When my twenty year old son called from his dorm and said he was feeling so sick and achy that he was coming home, I knew he had the flu.
Just a few days before my son called, I happened to read a Pubmed abstract referencing the ‘vitamin D hammer’, a term and dosage that were unfamiliar to me. In it, the doctor writes, “A colleague of mine and I have introduced vitamin D at doses that have achieved greater than 100 nmol/L in most of our patients for the past number of years, and we now see very few patients in our clinics with the flu or influenzalike illness. In those patients who do have influenza, we have treated them with the vitamin D hammer, as coined by my colleague. This is a 1-time 50 000 IU dose of vitamin D3 or 10 000 IU 3 times daily for 2 to 3 days. The results are dramatic, with complete resolution of symptoms in 48 to 72 hours. One-time doses of vitamin D at this level have been used safely and have never been shown to be toxic.8 .”
(I’m including a link in case you’d like to see where this came from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4463890/?fbclid=IwAR1-aVcZEeMysIWUgOy0v1cMzb91L0-K74K5P12rtWRmitxM9wpZ-aIK3vs )
Of course I knew about the importance of vitamin D for the flu since years ago when there was the swine flu panic I did some research on that. And I’m very, very comfortable and experienced with megadoses of vitamin C. But megadoses of vitamin D? Not something I had done.
I went straight to the pharmacy to pick up some vitamin D so I could have some ready for my son as soon as he got home. I was told the only options in Israel were for 400 iu or 1000 iu; I usually buy 5000 and 10,000 iu per capsule online. So I got more than one bottle.
Five minutes after he got home, I gave my son 25,000 iu and gave my other kids 5000 iu for prevention.Three hours later he took another 25,000 iu before going to sleep.
He was really sick and I expected he would be in for a rough night, and sure enough, he was. But by the morning, he was feeling much better; within 24 hours, the achiness and fever were completely gone (though he felt tired). Within 48 hours he was completely back to himself.
BOOM! The hammer was a winner for us!
It’s not coincidental that the flu comes around seasonally when it’s cold and dark, and most of us aren’t getting much sunlight (sunlight being the natural source of vitamin D). I read somewhere that the flu could be called a vitamin D deficiency; if you aren’t deficient in vitamin D, you aren’t going to catch the flu.
The day before this I was in the doctor’s waiting room with someone whose two children were just over the flu, and she told me how hard it had been for her to have nothing to do but let them suffer and wait for them to get better. That’s such a hard feeling for a parent. It’s so empowering when you know how to speed up a child’s recovery from an illness!
The amount I gave my son was for an adult, and I was wondering what a child’s dose would be. The formula I found to work out a weight based dosage is this: multiply a person’s weight (in kilograms) and then multiply that by 1000 to get each person’s dose. This dose would be the amount to take daily for only three days, then stop.
(Vitamin D is a fat soluble vitamin, unlike vitamin C, so megadoses are only for when sick. This isn’t an amount to take daily for an ongoing period!)
I love finding easy and effective ways to deal with seasonal illness! My son was certainly grateful.
Avivah
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