Here is the note that came with my lab results showing low Vitamin D levels:
Vitamin D is sold in IU, not grams, but I found conversion numbers online. Assuming they’re correct and my math is right, it comes out to 40 to 80 million IUs of Vitamin D. Presumably per day. But even if it’s 40 million over two months, that amounts to me taking 667 Vitamin D pills of 1,000 IU each, per day.
I have left them a message.
I assume she meant 1-2 thousand IU a day, but I do know that people who are deficient sometimes get put on 50,000 IU a week for a short time, so I really am not sure what she wants me to do.
They’re lucky the error was so egregious it would be impractical for me to poison myself trying to comply with it!
My last blood tests came back low for Vitamin D. My Dr put me on 50,000 units per week for 8 weeks, followed by 1000 units per day for a month. The OTC ones are the equivalent of the 1000 unit prescription I got, so my guess would be that is what they were prescribing. That seems to be the standard dose, 1000 units per day.
My standard regimen for folks who are vitamin D deficient is to give them 50,000 units of Vitamin D2 3 x a week for 6 to 12 weeks, then switch over to 2000 units of vitamin D3 daily for the forseeable future after that.
The vitamin D2 replenishes the deficit quickly and effectively, and then the D3 keeps one topped off.
It may well be that D3 would be fine in high dose to replenish the deficit, but most of the research in doing so has been done with D2 so that’s sort of the standard of medical therapy at this time.
