Dagnabbit, those thrill seeking old urologists!

Whatever bug I seemed to have yesterday morning cleared up by lunchtime yesterday. Yay!

Obviously, a highly controversial thing to post, but in my own personal experience, megadoses of vitamin D3 (not the D2-ergocalciferol form of vitamin D) really does work at stopping a cold/flu in its tracks. Nothing else I have tried, including megadosing vitamin C, echinacea, beta glucans, garlic, zinc lozenges, etc. have ever seemed to work to really knock down a bug. This has worked repeatedly for me over the years.

Yesterday, after realizing I was coming down with something, I took my D. I thought it was too late in this case, but apparently not, because I was feeling fine within the same morning.

I'm not a doctor and I'm not giving medical advice. Just passing along my own observations. I thought it sounded crazy but I tried for myself and found it highly effective if you take it early and take enough of it. There is a LOT of interest in vitamin D in the past 10 years. And we're not just talking bone health anymore.

It's unfortunate that non-patententable substances like vitamins will never be FDA approved because no for-profit company would recoup the upfront money to do the expensive clinical trials to get it officially FDA approved. The fact that some substance is not FDA approved does NOT necessarily mean that it doesn't work. It could just mean that no one has invested the money to prove it yet--or ever. (of course, plenty of things are not approved because they do not work!)

According to the FDA, the only thing that can treat a disease or symptoms is a drug. Technically, if you want to say that chicken soup can relieve the symptoms of a cold, really, that soup needs to be approved by the FDA as a drug first. I understand the spirit of the law, but it's application in many cases makes me shake my head.

For the record, she can't get the flu shot (egg allergies trigger migraines) and I usually don't, as I get sick anyhow.

I saw on the news they are working on an egg free verison of the flu vaccines.
katarin

vitamins a, d, e,and k, the fat soluble ones- are less easily excreted that the rest, and can cause problems in high oral dosages-in this case, hypervitaminosis d .

not clear that a short course for acute illness is dangerous, just suggesting that more caution is needed with these than with vitamin c. imho/ymmv.

You're quite right, and I certainly have done much reading on the matter before trying it out on myself. That's also why I did not mention any specifics in that post. If anyone is interested, they should really take the time to educate themselves instead of just blindly following something you read posted by some stranger on a web forum (i.e. me!). Honestly, though, any vitamin product is far, far safer than pretty much any medication people are taking.

Just for perspective, the Lazarou meta-analysis in 1998 looked at adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients. They estimated that a little over 100,000 hospitalized patients died from adverse drug reactions in 1994 (so not counting what happened to people outside of the hospital). Assuming that's a fair estimate, only heart disease, cancer, and strokes killed more Americans that year. (Too bad the CDC or FDA doesn't routinely track medication-related deaths.)

When's the last time anyone has heard of someone dying from a vitamin overdose?

From that link you provided, it says:

The typical vitamin D supplement you'll find at the drug store comes in 400, 1000, and possibly 2,000 IU doses. Rarely, you'll find 5,000 IU. Even with the 5,000 IU capsules, you'd have to take 125 of them to hit the 600,000 IU lower range quoted above. And keep taking 125 capsules for at least a few days before experiencing any toxicity issues. Actually, they don't specify in the article but I assume they're talking about vitamin D2, which has a lower toxicity threshold than D3.

"When's the last time anyone has heard of someone dying from a vitamin overdose?"
Don't know about dying, but several arctic explorers developed an exfoliative dermatitis from (IIRC) vitamin A toxicity after eating polar bear or walrus liver. Also found this:
"In 1913, Antarctic explorers Douglas Mawson and Xavier Mertz were both poisoned (and Mertz died) from eating the livers of their sled dogs during the Far Eastern Party" Wikipedia entry.
So there's a fatality.

Well, normally I would define "when's the last time?" as being less than 100 years ago, but I'll let this one get in under the wire. Just.

Well, worst case scenario, they die. I just checked and there's been one death due to iron poisoning since 1998. But yes, there are quite a few young children who get sick from too much iron, usually because they think they're eating candy. Imagine if we fortified beer with iron. I'm sure we'd see a lot more adult cases of iron poisoning in that case.

This may sound like splitting hairs, but I would classify minerals separately from vitamins. It's easier to develop a mineral toxicity.