Vicc-
While I appreciate your understanding of clotting issues, my own personal experience with this problem was not the impetus for my posting. Yes, there are things that can interact with coumadin that can produce deleterious effects. It's definitely a tempramental medication! But my warning was not just for coumadin users, and it was more objective than you make it out to be. Anyone who is on any medication should be cautious when adding anything to their regimen, whether or not it is a prescription drug or a 'natural' supplement. These can be powerful substances, even if they are found in the vitamin section. Too much vitamin A or vitamin E can have toxic effects. You have to be careful when taking such supplements. For instance, you casually mentioned taking DMSO, but DMSO is a very hazardous substance that is a powerful organic solvent. The material hazards page for this chemical advises having no direct contact with DMSO and washing it off immediately if it does touch the skin.

Also, there was a landmark study on antioxidants that came out in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that actually implicates them in increasing mortality. It was a systematic review of hundreds of other studies. They included 68 randomized trials with 232 606 participants from 385 publications. The authors found that beta carotene significantly increased mortality. And there have been recent studies that suggest that beta carotene my act as a cocarcinogen. Vitamin A also increased mortality dramatically, as did vitamin E. Vitamin C had no significant effect on mortality, but the sample size of vitamin C takers was much smaller than the sample size of other antioxicant takers. But still, it did not increase mortality. Selenium also had no effect.

The authors acknowledge that the findings directly contradict the findings of observational studies- it is folk knowledge that antioxidants are beneficial, but when the hard science is performed, you can see that they actually have a detrimental effect on health. They suggest that oxidative stress is most likely an effect of disease processes rather than the cause of them. Also, free radicals DO perform essential defense mechanisms in the body. They help in apoptosis (programmed cell death- the body's way of eliminating dying or mutated cells), phagocytosis (a white blood cell's ability to engulf and "eat" foreign invaders or damaged cells) and detoxification.

So in the face of this evidence, maybe people should be cautious about these specific supplements, but one should be cautious about supplements in general. Natural may not equal safe. Also, these are completely unregulated and their purities cannot be ascertained. It is virtually impossible to know what kinds of impurities and toxins are in these supplements, most of which are manufactured in China.

http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/297/8/842

Linnie