Nutritional Pharmacology vs Research Fraud VIDEO+PDF EXPLANATION: Can you see the obvious fraud in this research performed by the NIH, FDA and published in the NEJM?
When you know more, you see more lies. That might not be a pleasant experience, but it is better than being fooled all the time and suffering the consequences of ignorance and manipulation.
Outline of this article:
CHALLENGE YOURSELF: Can you see the fraud in this research design?
FRAUD CAN TAKE DIFFERENT FORMS: Where is the fraud located?
LET’S LOOK: Did you catch it?
VIDEO TUTORIAL AND ARTICLES: My video explanation and example
1. Can you see the fraud in this research design?
This horribly designed research was performed by the US Government’s National Institute of Health (NIH, subsection National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute [NHLBI]) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and paid for with American tax dollars.
“Oversight was provided by a central institutional review board and data and safety monitoring board of the sponsoring network, which were appointed by the NHLBI. The trial was conducted under an investigational new drug application with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).”
New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) describes itself as “the world’s leading medical journal and website” and forms a major part of the pharma echo chamber wherein whatever is published in the NEJM gets blindly accepted by most doctors and mindlessly repeated in newspaper, magazine, and television media first in the United States and then throughout the world. Most people don’t actually read the full-text of the articles in the NEJM but rather just the headlines, summaries, and then then echoes of the echoes and operative soundbites that reverberate around the world as hearsay. In this way, a single article published in the NEJM can directly impact the healthcare outcomes and medical treatment of hundreds of millions of people.
Many people/reporters/doctors will hypnotically accept any conclusion printed in any of the big journals, eg, NEJM, JAMA, BMJ, Lancet, even though all of these journals regularly publish garbage and pharma-paid infomercials and Editorials. Blind acceptance (or rejection) of information based on its origin is a formal “official” logical fallacy called the genetic fallacy or the origin fallacy.1
Fraud is defined (per Merriam-Webster) as “intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right; an act of deceiving or misrepresenting.”
What truth was perverted?—They misrepresented the state of the art and science on this topic. The idea that administering vitamin D in this fashion is wrong, absurd, outdated, and proven to be ineffective.
What was stolen?—They stole an opportunity to advance healthcare and they misused of millions of dollars of taxpayer money. The opportunity to gain knowledge into the use of a potentially helpful intervention (ie, the appropriate use of vitamin D) was stolen and these organizations (eg, FDA and NIH) misappropriated up to millions of dollars in this study that they knew or should have known was going to fail.
How could they have done this study in a manner consistent with the appropriate science?—They could have used the semi-activated form of vitamin D which acts faster and achieves better results. The form of vitamin D “25ohD” has been in clinical use since at least 2003 and would have likely produced dramatically better results.
2. The fraud is embedded into the design of the study
The study: "Early High-Dose Vitamin D3 for Critically Ill, Vitamin D–Deficient Patients", New England Journal of Medicine 2019 December 26 (published the day after Christmas, when most critics aren’t on duty)
“Methods: We conducted a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, phase 3 trial of early vitamin D3 supplementation in critically ill, vitamin D–deficient patients who were at high risk for death. Randomization occurred within 12 hours after the decision to admit the patient to an intensive care unit. Eligible patients received a single enteral dose of 540,000 IU of vitamin D3 or matched placebo. The primary end point was 90-day all-cause, all-location mortality.”
3. The fraud is in the pharmacology. Did you catch it by reading the study design provided above?
All doctors of medicine/chiropractic/naturopathy have to study Pharmacology, which is the “science of drugs including their origin, composition, pharmacokinetics, therapeutic use, and toxicology” (per Merriam-Webster Dictionary).
Of note, my training in Pharmacology was actually better* in chiropractic college than it was in medical school (*as was our study of Gynecology, Dermatology, Ethics, and Patient Management).
Pharmacology includes the study of pharmacokinetics, which is the study of a drug’s 1) absorption, 2) distribution, 3) metabolism, 4) elimination; those four components are typically memorized with the acronym A.D.E.M. even though it is out of sequence. The study of pharmacology applies to drugs just as it can apply to hormones, nutrients, and botanical medicines.
In the example of this research cited above, the fraud occurred in the design of the study. If you have not caught it by now, please see my explanatory video below.
4. Here is my explanation in video format.
Now I’ve got it down to 12 minutes; the original version was 27 minutes (included with the graphics appended at the end).
Did they have a chance to know that they were committing a gross error before they did it? YES
Researchers have an obligation to be aware of the current state of the art and science in their field so that they avoid wasting time and resources and so that they avoid repeating erroneous methods that have already been disproved. With regard to vitamin D administration in bolus dosing, we already had a meta-analysis published in 2013 (PLoS One journal) and another one in 2017 (in no less than the British Medical Journal) showing that bolus dosing (reasonably defined as anything above 80,000-100,000 international units [IU] of vitamin D3) is not effective whereas proper dosing of vitamin D3 in smaller daily or weekly amounts was indeed effective.
Certainly no later than 2011/2013/2017, the international medical community has known that ultra-high-dose “bolus” dosing of vitamin D does not work and can actually cause harm. Thereafter, any research that continues to use this method should be rejected, flagged, or noted as fraud.
In addition to those major reviews in 2013 and 2017, we also had plenty of additional data published in 2003, 2008, 2011 (including an authoritative book chapter titled “The Pharmacology of Vitamin D”, and 2015; as such, the authors of this 2019 NEJM study cited above have no excuse for using proven-to-be-ineffective bolus dosing. I reviewed the topic of bolus dosing in two articles in 20202 and 20213, both of which are provided below and both of which were originally posted at ichnfm.academia.edu/AlexVasquez.
The only way that the doctorate-level physicians and scientists at the NIH, FDA, and NEJM could be simultaneously ignorant of this information is if they wanted to be ignorant on this topic, if they were willing to be sloppy, if they were willing to see what they could get away with (especially by publishing their work the day after Christmas when most people are traveling, busy, away from work, and/or distracted), if they wanted to be strategically and selectively ignorant in order to serve their goals.
What are the goals behind denigrating nutritional treatment and denying millions of patients access to a safe effective affordable/inexpensive treatment?
I’ll let you answer that yourself (see *suggestions below), but clearly the answers would have to include more drug sales, strengthening the drugs-as-savior paradigm, denigrating natural and nutritional treatments, shifting more money to drug research because of manufactured “need” and “necessity”, etc.
*Virtually all of these researchers/politicians are paid by drug companies and/or have investments in drug companies, so they are rewarded when they make nutrition look bad and/or make drugs look good. Likewise, the major medical journals are paid millions of dollars for advertisements and article reprints as long as they make the drug companies happy (Smith 2005).
SUMMARY & CONCLUSION:
1) Vitamin D3 can be administered competently in 3 main ways without using bolus dosing; thus, bolus dosing has no place in clinical care nor in research:
Physiologic dosing of 3,000-10,000 IU per day, which is appropriate for the vast majority if people in the vast majority of (nonurgent/nonemergency) situations (reviewed Aug 16),
Acute dosing with vD3 60,000 (perhaps up to 80,000 IU) per day for up to 14 days (see: 2-minute Video Review of Postgraduate Medicine Journal)
Acute dosing with25ohD administered 266 mcg day1x2 (biological equivalence of 68,096 IU of D3 for the loading dose), day3, day7, day15, day30 per J Clin Endocrinology Metab 2021 June (reviewed Jun 16)
2) Bolus dosing (>100,000 IU for one administration) of vD3 almost never provides benefit and should be abandoned in favor of one of the strategies listed above.
3) Research performed (recently or in the future) with bolus dosing is designed that way 1) out of ignorance and the authors’ failure to read the literature on this topic over the past 10+ years, in which case they should probably not be performing research, and/or 2) with malicious intent to create the illusion that vitamin D is inefficacious for the condition being studied—this is to the advantage of drug-pushers and politicians who gain money and power by dis-empowering doctors and patients and corralling the public into drug-only options for healthcare.
Don’t let these pharma shills take over your healthcare and the politics of your society!
Supplemental information/links/graphics are provided below.
Thank you!
Dr Alex Kennerly Vasquez (introduction; brief Bio-CV) writes and teaches for an international audience on various topics ranging from leadership to nutrition to functional inflammology. Major books include Inflammation Mastery, 4th Edition (full-color printing, 1182 pages, equivalent to 25 typical books [averaging 60,000 words each]), which was also published in two separate volumes as Textbook of Clinical Nutrition and Functional Medicine (Volume 1: Chapters 1-4; Volume 2: Chapter 5—Clinical Protocols for Diabetes, Hypertension, Migraine, Fibromyalgia, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Psoriasis, Vasculitis, Dermatomyositis and most other major inflammatory/autoimmune disorders); several sections have been excerpted including Antiviral Strategies and Immune Nutrition (ISBN 1502894890) (aka, Antiviral Nutrition [available as PDF download] and Brain Inflammation in Chronic Pain, Migraine, and Fibromyalgia. Dr Vasquez’s books are available internationally via bookstores such as BookDepository, Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, ThriftBooks, AbeBooks, BetterWorldBooks, WaterStonesBooks and his new Telegram channel is https://t.me/DrAlexVasquez.
This super-cool information is not personalized medical advice.
https://fallacyinlogic.com/genetic-fallacy/ https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Genetic-Fallacy https://www.fallacyfiles.org/genefall.html