Tag Archives: pain

Thinking about Cholesterol

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Let’s just stop for a while and do some critical thinking about cholesterol.  I am not bound by having a medical degree or much education in the biological sciences.   This frees me from boundaries that are typically imposed when trying to come up with a new theory or hypothesis.  There are just about always these preconceived notions about how a process works that stops researchers from considering other pathways or avenues or even superhighways though they are clearly marked.  Of course this is really good for the keepers of the cash cow.  With that out of the way this makes it possible to allow my imagination to run free without restraint.

Okay so researchers, maybe you should pay attention to what I am about to say because some day it may make you a super star if you pursue my line of thinking.  However, if you work for one of the companies that make statin drugs and start talking about what I am proposing then you better put your things in a box and start looking for a new job.

So what is cholesterol?  It has the word sterol in it so that most likely makes it a fat.  So what do we know about fats?  They are necessary for life because I remember the story about the arctic explorers that had this canned food that was primarily carbohydrates and protein and they started to get sick and bloat.  It was later discovered that you have to have fat to survive.  It has also been discovered that we do not need carbohydrates to survive but this battle still rages on.  We do know that low fat foods that have the fats replaced with sugars or other carbohydrates just make us fatter.   I have proved this over and over by the amount of weight that I gain when I eat low fat foods.  And on top of that, the low fat foods just make me want to eat more.

Now there have been all of these stories about how cholesterol in the blood causes your arteries to clog up with plaque and this stops the blood flow.  When your blood does not flow for more than about five minutes you die and this is not good to a long life.  I have read studies that say that too much cholesterol causes this plaque problem and heart disease.  I have read studies that say there is no correlation between cholesterol and heart disease in more recent literature.  It was suggested that since a high amount of cholesterol would cause heart disease and that since cholesterol is fat that we eat too much fat and this causes us to have heart disease.  This seems so counter intuitive to the understanding about the explorers that did not get enough fat.

We can just put all of that aside and say that cholesterol is a marker and not necessarily a cause and effect for heart disease.  Now what does being a marker mean?  Well it means that a certain thing is an indication that something will happen.  It is like the speed indicator in your car.  If it says that you are going 70 mph that the car is going very fast and all the physical things that you can expect to happen at this speed will happen.  The speed indicator is not the cause of the car moving at this speed.  The indicator only says that the car is going at this speed.

Now, when I had severe back pain and my vertebral disc were failing and I had sleep apnea, I had very high cholesterol readings.  I had one test that indicated that my cholesterol was over 240.  The test also said that my fasting triglycerides were 680 or extremely high.  I also had problems with my heart because I was having pre-ventricular contractions and one time even a sudden fast heart rate.  My heart rate went over 200 bpm and stayed there for over 15 minutes.  I was in so much pain from the pressure on my spinal cord that I just thought that maybe this was it and I would just die and get rid of the pain.  However, my heart slowed down and I was just fine except for the severe continuous ever hurting downright destroying evil pain – pain – pain.

Then I started taking vitamin D3.  My spine healed.  My sleep apnea went away because the nerves for the lungs and throat were free to do what they were supposed to do.  My heart started working just fine.  My energy returned.  My brain healed.  My mind cleared. And guess what else happened.  That’s right on my last blood test, my cholesterol was 175 and my fasting triglycerides were 72.  Now how could this be because since I have been out of pain I eat the worst diet ever.  I am still overweight (BMI 130) even though recently my metabolism seems to be speeding up and I have lost 10 lbs in the last month. I eat now because I can because there is no pain when my gut gets big unlike before when my spine was shot.  So why would eating cheeseburgers and french fries and milk shakes cause my lipid profile to improve?

Thinking about arterial plaque, I have recently read that this plaque is a very small percentage of the gooey stuff that holds it together from cholesterol.  It is mostly calcium dross.  I like the word dross because that is what forms when you get too much oxygen over molten metal and so this is what happens in the arteries and not the veins where the oxygen is low.  Too much oxygen in the arteries causes the calcium in the blood to form dross.  This makes about as much sense as what we have been told about how the fat causes our arteries to plug.  If it was just fat, then the veins would clog as well.

So following the logic of the ‘eat low fat’ people, we should just stop breathing as this would not allow oxygen into the arteries and cause dross to plug them.  Now you guys that majored in the biological sciences still with me or have I sucked all of the air from your systems?  I know this is way out, but what fun!!!!!!!!!

When reading about how our body makes vitamin D, I discovered that the ultraviolent B radiation on cholesterol in the skin causes it to turn into vitamin D.  This vitamin D along with some isomers and other products like metabolites that it forms makes up our vitamin D physiology.  Now not being hampered by a biological religious cult, I would just think that as our bodies get enough vitamin D to where systems get satisfied that we stop making cholesterol.  When we do not go out into the sun and our vitamin D level gets low, our liver and skin spits out lots of cholesterol and our body starts screaming at us, ‘GO INTO THE SUN’.  We go into the sun and if there is enough UVB then our body makes D3.  We are happy as our pineal gland starts spitting out the commands for all of these happiness squads of hormones that can now act because we have enough vitamin D.

Process of vitamin D being made from cholesterol, University of California Riverside.

This also makes sense from understanding that the plaque in our arteries is a calcium plaque and the primary system for controlling calcium absorption is vitamin D.  If we do not have enough vitamin D then calcium serum regulation falls to the parathyroid hormones like a failsafe system.  We survive and do not thrive.

And while I am thinking about it, I do not believe there is a single case of secondary hyperparathyroidism when the serum 25(OH)D level is above 40 ng/ml in the medical literature.  At least that is what a bunch of guys from Spain have said in 2003.  You would think that knowing how PTH and 25(OH)D work together that we would increase the level of 25(OH)D before we started chopping out peoples parathyroids.  This happened to a friend of mined and he simply increased his 25(OH)D, his serum calcium normalized and he did have to get his parathyroids chopped.

So then, cholesterol is just a marker for low vitamin D levels in the body which means that we need to take action to get the level of vitamin D up so that over 2000 genes can turn off when they are supposed to be off and on when they are suppose to be on.

Changing the cholesterol level to try to prevent heart disease then would be like making the speed indicator on the car read 35 mph when we are really going 70.  We are just looking for an accident to happen because we do not know that we are going so fast because of the artificial indication.  I suspect this is what happens when we take statin drugs which I understand are just bad mimics of the vitamin D feedback system that tells us to stop making cholesterol.  This is really bad because when we do go into the sun we do not have adequate amounts of cholesterol to make vitamin D.  Okay, biological geeks, did you get it?  This is the reason for all the confounded data in your studies because your theories just – well- truly suck!

I say to you, the manufacturers of statin drugs, that I do not believe that you are so bad at logic and biological science that you could get this so wrong.  I think that you had dollars signs in your eyes because you could not figure out a way to profit from healthy people replete in vitamin D.  So it is obvious that you love money more than people even though it is the people, your customers, that is providing you this money.

I suspect that there is enough data out there from other studies that an energetic researcher could crunch around to show that when peoples serum 25(OH)D levels are less than 32 ng/ml that they have a problem with high cholesterol.  Get the levels up to above 50 ng/ml for a couple of months and I would suspect that you would see a significant drop in cholesterol.  It happened to me and others that I know.  Are our bodies just freaks of nature?

It seems that doctors that have tried this on patients with heart disease have had great success.  Why don’t you go visit with Dr. William Davis at the Heart Scan Blog and see for yourself.

Even better –GO INTO THE SUN!!!!!!!!!!!   – Pandemic Survivor

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Nutrients for Back Pain

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As you know from My Story, I ‘grew’ out of back pain by taking nutrients that allowed the vertebral disc to heal.  Now modern medicine says that this is not possible, but let us explore these two brief stories from people that I know that helped me get to the understanding of the nutrients that I took.

First it was a friend that was somewhat of an athlete.  After a surgery on his knee to removed damaged cartilage, he spent enormous amounts of time in the sun with his shirt off.  Against his doctors advice he continued to run.  It is important to keep up exercise for cartilage health as this is the only way that fluids move in and out of the cartilage to provide nutrients.  Cartilage is not feed directly by the blood system.  After a year he went back to the doctor and had his knee imaged as a follow up to the surgery.  The cartilage had grown back.

Second, I knew a lady that had back pain.  She said that after the summer in her garden that her back pain had gone and that she had grown an inch in height.  Again, significant height variation that is more than the normal from hydration is an indication of the health of vertebral disc.

The only thing that was in common with these two healings was sunshine and exercise.  The sunshine provided the vitamin D and the exercise allowed nutrient flow to the cartilage.

Nutrients that I took:

Vitamin C 1000 mg/d

Multivitamin

Magnesium as glycinate 800 mg/d

Vitamin D3 – enough to keep my serum 25(OH)D3 above 50 ng/ml for me at 203 lbs this was about 10,000 IU/d  in the winter and in the summer I only took 5000 IU/d

Vitamin A – from fish liver oil 5000 IU/d

Zinc – 25 mg/d

Boron – 3 mg/d

Calcium – 500 mg

Sulfur – MSM 1000mg/d and glucosamine sulfate 1500 mg/d

I could not really walk so I had purchased an inverter about three years prior.  I am not promoting the Hang-Up brand but this is the one that I used and it worked very well.  I would not really hang upside down but would rock 45 degrees back and then forward and this would work my spine like an accordion to pump fluids in and out.  I did this twice each day for 10 to 15 minutes.

Now from looking at these vitamins it is hard to imagine that is all that I did.  Let me tell you when you are in pain and the back is screaming at you the vitamin D does wonders.  Of course I was under the care of doctor during this time and he told me not to take the vitamin D3 in such large amounts that it would make my organs turn to ‘stone’.  He checked my serum calcium and my 25(OH)D and was satisfied that I was not doing anything harmful to myself.

There was not anything on the net about improving back pain with vitamin D at that time.  However, now Dr. Gerry Schwalfenberg, University of Alberta, has published case studies on using Vitamin D. Improvement of Chronic Back Pain or Failed Back Surgery with Vitamin D Repletion: A Case Series Gerry Schwalfenberg, MD From the Department of Family Medicine, University of Alberta, Canada

In his case studies, he does not use as much vitamin D as I did.  I do think that you should try to maintain your serum 25(OH)D level above 50 ng/ml as I stated above.

The pain got much better for about a 4 month period.  It then started to hurt up and down my back, but the places where the bulges existed got much better.  What was going on with my back as the disc healed was that the nerve roots were trying to find new homes as the disc increased in height.  I could exercise the part of my spine that was hurting and it would get better the next day.  After the first three months I was able to go to the gym.  I had a very kind trainer that would help me exercise without putting any compression on my spine. Within 10 months I was able to do 125 lb dead lifts and the pain in my back was gone.  I had grown back to my original height of 6 ft after six months and at the end of 10 months I was two inches taller than I had ever been.  I am sure because I was kept out of the sun as a child because of my heat stroke that my DNA had never fully expressed itself.

I think that it is very important for cellular differentiation that you get both Vitamin A and Vitamin D.  I got the largest growth spurt when I was taking both.  Also please note that I was not using beta-carotene but vitamin A from fish liver oil.  There has been much comment about not taking this preformed vitamin A.  We always ate liver every other week when I was growing up and I never had any problems.  Liver about the size of your hand has 100,000 IU of vitamin A.  I say eat as the endogenous people did – like the wolf where the internal organs are consumed first.  If you like liver then you have it made.

Again, do this only in the care of a doctor in particular if you have injuries in your cervical disc.  I had stenosis so bad at C3-C4 and since this is where the nerve for the lung originates the surgeon was really concerned I would just stop breathing.  I had severe sleep apnea (central) from this but after the pain was gone the doctor would not operate.  The sleep apnea took almost two years to resolve but it finally got there.  I have no more poping or snapping in my neck at all and can move it in any direction at will.

Sounds simple, it is simple.  I still do not understand why no doctor ever asked to take my vitamin D level when DDD is so similar to rickets.  I am truly sadden by the number of people that are still out there hurting when the solution is so simple.  There is hope for your pain so be of good cheer.  I know that it hurts and my prayers are for you.

Go nekkid into the sun!           – Pandemic Survivor

The Tragedy of Deficiency Disease

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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

Vitamin D, Disease, and Research

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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

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

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

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

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!