#102 - The "Vitamin D" Conundrum: When a Vitamin Is Actually a Hormone (Part I) | Dr. Stasha Gominak (Grüner Veltliner)

Why don’t the clinical trials agree with the science?

During the COVID epidemic “vitamin” D became front-page news. Because low “vitamin” D levels were associated with poor COVID outcomes most of us now recognize that D is not just a ‘’bone vitamin” but plays an important role in many parts of our body, especially our immune systems. This increased interest in D has also revealed an important mismatch between 80 years of scientific study of ‘’hormone’’ D and D’s use in routine medical practice.  Over the last 50 years “vitamin” D deficiency has been shown to be related to numerous chronic illnesses. There are thousands of scientific articles documenting that D is a hormone playing an important role in almost every organ in the human body. Because of these important scientific findings many prospective treatment trials are being performed. These trials are meant to answer a specific question: If hormone D deficiency shows up along with diseases that are common in our human population could giving hormone D help prevent or cure these same diseases? Why have so many of the recent human treatment trials shown negative results?
 
Because of the continued, inappropriate use of the word ‘’vitamin” most of the D treatment trials have been designed as fixed-dose, public-health “vitamin” studies. Because of the way these studies are designed they have consistently reported negative results. Because of these negative trials doctors are currently being advised not to test vitamin D levels or even recommend vitamin D supplementation.

About our guest:
Dr. Gominak grew up and attended college in California, moved to Houston
for medical school at Baylor College of Medicine, where she received an MD
degree in 1983. Her Neurology residency was done at the Harvard affiliated,
Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. She practiced Neurology in the
San Francisco Bay area from 1991-2004 then moved with her husband to Tyler,
Texas.

Starting in 2004 she began to dedicate more of her practice to the treatment
of sleep and sleep disorders. In 2012 and 2016 she published two pivotal
articles about the global struggle with worsening sleep, the possible causes and
solutions, related to vitamin D deficiency and the intestinal microbiome.
In 2016 she retired from her office practice to have more time to teach.
She currently divides her time between RightSleep® coaching sessions for
private individuals and teaching other clinicians the RightSleep® method of
sleep repair.

Resources Mentioned:
The Vitamin D Conundrum

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