Hacker News Reader

Comment by ukdm | Hacker News Reader

You mention that less sleep makes you feel better, Have you tried Polyphasic sleep?

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/

I'm sure you have, but your initial positive reaction to a massive dose of Vitamin D made you much better. Have you investigated what further large doses would do? (under doctor supervision of course) I mean much larger than the initial prescription.

View on HN

I don't think inflicting sleep deprivation on yourself is a good idea for a healthy person. It's an even worse idea for someone with a medical condition that causes tons of fatigue. Polyphasic sleep is quite frankly a crank theory[1]--I'm sure people can function on it, but people can function on untreated severe sleep apnea for years as well and in both cases you have chronic sleep deprivation. (And, obviously, anyone committed enough to polyphasic sleep to actually continue doing it for very long would have a pretty strong confirmation bias, so there's no trusting personal anecdotes.)

[1] Steve Pavlina's already a crank--his business partner and ex-wife is a telephone psychic who claims to contact your dead relatives.

The initial improvement I saw was on a 1000 IU 2x daily over-the-counter dosage from the doc. This was encouraging, so he gave me a 50K IU weekly prescription. I started to feel worse when taking this. Thought it was perhaps too much. Doc had me go back to the 2x daily 1000 IU. Unfortunately I never got back to that initial level of improvement. My bloodwork now shows that the Vit D level is within normal range (25-OH, Total: 47, D2: 35, D2: 12)

The Vitamin D thing was one of the first things they discovered with me...but they started me right away on the 50K IU/week. As with you, the benefit lasted a short time and then I actually felt worse. It turned out that the Vitamin D thing was a red herring. Vitamin D is a hormone, and I had multiple endocrine issues from the viral and bacterial infections...

Wow, that's really quite interesting that we both did initially better, then worse when on D. How did you get the viral/bacterial infection diagnosis? Was this lymne-related?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com