Why are many doctors missing this?

Research of any type is funded by people with a financial interest.  Years of propaganda tells us that vitamin deficiency is old-fashioned (“didn’t we cure that after the war?”) and unnecessary ("you can get all the vitamins you need in a balanced diet").  But malnutrition is widespread in the developed world (we eat fast food, microwaves destroy B12, vegetarians don't get B12 in their food because it's present in meat, AND changes in farming methods mean the food has fewer vitamins in it than a few years ago). So Vitamin Deficiency is here today.

The photos above are from a medical paper published in 1900.  B12 wasn't found until 1940s, although a cure for Pernicious Anaemia (PA) was found in 1926.  But the disease appears to have existed before then, and may easily have been 1 in 5 in the population, as we believe it is today.

Diagnosis of Pernicious Anaemia was relatively rare, more prevalent in the elderly and women of all ages [1].  People died, nobody asked why.  But PA was a devastating disease - Life expectancy was extremely short (1 – 3 years, which may account for the rarity of this disease as 2 years represents 3% of a 60 year lifespan) and the cure for pernicious anaemia in 1926s[i] was an extremely painful injection of extract of liver - faced with a choice between pain or death, those who could afford it chose pain.  During the inter-war and post-war period B₁₂ (newly discovered from the liver extract, and a lot less painful) was routinely given to patients on presentation with symptoms, and in some European countries this continues[2].

We now assume that B₁₂ Deficiency has been cured, so we don't look for it[ii], and invent new conditions (being named after their discoverer).  The new symptoms are difficult to cure with anything apart from B12, which means big bucks for big pharma.  So PA is very difficult to diagnose and everyone assumes that you have to have very low blood B12.

Baboir & Bunn identified ‘subtle’ cobalamin deficiency (cobalamin is another name for B12)(neuropsychiatric abnormalities but higher B12 in blood)[3] shows that treatment with Vitamin B₁₂ will usually prevent further deterioration and may result in improvement.  They and others  say “cobalamin deficiency must be suspected in all patients with unexplained neuro-psychiatric symptoms or unexplained anaemia.  The message is clear; anaemia and amcrocytosis is not present in all cases of cobalamin deficiency and discreet  neuro-psychiatric symptoms are often the only signs of vitamin B₁₂ deficiency” [4-6].  This ‘subtle’, or subclinical deficiency is probably at least 10x more common in the population than actual low B12 [7], and as well as PA, vitamin B₁₂’may cure another devastating disease - Muscular Sclerosis (MS) [8].

The British National Formulary for Children published recently has included a section in which it recommends treating children and new-born babies born to B₁₂ deficient mothers[9].  The Data sheets have been recommending B₁₂ treatment to pregnant mothers[10] who are deficient – to benefit the mother and child and prevent neuromuscular damage in the child; these BNFC and eMC guidance followed Dr Chandy’s submission[11] to them the year before.

However there appears to be confusion amongst clinicians; some have recently denied the existence of the BNFC and BNF guidance and given guidelines and statements which cause untold damage and suffering to mother and child.

Original article 17 Jan 2010

Citations