Healtcare Reform – Heal the People

Sorry to not have posted in a while.  I had vacation and business to take care of.  I am trying to post two to three per week.  Send me your vitamin D3 survivor stories to email vitamindmark@gmail.com.

I have been truly amazed at the amount of misinformation that is thrown about during the debate over healthcare reform.  There are both good and bad parts of the legislation that is being proposed.  I believe that it is good if we can get to a health coverage that takes the enormous profits of the health insurance industry out of play and how the intent to profit negatively impacts health.  I do not believe that the government taking over these profits as another form of tax is proper either. On the other hand the intrusion of government into our private lives can be devastating.

As I was surfing the channels listening to the comments by various ‘news’ channels I found Bill O’Rielly and Dick Morris talking about one of President Obama’s recent speeches on the mater.  They were just about to end the segment when Dick Morris made the comment that Canada’s death rate from cancer was sixteen percent higher than the US.  “Why would we want a healthcare system that would cause this much higher death rate”, he said.  Bill agreed and they ended the segment.  I decided to follow this line of argument.

I found the total death rate from all neoplasms or ‘new growth’ to be 184 deaths per year per 100,000 in the US  for 2005.  From Reuters. I did confirm that that Canada’s death rate from cancer was about 16% higher.  In following the logic of modeling a country with low cancer death rates, I then looked at Mexico.  I found the death rate to be about 90 per 100,000 or about half of what the death rate was for the US.  Article in the Oxford Journals.  This is about half the rate as the US so we most likely would want to adopt the healthcare industry in Mexico?  Dick Morris, get a grip!  Fear mongering is not the answer to healthcare.

I then looked at the death rate from all causes from the CIA  data to follow Dick’s logic in how to discover a healthcare system that is most appropriate.  I found the 2009 est. for the US to be 8.3 per 1000 with a worldwide rank of 102.  I also found the death rate in Canada to be 7.74 per 1000 with a rank of 117 and Mexico at 4.8 per 1000 with a rank of 194.  The highest death rate with the number 1 rank is Swaziland at 30.8 per 1000 and the lowest was the United Arab Emirates with a rate of 2.11 per 1000 and a rank of 223.

Now what are we to make of this?  It is to be noted that the lowest death rates in the world are primarily in countries that are awash in sunshine.  Countries in the Middle East are highly populated in the lower rankings as well as countries along the lower latitudes, closer to the equator, in the world. Swaziland at the highest is totally understandable because it has been devastated with the HIV virus.  It is also the world’s last absolute monarchy which means that if you do not do what the government wants you die.  With the amount of war going on in the Middle East, it is surprising to find the deaths rates so low.  However, think of how these countries have so many days of no clouds and just bright sunshine.

Let’s think about Mexico.  Mexico City has the highest population of any city in the world at almost 9 million.  It is also located at approximately 7400 ft in elevation.  This puts it above a lot of the atmosphere that blocks out UVB waves that generate vitamin D in the skin.  As an aside it was the practice to build solarims for the treatment for TB in the first par of the first part of the 20th Century above 5000 ft.  As we have discussed in other post, vitamin D3 has a vector in the pathology of all disease.  It is interesting that the death rate from the H1N1 virus has been so high in this country.  However, in general as the H1N1 has spread the countries with low vitamin D levels have much higher death rates from this disease.

Could it be that Dick Morris is just wrong in his statement?  I think that the answer is absolutely yes.  What should we do for the health of the population?  The best answer for healthcare reform is to treat the populations of the world with the best available science.  That is to be sure that everyone’s serum 25(OH)D3 level is above 50 ng/ml.  As discussed earlier from a paper by Dr. William Grant of SUNARC.ORG the serum level of people in a sunny country is 54 ng/ml to 90 ng/ml.  This could be done for about $20 dollars per person per year.  What an inexpensive way to improve the health of all people.  For the US this is only 6 billion dollars per year.  I suspect that this is going to be significantly less than we spend on the H1N1 vaccine alone for this year.  It is also just a ‘drop in the bucket’ of that 2.5 trillion dollar US medical economy.  But here lies the problem.  The medical economy could drop by 30% if we healed the population and what would we do with all those lost insurance jobs.  I would not want to be president, but if I were, normalizing the serum 25(OH)D3 level would be the first thing I did.

Spend time in the sun!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  – Pandemic Survivor

Another Pandemic – H1N1 – Protect Yourself

And the swine flew.  I had a friend that every time something unusual was uttered he would let out the phrase, ‘and pigs will fly out of my butt too’.  I guess that he meant that it was a total impossibility.  So now we have the swine flu and the ‘pigs are flying out of my friends butt’.

It truly seems strange to me that this virus is made up of two different versions of ‘bird flu’ that I believe are from two different continents and two different versions of the swine flu from two different continents and a version of the human flu.  WHOOO!  ‘Pigs are flying out of my butt’ as well.  When I think of a bird that flew his flu from North America and infected an Asian bird that infected an Asian swine that infected a European swine and ended up as the H1N1 in North America humans of a California variety, it makes me believe that pigs truly can fly.  Here is a summary of the WHO teleconference on the apparent origins of the various strains as a pdf. Note: All the links are set to open in another window.

Now there is another story that is floating around the alternative health blogs like Dr. Mercola and Mike Adams.  It seems that an investigative journalist from Austria has evidence that some sort of intentional release of this virus was made and she has filed criminal charges with the FBI against a host of people.  Here is the index page from Mike Adams, Natural News for the H1N1 virus. Also, here is Natural News pandemic page for the H1N1. Here is the article on charges being filed by author Barbara Minton:  It also is interesting that Jane Burgermeister has a blog on word press that is http://birdflu666.wordpress.com .  Cute url!?  Jane, for your sake, I truly hope that you have the ‘goods’ on all of these people because these are some really serious charges.  For the world’s sake, I hope not.

The other thing that is really concerning is that this version of the virus is mutating regularly so the vaccine, if you chose to take it, may not be effective on the mutated version.  This means you will have to take multiple boasters.  Also this virus has more activity in the lungs that the just ‘plain vanilla’ version of the seasonal flu.  What this means is that as the virus attacks you that pneumonia bacteria will take over in an opportunistic fashion and will result in a serious course for the combination of diseases.  It is the bacterial pneumonia that kills you and not the flu.  Here is an explanation from Dr. Donald W. Miller on LewRockwell.com on how he believes that it would be better not take the shot for multiple reasons.  Well, he agrees with Jane that you should not take the shot, but for medical reasons.  He says to take vitamin D!  What!?  Vitamin D not only affects chronic diseases, but infectious diseases as well.  Wow, it is no wonder that Oliver Gillie of the UK’s Health Research Forum in Sunlight Robbery says that vitamin D3 is a ‘magic shotgun’.

I like Dr. Miller because he writes well researched articles and his information is very clear.  I have used many of his articles to change my supplementation regimen.   Here is his index page for recent articles: http://www.lewrockwell.com/miller/miller-arch.html His article on iodine has benefited me greatly: http://www.lewrockwell.com/miller/miller20.html

So can we find more on taking vitamin D and how it affects the flu?  Yes, Dr. John Cannell, Director Vitamin D Council, has written two papers on vitamin D and the flu and how vitamin D controls the flu in a seasonal manner.  That is that you typically get the flu in the colder months and closer to the equator during the rainy season when there is less sun.  Here is how to protect yourself from Dr. Cannell at the Vitamin D Council Newsletter for H1N1.

I know this is a lot of information, but you know since I have kept my serum 25(OH)D above 50 ng/ml starting January 2005 I have not even had a cold.  I am just one anecdotal story but if you multiply that by all of those people that have taken Dr. Cannell’s advice then what a major study!!

Have a sunny day with lots of vitamin D year round!!!!!  – Pandemic Survivor

The Tragedy of Deficiency Disease

I was at the gym this morning on the treadmill when a woman that was a friend of my friend that was on the treadmill next to me came in.  She had a cane and I discovered that she had just had a knee implant.  It seems that she had a minor injury some 15 years ago and her knee continued to get worse until there was apparently no cartilage left.

I did not ask her age, but she appeared to be about 40 years old.  She had dark skin which is a real problem for vitamin D deficiency.  From the material that I have read it appears that about 80 percent of the population with light colored skin are deficient and 99 percent of people with dark skin are deficient.  Here is an article today from the Visit Bulgaria website.  It is a worldwide problem.

Of course the problem with dark skin is that the melanin content of the skin slows the rate of production of vitamin D3.  This means that to get the same amount of vitamin D a dark skin person may need to stay in the sun 2 to 10 longer than a person with light skin depending on skin pigmentation amount.

If this lady had been treated with vitamin D when she first had the injury and educated in how much she needed to heal her knee, she would not have to had the replacement.  It is difficult to imagine the amount of pain and the pain that she continues to have.

This first came to my attention with my neighbor that was an athlete and played baseball for a local college.  He would have made it in the pros but it seems that he had a problem in hitting the curve ball.  He had to have knee surgery when he was in his twenties.  His doctor told him that he should not run.  He loved the sun and spent as much time as he could in the sun with his shirt off.  He ignored his doctor and continued to run.  Later he had his knee imaged and discovered that the cartilage had regenerated.  Sun and exercise seem to be the magic formula for him as the sun gave him vitamin D and the exercise allowed the flow of fluids to his knee.

Think about the list of diseases that you have read from a prior post and we see this ever day with friends and acquaintances that we meet.  Pain from diseases are debilitating and life destroying.  It truly grieves my heart.

To think that there truly is a relative simple solution of keeping the vitamin D level up is tragic.

GO INTO THE SUN AND SUPPLEMENT!!!!!!!!!!!  – Pandemic Survivor

Lies, Damn Lies, and Vitamin D

Where did we go so wrong with sunshine and vitamin D?  Were these just people in the medical professions ignoring the facts as they concentrated each day on how to heal chronic disease?  If they were truly concentrating on chronic disease, why wasn’t the pharmacology of vitamin D studied more for determining how it could possibly help to heal disease?

This is a lot of questions considering the millions of people who have died of these diseases in the twentieth century.  How can we make sense of this without considering that just maybe some misdirection was happening?  In the early forties, one researcher made the statement that the amount of skin cancer that was prevented by staying out of the sun was minor compared to all the other cancers that could be prevented by going into the sun.  What happened to him and why wasn’t this line of research pursued?

Well it seems that there was some fear going on by those who held intellectual property rights to vitamin D and how it could be used to treat disease.  Supplements that you could buy over the counter had been made with extremely small amounts of vitamin D to the point that it was not beneficial for use.  It seems that the manufacturers thought that these supplements would interfere with their sales of prescription drugs.  I suspect there was also the thought that there were other applications like cancer that could be treated and prevented with higher amounts and the dollar signs were going off in their eyes.

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation held the rights to the vitamin D patents and licensed them to anyone who wanted to make vitamin D products.  It seems that they were trying to manage the license to maximize profits without concern of what they were doing to the health of the community.

The government brought suit against WARF and 17 other entities for trust violations on vitamin D in 1944.  It appears that there was ‘arbitrary and unreasonable prices’ and limited the potency of preparations so that it would not compete with their pharmaceutical products.  Now since this was when WWII was raging, I doubt that anyone in the press was paying too much attention.  What were a few kids with rickets not being able to get the vitamin D they needed as opposed to all that was going on with the war?

The settlement in the case happened when WARF turned over the patents for public use.  Here is the headline from the NY Times in 1946:

VITAMIN D PATENTS GIVEN TO THE PUBLIC; U.S. Court Decree Ends Civil Anti-Trust Suit Against Wisconsin Foundation PROHIBITIVE COST CITED Asst. Dist. Attorney Says Persons Who Most Needed Rickets Cure  Were Unable to Get It

Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES
January 15, 1946, Tuesday
Page 16

CHICAGO, Jan. 14–Patents controlling Vitamin D, the so called “Sunshine Vitamin,” which prevents and cures rickets, became public property today when Federal Judge John P. Barnes signed a consent judgment terminating a civil anti-trust suit filed last October against the Wisconsin Alumni Foundation and seventeen other defendants.

You can purchase the article from the NEW YORK TIMES archives.

It seems that this brought an end to the misadventure with vitamin D as far as rickets was concerned.  The patents had become public property so that anyone could make D3 and the market place would make the vitamin readily available to those who needed it.  But then THE LIE began to be perpetuated about how D3 and D2 were equal in the human body in the 1930’s.  This was great news for WARF because they continued to control the rights for many D analogs and perhaps D2 as well.  D2 is not a natural substance in the body as it is made from irradiating fungus.

But of great concern is that the beneficial findings on vitamin D and its effect on chronic disease were not published because WARF wanted to protect its intellectual property.  It appears that letting people die was okay as long as WARF protected its property.  You can hear a recent presentation at youtube where Hector De Luca, professor of biochemistry UWM, describes this very thing.  You can hear how wonderful the drug has been to Wisconsin in funding research but says nothing about how many people died because they did not publish the beneficial findings.  Vitamin D, the New Old Wonder Drug:   Listen to the introduction about how many vitamin D analogs have made life wonderful for millions of people and profited WARF.  It just makes me angry as this protection of an institution for profit brought much disease that led to pain and death to others in not telling how just plain vitamin D3 would get the job done.  All very legal and deadly! It looks like the thing that they were sued for in 1944 is still going on in a different format.

If you really wanted to protect your patents on vitamin D analogs and improve your market size, how would you do it?  You certainly would not want to report how good a job just plain old vitamin D3 would do as this is the least expensive of the supplements on the market.  If people got replete with D and 75% of chronic disease disappeared what would happen to the medical industry?  After all, it has a right to protect itself and its growth.

You know what would really be great for the growth of this industry would be to figure out some way to keep people out of the sun.  If we can’t keep them out of the sun at least figure out a way to prevent the skin from making vitamin D.  Remember that cute little girl with her ‘hiney’ showing bright white as the dog pulled her paints down from the 1960’s?  And here is Plough, Inc. finding a great new market for selling a consumer product that would be really beneficial to millions to reduce burns and prevent skin cancer – sunscreen – the DAMN LIE.

It did prevent sun burns and this was great for the entertainment industry and all the ‘fun parks’ that were being developed because people could stay out in the sun longer and spend more money.  However, since sunscreen was presented in the sixties, the rate of skin cancer has gone up about two fold or more.(See Note 1.)  There is a great article in To You Health called, “ The Sunscreen Dilemma”,  by Jacob Schor, ND. For further reading you may also consider this as well hypothesis about melanoma from 1993: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8287144 .  The increase of many other chronic diseases has been documented during the same period.  The vector of vitamin D3 in so many chronic diseases is amazing and I suspect the number one cause of the increase in chronic disease.  The second being exposure to so many industrial chemicals that in some cases are put into our foods and call ‘food’.

So Plough did really well in the sixties selling Coppertone and its Dr Scholl’s line of foot products.  So what if you created a market by keeping people out of the sun and increasing chronic disease – how could you profit from it?   By developing and selling drugs for treating chronic disease.  So Schering  a company that specialized in drugs to treat chronic disease merged with Plough in 1971 to form Schering-Plough, Inc.   In a recent review of SP’s annual report it was interesting to note that 20 percent of their income was from their sunscreen products and 80 percent was from statins, hypertensive, chemotherapy, and other drugs for treating chronic disease.  It was the ‘70’s when the push for really using sunscreen products truly began and it was a great marketing campaign to sell pharmaceuticals for treating chronic disease.  What—?

Now with a pending class action suit that was filed against SP and others in California in 2006 and at least one study coming back to show that sunscreen may actually make the incidence of skin cancer worse, Schering-Plough sells out to Merck.  Now I suspect depending on how the common stock was handled that the liability exposure was significantly reduced by this acquisition.

Ah, lies, damn lies, and the conforming to the institution for protection of the institution truly is evil as described by M. Scott Peck in ‘People of the Lie” when empathy is not taken into consideration.  Dr. John Cannell of the Vitamin D Council simply says that we have ignored the facts over the years.  I say that we have ignored the facts as negligent misadventure with intent to profit from death and disease.

GO INTO THE SUN AND DO NOT WEAR SUNSCREEN.  STAY ONLY LONG ENOUGH UNTIL YOU JUST START TO TURN PINK.  WEAR THE LEAST AMOUNT OF CLOTHES POSSIBLE DURING THE MIDDAY SUN. IN THE WINTER USE TANNING BEDS OR SUPPLEMENT WITH VITAMIN D3.           – Pandemic Survivor

Note 1:  Skin cancer rates from 1975 to 1995 annual percentage rate increase was 5.1 percent.  Given that the natural logarithm of 2 times 100 is about 70.  70/5.1 = 13.7 years to double.  So at 28 years we would have a factor of times 4. http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/othskin.html   SEER fact sheet on skin cancer.

Vitamin D, Disease, and Research

In 2006, I went to PubMed, the government clearing house for medical publications, and just entered vitamin D in the search engine and limited the search to that year.  There were over 2,100 papers.  I just did this for 2008 and there were over 2,300 papers.  If you limit it to the last ten years it comes up with over 17,000 papers.  The published recent work on vitamin D is voluminous.

The Vitamin D Council has provided a wonderful list of diseases that have been associated with vitamin D deficiency on their research page.  You go there, pick the disease and it sends you to PubMed right to the abstract of the article.  If you do not have a subscription to the particular journal you can purchase the article from the publisher online.

In reading this list, it makes me wonder why there are so many diseases and so much research and yet the medical profession is not treating with vitamin D.  There are so many diseases that are a result of or have a component related to D deficiency, you would think the news organizations would be all over this, but I digress.

If you are a doctor or a researcher and you are trying to just get a feel for the research that is out there then Dr. John Cannell has organized the research by disease.  It is a starting place as there are still many diseases that he has not listed.  For example, I had degenerative disc disease that is really a form of osteoarthritis.  This disease caused severe chronic pain, muscle wasting in my legs, central sleep apnea, memory loss from brain shrinkage with the pain, and other symptoms from oxygen deprivation from the sleep apnea.  If we took sleep apnea we find that it is not in the list because no one has done any research on it and vitamin D even though it has an obesity and stenosis vector which both can be tied directly to vitamin D deficiency.  There is a lot of work that is left to be done and a lot of miss-education of doctors, researchers, and the public in general that needs to be corrected.

Another disease that is not listed is psoriasis and I know that it can be treated with vitamin D according to Dr. Michael Holick of Boston University.  Dr. John Cannell has done a great job and we are grateful for his work, but the tentacles of vitamin D reach far and long in the course of human health and disease.

If you do not find the disease that you have interest with, then just go to PubMed and search on the disease itself and components of vitamin D.  Also I am sure that if you can identify research and that has not been listed then the Vitamin D Council would be interested.  Send that along to them.

Let’s just make a copy of the list without comment to see how long it is:

Vitamin D Council Research Links by Disease

Addison’s Disease
Allergic Hypersensitivity
Alzheimer’s Disease
Ankylosing Spondylitis
Asthma
Autism
Autoimmune Illness
Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia
Bladder Cancer
Brain Cancer
Breast Cancer
Cancer
Celiac Disease
Cerebral Palsy
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)
Chronic Pain
Cognitive Function
Colon and Rectal Cancer
Cystic Fibrosis
Depression and Seasonal Affective Disorder
Diabetes
Endometrial Cancer
Epilepsy
Ethnicity and Vitamin D
Eye Cancer
GastrointestinalFunction
Gaucher’s and Fabry’s Disease
Vitamin D and Genetics
Graves’ Disease
Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis
Heart Disease
HIV and AIDS
Hypertension
Inflammatory Bowel Disease
Influenza
Innate and Adaptive Immunity
Liver Cancer
Liver Function
Lung Cancer
Lymphoid Cancer
Melanoma
Mental Illness
Mineral Metabolism
Multiple Sclerosis
Muscular Weakness and Falls
Obesity
Osteoarthritis
Osteomalacia
Osteopenia
Ovarian Cancer
Pancreatic Cancer
Parathyroid Function
Parkinson’s Disease
Pediatrics
Post menopause
Pregnancy and Lactation
Premenstrual Syndrome
Prostate Cancer
Renal Function
Rickets
Sarcoidosis
Sickle Cell Disease
Skin Cancer
Stroke
Toxicity
Toxin and Radiation Exposure
Tuberculosis
Turner’s Syndrome
Vitamin D Deficiency

Other items of interest for Vitamin D with links to the research:
Best Science
Commentaries and Editorials
Genetics
Requirements
Reviews
Treatment
UV Exposure
Veterinary and Animal Studies
Worst Studies

Vitamin D Council Research Links by Disease

Well, I hope that you find this useful and that you do not think that just because your disease of interest is not in this list that it does not have a vitamin D vector.  This seccosteroid is the most important steroid of the human body – Vitamin D3.

There is a lot of pain and death listed above.  Shine the light on this research!!!  – Pandemic Survivor

The Legal on Vitamin D

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

Healthcare Institutions and the Struggle

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

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

A comment on the frustration of people needlessly dying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Pandemic Survivor

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

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

Brigham and Woman’s Study on Vitamin D

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

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

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