Author Archives: Mark Pegram

Healthcare Institutions and the Struggle

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“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” – Edmond Burke; British Statesman, Philosopher 1729-1797

“There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.  – Proverbs 14:12 NIV

A comment on the frustration of people needlessly dying.

It has really troubled me since I have been healed from the vitamin D pandemic that our institutions are not reacting in a way that would mean significant improvement to health. How is it that since the 1970’s there has been an extreme campaign for people to stay out of the sun and yet skin cancer rates have increased four fold. Where are the doctors in this and why have our organizations that we have set up through government not taken action more vigorously?

It is not only in the healthcare field that this is happening. It is also in the other major segment of our economy – energy. I have commented before that I have pretty much ignored the governments unwillingness to bring about significant change to the energy economy because it was just about the money. But with healthcare it is about the life. When I think that the number four priority that was listed for the secretary of HHS was ‘Markets before Mandates’ and ‘To Value Life’ was last sends chills down my spine, my newly healed spine.

It seems that we can take on any institutions that appear to be poisoning us and destroy them if necessary. We have done things like take on the tobacco industry and just recently to remove BPA or the plasticizer in plastic bottles that was causing an issue. Both of these were done on much ‘thinner science’ that what is now available on Vitamin D. There was no cohort study ever done on tobacco. Another one is DDT that was causing an issue with the environment. Also think about the fact that we dumped about 50 million tons of lead beside the highways until the mid ’70’s in a form that could readily be adsorbed by the body under the guise that it would increase gasoline mileage. Lead is an extemely dangerous carcinogen and neurotoxin. I do know a ‘little bit’ about lead as I worked in lead-acid industry for twelve years. Asbestos, red dye number 5, cocaine in cola, lithium in Pepsi, and PCB’s just to name a few.

If you put a toxin into our bodies because you may profit from it, eventually we will take action to eliminate your misadventure. However, can you name one substance that has been withheld and we have taken action to stop this misadventure? The only things that I can think of are types of fat and eggs. It seems that we were told that eating eggs was bad for us but now that has been changed. It was not ever proven that eating eggs was bad, it was just assumed that because there was a significant portion of cholesterol that they were bad for us(see note 1 below). And the fats have been all over the map. It seems that margarine was tauted to be extremely healthy for us and now it turns out that is not the case. I believe that one was just about the money but I do not think that anyone was significantly penalized.

And now all you hear from the agencies and doctors is that there is not enough “science” to recommend that everyone take enough vitamin D to prevent the majority of chronic disease. What these proclaiments are really saying is that he herd is not headed ‘our’ way. In M. Scott Peck’s book “People of the Lie” he describes the two poles of evil as being conforming to a group without empathy and malignant self-love or narcissism ( see note 2). I belive that the practice of allopathic medicine or the practice of treatment and not prevention has led us down a road of conforming to the herd without empathy and created a very evil state of death. The group acts as perceived protection for the group as believed by the leader of the group – the economy. In the case of our sick care system protection of the group means “Markets before Mandates” or in the immortal words of James Carville – ‘its about he economy stupid.”

That may be okay if we are talking about the energy economy where it truly is about the money, but it is another matter when we, with intent by ignoring the facts, kill people. Al Gore just made the statement yesterday about his battle on global warming that it was like fighting the Nazis in the 1930’s. I would like to say to Al that my frustration of seeing people die from vitamin D defficiency is like observing the Holocaust without the ability to take action to stop it. There is the blood of hundreds of thousands of people every year because we have not acted.

Al, there is only three percent of the carbon dioxide that goes into the air every year created by man. Is that really going to do all that you say? The Nation Academy of Sciences in 2006 said that if you take all of the matter that we know in space including star systems, black holes, and hydrogen distributed in space that it only represents a total of 4 percent of the energy of the universe. We cannot see or detect the rest (hence dark energy at 73% and dark matter at 23%) but know that it exists because the universe is expanding at an increasing rate of speed as shown by the Hubble light telescope and confirmed by the Chandra x-ray telescope. Knowing this, how can we say that we are creating global warming our ‘science’ can only identify 4% of the total energy in the universe. Now there is the science. Where are you Al? Is it about the money?  Nothing personal Al, but please do not distort the facts for profit.

The really exciting thing about this dark energy is that it appears that we can ‘tap’ it for our energy needs. There are a multiple patents that already exist for this purpose including one by NASA for space craft boosters.

Good men need to take action. The only real action that you as an individual need to take is to convince two people that vitamin D will prevent disease and save lives and have them each convince two more people. This geometric progression will move around institutions that are all about the money. We have personal word of mouth and the experts on the internet and I encourage you to go for it. I am writing this blog because of this understanding that our institutions have been ignoring the facts for about 100 years.

Go into the sun and take two people with you and wear only enough clothes to keep from getting locked up.

– Pandemic Survivor

1. Vitamin D3 is made in the skin when cholesterol in the skin is radiated with UVB light. The skin and the liver make cholesterol screaming at you to go into the sun and then your levels of cholesterol will get to where they need to be. This is my belief.

2. Narcissism is when there is love for only the self without empathy. Obviously loving yourself is important just as institutions are important. In all cases there should always be empathy for others or it is just evil. I know this one ear, nose, throat doctor really well and when I told him that by getting replete with vitamin D that I do not have to clean the wax out my ears but twice a year instead of every month his comment was – do not tell anyone about it as that is half of my business. At first I thought he was just trying to be funny, but later I considered that maybe he was somewhat lacking in empathy.

Vitamin D3 – Size Matters

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When we see the bottles of supplements we are used to looking at milligrams.  But have you ever stopped for a minute to understand how much this weight represents.  This can be difficult when you are dealing with extremely small amounts.

The best way to get an idea of how much we are talking about is to take an object that we are familiar with and divide it up.  When we think about a standard aspirin, it is typically 325 milligrams.  But how big is a gram?  At 325 milligrams an aspirin represents about one third of a gram.  So, three standard aspirins is about a gram.  You can take three aspirins and hold them in your hand to get a feel for how much this weighs.

With vitamin D we talk about IU amounts.  Forty IU is equal to one microgram, so how much is that.  That would be a weight that is equivalent to taking those three aspirin and dividing them into 1 million pieces.  That is really hard to imagine.

Let’s take a mid-size car as something that you are familiar and do this division.  A car will typically weight about 2,200 lbs.  This is a convenient weight as there is 2.2 lbs per kilogram so there are 1000 Kilograms in 2,200 lbs.  That would be 1 million grams or 1000 x 1000.  Kilo is the term used when describing 1000 grams.  If you take that car and divide it into 1 million pieces you would have the weight of about three standard aspirin.  That is really not very much of that car.  It would represent maybe one of the buttons on the dash.

When we say milligrams we are taking one gram and dividing it by 1,000.  When we say micrograms we take one gram and divide it into 1 million pieces.  Compare this to taking that car and dividing it into a million pieces and you start to get an idea of how small an amount we are describing.

However, vitamin D3 typically does not say milligrams it is measured in IU or International Units.  The NIH is trying to change this designation to micrograms for vitamin D so that it makes more sense in understanding how much you are taking.  Some products are presently in micrograms like some of the B vitamins.  However, I see in press articles how this is confused.  That is milligrams are confused for micrograms and in vitamin D I have even seen IU confused with milligrams because that is what we are use to describing.

An International Unit is a measure of the bioactivity or biological activity of a substance.  For vitamin D, one IU would be equivalent to 0.025 micrograms of vitamin D3 or cholecalciferol.  One IU of vitamin A is equivalent to 0.3 micrograms of retinol bioactivity.  IU’s are not the same equivalent weights for all substances but relates to the bioactivity of that substance.  Once this bioactivity has been established we can change the units to mass or weight.

For vitamin D we have 40 IU equal to 1 microgram by doing the math from above.  So when the government says that you only need 400 IU of vitamin D they are talking about 10 micrograms.  Continuing the math that means that 4,000 IU is 100 micrograms and to get to that familiar unit of milligram we would have to go all the way to 40,000 IU.  To get to a value that is equivalent to a gram we take 40,000 IU and multiply it by 1,000 or 40 million IU.  WOW!  We really are describing very tiny amounts.  Vitamin D is extremely biological active in very small amounts.

One researcher, Dr. Halcyon Skinner of Northwestern University, described a 43% reduction in pancreatic cancer by participants that were getting about 400 IU of vitamin D as compared to participants that were getting less than 150 IU.  Pancreatic cancer is an aggressive killer and if you know people that have had this disease you understand how significant the intake of vitamin D can be.  I will blog more about this, but you may read that news from the Life Extension Newsletter for September, 2006.

So now researchers are saying that many more cancers and many, many more chronic disease can be prevented by higher amounts of vitamin D and are suggestion that the total intake per day should be changed to 4,000 to 10,000 IU or 100 micrograms to 250 micrograms from all sources.

Part of the problem has been in measuring and understanding such minute amounts.  Part of the problem has been the medical institutions ignoring the facts for profit.  If you, your family and your friends have been suffering from any of these diseases, you should really question our agencies that are to protect us from such misadventures.

– Pandemic Survivor

Brigham and Woman’s Study on Vitamin D

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Well it looks like the NIH is finally taking this vitamin D thing seriously.  Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Woman’s Hospital are to enroll 20,000 people in a study taking vitamin D3 at 2,000 IU per day and fish oil for omega three fats.  Twenty five percent of the people in the study are to be black.  You can read the AP article here.

I believe the level of supplementation is less than half of where it should be, but this is enough to start to see the effect on chronic disease.  The real issue is that it will take several years into the study to start to see that the nation as a whole should be supplementing.  The question for you is that if it does no harm why wait until the study is complete to get your serum level high enough to where it will do some good.

The serum level should definitely be above 40 ng/ml of 25(OH)D and to get the best effect in the body it should be above 70 ng/ml.  The NIH fact sheet (Table 1) says that harm does not start to occur until it is above 200 ng/ml and animal studies show that below 400 ng/ml is safe.  This gives you a safety factor of at least 3 which is much better than most any prescription drug.

The thing that is really troubling to me is that many of the participants will be given placebos with no vitamin D.  I will pray for these people that they do no die from this continued deficiency of this vital steroid.  Hopefully as positive results are shown that the placebo group will also be given vitamin D.

If you decide not to wait because you already have one of the many chronic diseases from vitamin D deficiency then do what it says on the Vitamin D Council home page.  The volume of research is already HUGE and why we need another study is beyond me.  We have already done this the first part of the 20th Century when everyone was taking 2 tablespoons of cod liver oil, about 2600 IU of D3, per day without harm.  The only issue was that the vitamin A level may have been too high in the cod liver oil.  Look at the volume of research by disease at this Vitamin D Council Research Page.

I have been reading extensively on roles of vitamin A and how it interacts with vitamin D.  How these two act in synergy is still not complete science, but I do feel much better when I eat liver or take about 4000 IU of vitamin A from fish liver oil.  I will blog about this in the near future.

Here are the many diseases:  17 varieties of cancer as well as heart disease, stroke, hypertension, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, depression, chronic pain, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, muscle weakness, muscle wasting, birth defects, periodontal disease, and more.

Why wait!?  It is your health and your life – be healthy!   The encouraging thing about this pandemic is that the news of vitamin D is moving very fast through word of mouth and blogs like this one.  We should start to see things like the overall rate of cancer start to reduce significantly as more people take it on themselves to supplement.

Go into the sun!!!  The best time is between 11AM and 2PM when the UVB radiation is at it highest.  Wear the least amount of clothes possible so that you do not get locked up and if you start to turn pink it is time to get out of the sun and wait until the next day.  As you start to tan it will take longer and only about 15 to 20 minutes to start depending on skin color will be long enough.  – Pandemic Survivor

The Balance of Getting Sun

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You know as I have read the literature about the amount of disease that could be prevented by getting enough sunshine, I have wondered about the balance of decision making in the medical industry.  I know that the argument about treatment versus prevention has gone on for a long time, especially since the medical insurance industry has arisen to be such a giant in the economy.

It seems like the warnings were coming on two fronts:

  • That is if we spent too much time in the sun we would get skin cancer and die.
  • The other front was less understandable by the average person that was that if we got too much vitamin D that we would die because of absorbing too much calcium.  Let’s see that warning that I got when I told my physician that I was going to take 5,000 IU of D3 a day:  “I learned in medical school that if you get too much vitamin D that your organs will turn into calcium rocks and you will die”.

What was this fear and where was it coming from.  Certainly skin cancer rates had gone up significantly since the 1960’s.  Let us see what else happened in the ‘60’s, oh yes that is when sun screen started to be promoted with extreme vigor. Maybe we can make some sense of this decision making by drawing a sketch of the weight of disease.

balance

Wow that does not seem to make too much sense does it.  Where is the balance?  What could be going on to make some sense of the decision making.  What about the medical economy that is generated from the treatment of all those chronic diseases so that there will be lots of jobs and extra cars and houses for people in the medical insurance industry:

balance1There now that seems to be a better balance.  But what do we do with this box?

balance2 – Pandemic Survivor

Imagine Freedom

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Life, liberty, and the pursuit of dreams
Brings images of delight for life
As we follow our happiness
Not like a sea lion trapped in a desolate barren

Endless stretches of sun bleached sand
Getting stuck in every crevice available
Make you itch for the life that you are destined
As you long to be with ones of like mind

And you think of the lives given
So that the sand becomes endless
Delightful forest of refreshing green
All there for you to enjoy at this sacrifice

Now it is ours to maintain for a community
That believes freedom is a Divine gift
For our own decisions of what is happiness
Are we willing to make this same sacrifice?

Held up like a snake on a stick or a cross
We know that this gift has been given
For our enjoyment of life today and forever
And we pause in celebration of this joy

Original verse for the 4th, 2009 by M. Pegram – Please share if you desire

-Pandemic Survivor


Blast Your Concerns about Cancer Away with Dynamite (DINOMIT)

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Dr. Cedric Garland has been researching cancer and vitamin D for over thirty years.  Through Grass Roots Health and University of California San Diego, he has released a video talking about the stages of cancer and how vitamin D and calcium acts at many stages.

Until now typical treatment and prevention only considers Initiation, Overgrowth, and Metastasis.  He describes the additional stages as follows:

D – Disjunction

I – Initiation (genetic variation)

N – Natural selection

O – Overgrowth

M – Metastasis

I – Involution (cancer stops or slows)

T – Cancer becomes chronic condition)

A must watch video for doctors, researchers, oncologist, those concerned about cancer and cancer patients.  This University of California San Diego – TV video:  How Vitamin D Reduces the Incidence of Cancer: The DINOMIT Model by Dr. Cedric Garland.  For best results Dr. Garland says that you should get your serum 25(OH)D above 60 ng/ml.  Everyones serum level responds differently depending on disease state and body mass.  You most likely will need between 4000 IU to 10,000 IU per day of D3 from all sources.  The only way that you know for sure that your serum level is maintained is to have a blood test.

I would not suggest that you use D2 because it does seem to act the same as D3.  D2 and D3 has always been thought by the medical profession to be equivalent but new research shows this is not the case.  D2 also seems to be more toxic.  The Vitamin D Council on Treatment with D3. and  D2 versus D3 in this paper by Armas, Hollis, Heaney.

For doctors with your concerns about toxicity:  The NIH data shows serum 25(OH)D to be safe at levels consistently below 200 ng/ml.  Animal studies have shown that levels below 400 ng/ml do not cause toxicity.  See Table 1 at the NIH Fact Sheet on Vitamin D.

Also be sure your diet has enough calcium or about 4.5 mg per pound of body weight per day as discussed in this fact sheet on calcium from the NIH.

Other presentations from Grass Roots Health and UCSD-tv.  Vitamin D Presentations

If you have cancer be sure that your oncologist sees this information and do it conjunction with whatever protocols that he recommends.

You may also want to consider watching this one hour free video from Dr. Mercola on Vitamin D to help clear up the confusion of this strategic prehormone for health.

Cancer is not necessarily a death sentance.  Take control and be healthy.

GET HEALTHY!  and my  prayers are with you. – Pandemic Survivor

Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, the Sun

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I speculate here and believe that the obituary of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett should read:

“After years of compliance with the institutional norm of avoiding the sun for a beautiful complexion, Michael and Farrah succumbed to  chronic disease from vitamin D deficiency.  May they always be remembered for their art and artistry.”

If they had followed the instructions of Dr. John Cannell of the Vitamin D Council’s home page, I would imagine that they would have lived a much longer productive life.

Thank you John for helping me understand and not falling to this end.  This has allowed me to begin a life of poetry and art.  The poem below would not have been possible without life.  How much art have we been denied from Michael and Farrah?               – Pandemic Survivor

Bondage

Somehow bound up in this world,
We find ourselves trying to make a life
And not just live another existence.

But where do we find the boundaries
For this to allow peace of mind as we
Try to create our worlds?

Boundaries, what are those things that can
Take life away as well as bring life
In abundance to each being that understands?

Boundaries improperly defined
As shackles bind us in a darkness
That can only be compared to slavery.

Oh God, raise up this wretched bound soul
Swirled in desperation of time not spent
In defining bounds of my purpose in life.

Copyright ©2009  Mark Pegram

Black People, White People, the Sun

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So once again we have found that black people have been discriminated against because of their skin tone.  It has been known since we started keeping statistics on disease and skin color that people with dark skin have more chronic disease and shorter life expectancy.  I have asked black people why they thought this was and the response was because they believe the stress of discrimination and an overall lower standard of living because of their suppression which lead to reduced medical care.  When I have asked white people what they thought I would get the response that black people just did not take care of themselves.  It seems that none of us are free of bigotry.  Neither answer is even close to correct.

The true reason for much higher disease states is the physical fact that skin color has evolved over time so that we can more easily live with the amount of sun that we would typically get at that latitude.  You can see what this looks like from the skin color map of indigenous people.

As you move away from the equator skin color of indigenous people gets lighter so that they can make an adequate amount of vitamin D.  As you go toward the equator, the skin tone gets darker to protect the skin from the damage of UV.  It then follows that if you have light skin and move closer to the equator that you take a higher risk of skin damage from the sun.  If you have dark skin and move further away from the equator you take the risk of not making enough vitamin D for a healthy long life.

So let’s take melanoma for an example.  Should we expect to find the melanoma rate higher at the equator or at the higher latitudes?  If it was totally from exposure to the sun then you would expect to find higher rates along the equator.  With our very mobile world people with light skin at the equator would have an extremely difficult time with this disease.  However, this was not the case with the data from Edward Gorham, PhD et al in the presentation Skin Cancer\Sunscreen – the Dilemma.   What we see on page five is that as you go away from the equator melanoma gets worse.  So what is going on?  What is even more of a dilemma is that we see that the rates for Argentina are much lower than they are for Australia even though we found that the skin color of the indigenous people were about the same at the same latitude.  Could it be that the cause of a higher melanoma rate is because of an intense program for sunscreen use in Australia?  It is complex and complicated because you also have to consider ozone.  Watch the video: Skin Cancer/Sunscreen, the Dilemma.

It seems that as skin tone gets darker that it takes more time in the sun or a more intense sun for the body to produce the same amount of vitamin D.   For example a person with a light skin tone may take only 15 minutes to produce 10,000 IU of D3 and a person with dark skin at the same latitude and sun intensity it could take 3 to 10 times longer to produce the same 10,000 IU of D3.

With this being the case and low supplementation then it stands to reason that lower vitamin D levels will lead to more disease.  Low levels of vitamin D have been correlated with the ‘big three’ killer chronic diseases: diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.  Dark skin people have a higher incidence of chronic disease.

Our response to this understanding as a society has been alarmingly slow because of our bigotry.  Consider this article Racial Opportunities – about race from Dr. John Cannell at the Vitamin D Council and this civil rights complaint that was filed with the DOJ against the FDA and was refused to be heard by the NIH in 2005.  What are we to think?

In 2005 and 2006 I went to see my local congressman and wrote to the NAACP twice to try to get some help in having the complaint heard.  My congressman told me that there was nothing that he could do about it and the NAACP did not respond to either of my letters.

The research on chronic disease and skin color is being published at an every increasing rate.  Consider this paper just published earlier June.

Differences in Vitamin D Levels Likely Explain Ethnic Differences in Incidence of Congestive Heart Failure

William B. Grant, PhD ; Archives of Internal Medicine Vol. 169, No. 11, June 9, 2009

Let’s get healthier, give up the agendas, and embrace the light.

Boundaries improperly defined
As shackles bind us in a darkness
That can only be compared to slavery     – Pandemic Survivor

A Tale of Two Women

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In February of 2008 we got some bad news.  Our friend’s daughter had cancer.  This was very devastating to us because we had two daughters so we knew how much our friends were hurting.  She was only 19 years old and the threat of cancer hanging over her was certainly frightening.  She was a heady smart intelligent young woman who loved to spend time reading and working on her computer.  She did not spend a lot of time outside and she had the loveliest white complexion that a lot of people would say was most pleasing.

We told our friends about the vitamin d thing and how it could help prevent and maybe even help the healing process.  Vitamin D3, it seems works, along several pathways to help heal disease.  Number one it helps at a genetic level to tell immature tumor cells that they are just that and to stop growing or cellular apoptosis. The D3 also helps the blood supply network that is feeding the tumor to stop growing from a genetic level because this is not the normal design of the body or angiogenesis.  Also it raises the level of innate immunity so the body develops appropriate defensins such as cathelicidin antimicrobial peptides, phagocytes, and neutrofil granulocites that help destroy and adsorb ‘bad cells’ and ‘foreign bodies’ in the blood system.  There is also an aid to T-cell regulation in this complex system of immunity.  And if you are taking chemo one of the problems is thrombosis and vitamin D3 helps to control this issue as well.

It would seem that if any of this were true that you would want to get your serum level of 25(OH)D up to that of a sunny country or about 54 ng/ml to 90 ng/ml to allow the body to heal itself.  However our friends, one of them a medical professional, thought that if there was anything to this understanding of vitamin D that the cancer ‘experts’ or oncologist would have long ago begin this practice of maintaining a ‘sunny country’ level of vitamin D3 in cancer patients.  This seemed like a reasonable decision at the time.  I just can’t imagine the advice and what type that you would get if a family member had cancer.

The treatment protocols for our friend seemed to progress well through the year and they thought that with the combination of radiation and chemo that they had the cancer under control.  On the Friday before thanksgiving they decided to take their daughter back to the hospital for evaluation because she was having a lot of problems with headaches.  It turns out hat she had more tumors that had come back so they decided to begin treatment again on the following Monday.  Their daughter died on Saturday before they had a chance to begin treatment.  We are grieving.

In February of 2008 we got some more bad news.  My brother called to say that he had a girl friend that was in a serious way with cancer.  It turns out that she had ovarian cancer that was discovered two years prior.  She had surgery and had the tumors removed as well as her uterus.  She was told at the time that the cancer had metastasized to so many places in her body that she would have only two years to live.  She had a great job in New York City but decided that life should be lived to its fullest and she would come back home and take a walk on the wild side.  Who could blame her for this action?

My brother said that she had internal bleeding as she was passing blood and that all of her lymph nodes were swollen all over her body and that she had other lumps.  It seems that her medical insurance had expired and that she ‘had enough’ of the medical system.  With not any energy left she decided to just go to bed to die.  My brother wanted to help but did not know what to do.  He called to ask if there was anything to this vitamin D.  I told him that I did not think that it would help anyone who was this far along with developed cancer and that the best thing he could do was to call the woman’s oncologist expert that we have in our family to see if he had any suggestions and to get this woman to a doctor.

My brother decided that he would just tell her about the vitamin D and see what she wanted to do.  She agreed that if it could even give her any relief that she was willing to try it.  She decided to take 50,000 IU of D3 per day or 1.25 milligrams for three months.  She took other supplements as well like calcium, vitamin A from fish liver oil, chelated magnesium, zinc, vitamin C, and a vitamin B complex.  I told my brother that it sounded like the alphabet of nutrition.  She had also read that it would help balance the body’s system to drink bicarbonate of soda every day so she did that.

In late October I got a call from the woman.  She wanted to call to say thank you for helping them find out about the information on vitamin D3.  She said that all of her symptoms were gone and that she had the most energy that she had in twenty five years.  She was out looking for work.  I asked her about the vitamin D3 and how she had taken it and she said that she took a 50,000 IU per day until the bottle was gone or 100 days (at this level of use you could expect toxicity to begin at about six months or more) and then took a 50,000 IU once per week.  After she realized that she was not going to die she went to a doctor that advised her to keep taking the vitamin D3 at one 50,000IU per week as it would certainly do no harm.

I just did not know what to think at this point.  Had my brother exaggerated the symptoms of her cancer?  Was there some kind of spontaneous remission of the cancer?  She had reunited with her mother and they had the church praying for her so maybe it was a miracle of God and whatever the path it certainly is a miracle of God.  Anyway I could not wrap my mind around this.  Maybe the researchers are correct but just did not know how correct they are.  I understand that there are ongoing trials for the prevention of cancer with vitamin D3 but has anyone thought about trials for the treatment of cancer.  Are we so tied into a system that only responds to profit that we can not just help heal people and consider their health a profit?

I checked just a couple of weeks ago and my brother said, ‘yeah she is doing just fine’.  I still do not know what to think!?

If you think you have any symptoms of cancer go to a doctor!  You may also want to think about using D3 to get your serum level to that of sunny country as it will not do any harm and may help you significantly.  Also, please consider you diet to determine if you are getting the correct foods for essential nutrition.

The Vitamin D Council’s comment on Cancer.

” The light shines in the darkness but the darkness has not understood.”  – John 1:5 NIV

Health Care Crisis Solution?

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If you just read my most recent post you know how I feel about the solution to the high cost of health care and no insurance for 47 million Americans.  It is at least a disaster that is only going to get worse if we don’t act and I heartily agree with President Obama on this point.  I however disagree that spending more money for health care coverage is the right approach.  I think that healing the population of chronic disease is the correct approach.

Let’s think about the numbers for a moment as it seems to be a lot of misunderstanding and an unwillingness to just simply tell the people what is happening with the cost of health care.  If we think of the insurance industry as any other business then you would expect about 40% external cost and 40% internal cost and then a 20% gross margin that would include in it general, selling, and administrative(where the executives big bonuses come from).  What are the external costs for the insurance industry?  It is the payment to the medical providers as doctors, medical facilities (like hospitals), pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and any other insurance coverage that is provided.  The internal cost is the salary and wages of the employees and agents that handle your coverage and general maintenance cost of large facilities as we know theirs are the biggest.  The gross margin provides for the GSA as shown above leaving about an 7-9 percent margin.

This should make you a little bit perturb as you begin to realize that you get back only about 40 cents on a dollar that you spend for health care as insurance and you protect this industry by allowing some unusual rules like intrastate commerce only and policies that will not follow you around the country like say auto insurance.  Also you are not involved in the payment process of negotiating what actually gets paid to the medical provided.  The insurance companies lump bills together and then beat up the medical providers by saying look how much volume of business we are doing for you.  So the retail bill that you see from the medical provider is not what the insurance company pays.

So what is this in dollars?  I do not know if we have reached 2.5 trillion yet but we have to be close.  So we will use this number as it gives us easy math.  This number represents about 18 percent of the US GDP so 2.5/ 0.18 = 13.8 trillion for the US GDP.  We find from Wolfram Alfa that the US GDP estimate for 2007 was 13.78 million so we most likely have a close estimate for the medical economy.  The world GDP for 2006 in US dollars was estimated at 46.66 trillion.  So our medical economy represents 2.5/46.66 x 100% = 5.36% of the worlds economy.  Now since we have only 306 million out of 6.7 billion people, I would say that we are rather ‘hoggish’.  We are spending 2.5 trillion / 306 million about 8200 USD per capita for health care.  If you take the worlds GDP and divide it by the population or 46.7 trillion / 6.7 billion you get about 7000 USD per capita.  That means we are spending more on healthcare than the average of total per capita spending for the rest of the world.  I would say that it is really hoggish!

If a single payer plan was implemented then we could eliminate about half of the total cost and get it more in line with say Canada (US costs x2 of Canada’s) or Great Britain (US cost x2.5 Great Britain’s).  However, this would cost us about 5 million medical insurance jobs. I just do not think we have the political will for that in the current economy.  If you think about how much money your senators and representatives take from the medical industry to get re-elected, I would say that President Obama is going to have a ‘tough row to hoe’ as we use to say on the farm.

So what would happen if we had a healthy population and the system remained the same?  Let’s say that we could reduce chronic disease by 50%.  Chronic disease represents about 70% of our health care cost.  This would give us about a 35% reduction in total health care cost.  Are these numbers any good?  Let’s see what Dr. William Grant has to say in his work, ‘Reducing the Burden of Disease Through Adequate Intake of Vitamin D3’ for presentation at the UCSD, April 9, 2008.  We find that he picked a multiple of chronic diseases but not all and estimated a reduction of 366, 000 deaths and a reduced medical cost of 199 billion dollars.  He has estimated about a 20 percent reduction so I am not too far off but I am sure he has been more conservative than what will really happen considering my experience with D3.

So this gets even stickier as we consider the lives of hundreds of thousands of people every year.  If you want to put it into a 10 year perspective that would be about 3.4 million people dead and unnecessary spending of 1.9 trillion dollars ( to put that into the total including insurance it would be 1.9/40% = 4.75 trillion). Interesting enough this would just about cover the increased cost of insuring the uninsured according to the Obama plan.   Now it is not medical insurance people that are losing jobs but also medical professionals because total disease has been reduced.  We have not considered here the amount of increased productivity from a healthy population which I am sure would be significant or the cost of supplementation with D3 which should be about 7 billion USD per year.  Ah, if you were president what would you do?

I know that I would go for healing the population and let the economic numbers fall where they may.  We did not give much credence to tobacco jobs because of the bad actions that industry took neither should we give credence to the medical industry because of their bad actions of ignoring the facts.  The improved outlook of a healthy population would overcome any downturn in the reduced medical economy.

You know, I have ignored the abuse of not using available technology in the energy area for years as I knew it was about maintaining the existing ‘cash cow’.  It appears now that energy can be had with the cost of capital.  There was no death involved just more spending for energy than was necessary to generate a big economy.  However, with the death and tortuous pain that millions suffer we most act and not ignore the medical facts.

We are just getting past the reticule stage and starting to enter the violent opposition stage of change so be prepared!  I just cannot wait until we say it was self-evident!

A Survivor of ignoring the facts – go into the sun and be healthy!