Vitamin D deficient people usually have other deficiencies as well, pinning it down to D is textbook causation-correlation mixup.

As TFA says, it "may" account for it. Or may not. You need a control group with D (but no other) deficiency to upgrade from "may" to "does".

It’s just a correlation. No need to take vitamin d.

Why do you say this?

Almost half of Americans are vitamin D deficient, a lot more if you are Black or Hispanic: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/vitamin-d-deficiency-sy...

Vitamin D is very cheap, and it takes a lot to overdose: https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...

Up until a very short time ago, humans spent most of their time outside, and sunscreen did not exist. Now we spend nearly all our time inside, and many of us wear sunscreen whenever it's really sunny.

And there's a serious correlation between low vitamin D levels and COVID-19 fatalities.

We haven't proved causation yet, and we might never, but given the previous three points, there's every good reason to take vitamin D.

Primarily one should have sufficient levels of vitamin D for a host of other reasons anyway.. If it helps protect against COVID that is a bonus.

My problem with this line of reasoning is that people without the relevant expertise will think it means "Vitamin D supplementation protects me from COVID-19," start taking the vitamin, and stop engaging in other behaviors that reduce their risk of exposure, like social distancing and mask wearing.

I see this in infosec all the time. People think, for example, "I'm running antivirus software; I'm safe," which they'll use to justify all sorts of risky behavior that could (and sometimes does) lead to a security breach. They don't understand that antivirus software only reduces the risk of a security breach, never eliminating it, and it only works on certain kinds of attack vectors.

The same goes for vitamin D. Sure, lots of people are deficient, and the current evidence-based medical consensus is that people who are deficient should supplement. And maybe there's a weak correlation with COVID-19 infection/mortality risk, but people who aren't experts might misinterpret that and think they should hang out with their buddies in the sunshine or something equally risky while we're in the middle of a pandemic, instead of following the other bits of the current evidence-based medical consensus, which tells us to stay away from one another and to wear masks over our mouths and noses, which we know will greatly reduce virus transmission rates.

> hang out with their buddies in the sunshine or something equally risky

Spending time with people outdoors, especially in sunshine, is not risky, and for regions with serious outbreaks is an ideal way of finding compromise between keeping people isolated when indoors and allowing people some much needed social interaction.

I'm from Melbourne Australia which is just coming out of one of the longest/strictest lockdowns in the world, and all the evidence has been that letting people have some social interaction in the outdoors is beneficial to people's mental health and not a contributor to viral spread.

Q.E.D.

Our state has completely eradicated the virus. Zero cases for nearly 5 weeks, with 10-20k tests each day, from 700+ cases per day in July/August.

The outbreak was painstakingly contact-traced, transmission patterns modeled in great detail.

The transmissions were indoors; initially in workplaces and homes, then it tore through aged care homes.

Transmission outdoors just wasn't a factor. The government still imposed limits on how much outdoor interaction could happen, and mandated masks after things got bad, but the number of outdoor transmissions didn't change; it was always insignificant. Indoor contact was clearly the driver.

To be fair, the facts here probably don’t contradict your point much; severe restrictions were imposed, and adhered to by our largely compliant population, including significant limits on outdoor contact (exercise with only one person outside one's household for up to one hour per day) and requirements for distancing and mask-wearing.

Incidentally, Melbourne is the only large city in Australia that has cool/dark winters and a high incidence of Vitamin D deficiency, and was the only city to have a major covid outbreak. The other (warmer/sunnier/higher Vit D) cities didn’t limit outdoor contact at all, and had no trouble preventing outbreaks.

Do you have some evidence of this?

Yes, the very same paper.

> Although results of an observational study, such as this one, need to be interpreted with caution, as done by the authors [1], due to the potential of residual confounding or reverse causality (i.e., vitamin D insufficiency resulting from poor health status at baseline rather than vice versa),

You need a control group with vitamin D deficiency but no other health issues to prove the hypothesis. They are just stating there's a correlation worth looking into.

Rather, a control group who does not take vitamin D supplements. Choose them randomly and you can find causation (or lack thereof).

MDPI also publishes some high quality work, in remote sensing serious labs do publish good work in their journals “Forests” and “Remote Sensing”. You are right to be skeptic, though. They have very lax review processes and will publish anything that looks like science because their incentives are screwed up. Pay-to-publish for-profit OA is just as bad as closed-access IMHO, and in some case it’s worse when the publisher is a non-profit professional organization.

I somewhat agree, but many traditional publishers have an optional "pay for OA" model and more and more funding providers require OA. For journal publications, we (in the EU) almost always have to pay. However, MDPI is particularly aggressive in its editorial practices and marketing tactics. In my community, we sometimes publish "smaller" works there: when early-career researchers get to guest edit a special issue in an MDPI journal and we want to support them; i.e., we sometimes fall for MDPI's marketing tactics ;-)

It's best to have journals that are owned by the community, but these take time to grow into venues that administrators respect: we can publish some work there, but it's not enough for building a competitive academic CV.

Considering this article: it's just a comment, and to me it looks like something an expert can easily tear apart. A well-established researcher wouldn't publish such a comment in an MDPI journal (as one of the other comments suggests).

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.

The success of dexamethasone [1], compared to the increasingly conflicted results of remdesivir [2], argues against this view.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2021436 [2] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/10/16/th...

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 have reasons to sceptical, don't you think? It's like working in the financial services and someone is trying to sell you a $10 e-book that will make you rich in 1 year. It could do the trick but I bet you would be sceptical.

Testing/clinical trials usually cost a lot and even if the treatment it's not great, at least you have some hard data that you can rely on.

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.

I had a similar success with taking magnesium to control restless leg syndrome. As some people no doubt remember there are a few speciality drugs ( which you see TV commercials about) that are designed to treat RLS, but I have found that regular magnesium supplementation works very well. I have even done a few inadvertent 'tests' by forgetting to take it with me when I travel that has reinforced the role it has in helping my RLS.

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.

What was the process by which you found your self-treatment regimen? I've heard of magnesium's role with muscle clenching, what do the other things do?

Had a LOT of muscle aches. Took it for a few weeks. Aches went away. Mostly stopped taking it.repeat every few months.

Later on I started hearing from many sources to try it for migraines.

Realized my migraines had been ebbing and worsening a lot. Got serous about taking it. About A 50% reduction In severity. Had multi hour ones 7 days a week. Can’t walk kind.

Dentist suggested a mouth guard for TMJ. I looked up videos on it. Found a massage one, found a bad trigger point. 3 days later it eased up. Poof migraines almost completely gone.

I tried basically everything.

Elimination diet to find troublesome foods, etc. Prism glasses, etc

Too much for here

I have a clenching issue so this is useful info, thanks! I'm going to look more into the massage thing especially.

The thing is, this is very personal. No one knows you better than yourself.

I wish people were allowed to just experiment with different solutions. Sign a paper saying that you take full responsibility and they're not obligated to treat you and that's it.

Some people live in areas that good doctors left a long time ago.

this. Human bodies are different in subtle ways. Medical trials exclude outlier results, for good reasons. But if you're an outlier then it matters.

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.

I'm not sure what value you think your point has, especially as the OP wasn't attempting to detail their entire medical history.

Yes it could just disappear, but for some migraines are a chronic issue and the meds for it are preventative and not a cure.

I'm not sure if you've dealt with chronic illnesses but I can tell you from experience that a lot of us regularly attempt to come off our meds to see if anything has changed 'underneath' the drugs, as often the drugs have other side effects that make it hard to tell what's really going on.

It's highly likely then that the OP has indeed tested to see whether their migraines have just gone.

It's also odd when people defiantly state that we don't make medical decisions based on anecdotes when clearly all medical decisions were once anecdotes that were then tested for efficacy and became best practice.

The most clear recent example of medicine catching up with annecdoatal evodence for me is severe epileptic using diet manipulation to manage their condition when prescription medicine did little to nothing as a preventative.

I'm certainly not arguing against trying different treatments and self-experimentation. If had a chronic illness I'd do the same.

I'm arguing against the experience of anyone person being applicable to anyone other than that one person. That why we have the FDA and randomized controlled trials. There are so many confounding factors that unless you test a treatment under very strict conditions, there is a very good chance you observed is completely unrelated to the treatment. Hell, drug manufacturers run trials and fall into that trap all the time.

I can test migraines easily. Walk into Walmart or Target, or my old office.

10 minutes and I have a full blown migraine. (Lights)

If I’ve been solid with magnesium that time goes to an hour or two.

FL-41 lenses will add an hour to time as well.

Many other triggers, but light is the most consistent for me.

You can search my comment history under both this handle and Mz. It goes back more than 11 years.

I've spent nearly 20 years getting better when that's supposed to be impossible. I've done so while dirt poor and even homeless for several years. What I've spent to get better is a drop in the bucket compared to the millions my condition is supposed to cost under conventional treatment while merely slowing your slow, gruesome, torturous death.

No one's interested and I've been thrown off of various forums over the years and been openly hated on and called a liar, teller of tall tales and insane.

No wants it because no one will get rich off of it. No one wants it because I'm a former homemaker, not a physician or scientist. And no doubt several other reasons, none of which I can really fathom.

The world basically agrees with you, turns a blind eye to any and all evidence to the contrary and actively tries to silence people like me.

I think it’s more about prescription drugs versus otc drugs.

Prescription drugs need a prescription because they have potentially dangerous side effects. Often you don’t get a wanted effect without potential side effects.

OTC drugs are usually extremely cheap (hence why you could think the medical community dislikes cheap medication). The fact that you don’t need a medical professional to get them makes them a target for the alternative medicine crowd.

In the end it’s also the fault of patients for simply asking for simple cures. My doctor uses every occasion to tell me that I should do more sports, but that would mean that I would actually need to put effort in my health.

> Prescription drugs need a prescription because they have potentially dangerous side effects

Or, more likely, someone just decided they should be prescription only. Why are melatonin, gabapentin, piracetam prescription only? Paracetamol will kill you in the right dosage, yet it's OTC. Hell, you can overdose on vitamins and minerals/metals, too.

It's like a game for the industry, at the expense of a minority who have to suffer from only having access to bad doctors.

Metformin? Melatonin is otc.

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

Also - big tech is coming out against vitamin supplementation with their creepy censorship:

Example of YouTube saying they will ban vit. c videos using the "misinformation" label: https://twitter.com/i/status/1252676099169038337

Vit. c is known to be a potent immune booster. So this is a real head scratcher.

There's no such thing as an "immune booster". The immune system is incredibly complex and nuanced, and there isn't a knob (or 10) that you can tweak to turn it up or down. It exists in a continuum of largely understood configurations, and it can learn and adapt (not always with good results). If anything, "boosting" it as in turning up immune activity is usually terrible (think auto-immune disorders, inflammation, cancer).

The "misinformation" people are battling is about a) unsubstantiated health claims and b) the fact that supplement manufacturers don't need to provide any evidence or follow any regulations regarding what's actually in the supplements. That means they can say they're selling e.g. Vitamin C but it's just sugar.

John Oliver has a good video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA0wKeokWUU

> There's no such thing as an "immune booster".

Yes, there is. You could have done a quick search on Google Scholar to confirm this, example:

A mathematical model showing the potential of vitamin c to boost the innate immune response

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anuraag_Bukkuri/publica...

Vitamins: Key Role Players in Boosting Up Immune Response-A Mini Review

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jazib_Irfan/publication...

Use of vitamin C as an immunostimulant. Effect on growth, nutritional quality, and immune response of Labeo rohita (Ham.)

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10695-007-9184-...

> the "misinformation" people are battling is about a) unsubstantiated health claims

That "substantiation" requires a $2 billion payout to the FDA to certify.

> the fact that supplement manufacturers don't need to provide any evidence or follow any regulations regarding what's actually in the supplements.

Obviously you have no idea what you are talking about.

Have autoimmune condition. Life is about calming the immune system.

Crude I stopped eating for a month to kill it off. (Not intentional)

Worked great. Don’t recommend.

Just because a word has two meanings does not mean you can equate one meaning with the other.

Well, you'd be surprised how much great research doesn't make it into Nature, et al. I wouldn't discount the paper purely because of that.

"Treat it as if it were a preprint" is different from discounting the paper.

That's the science-snobby way of dismissing it.

Not at all, preprints are very important because the publishing process can take many months. In fast moving fields (e.g. COVID research) working with preprints is vital if you want to do cutting edge research.

Also, an actual peer reviewed paper came out recently that showed giving vitamin d to covid patients upon admitting them did not decrease death rates. I'll look for the link but it was front page here like two weeks ago.

Please find the link because about 2 / 3 months ago there was a story that was exactly the opposite finding.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24366006

I've been monitoring HN for Vitamin D info very closely.

I think the parent poster is referring to https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.16.20232397v...

(Can't find the HN discussion link at the moment, unfortunately -- it didn't point to that particular link!)

Worth noting that this RCT was for bolus supplementation of Vitamin D3 at some point in their hospital stay, and excluded patients already supplementing with D3.

This study stands in stark contrast to the earlier pilot out of Spain: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096007602... -- though as noted, this was not D3 but rather Calcifediol (a D3 metabolite), and a much smaller study.

There's nothing contradictory in it. It may take several months to restore normal Vitamin D level from the state of deficiency, so it's very long process. On average much longer than typical Covid duration.

Proper Vitamin D level should be reached _before_ contact with the virus. Then the data would be valuable and helpful. Theirs data doesn't show much, imho.

The Lancet published this in May, strongly advising patients to address Vitamin D deficiency.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8...

The Lancet or Nature don't exactly have stellar reputations anymore. Source reputability should not be weighted heavily when assessing new information in our information environment — this is a very outmoded, maladaptive norm.