alt Hacker News> At a checkup a few years ago, a doctor told me I was deficient in vitamin D. But he wouldn’t write me a prescription for supplements, simply because, as he put it, everyone in the UK is deficient. Putting the entire population on vitamin D supplements would be too expensive for the country’s national health service, he told me.
Ugh. It's amazing how incompetent medical systems are. I was also deficient in vitamin D and my doctor wrote a prescription. When I did the math, the cost was something like >$.10 per 1000IU. But if I bought the vitamins from a normal store, I would pay <$.01 per 1000IU. Since a person lacking sunlight only needs 1000IU, the price for giving everyone in the UK Vitamin D would be <$700k/day. And probably much less since most people won't need this high of a dose and bulk quantities would be cheaper.
For healthy people, taking extra vitamins is pointless, but giving them to people who are deficient in vitamins is one of the cheapest health interventions for the benefits.
PSA: if you're feeling off, make sure your doctor checks your various vitamin levels and see if cheap OTC vitamins help.
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Too add to this, if anyone is considering looking for otc vitamin supplementation, please check to see if the brand you're interested in has been lab tested. Heavy metals have been found in cheap stuff before in the US and the government isn't really screening for this stuff proactively.
If you consider the deficiency a national health issue, you can even subsidize a nation scale production reducing the cost even more. From a state perspective, that should be chump change considering the nation-wide effects.
From a strictly biomedical point of view, mild vitamin D deficiency is trivial to correct and supplementation is indeed one of the lowest-cost interventions we have. But large health services often optimize around procurement, prescribing ceilings, and clinical workload rather than marginal benefits. In that logic, pushing people toward OTC supplements is simply cheaper to administer, even if it looks absurd from the outside.
There’s also a less-discussed layer: population screening for micronutrients tends to be episodic rather than continuous, and the thresholds for “deficiency” versus “insufficiency” have shifted over the years. Some clinicians quietly adopt a pragmatic stance - if the risk is low and the intervention is cheap, they’d rather patients self-supplement without pulling the system into it.
The general point still stands, though. If someone has persistent fatigue, mood changes, sleep disruption, or immune irregularities, checking basic micronutrient status is a reasonable first step. A small, targeted correction often produces disproportionate improvements, even if it sits outside the more glamorous parts of medicine.