Monthly Archives: April 2014

VITAMIN D reduces 42 health problems

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Henry Lahore at VitaminDWiki list forty-two health problems as proven by Double-blind random-controlled-trials.

Hypertension,  Cardiovascular,  Back Pain,  Diabetes,  Influenza,  Falls,  Hip Fractures,  Breast Cancer, Raynaud’s pain,  Menstrual Pain,  C-section and pregnancy risks,  Low Birth Weight, Chronic Kidney Disease, Cystic Fibrosis,  Rheumatoid Arthritis,  TB,  Rickets,  Respiratory Tract Infection, Lupus, Sickle Cell pain, leg ulcers, traumatic brain injury. Parkinson’s Disease, Multiple Sclerosis, Congestive Heart Failure,  Middle Ear Infection, Gingivitis, Muscles in seniors, Antibiotic use in seniors, Taller Infants, Gestational Diabetes, Heart Strength following an attack, Prostate Cancer, Asthma, Depression, Breastfeeding, Fibromyalgia, Chronic Hives, cholesterol, Weight Loss: http://is.gd/proofvitd

What else do you need to know to be sure you have an adequate serum vitamin D level?   – Pandemic Survivor

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Time for Action to Help Relieve Pain

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I started to write this blog in 2009. That was five years after I had recovered from chronic severe back pain. I had written a non-published book at that time about the experience of healing. The book was about my two back surgeries and how I avoided the advice of doctors for more surgeries. This original book was a flow out of all that I had experienced. Three decades of chronic pain, two failed surgeries, the discovery that I could heal back pain with nutrition and growing three inches taller in ten months as I healed (think about twenty plus discs expanding in height more than one tenth inch to clear all the nerve roots). I have finally gotten over my thinking that the medical profession would move forward and not allow people to continue to suffer with back pain. After all, if an engineer could figure the combination of nutrients to allow cartilage to heal, then certainly someone in medical research could do the same.

I struggled after healing that first two years with why the medical guideline changes for healing failed cartilage had not already occurred. I had met twice with my congressman about the possibility of Congressional hearings to allow the experts to speak on things they had found on nutritional deficiency and chronic disease. We had talked about a meeting with Senator Burr to see if we could make it happen. Then, I discovered Secretary Michael Levitt’s Principles for Health and Human Services. With “Markets before Mandates” five positions above “Value Life”, I knew the economy is more important to the US Government than any life of an individual or many individuals. I knew that only a grass roots effort would cause change. I was happy to see Carole Baggerly turn her anger into action with the founding GrassrootsHealth. If you did not watch her in my last post then do that now! Presentation to Direct-MS Canada.

I have finally gotten over my emotions enough to act. I took an online course in creative writing, a daunting task for an engineer. I have reduced that first two hundred page book into about one hundred fifty pages and plan to e-publish within a week or so. It is about my life of pain, the discovery of healing, the healing, social acceptance, and my struggle to understand what was happening in government and our institutions. I only tout vitamin D3 in this book, but understand that it is the combination of many nutrients that allows cartilage to heal. Also, I wanted to wait because of the possibility that I was a unique case.   But after ten years of enjoying good health, it is now time to act.

I am about seventy percent through writing a how to book on healing back pain(still working on finding a publisher). This book will include a section on how to manage pain, the nutrients required for healing, and how to work with your doctor as you use nutrients to heal. To accomplish this task, I have persuaded a couple of medical professionals to coauthor, Molly Schneider, PharmD, and Caitlin Gerrald, PA-C.  Also, my primary care physician has agreed to write a preface supporting my claims of healing. We will also have a chapter for physicians. Here we will try to describe the physiological mechanisms as we best understand them to get physicians to understand the multiple levels of DNA/RNA action and needed nutrition to support them. We will also help physicians avoid the pit falls like just supplementing vitamin D versus checking the blood serum level of 25(OH)D.  Also supplementing with vitamin D3 versus vitamin D2. We will also do the same with other nutrients that are on the market as mimics or analogs of natural supplements. I am asking several of the people that have tried the supplements to be interviewed for this book and to discuss their outcomes. Hopefully, I will be able to release this book within six months to a year.

How significant is the need for a method to heal back pain? Consider Dr. Mercola’s recent article of “How to Avoid the Number One Cause of Disability”

My doctor, after the second surgery, offered to write me a letter for seventy percent disability. I declined at the time because through faith I believed there was a solution. It turned out to be both medical, environmental, and nutritional. Everyone who has suffered with back pain should at least try the nutrients before attempting the surgery route. Dr. Mercola makes this statement in the summary: “I strongly recommend avoiding surgery until or unless you’ve exhausted other treatment options, which include chiropractic, massage, acupuncture, exercise, and most importantly, K-Laser treatment.”

I would here like to apologize to all the people in the world suffering from chronic pain for not releasing these two books earlier.  Also for not disclosing all the needed nutrients in a timely manner. Unfortunately, there is more than physical disability in suffering with chronic pain. It totally distorts your outlook and mood from decades of pain and drugs. Every time I would hear of another person dying from chronic disease from apparent nutritional deficiency, I would allow anger to raise its ugly head instead of using it for action of love, peace, and joy. Here is a video of a recent Toastmasters speech in which I describe an event with one of my neighbors.

“Pulled from the Abyss Again”

I would like to thank my wife for her help in this effort and all the pain and suffering she has had to witness without a flinch.  – Jill W. Pegram, MT(ASCP)SC

Breast Cancer Survivor Takes on the Issues

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Carole Baggerly had her own experience with breast cancer. She then started to research the reason why. Her discovery; scientists have expressed the understanding that breast cancer is a deficiency disease. That is over her life time, her intake of vitamin D was not adequate. She was so upset and concerned about the issues that she started GrassrootsHealth. This is a consortium of more than forty scientists and doctors that are experts in vitamin D and nutrition. She discovered that it was not only breast cancer, but a host of chronic illness related to deficiencies. Take the time and watch her explain the issues in the first thirty minutes of this video presentation.  Carole Baggerly and Dr. Heaney, September, 2012  Presentation to Direct-MS Canada.

If you are concerned about the health of your children, yourself, your parents, the next hour is Dr. Heaney who has contributed significantly to the understanding of vitamin D. He talks about the longevity issues and decline with chronic disease because of nutritional deficiencies. There are many diseases that have now been linked to deficiencies that number into the hundreds. This is particularly pointed to vitamin D deficiency.

This discussion is fairly non-technical and is understandable by the average person. Dr. Heaney expresses the understanding that “things go better with vitamin D”. That is that vitamin D deficiency may not be the cause of a disease like TB, but not having enough vitamin D will prevent your body from properly healing. However, this understanding falls into the logic of the chicken versus the egg. In other words, if you had enough vitamin D would you have gotten TB in the first place? Dr. Heaney discusses everything from diabetes, heart disease, MS, pregnancy, and cancer to infectious diseases like TB. I give the video presentation six stars out of a five star rating system for understanding of chronic disease and the effect of vitamin D.  Presentation to Direct-MS Canada.

Your take away from this, is you, your friends, and your family should not suffer from vitamin D deficiency.   Standards within the medical industry have long been 20 ng/ml to 100 ng/ml.   There have not been any cases of toxicity below 200 ng/ml or 500 nmol/l.  There does not appear to be any downside at this level of vitamin D.  Some laboratories have decreased the upper number, 100 ng/ml, to whatever they are measuring the population. Best health for you can be reached with a vitamin D serum level, 25(OH)D between 40 ng/ml to 80 ng/ml; note this is still within the normal range as defined by medicine. It is not how much you take; it is where you maintain your serum level. Everyone responds differently to their intake from all sources of vitamin D. The only way to know is to test.  Dr. Heaney says to maintain a level above 40ng/ml will require an intake from all sources of 5000 IU or more of vitamin D3 per day.

Please note this presentation is in Canada. The measurements used are in nanamoles per liter or nmol/l. To convert ng/ml to nmol/l multiply ng/ml by 2.5. So the normal range of 20 to 100 ng/ml is 50 to 250 nmol/l. Get your serum level tested to give your body a chance to thrive. If you choose to do it through GrassrootsHealth, you become part of the study that will help to advance health in the population. – Pandemic Survivor

Test by GrassrootsHealth: banner_ad_long5company postingVideo of how to do the test:  bscvideothumbnailv3web

Understanding out of Chaos

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Many Causes, One Disease, Many Cures
Resolving Multiple Factors for Disease States

“Double, double toil and trouble
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble” Hamlet, Shakespeare

Okay, this post is not for the layman in trying to resolve issues of their personal health. This post is to point researchers to a tool long used in the military and manufacturing for troubleshooting problems. The issues are multiple factor diseases. When there is more than one factor, analysis of the variance, ANOVA, only tells you that there is a statistical significance of one of the factor variances. It does not tell you which factor is causing the variance.

One of the issues that have long plagued medicine is multiple factors. In the ‘gold standard’ for statistical analysis of a drug or nutrient in how it affects a disease, typically only one factor is used. The double blind, placebo controlled trial is run. The reason for this is the complexity of the math when there is more than one factor and the understanding by decision makers of what the math model is telling you.

Elis R. Ott developed a technique for measuring multiple factors in how they vary from the average. In other words, the technique measures the group average variation from the average of the entire population. This technique is called analysis of the means. So in comparing to ANOVA it may be stated as: ANOM compares the group mean to the overall mean, where ANOVA compares the group mean to the other group means. ANOVA can tell you if there is a significant difference, while ANOM can tell which group mean is significantly different.

I can tell you from personal experience that ANOM is a very powerful statistical method to sort out both common causes and assignable causes. I was once the engineering manager for the world’s largest automotive battery plant. We made sixteen thousand batteries per day. That is over a million electrode plates per day. We of course used all the standard statistical techniques. Until ANOM was introduced, confusion continued to hold sway because the employees as well as the managers did not understand the math. When the graphical method of ANOM with the ability to compare multiple factors was introduced, we quickly achieved much higher production levels of quality product. It was also great because ANOM could be applied to either attribute data, go/no go, as well as variables data.  Also, much smaller sample sizes were needed to show significance. Clear decision making with expected results became trusted.

Here is an explanation from the SAS software statistical module: “A health care system administrator might ask which clinics in the system have a higher or lower rate of admissions than the average for all clinics. Questions of this type can be answered with analysis of means, which is an alternative to one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) for a fixed effects model. However, unlike ANOVA, which simply determines whether there is a statistically significant difference in the treatment means, ANOM identifies the means that are significantly different. As a statistical technique, ANOM is a method for making multiple comparisons that is sometimes referred to as a “multiple comparison with the weighted mean”. Analysis of means lends itself to quality improvement applications because it has a simple graphical representation that is similar to a Shewhart chart and requires little training to interpret. This representation is also useful for assessing practical significance.”

History: “Analysis of means compares the absolute deviations of group means from their over-all mean, an approach that was initially studied by Laplace in 1827. Halperin and others derived a version of this method in the form of a multiple significance test in 1955. Ott developed a graphical representation for the test and introduced the term “analysis of means” in 1967. Refer to Ott (1967) and Ott (1975). In the 1980’s Schilling extended the application to non-normal distributions. P. R. Nelson (1982a) and L. S. Nelson (1983) provided exact critical values for ANOM when the groups have equal sample sizes. P. R. Nelson (1991) developed a method for computing exact critical values for ANOM when the group sample sizes are not equal.”

This is really great because this technique can be applied to existing data when there are multiple factors to readily point to which is the most statistically significant. You can easily decide if calcium or vitamin D is more important or better you could compare vitamin D, vitamin A, calcium, and magnesium. The thing that adds to the value of ANOM is the ability to compare the interactions of the factors. Many of the interactions will mean nothing. However, the interactions of some of the factors will be greater than any one factor. So you might find that vitamin D is great for moving the population toward health. The interaction of vitamin D and magnesium would be even greater. We can make suppositions based on our understanding of the mechanisms, but until the interactions are statistically verified it continues to be viewed as a witch’s brew.

An example of this in the nutritional community is the argument between Dr. Cannell of the Vitamin D Council and the folks over at the Weston A. Price Foundation. Dr. Cannell has held that high levels of preformed vitamin A will lead to illness because of the apparent reduction in the serum levels of vitamin D. Weston A. Price Foundation has long held the importance of vitamin A and especially cod liver oil as an elixir for health. So the question becomes is vitamin A and vitamin D antagonist or are they cofactors of each other. I personally suspect that large amount of vitamin A with small amount of vitamin D is the issue driving the assumption that large intakes of vitamin A is bad. Given two to three months for the liver to clear of stored vitamin A with a serum level of vitamin D above 60 ng/ml; I suspect health would be improved with high intakes of both vitamins. I also suspect that there is enough data currently existing in clinical trials to ferret out the answer using ANOM. One of the major advantages of ANOM is that it gives a graphical solution that is easily understood by clinicians and decision makers without having to have a complete understanding of the math operating in the background.

So the group averages of different levels of vitamin A and vitamin D may look something like this when compared to the total population.
ANOM IllstrationAfter applying ANOM you would get a graphical solution like this. This created hypothetical  example shows that both high A and high D are statically significant. But better, it shows that the interaction of vitamin A and vitamin D is even more significant. (this would make sense as the known mechanisms for growth factors, necrosis factors, and immune system improvement require VDR/RXR dimers)
ANOM DecisionIf the above ANOM is truly represented as fact, then after giving the population high amounts of vitamin A and vitamin D you would get a shift like this:

Improved wellness after applying the new understanding.

Improved wellness after applying the new understanding.

Now just imagine the power of this when analyzing a population when the levels of vitamin A, vitamin D, magnesium, and calcium are known. You would be able to see the effect of the main factors as well as the interactions of the factors and decide based on statistical significance. Or better, you could make an analysis of different levels vitamin D3, vitamin D2, vitamin A from fish liver oil, beta-carotene, magnesium oxide, magnesium chelate, calcium hydroxide, and calcium citrate all in the same study. There would be no control population required as the group averages would be compared to the average of the entire population. This is more real world than how it is done now. Also, because the interactions are so difficult to predict by individuals during the trial, the placebo effect would not be as large a factor.
The clamor over the last many years have been that vitamin D provides no consistent benefit based on meta-analyses of many studies. The beauty of using ANOM for the meta-analyses would show that dose dependence is of extreme importance. No longer would critics be able to say that vitamin D has no effect. It would be plain there are no effects at lower levels or the effects would be shown to be dose dependent for different diseases.

Imagine doing drug studies and show variations of other drugs and nutrients and interactions in the same trials with a graphical method that could be easily understood. Or imagine analyzing all of the environmental factors that are issues for a disease like autism from existing data. For this reason, the inability to show clearly which factor is most important; it is not likely that this technique will ever be adopted. I know this is a very critical statement, but it is obvious that the preference of the medical community is to keep the argument going instead of solving the problems because of the economics involved. With increased wellness in the general population, healthcare/healthcare insurance job opportunities would be significantly reduced. Our leaders have to decide which is more important, your health or the economy. I suggest that empathy for each person’s wellness would strengthen the economy to a much greater extent than creating and maintaining jobs in the healthcare sector only. It would certainly give more trust in our leadership. – Pandemic Survivor

“Think, and then plot the data.” Elis R. Ott

Further Reading: Process Quality Control: Troubleshooting and Interpretation of Data, Fourth Edition Ott, Schilling, Neubauer 2005 http://asq.org/quality-press/display-item/?item=H1222 or Amazon
The Analysis of Means: A Graphical Method for Comparing Means, Rates, and Proportions, Nelson, Wludyka, Copeland; 2005 Amazon

Many Diseases, One Cause, One Cure –The Sun

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“Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake.
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.”
Macbeth, Shakespeare

Does this sound like your typical medical researcher toiling away at work in the laboratory? It may as well be as far as the average person is concerned. When scientists start talking about chemical and biological mechanisms or how a particular drug affects disease, I am sure this is what it sounds like. This is really unfair to the researchers for it is the spin of medical marketing that cause our heads to ‘explode’ with too much misunderstood information. Hypocrisy and deception was of course the major theme in Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth.

It is fact that the medical establishment wishes you to view holistic medicine in this manner, a witch’s brew. How many news articles have you seen in the popular press since this past December have been placed simply to discredit the use of vitamin and mineral supplements? In particular vitamin D; it is the steroid/vitamin that results from our exposure to the sun. This is the thing that is the most alarming to the medical profession. That one source can heal, treat, cure, prevent, and diagnose a disease without it being called a drug that can be exploited economically.

And just how far has the medical establishment taken the bashing of supplements and food to treat disease? They have gone as far as passing a law that says nothing but drugs can be used for purposes of healing, treating, curing, and preventing disease. I find this extremely amazing as this one law totally ties the hands of doctors in their toolbox of treatment. It was however agreed to because the other option was to allow the FDA to treat everything as a drug. This would take away our freedom of access. Dr. X, would you please write me a script for turnip greens…..

Let’s take the sun as the one thing that is responsible for many diseases if it is taken away. Without the sun, the water cycle and clean fresh air would not exist. There would be no food sources as photosynthesis would end. You would only have fungi to stay alive. If you completely took it away and everything that it gives us, you would be dead in a very short period of time. So let’s take away some degree of the sun and see what happens. You get a host of chronic disease that is used by the medical establishment and government to support a large economic sector.

This is exactly what happened in the 1960’s as a prominent pediatrician, Dr. Cook, friend of the Kennedy’s, made the public declaration that vitamin D would cause birth defects. People were scared out of the sun, especially pregnant women. The use of cod liver oil as a supplement was held in an extremely negative view by medicine. Where was the science in this art? Then there was the large campaign by the medical professionals to keep us out of the sun because we might get skin cancer. RUN, IN FEAR of cancer! Of course, there is now an extremely close correlation between the use of sunscreen and the incident of melanoma. Also, other cancers have either staid the same as far as mortality or increased even with all of our efforts in the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on cancer research. There are now at least a hundred diseases that can be traced to the lack of vitamin D or our connection to the sun. Dr. X, would please write me a script for the sun………

Do you have someone in your family or a friend that makes their income from the medical/medical insurance industry? An entrenched “protection racket” used for apparent safety that under any other circumstance would be aggressively prosecuted. “Double, double toil and trouble, Fire burns, cauldron bubbles.” – Pandemic Survivor

One Disease, One Cause, One Cure

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“Double, double toil and trouble,
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.” – Macbeth, Shakespeare

As I have read about diseases and medical cures, I have been fascinated by the approach to problem solving. I know that these are words you don’t normally hear in medical practice – ‘problem solving.’ It is typically about the disease, the cause, and the cure. It is also amazing to me to read research papers that will end with the statement about more needed research. I always ask the question; more research about what? Biological mechanisms for creating a new drug or the multiple factors that are the cause and cure of a disease?

Typically medicine has tried to identify a specific cause of malady with a specific cure. This makes it nice and neat for both patient and doctor. However, I do now believe after reading for several decades that there is no disease that has a single factor as a cause. The only exception to this is acute disease like infections or a broken leg. If the disease is chronic in nature or occurs over time, then multiple factors always come into play. Could it be possible that an acute disease has multiple factors? I do believe this the case with the common cold and other mild infections and perhaps that broken leg as well. This may also extend to significant infections where ninety percent of the victims die like the Ebola virus. The reason that I can say this is that ten percent of the infected lived, which means that other factors have come into play other than the Ebola virus. Has anyone really asked what these factors are? Could it just be that the survivors have better nutrition with stronger immune systems? What are the nutrients that have contributed to the better immune systems?

The claim in the last hundred years is that medicine has transformed into a science instead of an art. This is a flat out fabrication. Science has come into play in a limited fashion. Science has not been applied to medicine the way it has to say manufacturing or space travel. In both of these endeavors, all factors of significant importance are always considered. Unlike medicine, there are no laws preventing problem solving of significant factors. In medicine, the most significant factors of nutrition cannot be used to treat, cure, diagnose, or prevent a disease. I find this most fascinating in the limiting or hand tying of our doctors and researchers. Of course there are some limitations of factors in manufacturing like environmental laws to protect future generations. What is being protected in medicine by limiting significant nutritional factors? I was startled at California’s attempt to make it a felony for a doctor to use nutrition to treat a disease. I guess the answer is to follow the money without empathy for the ill and dying.

Also medicine has not used all of the tools that are available to them. A great example of this is the statistical methods that are used for problem solving or troubleshooting an illness. Techniques of identifying multiple factor statistical probabilistic predications were developed for the military in the 1950’s. The techniques were them applied to manufacturing in the 1960’s. The techniques then matured in the 1970’s and 80’s. For example, are there control charts in hospitals tracking cases of MRSA to be sure that prevention methods have remained stable in hospital operations?

If it is not one disease, one cause, and one cure it seems that the solutions are too difficult to communicated to all of the decision makers. Decision makers in medicine are you the patient, the doctor, the institutional managers, the medical education community, the medical research community, the insurance institutions, and government institutions. This much complexity, prevents the swift solutions for common causes and special causes or assignable causes of illness. I am sure that W. Edward Deming and Walter A. Shewart are ‘rolling in the grave.’ The last couple of decades have seen the development of chaos theory. How long before this new science is applied to medicine with its repetitive predicative perception of nature? Or, will chaos as an artistic pursuit in medical decision making continue? – Pandemic Survivor