Category Archives: Back Pain

Back Pain Reduced with Near Infrared

Posted on by
Reply

I recently wrote about all of the nutrients and other needs for repairing cartilage to heal back pain. I also wrote about the necessity for sunlight.  A new revelation about near infrared light has now increased my understanding of the need for sun exposure for healing back pain. The exposure of near infrared light (NIR) is as critical as the exposure to the ultra violet light (UV). It is interesting to note that NIR and UV are not visible light but are found in the full spectrum of sunlight.

My first understanding about sun exposure for healing came in a very serendipitously manner. Some years ago, I was telling the owner of a book store about my return to health with nutrients.  I had explained to him that my cartilage had healed and relieved the stress on my nerve roots in my back.  He related a story to me that was a real surprise.  His mother was having back pain.  She had spent the spring and summer in her garden and her back pain had resolved.  She had grown an inch during this period and thought that was the reason for the back-pain relief.  I did not understand how just being outdoors could help the cartilage repair.  I thought then that it was exercise, the consumption of vegetables from her garden, and the increased amount of vitamin D from the sun.

The new revelation is this paper by George D. Gale: Infrared therapy for chronic low back pain, a randomized control trial. In this trial, patients from a clinic were randomly assigned to the treatment group or the placebo group.  The treatment group was given infrared light treatment in the wavelength of 800 nm to 1200 nm.  The placebo group was wearing the same exposure apparatus without the power connected.  The patients were asked to rate their pain on the numerical rating scale (NRS) of 0-10.  At the beginning of the trail the average on the NRS was 7 for both groups. In seven weeks, the treatment group’s pain was reduced to an average of 3, while there was no significant change in the placebo group.  What an amazing discovery of a low-cost and easily-applied treatment with significant results and no adverse effects.

Since this was so successful, I suggested this treatment to several members of a coffee group that are suffering from chronic back pain and they did not want to try my nutritional suggestions.  I suggested the 250w, single infrared light that you can get at any hardware store.  The method used was from this article by Wendy Myers.  In just a few weeks, they related to me how significantly the light had helped their pain.  There is also a welder that occasionally comes in the morning for coffee.  He said that he had hurt his knee and the doctor told him that he should stay out of work for two weeks.  I told him about the infrared light.  Two days later he returned to say that his knee pain had healed and he was going back to work—amazing.

Here is my infrared light setup that I use when experiencing aches and pains from exercising.  It is amazing how the aches and pains go away in a short period. I should also note that my eye floater that I reported in earlier post from over exposure to LEDs is completely gone with the NIR. IR Light Setup

There is science to support these findings.  It appears that full spectrum light does many things to our biology.  I recently reread Health and Light by John N. Ott.  This photo-biologist is the person that pioneered time-lapsed videos of plants, as they grew, for Walt Disney.  He also discovered many effects of full spectrum light on animals and humans.  This included his hip being healed after he broke his prescription sun glasses and went back to plain glass lenses.  He had his hip x-rayed to show the improvement from prior x-rays to be sure that he was just not imaging his healing.  He was denied many times for funding for research projects in association with many universities.  With this taking place in the 1950s through the 1980s, it makes you wonder why the medical profession scared us from the sun for the last sixty years.  Here is an eight-minute video describing his work. Ott believes that light through the eye, impacting the pineal gland, is responsible for balancing hormones. 

Dr. Michael R. Hamblin of Harvard University wrote a summary of the use of low level light therapy for treatment—Mechanism of Low Level Light Therapy.  He describes how low level light (near infrared) affects many areas of our health: increased ATP production, wound healing, tissue repair, prevention of tissue death, relief of inflammation, pain, edema, acute injuries, chronic disease, neurogenic pain, neurological problems, and amelioration of damage after heart attacks, stroke, nerve injury, and retinal toxicity. At the end of the paper, he provides a link to pub med with thousands of research papers on the use of light for treatment.  Many of the papers are about the use of lasers, but the real healing comes from full spectrum light.

Dr. Gerald Pollack’s work on structured water and how it affects life is amazing. This includes an exclusion zone that enlarges with infrared light at the boundaries of cells and organelles inside the cells.  This boundary layer creates a charged zone of negative ions.  He even shows how this creates a battery storage for electrical charge. He also shows how it increases blood flow and the effect on proteins to make them more active (Think about hemoglobin’s oxygen carrying capacity of a folded cell versus a fully extended cell.) when exposed to infrared light.  He is also a proponent of grounding or connecting our bodies to the earth to balance our electrical charge. Here is his TED video—Water, Cells, and Life.

Ultra violet light, visible light, and near infrared light or the full spectrum of sunlight are all necessary for health.  You do not have to decide if getting your vitamin D by supplementation is as effective as obtaining it from sunlight.  Exposure to sunlight is not just about Vitamin D.  The exposure to sunlight provides us with many other benefits that science is yet to discover.  The next time the doctor suggest a drug that makes you photosensitive, be very careful and ask if there is another treatment option.  What about the sunglasses you are wearing whenever you go in the sun.  Is that causing your hip to fail as reported by Dr. Ott? Is too much blue light from LED bulbs without full spectrum light damaging your eyes?  –Pandemic Survivor

Advertisement

Discovery of the Century—Healing Cartilage

Posted on by
5

Cartilage damage is the number one problem that creates pain in the aging population.  Cartilage compresses, nerves compress, and pain and chronic disease is the result. Unfortunately, it has also become a problem with the not so aged.  If you are a reader of this blog, you know of the back and nerve pain that I suffered for three decades.  I even wrote a book about the recovery, Healed from Chronic Pain.  I have been in the process of writing a second book about how to repair cartilage and felt that something was missing.  The missing environmental factor is the SUN.

health2

I started to supplement with vitamin D3 November 4, 2004.  I had shrunk an inch from degenerative disc disease over the years.  When I combined the supplements that I had researched, my cartilage repaired.  Not only did my cartilage repair, but also my health overall returned.  I had always assumed that getting vitamin D3 from whatever source was one of the keys.  That is, keeping my serum vitamin D (25(OH)D) above 60 ng/ml.  However, I noticed at times that my cartilage had not rehydrated to keep me at my new height.  During the year of recovery, I had grown back to my original height in the first seven months.  During the next three months, I grew to my genetic height of–-an inch and one half taller than I had ever been.

It took me several years to find one key necessary for cartilage repair.  During the year of repair, I had supplemented with methyl folate, as I had read that it crossed the blood brain barrier.  I knew that my brain had shrunk from over a decade of chronic severe pain.  I thought the methyl folate would help my brain repair.  I now realize that the methylation cycle, with methyl folate and its cofactors, were necessary to stimulate stem cell growth.  Only fifty percent of the population can convert folic acid, a manmade molecule, to folate required to drive the methylation cycle.  Thanks to Dr. Ben Lynch, I now understand how important the methylation cycle is to health because of its role in genetic expression. (Note: betaine or trimethyl glycine will allow the methylation cycle to work without folate.  The human body is so smart in usually having two pathways.  Both folate and betaine are in spinach; Popeye was so shrewd!)

The other key that I did not understand, at the time, was sulfate.  Sulfate is critical to health, and here. If you think of all the healing remedies that were about soaking in mineral baths, sulfate and magnesium ( and here) were always key factors. I supplemented with large amounts of chondroitin sulfate and glucosamine sulfate during the year of healing.  I now realize that these molecules are so large that you most likely do not absorb them.  However, I think the sulfate from the molecules is absorbed.  This is especially true if you have a higher vitamin D3 level as vitamin D controls the transport of sulfur through dermal layers.  I now use MSM as a sulfur supplement as well as eat cruciferous and allium vegetables.  Both vegetable groups are high in sulfur, especially the garlic, onions, and leeks.

The “event” happened this past fall to bring to light the last missing component that is necessary for cartilage repair and hydration.  I had oral surgery in October for a granuloma that had developed over long amount of time per the surgeon.  I had noticed an issue with the tooth that I had a root canal done in the ‘90s.  The surgeon said there was an opening in the root crest that was allowing bacteria to destroy the bone.  In any case, this prevented me from doing my normal routine of using a tanning bed in October.  By the first of November, I started to get a nerve rash on both legs.  I had experienced this before and knew that it was coming from compression of my disc.  I measured my height, and sure enough I had shrunk. I recovered my height in two times of tanning in one week.  The nerve rash disappeared and the severe itching stopped.

The three months that I grew to taller than I had ever been was during the summer.  I spent at least thirty minutes with the midday summer sun on my back.  It has now become obvious to me that the sun is critical in three ways.  The formation of vitamin D sulfate, formation of cholesterol sulfate (Dr. Stephanie Seneff and here), and improved formation of the exclusion zone (Dr. Gerald Pollack) at the cell membranes. I will not pretend to understand the biology involved, but know that this helps to hydrate and repair cartilage.

Through the grace of God in my medically untrained ways of thinking about how to reduce pain and repair cartilage, I stumbled on the significance of vitamins and minerals and environment.  Cartilage repair is complex and that is the reason that medical science has misdirected us, I hope.  I think specialization has kept us from putting it all together.  Vitamins and minerals that I was taking when my cartilage healed–-all the vitamins as supplements and mineral complexes. The source of the manufacture and the dose of the vitamins and mineral supplements is critical.  With modern processed foods, I would have to eat about 8,000 calories per day to get an adequate amount.

Critical supplements for cartilage repair: Vitamins A (used cod live oil), B (methyl folate and its cofactors), C, D3, and possibly E; magnesium, zinc, iodine, selenium, manganese, calcium, and sulfate; and environmental exposure to UV light and infrared light. Proteins from bone and skin are also critical (gelatin-simple explanation).  The dosage is key to this combination.  Too much or too little of any of these items will trip you up.  Through trial and error, I have arrived at the correct combination.  I will now begin the rewrite of my book about how to heal cartilage. I have had many people to try my formula with great success.  The ones that regularly exposed themselves to the sun were the most successful.  –Pandemic Survivor

©2017 Mark Pegram

Celebrities with Back Pain

Posted on by
4

As we consider the many people we know with back pain, this past weekend was particularly disturbing. Jason Dufner, Defending Champion, had to withdraw from the PGA Championship and Tiger Woods should not have continued to play. It has become obvious that the practice of medicine offers no nutritional solution for failed cartilage. This includes all joints that are supported and allowed to flex with cartilage. Very serious is the loss of cartilage in the back between vertebrae. The compression of the vertebral disc causes nerves that serve most areas of the body to become blocked or compromised. Whether it is in the upper back, like Dufner’s, which can affect the arms, torso, and neck or the lower back, like Woods, where the pain and muscle failure is felt in the lower extremities. We take alarm when our own backs and joints ache, but it takes away our love and joy for life when celebrities suffer and our leaders are impaired. I often think of John F. Kennedy and the fact that he was wearing a back brace at the time of his death.

It was particularly alarming to me as I have been a lifelong golfer. I know the pain of not being able to play. I have now overcome this disability, but have not returned to the game. Many of my friends think that I have not returned because of my back, but there are other reasons like writing which are more important. I often ponder if our leaders consider there are more important things than golf – sorry, I digress. Before I discovered the nutritional solution to repair cartilage, my doctor offered to write a letter for seventy percent disability which I turned down. If I decided to pick up the clubs again, I suspect I could return to my current age form. But most likely not the form that I did have when playing three times per week.

I would have thought by now that the nutritional solutions would be common in the practice of medicine. I would like to apologize for not making the solution more public. I have tried to explain the nutritional issues on this blog and it can be found. However, now emphasized is the fact that I need to get on with my second book – The healing of back pain and the nutritional approach for cartilage repair.

I guess finding the solution was not as simple as I thought. It is not just one nutrient, but the interaction of many nutrients. These include, vitamin D, vitamin A, and vitamin B in its many forms, sulfate, magnesium, iodine, and many other micro-minerals. The dose of nutrients is critical for supplementation versus diet. The vitamins cannot be taken in synthetic form and must represent nutrients that are expected by our biological processes. There is also the issue of genetic mutations that can be overcome when taken the vitamins in the correct form. Also toxins should be eliminated from the body, in particular arsenic as it interferes with the methylation cycle.

I have stated before that the solution can be found in the medical literature. However, it will not be found as a double blind control trial. You have to think of the formation of stems cells in the bone marrow, the differentiation into chondrocytes, and the further differentiation into the correct form of cartilage. There does not seem to be anyone that is willing to take on the interaction of nutrients because of the complexity and low economic return to the researchers. There were multiple papers that I read to arrive at the correct nutrients and just got lucky on one nutrient. After supplementing, I grew three inches taller in ten months. That was ten years ago. This freed up the compression on the nerves in my back and eliminated the several diseases that include, degenerative disc disease and sleep apnea and the resulting impairment. I had two back surgeries and prevented more back surgery. I now know that if I had found the correct combination of nutrients earlier in life; I could have avoided all back surgery.

I am sixty three years old and do not take any meds. This is very unusual for my generation as I have discovered through reading and in conversations with my friends. Over sixty years old, 89% of the population takes one or more prescription drugs according to the CDC. This is very sad to me as the US is about 50th in the world in life expectancy. Our country is ravaged with chronic disease. I will continue to take supplements and I don’t eat very healthily. The side effects of the prescription drugs that I did take for pain and resulting depression were alarming. I am sure that if I gave up my fondness for wheat, which I have a severe sensitivity and an addiction, most everyone in my generation would be envious of my health. At one point my doctor said my labs looked like those of a healthy twenty five year old. I have often doubted in my ability to solve complex problems, I should never do that again. After all, the solution to nutritional repair is totally out of my area of formal education, study of engineering, chemistry, fluid flow, heat transfer and combustion – aka “rocket science.” ;>) I have estimated about eight thousand hours of reading and researching over the last twelve years to arrive at the solution. But of course, I was also lead. Keep the faith, with the help of medical professionals I’m publishing soon. – Pandemic Survivor

Time for Action to Help Relieve Pain

Posted on by
Reply

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

Emotional Recovery from Pain

Posted on by
1

Pain stabs you in the emotions as well as the physical body.  When suffering long periods of chronic pain, emotions are on edge at best.  At worst, you are the vilest person in the universe.  Care should be taken when suffering chronic pain to not allow your emotions to overcome you.  The anxiety, anger, and other associated emotions will make the pain worse.

What happens if you don’t collapse the motions and allow them to take over?  I think that Dr. Joe Dispenza, “What the Bleep” fame, describes it best with what he calls a shortened refractory period.  An emotional refractory period is the time it takes to free yourself of an emotion.  If you don’t shorten the refractory period for anger as an example, others may say you are in an angry mood.  If you allow the anger to continue, they will say you have a temperament.  If you continue in anger, it becomes a personality trait and you are off to anger management. 

I had my own issues after several decades of illness and chronic pain.  It took a long time, but I finally got there through prayer.  After I discovered what was happening with allopathic medicine, I became very angry.  How could an engineer figure out what supplements to take without a medical professional or dietician urging a recommended approach that would work?  I was in severe pain from degenerative disc disease and was about to die from central sleep apnea that had been improperly diagnosed as obstructive sleep apnea.  It was so bad that I would find myself holding my breath when fully awake.  Of course, the proper supplements allowed me to recover from all the diseases.  You can just imagine the negative emotions during this period that had to be overcome.

Whatever method you use, prayer or meditation, the feeling of the emotion is unavoidable.  The triggers in the environment will set it off when you least expect it. The key is to collapse the emotion as quickly as possible.  I found that when anger set off, I would first try to move into the thought of love, joy, and peace.  This typically led to forgiveness.  From there, I would allow the anger emotion to further collapse into sadness which I held for as brief a period as possible.  I would then translate the sadness into empathy and passion for all the hurting people.  This in turn would stimulate me to act.  To do more research or to write.  Obviously the writing of this blog was very helpful.  The other side of this process is to hold the positive emotions, love, joy, peace, hope, faith, and optimism, as long as possible.

This does not happen overnight, but can happen very quickly practice.  As you continue to practice, you will find your refractory period continue to shorten.  The key is to make the feeling of a negative emotion just a brief stimulus to turn into a positive emotion and action.  Do not act on negative emotions which you can see from this blog I have done many times.  This was not helpful as who wants to read an angry writer.  If you have to talk about it, do it with a professional, your minister, or a close friend.  Don’t wear out your friend.

You may want to borrow from the emerging field of neuroscience and set a trigger for positive emotions.  It may be a bell, a snap of the fingers, a closing of the eyes while turning the head slowly from side to side or moving your eyes from side to side, slowly rubbing your palms with the tips of your fingers, a word that you say softly to yourself, or any other trigger that is convenient to you.  Obviously, you don’t want to appear ridiculous when around others.  Mark Robert Waldman describes the states of being with the following hierarchy: Reality, (perceptual) instinctual, habitual, (subjective) intentional, creative, (spiritual) self-reflective, transformational.  As you release your trigger, you can go up this ladder very quickly from brief prayer/meditation to awareness or mindfulness and a new reality.

Whatever your emotion, whatever you goal, whatever your illness, seek love, joy, and peace first – Dr. Alex Lloyd.  Pray and meditate that you will be filled with truth and light. The pain is unavoidable, but don’t make yourself and everyone around you miserable.  In Spirit and truth – Pandemic Survivor

Pain Reduction with Vitamin D3

Posted on by
1

Pain is a horrible terrible monster that can take your life away both emotionally and financially from your inability to work.  It can destroy relationships and leave you desolate without friends.  My back is filled with searing pain and my friends have deserted me, David complains in Psalm 38; the NIV is the best for this understanding.  Pain is not new.  It is the result of evil in its many different forms whether physical or spiritual. 

Vitamin D3 has shown significant properties in its ability to moderate physical pain levels.  I did a post several years ago about a pharmacist that used vitamin D to reduce a patient’s pain meds by fifty percent.  I am sure we do not understand the mechanisms at work to relieve pain with vitamin D, but should we care?  The answer of course is no unless you are trying to develop an analog that you can patent and sell for large amounts of money.

It is particularly important that you supplement with magnesium when supplementing with vitamin D3 or spending time in the sun for that matter.  Your body’s biological processes tend to increase when you increase your serum level of vitamin D.  If you don’t supplement with magnesium you could see some serious side effects like heart arrhythmias and muscle cramps.  Magnesium is responsible as an ion for the production and use of over 350 enzymes in the body.

Multiple papers have been published recently from many different studies confirming the significant effect of vitamin D3 on pain.  I suspect that it works at many different levels to control pain in all states of disease.  I know it was a paper from Saudi Arabia in 2003 that really got me going on vitamin D to relieve the issues in my back.  That paper’s conclusion was that 95% of the people in the study had reduced back pain.  Yes, that’s right, ninety five percent.

Serum vitamin D or 25(OH)D normal levels have been 20ng/ml to 100ng/ml since the 1970’s at least.  The Endocrine Society suggests a minimum of 30ng/ml when treating disease.  I believe the best level is 60 to 80 ng/ml.  As different people respond differently to vitamin D, it is not how much you take, but where you maintain your serum level.  The effect most likely will not be immediate, but long term there is nothing safer or more effective for pain.

I cannot help you with your spiritual pain except to tell you to put love, peace, and joy first in all that you do and to pray often.  I suspect this will help your physical pain as well. – Pandemic Survivor

Winter – Relieving Back Pain Without the Sun

Posted on by
8

It is that time of year when viral infections ravage the populations in the form of colds and the flu.  Disease states worsen and are manifest as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.  More pharmaceuticals are prescribed to relieve illness and the side effects are extremely destructive as this is the third leading cause of death.  Young and old people alike die at higher rates from the reduction in the total state of health.  Winter, an evil time of year, calls for renewal and the hope of spring.  And the effects of reduced health are the pain alarms going off all over the body, in particular the central nervous system as characterized by back spasms.  Longing for the warmth of the sun, a state of blue sadness envelops us.

Ah, but then the sun rises higher in the sky and we once again reach a state of hope as renewal is just around the corner.  What are we to do as we wait?  Celebrate life and enjoy the understanding that this sadness of winter is not necessary.  It truly is a matter of nutrition and getting the essentials from the sun that are available in abundance in the summertime.  So two things happen that impact the quality of life.  First at latitudes further away from the equator, we lose the exposure to ultraviolet light as the angle of the sun declines during winter.  Second, we do not have access to a large of abundance of fresh unprocessed foods.  Not enough ultraviolet light and we do not make enough vitamin D, the hormone that is the master of our biological systems through the connection with the sun.  Processing foods for food safety destroy the enzymes necessary for biological thriving.  All of the minerals necessary for the body electric normally consumed in fresh foods are lost in the water of the cook pot.  And worse, potable water safety has driven us to systems that take all of the minerals out of our drinking water.

As you know if you read this blog regularly, I have recovered from a number of very serious diseases that were stealing my life.  This by the consumption of supplements because we are not getting the require essentials for life through our modern systems of living.  So here is what I personally take to sustain my biological systems.  But before I state those, I would like to say that the less pharmaceutical products that you take, the better chance of survival you have.  When you take more pharmaceuticals to offset the side effects of what you have already been prescribed, be extremely careful as you heading done a path of complexity that our medical professionals struggle to solve.  There have not been any double blind placebo controlled studies that describes what happens when you are taking more than two things in combination.  The more pharmaceuticals you take the more complex it gets.  The average number of prescriptions for people over sixty five that are on Medicare/Medicaid has sky rocketed to fifteen.  The complexity of this many things combined is beyond the scope of most physicians.  Nutrition is just the opposite of this as variety is critical to obtain the essentials for life.

Consider that I weigh two hundred thirty pounds and am now six feet two inches in height – adjust according to your weight:

Vitamin D3 -10,000 IU per day from all sources.    As this hormone is added to many different products and you make it from the sun, it is necessary adjust what you require as a supplement of just vitamin D3.  It is not how much you take that is important, it is what level of 25(OH)D3 is in your system.  This is the amount of vitamin D to keep my results between 60 ng/ml – 80 ng/ml.  Brand type is important because all brands do not replenish your systems the same.  The only way that you know is through testing.

Vitamin A – 5,000 IU per day – Vitamin A from fish liver oil.

Vitamin C – 4000 mg per day

Vitamin B – whatever is in my multiple vitamins plus a 100 B-complex per day.

Multiple Vitamin – Here I make sure that it has the trace elements that are necessary.  This includes the essentials of manganese, molybdenum, and silicon. I depend on this tablet to contain my required vitamin E.

Magnesium – 800 mg per day as a chelate, ie. – malate, glycinate, etc.

Calcium – 800 mg per day

Sulfur – Triple strength glucosamine, chondrotin, and MSM – like Osteo – Biflex or Schiff’s brand.  Here I want to be sure that it has hyaluronic acid.  This is usually two caplets per day.

Or – 4000 mg MSM  Methalsufonylmethane

Or – One fourth to one half teaspoon of Epson Salt (magnesium sulfate, pharmaceutical quality) in my morning beverage.

If you do not want to practice variety in your sulfur consumptions, then stick to the triple strength products.  I also eat a lot of garlic, onions, and eggs – all very rich in sulfur.

Iodine – 12.5mg Iodine/Iodide

Potassium – I try to use as much potassium salt as a substitute for sodium salt as possible.  If I feel any cramping – I will drink twelve ounces of low sodium V-8 juice which gives you about 1000 mg of potassium.   In general, your salt consumption should be about five grams of potassium and five grams of sodium each day.  If one is higher than the other, then try to make the potassium consumption higher than the sodium through diet choices.  Typical American diet is about 1.5 grams of potassium and 7 grams of sodium.

Fish Oil for omega-3 fat

Five hours per week of exercise at the gym.  This is essential for nutrient flow along with spinal decompression using an inversion table.

I take no prescription pharmaceuticals.  The medical professionals say that you cannot grow new cartilage.  I disagree.  The above nutrients and lots of exercise that allows the flow of replenishing fluids to cartilage have given healthy cartilage.  Spacing in my spine has increased enough to clear all of the nerve roots to relieve pain.  The one place that the cartilage had completely disappeared has not grown new cartilage.  All other joints are now healthy.  None of the above supplementation would be necessary if I ate lots of raw foods and drink natural mineral rich water and lived in the sun.

Faith and Hope brings the very spark of life – Love!  – Pandemic Survivor

Two Eyes, Ten Fingers, and Ten Toes

Posted on by
Reply

November 4, 2011 was an anniversary for me.  The date represents seven years since I started taking vitamin D3.  I remember well what my doctor said when I told him I was going to start taking 10,000 IU per day of vitamin D3.  “Your organs will turn to stone, or at least that is what they taught me in med school.”  His practice now is the leading practice in the area for helping resolve issues around vitamin D and disease.   Thank you Dr. Perini.  I have not grown any new fingers, eyes, or toes.  My organs have not turned to stones.  My body continues to heal confirming a report from the UK from the 1930’s that said: “If you take 5,000 to 10,000 IU of D3 per day, it will take four to eight years for your body to heal.”

My body continues to heal.  I have overcome a failed back surgery and avoided three additional back surgeries that would have been required.  I have maintained a low blood pressure even though it has spiked many times in the past.  I have not had any more trouble with heart arrhythmias.  My vision has improved.  My skin tone has improved.  I have no more “brain fog.” (which I am sure was from the sleep apnea and oxygen deprivation)  The most important thing is that I have not died from severe sleep apnea.  By the way, I also have not had a cold or the flu in the last seven years.  Typical for me was three to four colds per year and the flu every two years.

Even though I grew three inches taller in one year as the spacing in my vertebral disc increased from healing, this is not the most amazing healing that happened to me.  The most amazing thing is that I was able to rid myself of my CPAP for sleep apnea.  For those that do not know, a CPAP is an air flow device that holds your airways open while you sleep.  During my sleep test (nocturnal polysomnagraphy), I would breath for thirty seconds and then stop for thirty seconds.  Of course the tech stopped the test after an hour because my blood oxygen saturation had dropped below seventy percent.  I was close to death.  The neurologist described my condition as severe obstructive sleep apnea.  He was wrong; it was severe central sleep apnea from the nerves in my neck being compressed between C3-C4 from vitamin D deficiency.  I was even finding myself not breathing during the day when I was wide awake.  All of those issues have been resolved.  I did not die from oxygen deprivation.

I like to answer the question; ‘Have there been any side effects or toxicity from taking that much vitamin D for seven years?’  Yes – Health!  I also like to answer the question; ’Who was the physician that guided you through the healing process?’ – God!

I declare November 4 a vitamin D holiday.  November 4, 2004 will forever be remembered as a glad day.  – Pandemic Survivor

All Vitamin D Brands are not Equal!

Posted on by
3

Bare with me, I will get to the vitamin D, but first the story. In July, 2010, I fell when descending stairs in an unfamiliar house. It was really a sort of a stupid thing as I was talking to another person as I descended the stairs. The stair was wide enough so that we were almost side by side. I was totally engrossed in our converstation. Thinking that I was on the bottom step, I took a large step forward to find that I was two steps ups. This resulted in a forward lunge. Let me also say that I had been working hard for the three hours prior. I had lost a singificant amount of body fluid from perspiration, almost seven pounds of weight ( I had weighed before starting this job because I was interested in how much fluid loss would occur under severe heat and work conditions. During the three hours, I had drank three twenty ounce bottles of water). This combination of muscles on the verge of cramping and a clumsy fall resulted in a nasty muscle pull and perhaps an injured spine.

Of course I did not know which at the time. I thought that I had totlly destroyed my back again. After a few days of trying to resolve the pain, I went to my neurosurgeon. After an MRI, it was discovered that I had ‘no change in the appearance of my spine.’ The doc left me alone in the room prior to his arrival with the MRI on the computer screen. It so happened that the 2005 MRI was also on the screen. When comparing the two images, It was apparent that the thickness of my vertebral disc in the lumbar region was twice what it was in 2005. No change was a statement saying that my back had actually improved, but since we know that ‘you cannot grow cartilage,’ we will just not comment on the improvement. Let me be very specific here as the statement of no change was from the radiologist that had read the MRI and not my neurosurgeon. The neurosurgeon was in disblief and amazed.

The spacing between the L4-L5 had not improved and it was apparent that there had been more distortion of the vertibra (hammer shaped). The surgeon felt that the pain I was experiencing was a direct result of this issue. I felt that he was partially right, but what I was experiencing for pain was not like what I had felt before. The pain would initiate in my hip and then descend the leg. Now neural pathways are tricky and to try to pin point the origins of pain is difficult at best. I had decided that my pain was originating from a strained piriformis muscle. This muscle is under the glut muscle and the nerve bundle that recombines and descends the leg goes through the middle of this muscle. Muscle relaxants would make the pain completely go away.

The pain and numbness got much better six months later but was still going on which was not a good thing. I continued to deal with it through the spring until my physical the thrird week in April. I was shooked to see that my serum vitamin D level was 42 ng/ml. I had been taking 10,000 of D3 per day since June of 2005. How was it that my vitamin D level had dropped from an average of 85 ng/ml to 42 ng/ml. It was apparent that the vitamin D3 that I was now using was not the same as before.

I had switched to Pharmassure’s brand that I could purchase from the local drug store. It is apparent that this brand does not have the required 5.000 IU of D3 in the product as described on the label. I had been using the Bio-Tech Pharmacal brand for the 5 years prior with good results. It is obvious to me that the lack of qualily control on such a tiny amount of vitamin D is a very real issue. It could be that one bottle or lot was bad and the rest of Pharmassure’s product is fine. However, you can bet that I will never use this brand again. This is a similar story that was reported by Dr. Davis that writes the Heart Scan Blog. In that case his patients had switched from Vitamin Shoppe brand to Walgreen’s Nature Made brand and it was like the Nature Made product had no vitamin D. For you in trying to maintain an adequate vitamin D level, YOU MUST HAVE YOUR SERUM LEVEL TESTED!

I wonder now if the large range of vitamin D3 intake to achieve an adequate serum level that was reported by the study at Grass Roots Health may partially be due to the fact that all brands that claim 5,000 IU may not be 5,000 IU. I had been part of this test through the spring of 2010, but had not had my serum level tested for over a year. Anytime you change brands or habits, like how much you sun bath or change diet in like how much liver you eat ( more vitamin A an antagonist of vitamin D), you should have your serum level tested.

I took fifty thousand IU of D3 per day for two weeks to get my serum level back up and am now taking 10,000 IU of Bio-Tech Pharmacal’s vitamin D3 per day. Interestly enough, the pain in my leg has gone and my hip seems to be healed. I now have over six thousand hours of studying vitamin D, it is obvious that the single most important thing that you can do in this new medical paradigm is to have your serum level tested! – Pandemic Survivor

Back Pain and the Beginning of Hope

Posted on by
Reply

There it was late one spring afternoon and the pain was unbearable.  It was as if I had been locked in an iron maiden torture device with the common intent of that device.  Pain banged like ping bong balls from one end of my spine to the other with sharp daggers of new response as one pain followed another.  With so many pain meds in my system that I was having difficulty remaining conscious I was still on the verge of shock from the pain.

Mixed with that was the emotional pain as my friends and family had deserted me as no one could stand to be around a person with that much constant pain. It reminded me of Psalm 38 NIV from Biblegateway.com where David was crying out to God about a similar situation.

6 I am bowed down and brought very low;
all day long I go about mourning.

7 My back is filled with searing pain;
there is no health in my body.

8 I am feeble and utterly crushed;
I groan in anguish of heart.

9 All my longings lie open before you, O Lord;
my sighing is not hidden from you.

10 My heart pounds, my strength fails me;
even the light has gone from my eyes.

11 My friends and companions avoid me because of my wounds;
my neighbors stay far away.

It was 2004 and as I know now the spring is the worst time of year because my vitamin D level was the lowest.  It had been a year since my last failed back surgery.  In this moment I asked that something be given to me so that I could overcome the pain of that afternoon.  I remembered the similarity of the numbers that I had researched for a friend where central air conditioning in homes in the US seemed to follow the obesity rates.  I focused my mind on trying to determine a correlation.  Going to the department of energy website and to the CDC I found these numbers.

Data:

  • Year 1980 1984 1987 1990 1993 1997 2001
  • % Obesity 15.1 18.2 20.6 23.3 25.2 28.4 31.5
  • % Central Air 27 30 34 39 44 47 55

When comparing the two sets of data with least squares it looks like this:

There it was better than a 99% correlation.  That calmed my mind with distraction and was fascinating at the same time.  It must be that fat people got hot and put in more air conditioning accordingly.  Of course at that time I could find nothing on the web about vitamin D deficiency and obesity and that ‘ah hah’ moment came later when reading a story on rickets and inner city kids.  It took me until November of 2004 to come to the understanding that the lack of exposure to sun was the issue.   See My Story.

I know that pain is harmful and destructive in ways that are not describable.  When I suggest that my pain was far above the pain of a ruptured appendix, no one seems to understand because even child birth pains cannot describe the constant intrusion of the neural system being in exceptional upset.  The ruptured appendix when I was nineteen now comes in at a modest 4 on my pain scale of 0 – 10.  My spine being 70% compressed by a central rupture at L4-L5 with sleep disturbance from sleep apnea and my friends deserting me is a 10.  Just writing this story for you brings up memories that are almost unbearable, but I know that this is important for your understanding and I will suffer this grief for you.

For you who may be reading this story because of pain and you have stumbled here in the hope of finding some relief, know that it is possible for your body to heal and for you to feel great again.  Please read here on what I did to overcome this pain without more surgery.  Back Pain

I know the destructiveness of pain and without God showing me where to find relief I would most likely be dead at this point.  My mission now is to get the understanding of vitamin D into the mainstream understanding of health.  Or at least to help encourage the ones that have given up hope.

Your mission if you choose to accept it is to spend enough time in the sun for health and to get your serum vitamin D level to one of health.  – Pandemic Survivor