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.