Here’s a common phenomena were seeing at our clinic. Fortunately, more physicians are testing their patient’s vitamin D baselines, hooray, the word is getting out there! Unfortunately, we’re seeing very little in the way of following-up those baseline tests with re-checks to see if the treatments did any good. It’s the re-checking of those blood levels that reveals the problem; that being, what you’d think would be a good strong dose to correct the deficiency falls short much of the time.

Here’s a classic example. One of my wife’s patients came in for an appointment. It came to my wife’s attention that this patient’s other doctor had wisely tested her vitamin D and found that it was low at 25.8 ng/mL (normal range being 32-80). The doctor then instructed the patient to take 1,000 IU’s of vitamin D daily and that they could maybe recheck it in a couple of years. The patient diligently took her 1,000 IU’s of D for 2 months, at which time she came to an appointment at our clinic and had her D re-evaluated. Guess what? Her levels had gone down and were now at 24.2! (remember, she started at 25.8!) Had this re-check level not been done, it’s very likely this person would have lived the next 2 years of her life vitamin D deficient. Certainly the 1,000 IU’s was better than nothing, but it fell way sort of even getting her into the normal range.

It’s this type of case that re-enforces our opinion that it’s important to re-check vitamin D levels in order to verify the effectiveness of the treatment.