few minutes earlier.

One moral of this story is that one can wait too long to start taking MePA, so long that it will be too late to realize any significant benefit. The process of aging causes damage that takes time to heal. MePA has been reported to accelerate the healing of injuries, and it can evidently stop or even slowly reverse damage due to aging. In time, however, the damage may become so severe that not even MePA can prevent death. My own father was a case in point. Another moral to this story is that everyone, even someone who takes MePA, should be prepared to die at any time with a hope of eternal life in glory (John 3:16). I am so glad that my father was such a man and wanted me to have that same hope.

Case 2: Papa Bill

A few individuals participated as pilot-study volunteers with Dr. Aardsma’s Vitamin MePA Dietary Supplement. Papa Bill, under the care of his son, John, and John’s wife, Victoria, was one such participant. Papa Bill was of special interest because he was very elderly and not doing very well. At 88 years of age, he would be our oldest pilot-study participant.

Papa Bill entered the pilot-study soon after moving in with John and Victoria. He started using Dr. Aardsma’s Vitamin MePA Dietary Supplement at one drop (2 micrograms MePA) per day on September 29, 2017. Victoria inquired whether the drop could be taken with some other beverage, as Papa Bill did not drink water. She was assured that would be fine.

Victoria is a friend of Jennifer Hall, Dr. Aardsma’s eldest daughter, so updates on Papa Bill were frequently relayed through Jennifer, as text messages.

October 22, 2017 (3 weeks 2 days on MePA)

Victoria: He’s doing very well. We attribute some of his feeling better to changing his environment and the rest to the vitamin.

November 15, 2017 (6 weeks 5 days on MePA)

Jennifer: From Victoria, about Papa Bill– “Doing very well. He has a little more strength. His mind is good. He takes one drop a day.” WORDS CANNOT EXPRESS HOW HAPPY I AM TO HEAR THAT!!!! Honestly, he could be on death’s doorstep by now if not for MePA.

December 25, 2017 (12 weeks 3 days on MePA)

Jennifer: Victoria says he is doing very well. Stronger in every way she says. They are taking much better care of him than the situation he was in before, so hard to know what is causing what.

January 7, 2018 (3 months 9 days on MePA)

Jennifer: I spoke with John and Victoria today. Papa Bill is still just SO old. Basically the gist of their comments was that they are starting to wonder how long he can really go on in this state. How long do they WANT him to, etc. I think initially they didn’t really believe he would live a lot longer from taking this. But now they are starting to wonder. And it’s hard for them to think about him going on like this long term. They are caring for him; like a nursing home type situation. It is very taxing on them. He’s not thinking clearly half the time, etc. So we discussed that it’s certainly not best to start taking this when you are already advanced in the disease of aging. WAY better scenario to take it while still young or relatively young.

January 27, 2018 (3 months 29 days on MePA)

Victoria: It looks like papa bill is trying to leave us.
Jennifer: Oh really? What do you mean??
Victoria: Trying to die. It may be soon or days.
Jennifer: Oh no… thanks for telling me. Did this just start today? Like he doesn’t want to live anymore? Or his body is shutting down?
Victoria: His body is shutting down. In the last 24 hours.

January 28, 2018 (3 months 30 days on MePA)

Jennifer: Victoria says they have called Hospice in for help.

Papa Bill died on the 29th.

January 29, 2018

Jennifer: So sad. Clearly the best way to deal with this disease is to prevent it from setting in at all. As Dad states in his book.

January 31, 2018

Jennifer: Mom, I just gave Victoria your hug. She said she really appreciated it, and then she said, “Please thank them for me. They gave us four months, and they were very happy months, because he was doing so well.”