I am a licensed massage therapist, and a strong advocate of Vitamin D supplementation. I have a few clients with I.C. to whom I recommended Vitamin D testing. Their levels were extremely low! After a period of supplementation with D, they have reported improvement with I.C. Have you had any other feedback on this topic?

Vitamin D is an essential nutrient, meaning that our bodies cannot manufacture it, so we need to get it from our food or outside sources. Unlike most essential nutrients, however, our bodies can make Vitamin D if we are exposed to the sun’s ultraviolet rays for a minimum of 10 minutes a day. Although 10 minutes doesn’t seem like much, if a person doesn’t get much exposure in the winter and avoids sun in the summer by covering the body with clothes and sunscreen, you can see how quickly a low level of the vitamin can develop. Now, a true Vitamin D deficiency in an adult would be evidenced by a softening of the bones called ‘osteomalacia.”

This is actually very rare in the United States due to supplementation of the vitamin in a number of food products including most milk. What we are learning, however, is that a person does not need to be “deficient” in the classic sense of the word, but that Vitamin D levels can be very low contributing to a variety of common disorders. The problem with trying to link Vitamin D to IC is that prevalence of low Vitamin D in the IC population is probably not much different than we are seeing in the general population, which is quite high regardless of any other disease process. If you do an internet search for “Prevalence of low Vitamin D,” you can see the many different studies that have compared Vitamin D to various diseases. It is actually staggering.

Not to totally discount the connection of Vitamin D to IC, it is important to recognize that anything that makes their bodies stronger as a whole can help IC patients with their symptoms, at least to some degree. Therefore, if anyone suspects their Vitamin D levels are low, they should talk to their physician to get a blood level test to determine if they should take supplemental Vitamin D, and how much.