Vitamin D is on the fast-track toward nutritional sainthood – that is, of being declared a miracle vitamin.
Indeed, the research shows that vitamin D is required for healthy bones and to maintain the skeletal muscles that hold our bones in place. It helps prevent type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Vitamin D fights infections and may also have anti-depressant benefits. Vitamin D seems necessary for a maintaining a healthy heart. And perhaps most dramatically, vitamin D protects against many different types of cancer, including those of breast, colon, and prostate. All of these benefits point to the fundamental importance of vitamin D in health.
But I’ll argue for a moment that almost everyone is looking at the health benefits of vitamin D from the wrong perspective.
Studies have consistently shown that low levels of vitamin D (either marginal levels or outright deficiencies) are common among both sexes and all age groups, from infants through seniors. The consequences of inadequate vitamin D are nothing less than catastrophic, contributing to the risk of all the diseases that vitamin D supplements correct. As Evan Shute, M.D., once told me, vitamins prevent what they also cure.
The risk of a vitamin D deficiency can be reduced simply by taking a a capsule containing 1,000 to 2,000 IU daily. The benefits might seem miraculous, but they are not a true miracle. They are the result of correcting a single vitamin deficiency.
The conventional medical and dietetic view is that vitamin deficiency diseases were common through the 1940s, but that they are rare today. But this conventional view is wrong – often dead wrong for the people affected by such deficiencies.
It’s incredible that, in 2008, a lack of vitamin D
is widespread, not just in the United States, but throughout Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world. And if we looked just a little harder, we would find deficiencies of other vitamins and minerals also to
be common. Imagine much much better off people would be if somehow we managed to eliminate all vitamin deficiencies.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Hospitals Are Some of the Most Dangerous Places
Ads touting the benefits of particular hospitals are common in big city newspapers, but on a recent day, I was struck by the sheer number of full-page ads for hospitals. In particular, one ad read: “For a healthy heart...eat properly, exercise daily and visit St. Francis, the hospital with more of the best cardiac specialists than any other hospital...”
What do hospitals have to do with disease prevention? Virtually nothing.
Visit St. Francis or any other hospital? Unless you need the ER, you may very well be putting your life at risk.
Years ago, while researching an article on the Navajo reservation, I learned that Native Americans had a specific word for hospitals – it translated to “the place where people go to die.”
The truth is that hospitals are among of the most dangerous places in our modern world, and you would do your best to stay out of hospitals. They’re a great place to contract “nosocomial infections,” a euphemism for infections contracted in hospitals. This doesn’t mean that hospitals and surgery don’t help a lot of people. They do, but there are serious downsides – e.g., death – while being hospitalized.
It turns out that whenever physicians go on either a strike or a work slowdown, the area’s death rate decreases.
I’m serious.
When physicians began a major work slowdown in Israel in 2000, the death rate decreased by 68 percent. When Israeli doctors went on strike for a month in 1973, the death rate during that month dropped by 50 percent. No one had seen such a dramatic decrease in death rates since the previous doctors’ strike 20 years before.
In 1976, doctors in Los Angeles went on strike to protest increases in malpractice insurance. You guessed it – the death rate decreased by 18 percent. That same year, doctors in Bogota, Columbia, also went on strike, and the death rate went down by 35 percent.
These aren't the ravings of a lunatic, believe me. Even the British Medical Journal has reported these amazing reductions in death rates when doctors go on strike and disrupt the treatment of people in hospitals.
The risk of death in hospitals also seems to relate to the magnitude of intervention, with more aggres-sive interventions increasing the odds of dying. In a recent study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, patients were more likely to die when treated entirely by critical-care physicians in intensive care units (ICUs), compared with patients treated entirely by noncritical-care physicians. You might argue that patients in ICUs are more seriously ill, but the researchers accounted for these differences in the severity of illness.
The problem lies with the pharmaceutical and surgical interventions that lie at the heart of modern medicine. Aggressive interventions are dangerous – and deadly – compared with more conservative therapies, such as nutritional medicine, especially for chronic diseases. Going to a hospital invites such interventions, and doctors often forget their Hippocratic Oath: first do no harm.
References: Siegel-Itzkovich J. BMJ, 2000;320:1561. Mendelsohn RS. Confessions of a Medical Heretic. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1979:114. Levy MM. Annals of Internal Medicine, 2008;148:801-809.
What do hospitals have to do with disease prevention? Virtually nothing.
Visit St. Francis or any other hospital? Unless you need the ER, you may very well be putting your life at risk.
Years ago, while researching an article on the Navajo reservation, I learned that Native Americans had a specific word for hospitals – it translated to “the place where people go to die.”
The truth is that hospitals are among of the most dangerous places in our modern world, and you would do your best to stay out of hospitals. They’re a great place to contract “nosocomial infections,” a euphemism for infections contracted in hospitals. This doesn’t mean that hospitals and surgery don’t help a lot of people. They do, but there are serious downsides – e.g., death – while being hospitalized.
It turns out that whenever physicians go on either a strike or a work slowdown, the area’s death rate decreases.
I’m serious.
When physicians began a major work slowdown in Israel in 2000, the death rate decreased by 68 percent. When Israeli doctors went on strike for a month in 1973, the death rate during that month dropped by 50 percent. No one had seen such a dramatic decrease in death rates since the previous doctors’ strike 20 years before.
In 1976, doctors in Los Angeles went on strike to protest increases in malpractice insurance. You guessed it – the death rate decreased by 18 percent. That same year, doctors in Bogota, Columbia, also went on strike, and the death rate went down by 35 percent.
These aren't the ravings of a lunatic, believe me. Even the British Medical Journal has reported these amazing reductions in death rates when doctors go on strike and disrupt the treatment of people in hospitals.
The risk of death in hospitals also seems to relate to the magnitude of intervention, with more aggres-sive interventions increasing the odds of dying. In a recent study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, patients were more likely to die when treated entirely by critical-care physicians in intensive care units (ICUs), compared with patients treated entirely by noncritical-care physicians. You might argue that patients in ICUs are more seriously ill, but the researchers accounted for these differences in the severity of illness.
The problem lies with the pharmaceutical and surgical interventions that lie at the heart of modern medicine. Aggressive interventions are dangerous – and deadly – compared with more conservative therapies, such as nutritional medicine, especially for chronic diseases. Going to a hospital invites such interventions, and doctors often forget their Hippocratic Oath: first do no harm.
References: Siegel-Itzkovich J. BMJ, 2000;320:1561. Mendelsohn RS. Confessions of a Medical Heretic. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1979:114. Levy MM. Annals of Internal Medicine, 2008;148:801-809.
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