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Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

mdpi.com

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Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#191

Post by pacaro »

shortandsweet wrote: post #149
pacaro wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't donate blood, for fairly bogus reasons, this is true for a surprisingly large subset of the population

What's the reason? Maybe not share it but double check that the reason is still valid. The criteria changes pretty frequently. They always need more blood.

I lived in the UK during the vCJD panic (colloquially mad cow disease), this bars me from giving blood or being an organ donor.

For a sense of scale a total of 177 people have died of vCJD, out of a UK population of approx 60,000,000

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#192

Post by audiometry »

treeman79 wrote: post #166
themihai wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the inexpensive treatments are abused by many different actors because they carry little or no cost to develop, thus there is reason a to be sceptical. For example you can find a lot of supplements that claim to cure various cancers and many have been proven to have no effect. People even claim that objects or they by themselves cure diseases. If not much money or effort has been put into a 'treatment' you ha…

Suffered horrific migraines for years. Was using injections that costs thousands. My routine these days? Magnesium, Vit D, and massaging TMJ joint. Diet helps a lot too. Cure cancer, no. Help various issues, often.

Yep. I noticed that concurrently with regularly taking magnesium (for other reasons) my semi-regular (5/year?) effectively vanished. Not sure it’s causal but I don’t care — they’re gone.

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#193

Post by pacaro »

pacaro wrote: post #191
shortandsweet wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the reason? Maybe not share it but double check that the reason is still valid. The criteria changes pretty frequently. They always need more blood.

I lived in the UK during the vCJD panic (colloquially mad cow disease), this bars me from giving blood or being an organ donor. For a sense of scale a total of 177 people have died of vCJD, out of a UK population of approx 60,000,000

To be fair, I do understand that universally fatal, untreatable, undiagnosable, undetectable diseases with unknown incubation periods are scary, and I understand that blood donation is an amplification factor for blood borne diseases, hence the caution.

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#194

Post by refurb »

g42gregory wrote: post #120
xenophonf wrote: post #81

MDPI follows an author-pays model, which incentivizes it to accept all submissions instead of publishing only good-quality work. In fact, this publisher is highly suspect, as it has allegedly pressured peer reviewers to accept low-quality work for publication in the recent past: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/open-access-editors-r... https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/be... I would trea…

I think that easy and inexpensive treatment methods are getting very skeptical reception by the medical community. My sense is that this is the training from the medical school, which in turn, is influenced (to a degree of course) by the pharmaceutical companies.

No. It’s skepticism of easy and expensive treatments that have limited to no data to support the claim.

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#195

Post by refurb »

treeman79 wrote: post #166
themihai wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the inexpensive treatments are abused by many different actors because they carry little or no cost to develop, thus there is reason a to be sceptical. For example you can find a lot of supplements that claim to cure various cancers and many have been proven to have no effect. People even claim that objects or they by themselves cure diseases. If not much money or effort has been put into a 'treatment' you ha…

Suffered horrific migraines for years. Was using injections that costs thousands. My routine these days? Magnesium, Vit D, and massaging TMJ joint. Diet helps a lot too. Cure cancer, no. Help various issues, often.

How do you know your migraines wouldn’t have gone away without your self treatment?

I mean, there are cases of cancers that resolve on their own.

That’s why we don’t make medical decisions based off anecdotes.

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#196

Post by refurb »

nucleardog wrote: post #86
ryandvm wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've often wondered if it would be economically feasible for blood donation banks to do this as a perk/incentive for giving blood. Every 6 months or so, you donate blood and as part of the process you get run-of-the-mill bloodwork report emailed to you a few days later. You'd have to make sure you weren't creating an incentive for sick people to donate blood just for the lab work, but otherwise it seems like it would…

Seems like that could easily work places with universal healthcare. Very little incentive to donate for free lab work when any medically necessary lab work would be done for free anyway. And second that, would happily donate in exchange for curiousity-fulfilling bloodwork.

I think the key is “medically necessary”. If I went to my doctor in Canada and said “can you run a panel of genetic tests” he’d say “no, that’s a waste of money because you don’t have any other risk factors”.

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#197

Post by refurb »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #108
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think was helpful in your snide comment?

It reminds people that the world is not the US. 30+ comments above and nobody pointed out the unspoken assumption.

The OP mentioned the doctor firewall. I don’t live in the US and have the same firewall.

It’s not a uniquely American issue.

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#198

Post by filleduchaos »

55555 wrote: post #115
DevX101 wrote: post #79

Authors controlled for age, sex. But I'd like to see additional control for race. Black people have less Vitamin D due to melanin blocking sunlight. And black people are disproportionately impacted by COVID. So I'm now curious whether it's really Vitamin D deficiency that's causing the poor outcomes, or some racial socioeconomic factor that Vitamin D is simply a marker for.

> And black people are disproportionately impacted by COVID. Isn't Africa doing surprisingly well?

> Isn't Africa doing surprisingly well?

I've always wanted to ask someone personally: why is the fact that African nations haven't been overrun by COVID-19 surprising?

I mean, I live here and I'm certainly very pleased that we've had such positive outcomes. But the constant tone of surprise from foreigners was funny at first but is now mildly annoying if I'm being honest; not you, obviously, but I've read one too many op-eds that seem somewhat upset that we aren't dying in droves.

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#199

Post by hannob »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #10

It's unfortunate that it is not simple to get regular tests for vitamin and mineral deficiencies. The whole process seems to be stuck behind the doctor appointment firewall. This might be one of the reasons why Theranos was so readily believed. As the quantified self movement that gained popularity around the same time showed, there's an appetite in certain segments of the population for this type of testing and trac…

There's a reason medical tests aren't made easily accessible. The science of when regular testing something helps is complicated. If you test for things that are rare you might cause more harm than good by doing mass testing, because you might overwhelmingly treat people with false positive test results.

There's a lively debate around various cancer screening initiatives, which often don't have any good evidence that they overall do more good than harm. The same mechanisms are true for lots of other medical tests.

Ultimately a medical test should be treated like any other medical intervention: Only do it if you have scientific evidence that it helps the patient.

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#200

Post by fastglass »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #182
nobody9999 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>AFAIU you can’t donate blood if you’re gay. At least, I saw some segment on Anderson Cooper where he claimed that was the case. That's not actually true. There are some restrictions if you're a man who has sex with men, but you're certainly not permanently barred from giving blood. cf. https://nybloodcenter.org/donate-blood/become-donor/can-i-do...

So if you're in a committed, monogamous relationship where you have sex with your partner more than a couple of times a year, you're barred.

That one time will also need to be consensual.
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