Making Medical Choices – Vitamin K Case Study
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Hello. Hi, I’m Dr. Brian Thornberg and I wanted to address my last Vitamin K video that came out just last week. There were a couple important distinctions I have to make when you receive medical information whether it be from an independent person like me or if it comes from an institution or some type of collective because everybody’s going to come at information differently. So, we have to understand how to understand where people are drawing their conclusions from. In my case, as an independent physician with 20 years of experience, served on the American Academy of Pediatrics Executive Committee, spoke at the National Convention for the American Academy of Pediatrics on home visits. I am a functional and board certified pediatrician. I have eight children. I was a child abuse doctor for 12 years. I was a philosophy major as an undergrad. And I love to understand how things are put together because that where my insights into my medical advice or medical information would probably be a better word is drawn from this desire to understand how we’re receiving information and how that information is packaged to be received. When I mention that injectable vitamin K is a better option than no vitamin K, where I’m drawing this conclusion from is prior to the introduction of vitamin K, there was a 1 in60 chance of having vitamin K deficiency bleeding disorder. And if the intervention that you have to do as a parent is to inject vitamin K1, and I’ll go through the ingredient list in a moment, but if that’s all you have to do to prevent a brain bleed, a stroke, loss of part of their body function, you don’t want to carry that weight when you think that all there was on the opposite side of that decision to prevent my child from going through a lifetime of handicapped stress that I could have just given this shot. So when we have a 1 in60 chance of having VK vitamin K deficiency bleeding of the newborn then I don’t see much of a costbenefit ratio because I wouldn’t want that to happen to my child. Now of course you can play the odds and say well I am going to hope that my child comes into one of those 59 kids who didn’t have a problem. Then that is a gamble that I just don’t see the costbenefit ratio to. And that’s where if you have an option, you would jump over to the oral form of vitamin K because the oral form does not have the additional ingredients that the injectable form. The difference between an oral formulation, injectable formulation is how they’re administered. And so there is a different kind of grouping of ingredients that you need in order to make it digestible or absorbable depending how the medicine was delivered. But again, I want to emphasize it’s always a matter of degree. Can you return to this moment and get to the same safe space? Or do you have to look at this moment as really a fork in the road with very real possible different outcomes? And that’s when I don’t make a bet on something that could be lifelong and terrible for my child because I don’t want to live with that kind of emotional hangover. It’s a matter of degrees. I don’t see the benefit of being 1 in 59 just to say that you were natural. Now, is it true that the vitamin K that we inject or that we administer orally is not natural? Is it true that vitamin K doesn’t come across the placenta naturally? That is all true. Is it designed that way by God? Yes, it is. Because vitamin K is part of the clotting cascade. And if the baby had a lot of K and they go through a traumatic delivery, that means they’re most more likely to throw a clot. And then that means that they could have a stroke. Because remember having a lot of K means that you can throw a clot during a traumatic event and not having enough K you can basically throw a clot because there’s not enough clotting factor so you can bleed. So both lead to the same space. So there’s this Goldilock center point and when a baby’s born that is lowered because we don’t want the traumatic delivery to cause a brain bleed or something else that would be bad. So naturally there is a decrease in the vitamin K. Now when the baby comes out historically before we injected K a lot of it depended on maternal diet and nursing there has been a change because of modern life that we don’t nurse as much and diets are full of high inflammatory seed oils in moms a lot of the time or majority of the time and so the baby isn’t receiving the same nutrients through breast milk as they had been historically. So again, if you wanted to parse this out and look at it as a matter of degrees, you’d say like, well, I didn’t have antibiotics during my pregnancy. I plan on nursing. I eat very healthy organic whole food diet and I have been doing this for years and years and years and I know that I have all of my nutrients that I need. Then you are taking a very educated position as opposed to the person who just hears from some institution and this is where we differ. We don’t do that because it’s bad. And so where I have a criticism is that when you move into an institution, whether it’s a well-intentioned institution or a politicized institution, eventually there comes to be a group think because nobody is being individually held responsible. And we saw this in my vitamin K video that I did last week. There was just some broad strokes of dismissal without a failure to recognize that this is a matter of nuances and there isn’t a black and white description. That’s the problem when you get into institutional group think is that everything becomes black and white because it’s hard to nuance. It’s hard to take the time to do what I am doing right here, which is to understand that there needs to be a stratification in decision-m and you need to know what you are doing. And so again, if you are a mom that’s nursing, never been on antibiotics, don’t eat any seed oils, you’re whole food diet, you’ve been doing this for years and years, you take care of yourself, you may be, again, wouldn’t be my risk. I wouldn’t do this with my child. You may be a candidate that would say, “Well, I think it’s okay that I don’t give the synthetic oral form of vitamin K.” Again, I don’t agree with that. I think that that downside is too great for just a little vitamin K. So, um, going back to the oral form of vitamin K, if you have a baby that’s healthy and term, and you know that they can absorb nutrients to their GI tract and there is no reason to have to inject vitamin K that contains a lot of additional ingredients. Like I mentioned, it contains polyorbate 80, polyropylene glycol, sodium acetate and hydrris and glacial acetic acid. These are in there to stabilize it to emulsify it to correct the pH. And so these are necessary ingredients for that kind of delivery method. Again, stratifying best to take at least the injectable if you are in the proper situation to take the oral form, which is that you have a healthy term infant. you’re not taking certain types of anti-seizure medicines that can decrease the amount of vitamin K that’s transported across the placenta. So the baby’s starting at a very very low vitamin K level. In that case, you would want to use an injectable form. And so if you know that you’re having this excellent pregnancy and healthy term baby and you are a person that can administer oral vitamin K drops weekly for 12 weeks and you could be responsible, then you could be a candidate again to satisfy that you could do that level of oral vitamin K instead of injectable form of vitamin K. Once we understand that there are nuances here and we don’t always like the decisions that were provided. But that never means that we degrade our options and our opportunities and our information gathering to a black and white answer. That is the wrong way to look at medicine. So I am here as an independent physician who refuses to align with any particular group to think independently. And you know, I’m going to continue to carry this out because when I do my sleeping videos, I have a lot of push back from those who like the family bed and say historically, culturally that there has been an improvement with SIDS, with family bonding, with sleep hygiene because of the family bed. And but then again, we have to stratify this. And this is just a quick preview into what I’m going to do in the future. In this culture, we don’t have that culture of family beds. So, we have to operate inside of the culture. Now, if you’re an individual that can say, “I can move outside of my culture in a conscious way and understand how that is going to positively and negatively affect me and my family and I’m willing to go through those steps and I have a supportive partner and it just appears to be working well for the whole family.” So, the outcomedriven endpoint is appropriate, then you could be a candidate to do that. But if you’re someone who is so busy that you don’t have time to really put your day together and then you’re going to try to take just this well. If you family bed it and because it’s a black and white decision and don’t listen to Thornberg who’s got 20 years of experience and has done this with thousands of kids because that’s the wrong answer or that’s the male answer and how can he understand? No, that is the black and white. That’s that group think. The sneak preview is yes. If you’re able to create that niche where you can understand consciously and it is not resulting in a chaotic outcome then you are candidate. You have again you have to look at how you’re making your family medical decisions and where you’re getting the information, how these institutions are packing the information for you and how you have to break that down so you know how to digest and interpret what they are delivering because that’s what I like doing is I like to explain why we’re making decisions and that informs you so you become a more empowered Parent.
