Corey Weinstein, MD
Newsletter
Home | My Services | Meet the Doctor | Newsletter | Newsletter Archive | Insurance and Fees | Directions | Contact Me | The Homeopathic Consultation

This newsletter contains information about homeopathy and natural medicine as well as important news about health and medicine.  Questions of general interest that you send in will be answered here.

Drug for Gout Stolen by URL Pharma

The herb Colchicum has been used to treat Gout for 2,000 years and for inflammatory arthritis for 3,500 years.  Colchicum’s chemical extract Colchicine has been the main treatment for Gout for the last 200 years.  In 2006 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched an initiative which targeted old drugs that have never been approved under rules set up in the last 75 years.  The drug company URL Pharma seized this opportunity for profiteering and conducted a study of Colchicine in the treatment of Gout.  The study demonstrated that it works just fine.  The result is that although it has been a generic drug for 200 years, the FDA gave 3-year marketing exclusivity to URL Pharma, in exchange for URL Pharma doing the new study. URL Pharma raised the price from $0.09 per pill to $4.85, and sued to remove other versions from market.  Other companies must cease production this year.  Colchicine is used in both management of the painful acute attacks of Gout and even more commonly in long term prevention.  Patients who used to pay $65 for a year’s supply of the drug for prevention are now forced to pay $3,600 a year.  Or they can find a good homeopathic practitioner.     

Vitamin D Overdose and Fractures

Vitamin D supplementation is generally believed to lower the risk of fractures in older women.  Most doctors now test for Vitamin D levels in middle aged and older patients and provide prescriptions for high dose supplementation as

needed.  While previous clinical trials of the benefit of Vitamin D have yielded

some conflicting results, generally it is thought that doses above 400 IU per day help with fracture prevention.  But because some people find it hard to take daily doses of Vitamin D a clinical trial was conducted using very high single doses once a year for 3 to 5 years.  The dose was 500,000 IU once a year.  The  dose did raise the blood levels of Vitamin D in the treated women to normal  levels.  But the fracture and fall rates were found to be higher in the women who got the massive dose of Vitamin D.  A second study confirmed the finding of increased risk of fracture in women getting massive single doses.  It seems prudent to not take such large doses of Vitamin A, or I would say any Vitamin or other micro-nutrient.  They are after all micro-nutrients that our bodies only have experienced in small amounts during our entire genetic history.  We must take pause and remember the tales of explorers going to the Arctic who got sick and even died after eating polar bear liver that contains huge amounts of Vitamin A.  The study that made me wary of large doses of daily vitamins was the now famous study of middle aged male smokers.  They were given Vitamin A and in a later study Beta Carotene assuming that it would help prevent the development of cancer.  Quite the opposite; those who took the Vitamin A got cancer more frequently than those who took placebo.  Since that study I’ve had more respect for the “micro” in micro-nutrients and have advised only modest quantities of vitamins in most circumstances.

 

Corey Weinstein, MD, CCH  1063 Plymouth Ave., San Francisco, CA 94112   415-333-8228

Homeopathic and Natural Medical Consultations