Vitamin C Forum

Indeed, Marik, who remains a strong proponent of this approach, rejects the findings of the study. He tells NPR that by his reckoning, patients in the study received treatment far too late in the course of their disease. "It's like giving it to a patient who's dead," he says. "It's of no benefit. The horse was out of the barn miles beforehand."

Marik, at Eastern Virginia Medical School, gives his patients the vitamin C infusion as quickly as he recognizes signs of sepsis. That's impossible to do in a study in which participants must be enrolled in a study and then randomized into one of the two comparison groups before treatment can begin.

"The question is, why does this study not replicate real-life experience and the experience of hundreds of clinicians around the world?" he asks.

Marik says in his experience, the treatment is only effective if given within six hours after someone has suspected sepsis. At the meeting in Belfast, Dr. Tomoko Fujii, on the study research team at Monash University, said they provided treatment an average of 12 hours after patients arrived in the intensive care unit. Patients came from a variety of locations, including the emergency room, and she said they have no information about how long they had been septic before arriving at the ICU.