Tag Archives: cancer

The Legal on Vitamin D

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You would think with as much solid research as there is on vitamin D that the attorney’s would be ‘jumping right in’ there.  What is up with this.  It is about the money.  As soon as someone with money figures out that companies and institutions need to pay up for their misadventures, the courts will be ‘slammed’ with cases on vitamin D.  I mean just think about the tobacco issues.  It only really involved cancer and perhaps heart disease.  It did not involve all chronic disease.  When this starts to happen there will have to be congressional action to save the medical profession.  Of course now congress will not take action to save you from some really serious diseases.

So what has happen with the legal.  What I know to date:
In 2001 the FDA and FTC got together and took on the sunscreen and sunblock industry to get them to change the rules of marketing after combining 9 lawsuits.  It seems with the INCREASE in skin cancer by about a factor of X4 since the 1960’s that the sunscreen industry was participating in false advertising.  The marketing changes would have been to assure that the consumers understood that there was really no science to support the industry claims of preventing cancer.  This really seems odd that we would let a judge decide something scientific instead of just letting the facts be the facts – oh yeah, there is money involved.

So the sunscreen industry formed a powerful lobby group and hired a powerful attorney and sucessfully defected the FDA and FTC.  This attorney was so good that he was later made Chief Justice of the Surpreme Court.  Yes, that’s right Chief Justice John Roberts.  Wall Street Jounral Law Blog comment.
Now if I were an attorney and wanted to start a large class action lawsuit that would most likely end up in the supreme court and may take as much as a decade to litigate would I want the final decision maker to have been on the payroll of the group that I was fighting against?  Sounds like ‘trouble in river city’.

Now there is a new suit that was filed in the spring of 2006 agaisnt this same bunch of snake oil producers.  “Sunscreen is the snake oil of the 21st century” says Samuel Rudman filing attorney for the plaintiffs.  That is really some strong language which I think is justified when we are just causing death with many diseases by chasing people out of the sun.

You know what I really think is interesting is that you can go to the store and get a bottle of sunscreen today that has no warning label at all and says that it will prevent cancer if you use it.  The warning label should at least say something like: 

WARNING: THIS PRODUCT PREVENTS THE FORMATION OF THE MOST ESSENTIAL SECCOSTEROID OF THE BODY AND WITHOUT THIS VITAL STERIOD YOU WILL DIE FROM ONE OR MORE OF ALL THE CHRONIC DISEASES THAT INCLUDE THE BIG THREE KILLERS – HEART DISEASE, CANCER, AND DIABETES.

This would better describe the reality of what the product does to you.  In all seriousness, even if the science is confounded which it is not, the label should read that the sunscreen product will prevent the production of vitamin D.  This would at least allow the consumer to make his own decision.

You know it is really interesting that there were not any cohort studies on the tobacco issues.  It was just ‘good men’ doing what was right for you.  Oh yeah, and government stepping in and taking a piece of those large margins made from selling tobacco products.  There have been a large number of cohort studies completed in the last decade on vitamin D and chronic diseases and the research continues to come in at multiple of thousands of new studies every year.  It is a mountain of evidence.

Lawyers are really just waiting for prior case law to be complete so that they will not have to battle.  They will simply walk in and take the spoils from your dying friend or family or from your death.  What a great land of scavengers for profit that we live in.  It is no wonder that people yell that captilism is not the right form of government when the real issue is that our institutions are being corrupted for money that is just like a third world country with a flair for class.

I have the will but not the money.  Is there someone out there that would like to start a legal fund to take on the largest institutions in the land for their misadventure of ignoring the science for profit?

GO INTO THE SUN!!!   – Pandemic Survivor

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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

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!

The Change of the Medical Landscape in the Next Ten Years

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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!

Toxicity of Vitamin D

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This is my own opinion about toxicity and how we got to such a state as the doctors were trained to fear vitamin D.  It seems there are multiple areas where mistakes were made about the issue of toxicity.

I think that one of the issues that everything that resembled vitamin D was called vitamin D.

There is D2 or ergocalciferol which is made from fungus when it is irradiated with UV light. This version has a higher molecular weight, an additional double bond, and one additional methyl group if that means anything to you.  The medical professionals still considers this as equivalent to D3 even though there have been many papers saying that it does not act the same in our body.   Rodents seem to thrive on vitamin D2 as they are noctournal animals and eating fungus that has been exposed to sunlight seems to be a reasonable way for them to get vitamin D and their bodies have adapted.  I observed a squirrel just really munching down on what I assumed was a morel mushroom this past weekend when I was camping.

Hey researchers! – beware when using rodents for vitamin D test as they most likely do not react the same as humans.  The case against using ergocalciferol  (vitamin D2) as a supplement – Houghton and Vieth American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 84, No. 4, 694-697, October 2006th

There is D3, cholecalciferol, which our body produces from the sun with cholesterol in our skin. Our bodies love this particular version of D and it is the substance in our bodies that allows the sun to give us energy and health.

There is the storage form prehormone of vitamin D which has been found to correlate with lots of chronic diseases.  It is called twenty-five hydroxy vitamin D and you usually see it written 25(OH)D.  It can be either 25(OH)D2 or 25(OH)D3.  This adds to the confusion when running test in the lab.  Let’s say that a hospital runs only the test for 25(OH)D2 becuase that is what is being prescribed by their doctors and yet ignores the 25(OH)D3 that you are getting naturally.  The better lab test will give you total and I will write another blog on testing.

Certainly if you take the activated steroid form of vitamin D or one twenty-five di-hydroxy vitamin D (1,25(OH)2D) then you will have problems if the dose is too high or administered over a period of time.  This is yet one more form of vitamin D that the body uses as a steroid to do all the good stuff.   This form in the blood stream allows our body to absorb more calicium and will ultimately drive your serum calcium too high.

The really cool thing about the understanding of the new research is that each organ cell seems to make the steroid version inside and outside the cell as it is needed.  This means that it does not go through your blood and affect your calcium yet it gives you healthy functions.  This is one of the things that has always confounded the research as researchers were going right for the best benefit or so they thought by using the steroid form of D instead of given just plain old D3 and letting the body make the steroid as it was needed.

The old paradigm was that the D3 was converted in the liver to the storage form, 25(OH)/D3, and then the kidney converted the 25(OH)D3 into the steroid form, 1,25(OH)2D3 and is still a valid path.  However, when every cell that has vitamin D receptors converts its own steroid form as needed most excellant health is achieved.  You have to have enough of the D3 in your body to fill up the stores.

Well let me stop here and say that this is most likely very confusing to you and has confused the medical field also.  You should go read at the Pharmacology of vitamin D at the Vitamin D Council to get a better description.  You can also read at the University of California Riverside as well about Vitamin D.

The amount of vitamin D is also a really large issue because it is active in extremely small amounts.  Now lets see, the serum test for 25(OH)D is measured in ng/ml.  We take D3 is in units of IU where 40 IU equals 1 microgram – that’s mircogram not milligram.  I suspect you are just conformtable using milligrams and do not have a clue about a microgram much less nanograms per milliliter. So to get 1 milligram of vitamin D you would need to take 40,000 IU.

Are you confused yet.  To formulate and to test at these extremely small quantaties is extremely difficult and one major lab has alreadly had a recall this year because of this difficulty.  So that brings us to the one major case of toxicity with vitamin D3.  It was a formulation problem and a mistake on how much should be taken by the person doing the supplementation.  Evidently the person was taking over a million IU per day for over a year. It is my understanding that he recovered and was just fine.

To get more of an understanding on toxicity of D3 please visit the Vitamin D Council’s page on toxicity.

So what is the deal and why were doctors told to be extemely concerned about toxicity with vitamin D?  It seems that D2 drives toxicity much quicker at lower levels in humans than D3.  I found a paper by Moon and Reich at the Orthomolecular library entitled “The Vitamin D Problem An Important Lesson in Orthomolecular Medicine.” This paper was written in 1975.  These writers researched the issue of toxicity and found that reports started p0uring in after vitamin D2 began to be used.  This particular section in the paper is well titled: ‘Origin of the Vitamin D-Problem:  Irradiated Ergosterol is Not Vitamin D’

Irradiated Ergosterol was origianllly used as the fortification of milk.  However, in the 50’s and early 60’s most dairies changed to D3 because of the toxicity issues.  During my early reading I was finding compounds that were in equilibrium with D3 as tachysterol and ichysterol but D2 seemed to have one called toxicysterol.  This should have been a clue.

If all of this was known at least by the mid 70’s why all of the fear of D3.  Because D2 and D3 were considered to be equivalent by the medical profession.  I would say that this is terrible science or chosen to be ignored by the medical profession because there was no money to be made. Interestingly enough, D2 is what is found in vitamin D prescriptions because it can be protected because it is not a natuarlly occurring substance in the body.  You could not obtain D3 in beneficial amounts until a few years ago.  To get equivalent to one day in the sun where your body could make as much as 40,000 IU as a supplement you would have to take 100 of those 400 IU tablets.

I was curious as to a statement made by Hector DeLuca in his presentation to the Wisconsin Alumini Research Foundation on Vitamin D: The New Old Wonder Drug.  This you tube video gives you the understanding of how vitamin D analogs have been very sucessful in helping to fund the programs at Wisconsin University.  The statement that some of the beneficial findings over the years were not published is frightening.  This of course was to protect intellectual property rights or dollars.

So does ignoring the facts for profit make the medical profession seem somewhat callous?    It happens all of the time and you acting as the government protect these profits to the loss of your health and life.  Consider former Secreatary Leavitt of Health and Human Services.  On his bio page he listed his priorities.  Number four was ‘markets before mandates’ and you had to go to his last to find ‘value life’.  Now this is really troubling since I was tortured with pain for 25 years when there was a simple solution.

So is it going to far to say that by scaring people out of the sun and causing a significant increase in chronic disease that we were benefiting the well being of America because of an increased medical economy?  Creating disease by selling sunscreen and profiting from the meds to treat the diseases is for another post.

Go into the Sun until you start to turn pink.  Being in the pink is a good thing!