So, it turns out that Maine doesn’t get much sun. Or, rather, it doesn’t get as much sunlight as other states, like those that aren’t in the most upper northeast corner of the U.S. (Did you know that about 5 years ago, there was talk of moving Maine into the Atlantic Time Zone so Maine’s days wouldn’t have to be so short — and there’d be more sunlight at night to ski?) I knew I’d been suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder since I moved here in 2004, which basically means that once we get to the Winter switch of Daylight Savings, my body automatically starts shutting down at 4pm every day. I can physically feel the sunset like a heavy blanket covering me, weighing all of my muscles down; I don’t even have to be near a clock or a window to know it’s happened either. I just feel it’s happened. By 6pm, I want to be in my PJs, and I just don’t know what to do with myself because technically it’s too early to go to bed.
Interestingly, it turns out that Maine’s short days have had another affect on me as well — or rather, they have likely helped along my poor health by denying me that vitamin-D everyone always talks about. Supposedly, we should be able to get enough vitamin-D naturally without having to ingest it from dairy and food products that have had it added, like store-bought orange juice or cow milk. Theoretically, just walking around, living our lives, we should get enough vitamin-D from the sun to be healthy.
That’s not true for everyone, I guess. It probably doesn’t help that I spend 8+ hours 5 days a week sitting in a building with few windows sitting in a chair typing on a computer during the usual daylight hours and then on the weekend, I’m not really an “outdoorsy” kind of gal, though I want to embrace my inner-gardener and house-maintenance home-owner. The normal levels for vitamin-D labs are 30 – 100 ng/ml; my result was 16 ng/ml — it’s been suggested that any results below 20 ng/ml are considered serious deficiency states and increase your risk of breast and prostrate cancer and autoimmune diseases.
Hmmmm…there might be something there. After doing some research, I discovered some studies indicate that sufferers of chronic musculoskeletal pain may be suffering from symptomatic vitamin-D deficiency.
Dr. Michael Turner from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, indicated in a news release last March that this is especially likely in many patients labeled with fibromyalgia when certain risk factors are present, such as obesity, darker pigmented skin, or limited exposure to sunlight. The news release was in connection to a study published in the journal Pain Medicine in November 2008 in which Dr. Turner was the lead investigator; the study suggests a correlation between vitamin-D deficiency and the amount of narcotic medication taken by chronic pain patients. Turner’s group discoered that vitamin-D deficient patients who required narcotic pain medication were taking much higher doses — nearly twice as much — as those with adequate levels of vitamin-D. Plus, these patients also felt they had worse physical function and worse overall health.*
Since I have such a low vitamin-D deficiency and such a high level of pain and no one will give me anything more than Tylenol, which doesn’t help, these studies do sound hopeful and promising. My rheumotologist seems to think so anyway; I have a nifty new prescription for vitamin-D. Yep, none of that random convenience store pharmacy vitamin-D for me. He says you can’t trust what’s in those bottles; you can’t be sure the dosages are really what they say they are, especially if they aren’t made in the States. So, I have a prescription for a daily dose of 2000mg of vitamin-D.
We’ll have to see if it helps. At the very least, it should raise my vitamin-D levels. I’m not so sure about how it’ll do with reducing the chronic pain – it turns out there haven’t been many successful studies where treatment of vitamin-D benefited chronic pain sufferers; the vitamin-D might just be a red herring.
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