TO: All melanoma researchers, doctors, and patients.

I may be an electrical engineer, but I have more than just a hunch that
melanoma is a Vitamin D deficiency cancer.  Please consider the
following.

One of the skin's functions is to photosynthesize Vitamin D3 from
natural sunlight.  As the body's provider of Vitamin D, the skin would
thus show initial signs of a critical shortage, which would affect all
ages of both genders and, if left uncorrected, would be fast-spreading
and deadly--just like malignant melanoma.

Somebody even did the experiment.  Way back in 1981, a small group of
Stanford researchers added Vitamin D3 to a test tube with human
melanoma cells and noticed that it inhibited their growth. (See Colston
K, Colston MJ, Feldman D.  "1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 and malignant
melanoma: the presence of receptors and inhibition of cell growth in
culture."  Endocrinology. 1981 March;108(3):1083-6.)  Since Vitamin D3
inhibits growth of human melanoma cells in a test tube, then why on
earth wouldn't it do so right where it is being generated in the skin?

I realize that new views are always painfully slow to find acceptance
in medicine, and so just as I've done the last few years, I'll review a
melanoma finding in a monthly follow up post and discuss how it is
explained by Vitamin D--or the lack thereof.

Thank you very much for carefully considering this novel idea.

James Semmel
Albuquerque, New Mexico

reference:
http://www.mpip.org/bb/shtml/364418.shtml
Last month's follow up to the 4th annual discussion: "Is melanoma
simply a Vitamin D deficiency cancer?"