Chronic Pain: Does Vitamin D Help?

Chronic Pain: Does Vitamin D Help?

www.webmd.com

Over the past 10 years, several researchers have found an association between extremely low vitamin D levels and chronic, general pain that doesn’t respond to treatment.

… “...weakness, achiness, fatigue - three pages worth of symptoms. Doctors had offered her antidepressants and seizure medications and all kinds of things that didn’t work. …” …After six months on an aggressive, high-dose prescription vitamin D replacement, the woman could cross off every symptom on her three-page list.

(visit the link for the full news article)

It makes sense that a hormone like Vitamin D could have such a powerful effect - it's present in all our body's tissues.

Plotnikoff notes that vitamin D is a hormone. "Every tissue in our bodies has [vitamin] D receptors, including all bones, muscles, immune cells, and brain cells," he says.

But Vitamin D is cheap, and the treatment is quite simple, so there's no money in it. Surprise, surprise - nobody is doing any randomized clinical trials, so the effects aren't proven.

…“It would be nice if vitamin D worked for chronic pain. It would offer an inexpensive and simple treatment with known and probably limited adverse effects,” Sebastian Straube, PhD, tells WebMD in an email. Straube is a professor at Germany's University of Göttingen and led the research review, published in the Cochrane Library.

But it hasn't been proven that boosting your vitamin D level will erase your pain.

“Looking at all the available evidence, the link is not convincing,” Straube says. “As far as treatment studies are concerned, we found a striking contrast in study outcome between randomized double blind trials that by virtue of their study design minimize bias, and other (non-double blind) studies that are more prone to bias. The latter largely do suggest a beneficial effect of vitamin D treatment; the former largely don’t.”

Don't expect to see any funding for Vitamin D and chronic pain studies any day soon.



IMPORTANT NOTE:

If you have severe vitamin D deficiency, any efforts to boost your D levels should be done by consulting with your doctor. Too much vitamin D can be dangerous and lead to an excess accumulation of calcium in your blood, which can lead to kidney stones.

www.webmd.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

My dad had amazing results from drink black cherry juice...


and he had major neck surgery and neck problems...

[edit on 3-6-2010 by NecromancerYHVH]

Dr. Sarno can help with pain as well.

I'm pretty sure your body makes vitamin d from the sun so...ya know you could go outside for a while and get vitamin d

I've got severe osteoporosis. I supplement with Calcium Citrate which contains a healthy dose of Vitamin D.

However, it does not alleviate my pain whatsoever. Hopefully, my bones are getting stronger and all blood work shows that I am supplementing and doing things right.

The science for Boniva and other like drugs have proven to be disastrous. As a matter of fact, it may cause thigh fractures.

I'm hoping the Vitamin D supplementation works better, but I say no to the bone reclast building drugs. Mostly because it interferes with bone rebuilding. These drugs stop the sloughing of old bone material and in building new bone growth. It's a temporary fix and science is proving such.

If anything messes with your natural bone building process, it is wrong. I don't care what a doctor says.....these drugs are bad science. The Doc's are paid to sell these unproven drugs.

Get some sun, drink milk, supplement and try and work out to some degree. That is really your only chance of building strong bones.

I'm 43 with a 90 year old skeletal frame. Pain medications seem to help me out most. Narcotics are better for me than Naproxen, Celebrex and etc.

It sucks......sometimes we just got to grin and bear it.

reply to post by soficrow


Interesting article, Thanks.

Kinda makes sense that lack of vitamin D may play a role in chronic pain.

Of course there will be plenty of doctors that will disagree with this as it will hurt their business. And of course big pharma wouldn't want something like this to be proven, as it could hurt them big time.

reply to post by chise61


Thanks for your response chise61.

...and that's the point:

...there will be plenty of doctors that will disagree with this as it will hurt their business. And of course big pharma wouldn't want something like this to be proven, as it could hurt them big time.

Glad you're looking at the conspiracy angle - and not confusing ATS with some self-help pain management site.

Fish oils such as Cod Liver Oil are amazing inflammation fighters. Packed with Vitamin D and Vitamin A. It comes in east to swallow capsules.

This is a conspiracy site. NOT a self-help pain-management board.

Where are the conspiracy theorists?!?

Does anybody besides chise61 even get the point of the OP?