This blog story tells you about a personal health battle I fought years ago and how you may be affected without even knowing it.
Click on the YouTube link below to watch the video blog. The transcribed version is below it!
About six years ago I was sitting in my basement working on my computer when I felt some twitching into my calf muscle. I didn’t think anything of it, I was training for a race at the time, so just thought it was part and parcel, but as the days ensued, I got more twitching throughout the rest of my body and muscles; as time passed, a few weeks later, I started to get a lot of stiffness and ache, my legs started to feel like they were turning to cement if I sat or walked for more than a half hour at a time, and obviously this started to get concerning. So I decided to go see my medical doctor to talk to her about my issues and she decided to send me for some blood tests.
The blood tests ended up coming out normal, so she decided to send me to see a neurologist. As I waited, I started to notice I was experiencing fatigue, light headedness or dizziness, and by the end of the day I was exhausted. I would go to sleep early and wake up the next day feeling like I had run a marathon the night before. Even grabbing a jug of milk out of the refrigerator was very tough. When I finally got to see the neurologist, he went through a bunch of different tests and he could not find anything wrong. He said that we should wait for a few more months and monitor my status. Four months later I saw him again, the symptoms started to worsen in terms of the fatigue; he did further testing and again, nothing new showed up. He sent me to a physiatrist who tested my cardiovascular system and again, everything normal.
So back I went to my medical doctor who proceeded to say she wasn’t quite sure what was wrong, but could send me for some more blood tests. I told her that after having gone through all these blood tests and nothing being found, I would rather not go through more, but I would be willing to try a vitamin D blood test. It was something I had thought of just on a whim and she entertained the idea but said, “Well, I can send you for one, but I really don’t suspect you have a deficiency: you’re young, you’re active, you’re outdoors all the time, you even take a vitamin D supplement already, I highly doubt you have a deficiency, but I’ll send you for a test.” Two weeks later, I discovered I had a vitamin D deficiency.
Vitamin D is a very important vitamin because it is a fat soluble vitamin and can only be synthesized from the UV rays of the sun. Here in Alberta where we are located, between the months of September to May, there isn’t enough strength in the sun to create that vitamin D that we need, thus we have to get it from somewhere. If you look at diet and foods that are high in vitamin D, a 3 ounce steak of swordfish, which is high in vitamin D, has approximately 550 IU of vitamin D. An 8 ounce glass of milk, which is fortified with vitamin D, has about 120 IU of vitamin D. The average amount of vitamin D you should take is approximately 5000-6000 IU of vitamin D per day. Thus, that’s a lot of swordfish and milk that you have to consume in a day to reach your required vitamin D intake! The rule of thumb is 35 IU per pound of body weight is what you should be supplementing with per day.
Vitamin D3 drops
Once I started supplementing it took the better part of a year for me to start to feel normal again. The strength and stiffness issues I had changed very quickly, but everything else, energy levels especially, took a while, so you want to make sure you’re not deficient. There are a lot of people out there who are deficient who have no idea that they are, and our system no longer does vitamin D testing because it is ‘too expensive’, so it is hard to figure out if you are deficient.
Hopefully you take from my story that vitamin D supplementation is important and there are a number of different symptoms you can be experiencing that could easily be remedied with supplementation. Even if you have no symptoms and you do not supplement with vitamin D right now, please start supplementing, and please make sure to choose a supplement that is of high quality and high absorption. At our clinic Access Chiropractic and Wellness, we sell vitamin D supplements in a liquid form from a Calgary company called AOR which has very stringent quality control testing and high quality products.
Vitamin D is needed for a lot of different bodily functions most notably the skeletal, nervous, and immune systems. Do not be deficient!
Please feel free to visit our south clinic’s website at www.accesschiropractic.net and our north clinic’s website at www.accesschiropracticnorth.ca, and our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/accesswellness! You can also call to book with Dr. Bajor at the north location behind the Superstore at 403-945-1349 or contact the south location in the Airdrie CO-OP at 403-945-0855 to book with Dr. Jacqueline Boyd!
Drs. Jacqueline Boyd and Paul Bajor are also both registered and active members of the ICPA (International Chiropractic Pediatric Association).
