I submitted the below solution to an Innocentive challenge over a year ago that was sponsored primarily by medical insurance institutions as a way to immediately control cost.  I got a nice thank you from Innocentive and of course I did not win the challenge. I imagine that it was frightening to them to think that the medical economy could be reduced by at least 30%.

If you are a medical insurer, health provider, government, or a pharmaceutical manufacturer you will should have great concern when you read this message.

Note, I am neither a doctor nor a nutritionist.  I am just someone that discovered a 99% correlation between obesity and central air condition in the US over the last 20 years.  When I started looking for cause and effect I found sunshine.  I was healed of degenerative disc disease, severe sleep apnea, and after having two back surgeries I avoided three more. All of this healing and reduced medical cost in just four years. My physician tells me that I now have the health of a 25 year old and that is not too bad for a 57 year old man.  This was accomplished by simply supplementing with 4000 IU per day during the summer and 10.000 IU per day during the winter (body weight 230 lbs – 38 degrees North Latitude).  Without this understanding I would be either incapacitated or dead.

For 70 years now we have been ignoring the advantages of the sun or being replete in Vitamin D.  It is even longer if you consider that Niels Ryberg Finsen was given the Nobel Prize in 1903 for curing a form of TB (lupus vulgaris) using UV light.  It is amazing that we started to implement the understanding during the first part of the 20^th Century by having the medical profession encourage everyone to take cod liver oil everyday.  We then discovered synthetic steroids in the fifties and the desire for profit and allopathic medicine outweighed our desire for individual health and preventative medicine.  We then entered the years of sun phobia and the entire population became less healthy and is kept alive with modern medicine.  This is great for the medical economy but poor for the individual health.  Our institutional ignoring of the facts has lead to the second ‘Holocaust’.  Sorry to use this word, but I just do not know what else to call it after personally suffering 25 years of torturous pain and loss of income.

The simple solution to improve health care is to heal the population.  The majority of chronic disease can be significantly reduced by changing the health policy of supplementation of vitamin D and the medical guidelines for treatment.  That is to encourage the population to get at minimum 3000 IU (adults) of D3 per day either through supplementation or exposure to the sun or other UVB light source with an upper limit of 10,000 IU per day.  The medical guidelines should be changed to assure that deficiency begins below 40 ng/ml of serum 25(OH)D3 and insufficiency below 60 ng/ml.  Normal range should be changed to 60 to 100 ng/ml for 25(OH)D3 instead of the current 20 to 100 ng/ml.

The present resistance is that there is not enough research to support such a change.  I say that this is just wrong as we have already had a public policy that was close to this when the medical profession suggested that everyone take two tablespoons of cod liver oil per day or approximately 2600 IU of D3.  It is interesting to note that in 25 years in suffering back pain and other disease that not one single doctor suggested that I might vitamin D deficient when we have a national health policy of supplementing milk for bone disease.  How easy is it to ignore the facts when there is no profit motive?

Given the antiviral, antibiotic, antifungal, cellular differentiation, other genetic signaling, autoimmune disease, hypertension, muscle strength, stimulation of the entire endocrine system, and cancer treatment and prevention, the medical industry will most likely shrink by 25 to 50 percent over the next ten years.  As the centers of cash flow change there would be a huge shift in the centers of economy.  The medical economic segment would shrink from first to about somewhere in the middle of the pack.  This would cause great economic concern over a 10 to 20 year period but would significantly improve the productivity and economy of the individual as the population became healthier and in general and an improvement of the economy of the whole.

I know that your goal is to significantly improve medical cost while not impacting medical income.  The question that you have to ask yourself is the health of the individual more important than the medical economy.  So far lobbying efforts have held government policy in check as is readily confessed by HHS Secretary Levitt in his number four principle of “Markets before Mandates”.  It is interesting to note that to “Value Life” is number nine.

You will not be able to stop the growing health benefit of this understanding.  Given that the medical publications are already making their way through the general population anything that you do to slow it down will make you look like perpetuators of the second ‘Holocaust’.  If you take only cancer and consider Lappe, et. al. study from Creighton University June 2006 that showed a reduction in total cancer of 60% when supplementing with only 1100 IU per day of D3, it becomes clear the ramifications of taking policy action.  If policy action is not taken soon the courts will become jammed with tort liability cases against the institutions of health and lead to economic failure in that manner.

Conclusion: Policy Change and Implementation by the US Government on Vitamin D

I will not list resources in this summary as it would take at least 10 pages.  However, please consider the Expert Opinion Diagnosis and Treatment of Vitamin D Deficiency by J. Cannell, B. W. Hollis, M. Zasloff, and R. P. Heaney.

Go into the Sun as I see a bright future in your life!