Restored Vision Through Vitamin D Megadoses
We asked our readers to help us document how they use vitamin D to treat their conditions. One respondent reported: I am 65 years old and live in Minnesota. I began taking 5K IU/day in 2010, and have not experienced a respiratory illness since. In October 2012, I upped my dose to 50K IU/day for a couple of weeks, then 30K IU/day for another couple of weeks, and then 20K day for two years. I now take 15K IU/day.
In December 2012, my hairdresser said the roots of my hair were darkening, and the following month that hair was growing into my bald spot. In 1988 I lost most of the sight in my right eye due to idiopathic optic neuritis. In September 2013, I started to notice pattern and color in an area formerly without sight. By August 2014, I had recovered nearly all the sight in my right eye; my vitamin D level was measuring at 104 ng/ml. My physician says that the optic nerve has remyelinated, and he says he is unaware of any other case where this has occurred 25 years later.
I attribute recovery of sight to high-dose vitamin D, as nothing else has changed. I took 5k IU/day for nearly two years without any noticeable effects other than no respiratory illness, in contrast to previous years when I had two or three colds per winter. The first evidence of darkening of hair occurred about 8 weeks after I started the 20k IU/day but continued for a couple of years. I haven’t noticed much change in the past year. I did not notice the changes to vision until about 10 months after taking 20k IU/day, and the vision gradually improved over the next 12 months. As stated earlier, it is now almost completely back to normal.
An important point is that all of the more remarkable effects occurred while I was taking doses of at least 20,000 IU per day. I think this is important because it suggests the dosages necessary for remyelination of nerves and the duration of treatment. It doesn’t happen overnight! And, it is obvious, different effects occurred on different timetables. Hence my strong interest in the health effects of vitamin D, and my fascination with the efficacy of very high dose D on otherwise refractory illnesses and autoimmune diseases.
