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Comment by Sunspark | Hacker News Reader

Be careful. "Vitamin" D is actually a hormone that is fat-soluble which means it can build up too much in your body and cause a toxic effect and I know one person who that happened to.

The way to know you're ok at your current dosage is to take a blood test, ideally at least twice a year (summer and winter) so you can make sure you're not overdosing.

I haven't had a blood test in many years, so currently I am only on 3000 IU. It's a big difference, in one week I have 21,000 IU and you have 70,000 IU, I am only taking 30% of the dose you are.

Get a blood test!

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Perhaps off-topic but my inner hacker finds it very upsetting that getting blood tests can be so cumbersome, despite being so important. Make an appointment, transit to the doctor's office, pay a bunch of money, wait for labs, wait for your doctor to explain and prescribe stuff to you. It's cumbersome enough to the point where the vast majority of humans aren't testing anywhere near the frequency they should, including myself.

I don't think running diagnostics on a human should be this hard, we run diagnostics on our apps, computers, cars more often than ourselves. I wonder if people are working on making this process a lot easier (or if it's even possible, I have zero knowledge of the space).

Quest diagnostics will let you do it yourself. I am in the process of ordering a self-serve vit-d test and metabolic panel for about $150, no doctor referral required.

(I also dislike the limitations as I feel like people are more capable of helping themselves in a lot of these situations)

It's not hard.

Google "LabCorps" near you.

You can walk in and get a basic metabolic panel in about 15 minutes, with results the next day or two, for about $50, without a doctor. I use them for frequent STI testing.

I paid $47 for this vitamin D test (via blood draw): https://www.lifeextension.com/lab-testing/itemlc081950/vitam... You get a doctor's prescription (from a Florida doctor, good for anywhere in the country) and instructions to go to your nearest Labcorp for a blood draw. So make sure you have a Labcorp near you.

Here are a few alternatives you can look into, mentioned in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15868143

[0]: https://www.privatemdlabs.com

[1]: http://www.directlabs.com/

[2]: https://www.walkinlab.com/

[3]: https://www.health-tests-direct.com/

[4]: https://www.personalabs.com/

These are definitely a step up than what I'm used to and I appreciate the effort put into the reply. I'm still naively hoping there will be a scifi-esque biometric scanner or finger-prick analyzer, as another commenter put it, some day ;)

It would be great to have very easy testing with a pin prick of blood. This dream is what kept Theranos going for so long, but hopefully that scandal does not scare off other people from trying.

Why should you even need doctor prescription for something like this? Week ago I just went to nearby lab and asked them to make a blood draw to verify my vitamin D levels and got results same day via email.

Can you tell us which lab? Did you contact them before hand?

Sorry for not being clear - I'm not in the US. I was just surprised you need a doctor prescription for something like that.

US doctors have a strong political presence through the AMA and maintain a monopoly on nearly every medical procedure, test, and many drugs. It's impossible to get anything without a doctor's prescription and it's usually impossible to get that prescription without a (paid) visit to their office.

Seriously. Gimme a finger-prick analyzer, eh?

Elizabeth Holmes founded a startup a while back to solve this problem...

It seems like it’s just tough because you generally need a fair amount of blood for each test. We could lose some of the bureaucracy but it seems hard to get away from human phlebotomists and lab techs.

well, Holmes effort was more of a con game than delivering actual solutions.

I use medichecks. I order the tests I want, a nurse comes and takes my blood at home, then a few days later I get results emailed to me and a brief rundown from a doctor that’s looked them over. If there’s any problems I can take it up with my GP, even that can be done online now.

Our most current understanding is that 7k iu is closest to optimal, and that previous recommendations were based on bad math.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5541280/

While toxicity is a serious matter, the actual risk is generally overblown, since it requires truly heroic, sustained doses.

>The evidence is clear that vitamin D toxicity is one of the rarest medical conditions and is typically due to intentional or inadvertent intake of extremely high doses of vitamin D (usually in the range of 50,000-100,000 IU/d for months to years)

https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(15)...

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