Q & A archive—Nosebleeds

Question: I have a thirteen year old boy who has frequent nose bleeds. He can have three or four in a day’s time. Is this something I should be concerned about?

Answer: Very definitely! While it may be something which is easily correctable, it could also be symptoms of some very serious conditions. The first thing you should do is go to your doctor and get a complete blood count run on him. If that is normal, then the following advice is very important.

In the absence of disease, most nose bleeds are caused by excessive fragility of the platelets in the blood. These are the cells that make up the clotting mechanism of the blood. With improper nutrition over a period of time, they loose their ability to properly form the blood clot to stop bleeding.

In most cases that I have seen, the patient is usually eating a lot of junk foods and/or drinking a lot of soft drinks which can ruin the clotting ability. Hence, cleaning up the diet is imperative. All sugar foods and refined flour foods should be stopped and good foods such as meat and eggs and vegetables and fruits and nuts should be his diet. Vitamin C is always seriously deficient in this type of case. He should be taking at least 3000 to 5000 mg. of vitamin C daily in divided doses. To this must be added the Bioflavinoids which accompany vitamin C in nature. I would suggest Bioflavinoid caps 1000 mg. twice a day. Minerals are very important also but they will probably take care of themselves if a above dietary suggestions are followed. If he continues to have nose bleeds after these suggestions are followed for a couple weeks, he may have to have some of the blood vessels in the nose cauterized. In any event, the above dietary instructions should be imperative. Good luck.

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