Off Topic but ....Out in the sun or not

 
  God i like to get a little burnt  but being a fair hair leaping gnome
who had melanoma  excised I'm a bit slow to repeat my excesses of youth
sometimes.  So what it a best path?

  Question where do we get vitamin D aside from light?

  Current art suggests.

....................................

 : Ann Epidemiol. 2009 Jul;19(7):468-83.
 Links

Vitamin D for cancer prevention: global perspective.
Garland CF, Gorham ED, Mohr SB, Garland FC.
Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, University of California
San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA.
PURPOSE: Higher serum levels of the main circulating form of vitamin D,
25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D), are associated with substantially lower
incidence rates of colon, breast, ovarian, renal, pancreatic, aggressive
prostate and other cancers. METHODS: Epidemiological findings combined
with newly discovered mechanisms suggest a new model of cancer etiology
that accounts for these actions of 25(OH)D and calcium. Its seven phases
are disjunction, initiation, natural selection, overgrowth, metastasis,
involution, and transition (abbreviated DINOMIT). Vitamin D metabolites
prevent disjunction of cells and are beneficial in other phases.
RESULTS/CONCLUSIONS: It is projected that raising the minimum
year-around serum 25(OH)D level to 40 to 60 ng/mL (100-150 nmol/L) would
prevent approximately 58,000 new cases of breast cancer and 49,000 new
cases of colorectal cancer each year, and three fourths of deaths from
these diseases in the United States and Canada, based on observational
studies combined with a randomized trial. Such intakes also are expected
to reduce case-fatality rates of patients who have breast, colorectal,
or prostate cancer by half. There are no unreasonable risks from intake
of 2000 IU per day of vitamin D(3), or from a population serum 25(OH)D
level of 40 to 60 ng/mL. The time has arrived for nationally coordinated
action to substantially increase intake of vitamin D and calcium.
PMID: 19523595 [PubMed - in process]

 .........................
 I purchase

<(Amazon.com product link shortened)
14D192/ref=pd_sim_gro_1>

 Bill

--
Garden in shade zone 5 S Jersey USA
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people
by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and
sudden usurpations.... The means of defense against foreign danger historically
have become the instruments of tyranny at home."
-James Madison

 On Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:07:56 -0400, Bill who putters


Fair hair leaping gnome????  Gawd, you never cease to make make me
smile, old friend.  The mental image is fantastic!

I'm a gonna post a link and the whole article to save you time and
start the good folk a hollering about bandwidth and all that
stuff.....

BTW and as an aside...I think we done been sold out on campaign
promises and all that happy horseshit.....Know Whut I Mean, Verne???


We also supplement with Vit D and I get lots of sunshine
also....without any SPF stuff........

Charlie, who will die of summat sumtime fer sure and doesn't look
forward to the prospect......


Worried Sick: How Vulnerable Are You Really to Heart Attack, Stroke or
Breast Cancer?
By Maggie Mahar, Health Beat
Posted on November 27, 2008, Printed on June 18, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/108867/

Assume that you are a 40-year-old man. What do you think the chances
are that you will die of a heart attack or stroke in the next 10
years? (Please forgive the morbidity of the question; there is a
purpose to this pop quiz.)  The answer: just 4 out of 10,000 according
to Drs. Steve Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz, authors of Know Your
Chances. The chances that you will die in an accident before reaching
your 50th birthday are 50 percent higher: 6 out of 10,000.

Nevertheless, many men remain convinced that they are at great risk of
dying from vascular disease, particularly as they get older. In truth,
even at age 60, the odds that a heart attack or stroke will end your
life over the next decade are only 37 out of 10,000. Over that span,
you are three times more likely to die of another cause -- with the
chance of an fatal accident (5 out of 10,000) just as high as the
chance of a stroke. Moreover, for reasons we do not fully understand,
the incidence of heart attacks is declining.

"Fifty hears ago, heart attacks were a scourge. Everyone knew a
working-age man who'd dropped dead from one," writes Dr. Nortin Hadler
in his new book, Worried Sick. Today "the decline in mortality from
coronary artery disease is well documented."

There is one exception: If you are a 60-year-old smoker, the chance of
a fatal heart attack or stroke in the next 10 years climbs to 67 out
of 10,000, and your chance of dying of lung disease rises to 59 out of
10,000.

The moral? The average man should probably worry less about his
cholesterol levels and more about driving safely and avoiding tobacco.

For many women, breast cancer is the great fear. Again, let's look at
the numbers. If you are a 35-year-old woman, what do you think the
chances are that you will die of breast cancer before you turn 45?
Just 1 out of 10,000 according to Woloshin and Schwartz. The chances
that you will die in an accident over the next decade are twice as
high: 2 out of 10,000.

Granted, as you grow older, your chances of dying from breast cancer
rise, but so do your chances of dying from other causes. When you are
60, the odds that breast cancer will kill you over the next 10 years
are 7 out of 10,000. Slim odds. The chances you will die of a heart
attack are twice as high: 14 out of 10,000. Maybe you shouldn't worry
quite so much about breast cancer.

I was surprised by these numbers, because I thought breast cancer was
a leading cause of death among women. This is because I have heard
that 1 in 9 women will "get" breast cancer if they live to 85. But as
Woloshin and Schwartz point out,  this is one of those health messages
that is "intended to be scary, warning us that we are surrounded by
danger and hinting that everything we do or neglect to do brings us
one step closer to cancer, heart disease and death."

As a result, Americans are Worried Sick writes Hadler. A professor of
medicine and microbiology/immunology at the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill, Hadler points out that "far less than 1 in 9
women will die of breast cancer, or even know that they 'have' it when
they die."

Unless they had a mammogram. Then they would probably find out and be
treated -- whether or not they need treatment. It  turns out that
two-thirds of women over 55 who have breast cancer will die of
something else.  Here are the numbers: In order to prevent one cancer
death among women over 55,  250 women have to be screened annually,
beginning at age 55.  But mammograms will also detect two other women
with breast cancer who would not have died of the cancer. "In other
words" Hadler says, "the screening will lead to the treatment of three
women, for two of whom the treatment is unnecessary."

"This is the best-case scenario for screening postmenopausal women,"
Hadler explains. One out of 250 will be saved, and two out of 250 will
be exposed to the risk and worry of treatment without deriving any
benefit. Hadler sums up the findings: "Early detection [via a
mammogram] makes less sense the older the woman, or the more
morbidities [potentially fatal diseases] that she suffers. In such a
circumstance, breast cancer is but one of the processes vying for the
proximate cause of death and not the most likely to win."

Moreover, there is no "best-case scenario" for screening younger
woman, unless they have a family history of early death from breast
cancer. This, Hadler notes,  is why "the American College of
Physicians  believes that the risks of unnecessary biopsies far
outweighs the likelihood of saving a life, and therefore does not
recommend mammography before age 50 and suggests that women do not
need to be screened after age 74. Similarly, the U.S. Preventive
Services Task Force recommends mammography screening only every one to
two years for women age 50-69.

Precancers

Too often, Hadler warns, mammograms discover ductal carcinoma in situ
(DCIS); "in situ" suggests that there is no discernible evidence that
the cancer is spreading. By the 1970s, physicians were finding more
and more cases of DCIS.

"It's about this time that the notion of a ‘precancer' really took
hold," Hadler observes. "Powerful surgeons writing in powerful
journals were advocating mastectomy to expunge the risk, whatever its
magnitude."  DCIS can become invasive, he acknowledges, "but
low-grade, tiny DCIS lesions take their time to become invasive, even
more time to become metastatic."

"It is defensible to excise DCIS if it is discovered in a younger
patient," he says. "That's not the issue. The issues are what are the
yield and iatrogenicity [danger of inadvertently harming the patient]
when trying [so] hard to discover DCIS in the first place?"

Today, "we are witnessing an epidemic of DCIS," says Hadler. "In 1980,
DCIS accounted for only 2 percent of breast cancers. Between 1973 and
1992, the age-adjusted incidence rate of DCIS increased nearly
sixfold. Meanwhile, the age-adjusted rise in the incidence of invasive
ductal cancer was only 34 percent. Women are not getting more cancers.
Rather, U.S. women are getting more breast biopsies thanks to
mammography."  And once diagnosed, "local excision is always
recommended, often with some radiation therapy, chemotherapy or
surgical exploration of the nodules." And local excision can be
extensive, to assure "clean margins." Often, women then opt for
painful, expensive breast reconstruction.

How many of these women would have been better off if they had never
known about the lesion? As Hadler points out, older women in
particular, are likely to die of something else before this type of
cancer becomes invasive.

Nevertheless,  Americans have been sold on the idea that early
detection is always best. Hadler says:  "the public-awareness program
for cancer has been far more successful in promoting enthusiasm than
reason." Research shows that "Americans are willing to undergo
screening without regard to the efficacy of the tests or the
likelihood that they will lead to unnecessary treatment."

Hadler and Popper

Who is Nortin Hadler, and why he is saying these terrible things about
screening and early detection? Hadler is a scientist and a physician.
He started his career as a geneticist, moved on to study
immunochemistry, and spent his first decade on faculty as a physical
biochemistry professor.  Today, he is  a professor of medicine and an
attending rheumatologist at UNC hospitals.  He has closed his
laboratory, but he retains "a keen appreciation for the scientific
method at its most rigorous."

At the same time, Hadler knows how fallible medical science is. A
student of Karl Popper, the philosopher of science who taught that
"truth is only the hypothesis that is yet to be disproved," Hadler
knows that today's received wisdom may be replaced tomorrow.

Not long ago, he points out "tonsils were removed because they were
swollen and uteruses because they were lumpy." We were wrong.
Throughout the 1990s, oncologists thought that bone-marrow transplants
would help breast cancer patients -- and thousands of women suffered
needlessly. More recently, we are realizing that when you consider the
risks as well as the benefits, we may have been overly optimistic
about mammograms as the answer to breast cancer. A few women are
saved; many others are hurt. Or as an Australian study declared not
long ago: "Benefits and harms of screening mammography are relatively
finely balanced."

Until quite recently, the National Cancer Institute and the American
Cancer Society recommended PSA testing for early-stage prostate cancer
for average-risk men over 50. Now, they don't.

In medicine, scientific progress is not simply a matter of
accumulating of knowledge. Often, advances mean unlearning what we
thought we knew -- and replacing that knowledge with a new, temporary
truth. Sometimes the new truth is misleading; sometimes it will apply
only to some patients. Always, we have to be ready to see it replaced.
Hadler explains that he wrote Worried Sick, not for people who are
seriously ill, but for the "worried well." Hadler wants to help us
cope with knowing that we are mortal without letting the fear of death
shadow our lives as we fret over each and every symptom -- be it
"heartburn, a peculiar sensation or a realization of our physical
limits."

His goal is "bolster the personal resources that facilitate coping"
with the ills that flesh is heir to. "And our coping is in dreadful
need of bolstering," he adds. "The wealth of information disseminated
by all sorts of health care vendors, including those in the medical
profession, may be intended as helpful but often is not. Much of this
information does violence to our sense of invincibility without doing
equivalent good for our health or longevity...

"Your sense of well-being requires conviction to withstand the
badgering assaults of health-promotion programs," Hadler adds.  "Yes,
we will all die. The issue for me is not so much how or why we die,
but when and how we lived." But in our health care system, and in the
mind of the laymen, "the proximate cause of death is foremost, so that
great energy and great wealth is expended trying to spare you death
from a particular cause without considering whether you will die at
the same time from some other cause. "

Ultimately, Hadler wants to help us cope with not being perfectly well
-- and knowing that we are mortal without being "worried to death"
about dying. "No one should be as concerned about the proximate cause
of their demise as they are about the likelihood their course in life
will be satisfying. It matters little what carries one off, as long as
it was her or his time and the journey was gratifying."

Maggie Mahar is a fellow at the Century Foundation and the author of
Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much
(Harper/Collins 2006).

 On Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:07:56 -0400, Bill who putters


(Funny stuff happening....first time I posted this, it showed up as
msg no longer available....hmmmmm)

Fair hair leaping gnome????  Gawd, you never cease to make make me
smile, old friend.  The mental image is fantastic!

I'm a gonna post a link and the whole article to save you time and
start the good folk a hollering about bandwidth and all that
stuff.....

BTW and as an aside...I think we done been sold out on campaign
promises and all that happy horseshit.....Know Whut I Mean, Verne???


We also supplement with Vit D and I get lots of sunshine
also....without any SPF stuff........

Charlie, who will die of summat sumtime fer sure and doesn't look
forward to the prospect......


Worried Sick: How Vulnerable Are You Really to Heart Attack, Stroke or
Breast Cancer?
By Maggie Mahar, Health Beat
Posted on November 27, 2008, Printed on June 18, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/108867/

Assume that you are a 40-year-old man. What do you think the chances
are that you will die of a heart attack or stroke in the next 10
years? (Please forgive the morbidity of the question; there is a
purpose to this pop quiz.)  The answer: just 4 out of 10,000 according
to Drs. Steve Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz, authors of Know Your
Chances. The chances that you will die in an accident before reaching
your 50th birthday are 50 percent higher: 6 out of 10,000.

Nevertheless, many men remain convinced that they are at great risk of
dying from vascular disease, particularly as they get older. In truth,
even at age 60, the odds that a heart attack or stroke will end your
life over the next decade are only 37 out of 10,000. Over that span,
you are three times more likely to die of another cause -- with the
chance of an fatal accident (5 out of 10,000) just as high as the
chance of a stroke. Moreover, for reasons we do not fully understand,
the incidence of heart attacks is declining.

"Fifty hears ago, heart attacks were a scourge. Everyone knew a
working-age man who'd dropped dead from one," writes Dr. Nortin Hadler
in his new book, Worried Sick. Today "the decline in mortality from
coronary artery disease is well documented."

There is one exception: If you are a 60-year-old smoker, the chance of
a fatal heart attack or stroke in the next 10 years climbs to 67 out
of 10,000, and your chance of dying of lung disease rises to 59 out of
10,000.

The moral? The average man should probably worry less about his
cholesterol levels and more about driving safely and avoiding tobacco.

For many women, breast cancer is the great fear. Again, let's look at
the numbers. If you are a 35-year-old woman, what do you think the
chances are that you will die of breast cancer before you turn 45?
Just 1 out of 10,000 according to Woloshin and Schwartz. The chances
that you will die in an accident over the next decade are twice as
high: 2 out of 10,000.

Granted, as you grow older, your chances of dying from breast cancer
rise, but so do your chances of dying from other causes. When you are
60, the odds that breast cancer will kill you over the next 10 years
are 7 out of 10,000. Slim odds. The chances you will die of a heart
attack are twice as high: 14 out of 10,000. Maybe you shouldn't worry
quite so much about breast cancer.

I was surprised by these numbers, because I thought breast cancer was
a leading cause of death among women. This is because I have heard
that 1 in 9 women will "get" breast cancer if they live to 85. But as
Woloshin and Schwartz point out,  this is one of those health messages
that is "intended to be scary, warning us that we are surrounded by
danger and hinting that everything we do or neglect to do brings us
one step closer to cancer, heart disease and death."

As a result, Americans are Worried Sick writes Hadler. A professor of
medicine and microbiology/immunology at the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill, Hadler points out that "far less than 1 in 9
women will die of breast cancer, or even know that they 'have' it when
they die."

Unless they had a mammogram. Then they would probably find out and be
treated -- whether or not they need treatment. It  turns out that
two-thirds of women over 55 who have breast cancer will die of
something else.  Here are the numbers: In order to prevent one cancer
death among women over 55,  250 women have to be screened annually,
beginning at age 55.  But mammograms will also detect two other women
with breast cancer who would not have died of the cancer. "In other
words" Hadler says, "the screening will lead to the treatment of three
women, for two of whom the treatment is unnecessary."

"This is the best-case scenario for screening postmenopausal women,"
Hadler explains. One out of 250 will be saved, and two out of 250 will
be exposed to the risk and worry of treatment without deriving any
benefit. Hadler sums up the findings: "Early detection [via a
mammogram] makes less sense the older the woman, or the more
morbidities [potentially fatal diseases] that she suffers. In such a
circumstance, breast cancer is but one of the processes vying for the
proximate cause of death and not the most likely to win."

Moreover, there is no "best-case scenario" for screening younger
woman, unless they have a family history of early death from breast
cancer. This, Hadler notes,  is why "the American College of
Physicians  believes that the risks of unnecessary biopsies far
outweighs the likelihood of saving a life, and therefore does not
recommend mammography before age 50 and suggests that women do not
need to be screened after age 74. Similarly, the U.S. Preventive
Services Task Force recommends mammography screening only every one to
two years for women age 50-69.

Precancers

Too often, Hadler warns, mammograms discover ductal carcinoma in situ
(DCIS); "in situ" suggests that there is no discernible evidence that
the cancer is spreading. By the 1970s, physicians were finding more
and more cases of DCIS.

"It's about this time that the notion of a ‘precancer' really took
hold," Hadler observes. "Powerful surgeons writing in powerful
journals were advocating mastectomy to expunge the risk, whatever its
magnitude."  DCIS can become invasive, he acknowledges, "but
low-grade, tiny DCIS lesions take their time to become invasive, even
more time to become metastatic."

"It is defensible to excise DCIS if it is discovered in a younger
patient," he says. "That's not the issue. The issues are what are the
yield and iatrogenicity [danger of inadvertently harming the patient]
when trying [so] hard to discover DCIS in the first place?"

Today, "we are witnessing an epidemic of DCIS," says Hadler. "In 1980,
DCIS accounted for only 2 percent of breast cancers. Between 1973 and
1992, the age-adjusted incidence rate of DCIS increased nearly
sixfold. Meanwhile, the age-adjusted rise in the incidence of invasive
ductal cancer was only 34 percent. Women are not getting more cancers.
Rather, U.S. women are getting more breast biopsies thanks to
mammography."  And once diagnosed, "local excision is always
recommended, often with some radiation therapy, chemotherapy or
surgical exploration of the nodules." And local excision can be
extensive, to assure "clean margins." Often, women then opt for
painful, expensive breast reconstruction.

How many of these women would have been better off if they had never
known about the lesion? As Hadler points out, older women in
particular, are likely to die of something else before this type of
cancer becomes invasive.

Nevertheless,  Americans have been sold on the idea that early
detection is always best. Hadler says:  "the public-awareness program
for cancer has been far more successful in promoting enthusiasm than
reason." Research shows that "Americans are willing to undergo
screening without regard to the efficacy of the tests or the
likelihood that they will lead to unnecessary treatment."

Hadler and Popper

Who is Nortin Hadler, and why he is saying these terrible things about
screening and early detection? Hadler is a scientist and a physician.
He started his career as a geneticist, moved on to study
immunochemistry, and spent his first decade on faculty as a physical
biochemistry professor.  Today, he is  a professor of medicine and an
attending rheumatologist at UNC hospitals.  He has closed his
laboratory, but he retains "a keen appreciation for the scientific
method at its most rigorous."

At the same time, Hadler knows how fallible medical science is. A
student of Karl Popper, the philosopher of science who taught that
"truth is only the hypothesis that is yet to be disproved," Hadler
knows that today's received wisdom may be replaced tomorrow.

Not long ago, he points out "tonsils were removed because they were
swollen and uteruses because they were lumpy." We were wrong.
Throughout the 1990s, oncologists thought that bone-marrow transplants
would help breast cancer patients -- and thousands of women suffered
needlessly. More recently, we are realizing that when you consider the
risks as well as the benefits, we may have been overly optimistic
about mammograms as the answer to breast cancer. A few women are
saved; many others are hurt. Or as an Australian study declared not
long ago: "Benefits and harms of screening mammography are relatively
finely balanced."

Until quite recently, the National Cancer Institute and the American
Cancer Society recommended PSA testing for early-stage prostate cancer
for average-risk men over 50. Now, they don't.

In medicine, scientific progress is not simply a matter of
accumulating of knowledge. Often, advances mean unlearning what we
thought we knew -- and replacing that knowledge with a new, temporary
truth. Sometimes the new truth is misleading; sometimes it will apply
only to some patients. Always, we have to be ready to see it replaced.
Hadler explains that he wrote Worried Sick, not for people who are
seriously ill, but for the "worried well." Hadler wants to help us
cope with knowing that we are mortal without letting the fear of death
shadow our lives as we fret over each and every symptom -- be it
"heartburn, a peculiar sensation or a realization of our physical
limits."

His goal is "bolster the personal resources that facilitate coping"
with the ills that flesh is heir to. "And our coping is in dreadful
need of bolstering," he adds. "The wealth of information disseminated
by all sorts of health care vendors, including those in the medical
profession, may be intended as helpful but often is not. Much of this
information does violence to our sense of invincibility without doing
equivalent good for our health or longevity...

"Your sense of well-being requires conviction to withstand the
badgering assaults of health-promotion programs," Hadler adds.  "Yes,
we will all die. The issue for me is not so much how or why we die,
but when and how we lived." But in our health care system, and in the
mind of the laymen, "the proximate cause of death is foremost, so that
great energy and great wealth is expended trying to spare you death
from a particular cause without considering whether you will die at
the same time from some other cause. "

Ultimately, Hadler wants to help us cope with not being perfectly well
-- and knowing that we are mortal without being "worried to death"
about dying. "No one should be as concerned about the proximate cause
of their demise as they are about the likelihood their course in life
will be satisfying. It matters little what carries one off, as long as
it was her or his time and the journey was gratifying."

 I had an interesting conversation with somebody about the effect of women who
have to
be covered heat to foot in a burka or some such and how seriously their health is
affected by a lack of sun exposure and decrease in vit D!!!!
Somewhere between zone 5 and 6 tucked along the shore of Lake Michigan
on the council grounds of the Fox, Mascouten, Potawatomi, and Winnebago

 
Supplements.

However, you probably get enough sun to provide vitamin D taking out
the garbage twice a week.  You only need 5-30 minutes or something
like that.
Dora