Friday, August 6, 2010

Vitamin D Myths and Reality on Toxicity Dose How Research Can Go Wrong

Tags: Vitamin D Toxicity?, Gary Null, Cannell, Drugs Overdose or Not, Flawed Assumptions, Best Practices, Brain, Memory, Creativity,

Scientists and doctors are very smart, but that does not mean that they do not make flawed assumptions beyond what the data and studies tell them which leads to such conclusions as blood letting helping sick patients get well. These results may be what they thought they observed, but they did not have controls where they did nothing. Also the placebo effect can be quite strong as drug makers have alarmingly observed. If possible, the patient should not know what treatment they are getting if any.

Also like most people, scientists and doctors do not like to be out of the mainstream of thinking. For example, global warming was not accepted by most scientists decades ago. It took overwhelming information obtained by many different scientists all over the world to get over 90 percent acceptance of the unassailable evidence. It is happening now. It is not a part of the a cycle of weather change.

Unfortunately, the public and many Republicans are not familiar with the scientific method which involves trying to disprove a theory whether our own or someone else’s hypothesis and they need to run experiments and gather information to prove or disprove their hypothesis. Global Warming is now a proven theory until someone can disprove it by an alternative hypothesis and experiments.

It takes 17 years for half of the practising physicians to adopt Best Practices either due to ignorance or not believing someone else knows more than they do. We are all prone to take irrelevant information and overrate their importance.

Creativity has gone down 20 percent (http://charlierose.com ) because we have less information in our brains because the Internet has altered our brain so we cannot concentrate long enough due to web distractions to commit things to memory for longer than a few seconds in our Working Brain. (The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr who read the enormous number of scientific work on how the brain works by Columbia’s Nobel Laureate Kandel. See Charlie Rose’s brain series.)

Only a small percentage of Dementia has been due to genetic propensity to Alzheimer’s Disease. Of course much of our health and brain wellness or sickness has

genetic or environmental epigenetic origins, but the drugs we so blithely take as seniors averaging 15 different medications daily, have known and unknown side-effects not appreciated by most Americans even though or because Big Pharma tries to distract us with beautiful images while talking or listing the horrendous side-effects so we forget them in the working memory if it gets there.

Our Daily Meds by Melody Petersen, formerly of the New York Times, has written this book to alert us that lots have not been told to us such as a whole host of drugs which are known to cause dementia and a multitude of other problems.

Jim Kawakami, August 06, 2010, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com


The Vitamin D Newsletter

August 6, 2010, John Cannell, MD, Executive Director, Vitamin D Council


Gary Null and Vitamin D Toxicity

… Is 2,000,000 IU/day of vitamin D toxic? (Read whole Newsletter at http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/ I excerpted about six pages into about 1 1/2. Jim)

Ask Gary Null, alternative medicine guru and entrepreneur

(He did not check his shipment of vitamin D3 for actual content. That is why non-regulated supplements can be dangerous and should be bought from a highly reputable dealer. Jim)

He took his own supplement, Ultimate Power Meal, for a month and became extremely ill; one batch of Power Meal apparently contained 1,000 times more vitamin D than it should. That is, it contained 2,000,000 IU of vitamin D3 per serving instead of 2,000 IU per serving. Mr. Null became sicker and sicker as he gulped it down. …

(He survived, but very likely suffered kidney and possibly other organs and blood vessels would be my guess. Too high levels of vitamin D does result in increased levels of calcium in our blood. That is why I cut back my calcium level to 800-100 mg. I check it monthly and seems to be holding steady in the middle of the normal range. Jim)

By 1948, the medical community began condemning the use of such massive doses of vitamin D as evidenced by a paper from Johns Hopkins University.

Howard JE and Meyer RJ. Intoxication with vitamin D. J. Clin. Endocrinology. 1948;8(11);895-910.

The authors reference 12 earlier papers on vitamin D intoxication with calcification of everything from the kidneys to the sclera of the eyes. The first symptoms of vitamin D toxicity in their series of 11 patients were weight loss and fatigue, which occurred before the anorexia (poor appetite) and vomiting.

All of their patients suffered from kidney damage and anemia. Virtually all of the patients had a characteristic eye lesion, which are calcium deposits in the sclera and cornea, just beneath the conjunctival basement membrane.

All patients had high blood calcium, ranging from 12.4 to 15.1 mg per 100 cc. Dosages of vitamin D ranged from the lowest at 150,000 IU/day for 4 months (serum calcium 13.9) to the highest at 500,000 IU/day for 18 months (serum calcium 14.3). They reported on another patient who developed hypercalcemia after she reported taking 300,000 IU of vitamin D2 for only 2 weeks; she also had eye lesions evident on slit lamp exam. Although accurate follow up was not possible due to the fact the patients came from around the country, no patients died but some suffered permanent renal damage from the excessive doses of vitamin D. …

The dark ages of vitamin D meant that for several generations of doctors, vitamin D was toxic at all but the most meaningless doses. Its use to treat asthma and arthritis became verboten. For fifty years, doctors forgot about vitamin D – other than vitamin D deficient rickets – because of fear of toxicity. …


Out of the dark ages and Real Science on Vitamin D Emerges

… Professor Reinhold Vieth of the University of Toronto showed us the way out of the dark ages with an objective review of the toxicity literature.

Vieth R. Vitamin D supplementation, 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentrations, and safety. Am J Clin Nutr. 1999 May;69(5):842-56.

What Vieth’s paper showed was that there is a difference between 5,000 IU per day and 50,000 IU per day, the first being a physiological dose and the second being a pharmacological dose, a drug. However, in 1999 the world was using neither dose properly, in that no doctors were prescribing 5,000 IU per day and no scientists were studying 50,000 IU per day.

After Vieth’s paper, in the first few years of this century, a steady stream of vitamin D papers began flowing out of research labs… scientists published 1,582 new papers on vitamin D in the first six months of 2010.

Very few are about toxicity, instead they cover a breathtaking variety of diseases. These papers raise the possibility that many of the diseases that we take as being part of the human condition are not part of the human condition, instead they are simply the result of the toxicity scare: vitamin D deficiency.


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