Want to Test Your Vitamin D Level at Home?
Did you know you can order a test to determine your vitamin D level at home? Or order a kit to send results obtained at home to a lab for processing?
The Vitamin D Council, founded by John Cannell, MD, offers all the details you need for these approaches. Vitamin D levels play a key role in autism, depression, cognitive impairment, irritable bowel syndrome, among other conditions. Of particular interest to ACN Latitudes readers, Dr. Cannell, a psychiatrist, explained in an interview with Safe Harbor:
What the literature supports is that people with mental illness have low vitamin D levels. It’s true for depression, schizophrenia, autism and others. There was one study conducted by Rinehold Vieth involving endocrinology outpatients who were given 4000 units of vitamin D for 6 months, and their feelings of well-being improved significantly. There aren’t a lot of randomized, controlled studies on vitamin D and mental illness, so this leaves you with an option: to treat or not to treat. I don’t think we can wait for randomized studies. Say you have a schizophrenic patient with low vitamin D levels. What do you do? The ethical thing to do is to treat the vitamin D deficiency. Given what we know now about vitamin D, we have an obligation to treat it in any psychiatric patient who is deficient.
So how do you know if you are deficient in vitamin D? According to the Vitamin D Council, there are 3 ways to be tested:
- Ask your doctor for a specific test (25(OH)D.)
- Order an in-home test.
- Order a kit online and send results to a lab.
The Council advises that all three methods of testing should give you an accurate result.
Please visit their website for details on how you can test your vitamin D levels at home, and how you should pursue ordering a kit online and using a lab. Details are also provided on guidelines for levels of vitamin D.
See a video from the Council on home testing:
