Let me rephrase .... the only reason Vitamin D and other "miracle cures" palliate such a wide range of diseases is because of the short-term anti-inflammatory effect. If you take enough Vitamin D that your 25-D is maintained higher than 1,25-D, you will feel better, but your disease remains, and you are on a slow immunosupressive cell-wall-deficient bacteria induced spiral of death. We probably have to agree to disagree on this .... but the recommended 32 ng/ml blood level of Vitamin D is not natural. The questions are, How can the body expect a level of Vitamin D that in many cases requires a supplement containing 1000x the Vitamin D of any natural food source? If the supplement is simply to make up for "lack of sun", why is Vitamin D deficiency equally common at all latitudes? Why don't the bodies of people at the equator make 32ng/ml? http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb4393/is_8_36/ai_n29200322/ http://www.voanews.com/english/Science/2009-07-20-voa47.cfm The approach of the Vitamin D Council lacks scientific scrutiny. If a level of vitamin results in palliation of certain disease symptoms, it must be good, without even considering "why or how". Here is a recent example of this: http://bacteriality.com/2009/08/10/iom/ (I have no affiliation with Amy or Paul, other than that we all have been helped by Dr. Marshall's work. I was sick my whole life, even bedridden for 4 years.)
Almost any other system is better than the one we have now. We rank first in health care cost and near last for most health indicators. http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2000/07/30/doctors-death-part-one.aspx
Yep, and doctors don't have any tools to actually make people healthy. As long as this is the case, health care is an unsolvable problem. Chronic disease rates are higher than ever, even in young people. I also submit that the alternative health community is not faring much better. Most people involved in alternative health care for a long time are still just "hanging on".
This is just not true, review the hundreds of scientific studies showing the healing properties of Vitamin D in a wide range of disease: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/research.shtml Relating to it be an antibiotic: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/2006-june-july.shtml "Human biology was probably optimized through natural selection for a sun-rich environment that maintained serum 25(OH)D higher than 100 nmol/L. These levels are now only prevalent in people who spend an above-average amount of time outdoors, with the sun high in the sky. The best-characterized criteria for vitamin D adequacy are based on randomized clinical trials that show fracture prevention and preservation of bone mineral density. Based upon these studies, 25(OH)D concentrations should exceed 75 nmol/L. This concentration is near the upper end of the 25(OH)D reference ("normal") range for populations living in temperate climates, or for people who practice sun-avoidance, or who wear head coverings" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16766239 Note that 32 ng/ml is equal to 80 nmol/L Because Vitamin D was designed to be obtained from sun exposure, not ingestion. Your own reference answers this: "Those who live closer to the equator are actually less prone to vitamin D deficiency, but at times this, can be overshadowed by other factors like skin pigmentation, less outdoor activity and more skin cover with clothes." You should probably completely read your references before you ask questions like this. Again from your own reference "The North American survey involved 1536 community-dwelling postmenopausal women being treated for osteoporosis. Of these, 52% were found to have a serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25[OH]D) level below 30 ng/mL." Obviously this means that 50% had levels higher than 30 ng/mg which you claim is on the verge of being not natural and this data isn't even from people who live at the equator. It references hundreds of peer reviewed medical studies. In your previous post you already acknowledged the "why or how" explanation; vitimin D has been found to regulate over 3000 genes. Now you are questioning this?
What tools are you referring to? I do not agree with any type health care, mainstream or alternative that does not use include an orthomolecular approach. There are very few doctors that do this. Even if they are just "hanging on" at least they aren't 1 of the hundreds of thousands of Americans being killed by adverse drug reactions each year. http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/279/15/1200
Blade Often does not cover the half if it. Your response is ENTIRELY typical. The CDC used to have a biofilm lab, which they apparently closed during the Bush years. Most MDs never heard of a biofilm, but that is the default mode of living for bacteria, and biofilms are 100 to 1000 times as resistant to antibiotics as platonic bacteria. But most docs are entirely uninformed that they can grow on native human tissue. In 2006 I was told that it would cost 100K to write a preposal to the human studies committee at Duke to allow histology samples from sinus surgery to be inspected for biofilms with an electron microscope, of course Sanderson at the VA hospital at San Diego did just that and indeed found the biofilm growing. The fact is that humans are studied for days and the modles are studied for years, so we know MUCH more about diseases in rodents (which make their own vitiman C by the way) than we do about the diseases of people. The bureaucratic impediments that have been put in place against research are just mindboggleing 99% of bacteria can not be cultured. Look up Kim Lewis's work at U Penn on unculturable bacteria. http://books.google.com/books?id=xT...esult&ct=result&resnum=4#v=onepage&q=&f=false Koch was an engineer, and the culture method and induced disease method of proving causality served very well to characterize the capabilities of individual microbiota, but even Koch recognized that if the causative agent could not be cultured that did not mean that it did not cause disease in vio. The default COMMON, NORMAL habit of bacteria is to exist in multispecies biofilms. http://books.google.com/books?id=at...esult&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false The biggest misunderstanding in in the area of immune response. The idea common in medicine has been that the inflammatory response has been due to an inappropriate immune response. This theory of the immune system gone wild is a descendant of the theory of spontaneous generation. In the dark ages, doctors thought people spontaneously give rise to worms now we are thought to spontaneously have allergic reactions to harmless antigens in the environment. However often this is not the case. It turns out that Bacteria produce sexual pilia, little spikes that allow them to swap plasmids like mad with everything in the neighborhood, other bacteria, human cells etc. Which is why immune cells attack apparently normal cells, because bacteria have pushed Bacterial plasmids into them. It is the signature proteins produced by the bacterial DNA that the immune cells are responding to. Or take for instance the treatment of people with asthma and high IgE and eosinophil counts. Since eosinophiles are specialized immune cells to fight worms, a doctor could look for antigens associated with toxocara cutis (dog hook worm larva transmittable via mosquito), or hymenolepis nana (carried by mice and grain beetles) via ELIZA. Worms are some of the most common infections in humans on Earth, and these infections are endemic in North America which has abundant reservoirs of alternate hosts for these parasites, yet is assumed that A. we do not get worms when bitten though our animals do, and that any human infestation is limited by the temperature requirements for development of the larval worm, ignoring that the pest may do that pesky evolving thing. H Nana has adapted so that it can complete it's entire life cycle at the higher temperatures in the human body. But if you get H nana prehaps on a camping trip, it is likely that you will keep it for life, because in America only the dog and cats are wormed. What a person having either one of these worm infections will likely get is not a test for worms and a prescription for praziquantel or albendazole, (which are effective and well tolerated) but rather a management for a chronic "allergy" with prescription for a steroid preparation which will over time can cause bone deterioration. Considering that cost benefit ratio, one would think that the test for worms in humans would be as routine for us as for our animals. Now that we have laser confocal microscopes that allow resolution of biofilm structures, ELISA DNA tests and gene sequencers able to sequence a community genome so that the DNA that code for virulence factors can be detected without the need for cultures,the infectious agents things that cause half of Cystic Fibrosis-like disease in the absence of any abnormality in the CFTMCF can identified and treated. If the Docs will deign to do so.
Since 25-D and 1,25-D are opposites (one is an agonist, the other an antagonist, of the VDR which transcribes those 3000 genes), every "positive" outcome has a flip side. High 25-D strenghtens bones, but high 1,25-D causes osteopenia (of course they only publish the first result) High 1,25-D stimulates the immunes system, but high 25-D supresses it (of course they only publish the first result) Additionally the results are not scrutinized beyond "if a level of vitamin results in palliation of certain disease symptoms, it must be good". The common error is that disease palliation = recovery. North American milk is supplemented with levels of 25-D that are 50 times higher than what occurs naturally. Many other food are supplemented. I read that, to me that is pure speculation due to an unexpected result. In a way the mainstream research is just catching up to Dr. Marshall in finding out that Vitamin D plays a role in so many diseases. Dr. Marshall is just taking a deeper look at the same data and arriving at an opposite conclusion.
Truehawk - great post, you are decades ahead of most. This is why the current state of medicine is an unsolvable problem. The number of bacteria living within the body of the average healthy adult human are estimated to outnumber human cells 10 to 1. Vitamin D is just one part of this puzzle. Matt - I am talking about what got me better http://bacteriality.com/about-the-mp/ More about biofilms, l-form bacteria, antibiotic resistance, etc. http://bacteriality.com/2007/08/15/l-forms/