There is a Vitamin D deficiency epidemic throughout the world.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people have been linking this deficiency with increased mortality from the virus - see here for some studies. Watch this. I have been perplexed by the almost total lack of interest in nutrition and general wellbeing during COVID-19 despite it being very clear that it is those with comorbidities and deficiencies who're most at risk - and despite it being known that many of these health issues can be reversed, often very quickly, with a change in diet, and/or cheap supplements. (If anything, it seems like we've been encouraged to harm our wellbeing, with the constant fear, isolation etc!).
I have since discovered that doctors, (in the western world at least), learn almost nothing about nutrition at medical school, which I find shocking!
I've been trying to figure out how the medical system ended up like this, and was recommended this book, which I'm currently half way through reading. It's a fascinating book, detailing how the system was set up primarily in the interests of corporate capitalism. The billionaires and elites of the late 19th and early 20th century favored allopathic (science-based) medicine, largely because it enabled them to further centralize and control society. Its reductionist approach to the human body enabled poor social and environmental conditions, brought on by capitalist exploitation, to be ignored, as root causes of illness. Non-allopathic practitioners, some of whom focussed more on things like diet and lifestyle, and who saw healthcare as more of an art form, and not something that a one-size-fits-all, departmentalized approach, could effectively address, opposed this monopolization of medicine by the 'science-based' approach. They were subsequently smeared as 'quacks', and put out of business.
Of course, many of those non-allopathic practitioners were indeed 'quacks', and there have also been plenty of achievements with allopathic medicine, but unfortunately it seems that its reductionist approach is a major issue, and it appears that corruption and bias in favor of the interests of the subsequently enlarged and empowered pharmaceutical companies, is extreme. Read here, here, here, here.
The reductionist approach to the human body, the influence of big pharma, and the almost total lack of understanding regarding nutrition, makes it very difficult for allopathic practitioners to heal chronic disease (of which there is now an epidemic), and mental health issues. Patients are given drugs, just to manage the disease (many of which are poorly tested/will negatively impact other parts of the body), when so often, a holistic approach and a change in diet is the medicine required, (...and a change in social/environmental conditions). It mostly seems to be a system of sickcare, rather than one of healing and wellbeing. And it all seems very anti-science to me!
Anyway, I thought I'd keep a list of things to read and watch below, about Vitamin D, as it seems to be one of the nutrients that people are most in need of. Though what people are really most in need of is a different approach to healthcare, (and a change in social conditions). I've been looking into Functional Medicine, which is a holistic, science-based approach, with a focus on food as medicine. Look it up on Wikipedia, and you'll see it described as 'quackery' and 'pseudoscience'. But surely it is allopathic medicine that should now be described as that, given what I've stated above, and given that it is, according to some, the third leading cause of death in the US! My allopathic doctor's surgery in California is now offering Functional Medicine, which hopefully indicates that it is becoming more accepted and popular.
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I have now finished the book mentioned above. I thought I'd copy a few extracts from the last few pages here...
Scientific Medicine: Beliefs and Reality
Nearly all of us turn to medicine when we are sick. Whether the healer is called a shaman, a witch doctor, a priest, a feldsher, or a physician, we all seek someone in whom to place our confidence, someone we believe will make us well. Early in the 19th century, most Americans relied on lay healers. By the middle or latter part of the century, most Americans turned to physicians, who were being prodigiously produced in mushrooming medical schools throughout the land. At the time, one could choose the particular medical theory one wanted in a physician – from homeopathy to orthodox or “allopathic” medicine – or the particular type of healer – from herbal traditions to Christian science. Not until the last two decades of the last century were there any significant number of physicians who practised what they called “scientific” medicine, meaning a medical practice based on principles continuously being developed and refined by the analytical biological and physical sciences.
Today most of us look to doctors and hospitals and surgery and drugs to cure us of every ill. We want solace, and, therefore, we expect it. The medical profession has, of course, encouraged such beliefs through its campaign to increase the confidence of the populous. Other medical interest groups, like the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute have joined in the campaign for public confidence, frequently hosting briefing sessions for newspapers’ science and medical writers to learn about the “latest advances” in cancer treatment. We have come to credit scientific, technological medicine with having reduced the enormously high death rates of past centuries and with being effective against most disease and suffering in our time. Yet such past successes and current progress are greatly exaggerated.
Life, Death, and Medicine. The Historical Record.
Historical epidemiological evidence overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that medical science has played a relatively small role in reducing mobility and mortality. Thomas McEwan argues very convincingly that improved health and the great decline in Western Europe’s total death rate from the 18th century to the present were due to four factors. First, nutrition improved because food supplies increased from the early 18th century, due initially to the reorganisation of agriculture rather than improved chemical or mechanical technology. Second, environmental sanitation measures – cleaning up the accumulated filth of the cities, assuring uncontaminated water supplies, and so forth – instituted by the late 19th century, added to improved nutrition and further reduced mortality particularly of children. These measures were well underway by the middle of the century, before either the concept of specific causes of disease or the germ theory was widely accepted. Third, these improvements in the standard of living caused a substantial increase in population, which would have overrun the gains in health if birthrates and family size had not soon sharply declined. Finally, specific preventative and therapeutic medical measures gradually introduced in the 20th century slightly accelerated the already substantial decline in mortality and also improved physical health. While science greatly extended the original non-technological advances in agriculture, hygiene, and birth control, the contribution of medical science to the overall reduction in death rates and improved health was relatively quite small.
In the great majority of cases the toll of the major killing diseases of the 19th century declined dramatically before the discovery of medical cures and even immunisation. Tuberculosis, the Great White Plague, was one of the dread diseases of the 19th century, killing 500 people per 100,000 population at mid century and 200 people per 100,000 in 1900. By 1967 the United States rate had dropped to 3 deaths per 100,000. This tremendous decline was only slightly affected by the introduction of collapse therapy in the 1930s and chemotherapy in the 1950s. Similarly, for England and Wales, John Powles shows that overall mortality declined over the last hundred years well in advance of specific immunisations and therapies.
René Dubos, the microbiologist formally with the Rockefeller Institute, succinctly summed up the historical record: “The tide of infectious and nutritional diseases was rapidly receding when the laboratory scientist moved into action at the end of the past century”, Dubos wrote in Mirage of Healthy. “In reality“, he observed, “the monstrous spectre of infection had become but an enfeebled shadow of its former self by the time serums, vaccines, and drugs became available to combat microbes”.
Improvements in general living and working conditions as well as sanitation, all brought about by labour struggles and social reform movements, are most responsible for improved health status. Improved housing, working conditions, and nutrition – not medical science – reduced TB‘s fearsome death toll. Responding to riots and insurrections as well as the pitiable living conditions of the poor and working classes in Western Europe and North America, nineteenth-century reformers brought dramatic declines in mortality without the benefit of even the germ theory.
Children have benefited the most from these changes. The average baby born in 1900 could have expected to live only forty-seven years. A baby born in 1973 can expect to live more than seventy-one years. Most of this increased life expectancy at birth has been due to a sharp decline in infant’ and young children’s deaths from infectious diseases. At the turn of the century, young children succumbed to influenza, pneumonia, diarrhoea, scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, and measles. By 1975 the infant death rate had fallen to sixteen per 1000 live births - less than one ninth the rate in 1900. And the death rates of young children have similarly declined. Improved housing, nutrition, water supplies, and waste disposal, pasteurisation of milk, and the virtual elimination of child labor (except for migrant farm workers) drastically cut the spread of infectious diseases and enabled children’s bodies to resist them.
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Members of the corporate class embraced scientific medicine because it supported their political and economic struggles. Technological medicine provides the corporate class with a compatible world view, an effective technique, a supportive cultural tool, and a focus on the disease process within the body that provides a convenient diversion from the health-damaging conditions in which people live and work...
...Their policies reflect a general corporate class concern that any excess sickness and death not be attributed to the admitted inequalities of capitalist society or to the organization of production that places profits before environmental protection and worker's health. In addition to this broad class interest, a growing interest group within the corporate class has a direct financial stake in the dominance of technological medicine.
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