Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, the Sun

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

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

Health Care Crisis Solution?

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!

The Change of the Medical Landscape in the Next Ten Years

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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