25 hydroxy

Intuitive Surgical: What Are the Limits of Robotic Surgery?

One interesting problem for ISRG in terms of its prostate surgery market is that -are you sitting down- it turns out that prostate cancer in many if not most cases may be a manifestation of vitamin d deficiency. Vitamin d deficiency is epidemic (particularly in hispanics and african-americans). Over the next few years the Federal Government will be pressured to raise the daily requirement of vitamin d to 1000units a day or higher for adults which while still not optimal has been shown to reduce the incidence of multiple different kinds of cancer by 17% in a prospective study. The sad and sick thing is that this has been known for at least 10 years, particularly in the case of prostate cancer. Your governments (NIH) and the industries response? Try to find some patentable molecule that they could use instead of plain old vitamin d as a "chemopreventive" (vitamin d3 -the preferred form-is literally cheaper than dirt). And so they have patented 2000 analogs of vitamin d in the past 10 years to try to make some money. Now I am not against making money, but when you think of how many needless cases of prostate cancer and other cancers have occurred because they couldn't rouse themselves (particularly at NIH) to give a damn about a nonpatentable vitamin even if it will probably turn out to be one of the most cost effective disease prevention strategies ever discovered. That should piss you off! (Have you ever watched someone die of metastatic prostate cancer?) (I've seen the pictures of the prostate cancer cells being destroyed when plain old vitamin d is added to a petrie dish of them.) But I digress, if this eventually turns out to be true (and having read a vast majority of the literature and having 5 years now of experience in this area-I believe it will) what will happen to ISRG if it eventually looses 20-30% of the volume of prostate cancer surgeries to public awareness or public health campaigns regarding vitamin d deficiency? It has happened before, before drugs like tagamet and zantac stomach ulcer surgery was big business (some surgeons that's all they did-remember the highly selective vagotomy-would have been a great surgery for the robot) now those surgeries are hardly ever done. Just a little give back to the community here; have your doctor measure your 25 hydroxy-vitamin d level (particularly if you are african-american) and educate yourself about vitamin d deficiency at vitamindcouncil.com.