12/02/2024
Some people will tell you that vitamin K isn’t very effective, and I completely disagree.
Vitamin K is VERY effective.
Just like it would be VERY effective to get everyone to take a couple of painkillers before they left home in the mornings.
That would really reduce the number of sick days we lost to headaches, hangovers, period pain and the like.
But that doesn’t make mass medication justifiable, because there are wider issues to take into account.
So yes, vitamin K is very effective when given to newborn babies.
But is it also frustrating that, although only one in several thousand babies would have a problem without it, we don't know enough about which babies would have had a problem without it and which would have been fine.
Because the emphasis has been on the idea that, because it works, we should just give it to all babies.
But this raises some fascinating questions.
Some people will tell you that babies are born with ‘low’ levels of vitamin K, but this is only when you compare them to adults.
It’s possible, and perhaps even likely, that these relatively lower levels benefit newborns in some way.
(My money would be on stem cells, but that's just a researcher's educated guess.)
This is just one of the questions that I have been exploring over the past twenty-five years and which I discuss in my book, Vitamin K and the Newborn.
We need to think more widely about the wider issue, the deeper questions and the bigger picture.
And, as I once wrote,
Part of the solution, I humbly suggest, is to slow or cease our acceptance of the notion that women's and babies' bodies fail so often and so spectacularly, and to be willing to think about how nature, evolution or whatever you believe in might have designed us to land on the earth with what we needed in the first place.
For more information on vitamin K, see www.sarawickham.com/vk
