I am a researcher, not a doctor. I don’t analyze peoples’ health problem and give my analysis and prescription (actions to take) to cure their problems. I research what happens in the human body at the cellular level and look for cause and effect relationships. One must attack the cause of a problem to treat it properly.
Doctors treat symptoms. Prescription medicines treat symptoms. They are band-aids on a problem that don’t address the cause of that problem. Is there a conflict of interest? I think not, but it leads one to believe if they fixed the problem the first time there would be very little need to take meds and see your doctor for the rest of your life to treat a disease.
I blogged about vitamin D3 (VD3) yesterday. Look at your multivitamin bottle, or your bottle of VD3 and check out how much you are actually getting. It’s probably less than a 1000 IUs/day. In most cases, it’s around 400 IUs/day. Let’s go to the heart of the problem, is that enough to do you any good?
Scientists have studied the blood levels of 25-hydroxy vitamin D and compared those results to healthy people and those with various diseases and tracked the results of increased dosages of VD3. The old standard for 25-hydroxy vitamin D was 20-40 ng/ml. The more current standard is 30-50 ng/ml. The gold standard is above 50 ng/ml/day.
If you take 400-1000 IUs/day of VD3 you will never attain anything near 30 ng/ml. That is why the vast majority of the American public is deficient in VD3. VD3 is critical for your immune system to fight disease. Without it, you are going be at risk for bacterial, fungal and viral infections – not to mention most diseases that your body could fight on its own, but doesn’t have the ability to do so. Your immune system is your number one system to fight and prevent disease.
If you want to know how much VD3 is needed by you (everyone is different), then get a VD3 blood test (they are cheap) and increase your daily intake of VD3 until your blood tests consistently come back over 50 ng/ml. Do this in conjunction with your doctor. Ensure you have medical supervision to follow your progress. Insurance should pay for it, but it is cheap enough that most can afford this test otherwise. It is very cheap insurance to get your immune system working for you.
At 50 ng/ml of VD3, you have the entry level requirement met to sustain a healthy immune system. If you have a disease, scientists tell us that our VD3 levels in our blood should be between 80-100 ng/ml. I keep mine around 80 ng/ml and I take at least 10,000 IUs of VD3 daily, especially during the winter. My wife’s levels are around 100 ng/ml. She had cancer a couple of years back and it is critical that her immune system fights anything that is trying to get a foothold in her body.
We just finished walking the 500-mile Camino de Santiago in Spain and neither one of us had any health issues while we were walking daily for over a month.
You’re not a doctor but you know how to take care of yourself.