Tag Archives: treat cancer

Healtcare Reform – Heal the People

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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

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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

Vitamin D3 – Size Matters

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When we see the bottles of supplements we are used to looking at milligrams.  But have you ever stopped for a minute to understand how much this weight represents.  This can be difficult when you are dealing with extremely small amounts.

The best way to get an idea of how much we are talking about is to take an object that we are familiar with and divide it up.  When we think about a standard aspirin, it is typically 325 milligrams.  But how big is a gram?  At 325 milligrams an aspirin represents about one third of a gram.  So, three standard aspirins is about a gram.  You can take three aspirins and hold them in your hand to get a feel for how much this weighs.

With vitamin D we talk about IU amounts.  Forty IU is equal to one microgram, so how much is that.  That would be a weight that is equivalent to taking those three aspirin and dividing them into 1 million pieces.  That is really hard to imagine.

Let’s take a mid-size car as something that you are familiar and do this division.  A car will typically weight about 2,200 lbs.  This is a convenient weight as there is 2.2 lbs per kilogram so there are 1000 Kilograms in 2,200 lbs.  That would be 1 million grams or 1000 x 1000.  Kilo is the term used when describing 1000 grams.  If you take that car and divide it into 1 million pieces you would have the weight of about three standard aspirin.  That is really not very much of that car.  It would represent maybe one of the buttons on the dash.

When we say milligrams we are taking one gram and dividing it by 1,000.  When we say micrograms we take one gram and divide it into 1 million pieces.  Compare this to taking that car and dividing it into a million pieces and you start to get an idea of how small an amount we are describing.

However, vitamin D3 typically does not say milligrams it is measured in IU or International Units.  The NIH is trying to change this designation to micrograms for vitamin D so that it makes more sense in understanding how much you are taking.  Some products are presently in micrograms like some of the B vitamins.  However, I see in press articles how this is confused.  That is milligrams are confused for micrograms and in vitamin D I have even seen IU confused with milligrams because that is what we are use to describing.

An International Unit is a measure of the bioactivity or biological activity of a substance.  For vitamin D, one IU would be equivalent to 0.025 micrograms of vitamin D3 or cholecalciferol.  One IU of vitamin A is equivalent to 0.3 micrograms of retinol bioactivity.  IU’s are not the same equivalent weights for all substances but relates to the bioactivity of that substance.  Once this bioactivity has been established we can change the units to mass or weight.

For vitamin D we have 40 IU equal to 1 microgram by doing the math from above.  So when the government says that you only need 400 IU of vitamin D they are talking about 10 micrograms.  Continuing the math that means that 4,000 IU is 100 micrograms and to get to that familiar unit of milligram we would have to go all the way to 40,000 IU.  To get to a value that is equivalent to a gram we take 40,000 IU and multiply it by 1,000 or 40 million IU.  WOW!  We really are describing very tiny amounts.  Vitamin D is extremely biological active in very small amounts.

One researcher, Dr. Halcyon Skinner of Northwestern University, described a 43% reduction in pancreatic cancer by participants that were getting about 400 IU of vitamin D as compared to participants that were getting less than 150 IU.  Pancreatic cancer is an aggressive killer and if you know people that have had this disease you understand how significant the intake of vitamin D can be.  I will blog more about this, but you may read that news from the Life Extension Newsletter for September, 2006.

So now researchers are saying that many more cancers and many, many more chronic disease can be prevented by higher amounts of vitamin D and are suggestion that the total intake per day should be changed to 4,000 to 10,000 IU or 100 micrograms to 250 micrograms from all sources.

Part of the problem has been in measuring and understanding such minute amounts.  Part of the problem has been the medical institutions ignoring the facts for profit.  If you, your family and your friends have been suffering from any of these diseases, you should really question our agencies that are to protect us from such misadventures.

– 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