BOOK Vitamin B12 deficiency in clinical practice
“Vitamin B12 deficiency in Clinical Practice” (subtitle “Doctor, you gave me my life back!” by Dr Joseph “Chandy” Kayyalackakom and Hugo Minney PhD is available from Amazon and can be downloaded from this site here.
The book describes Dr Chandy’s findings over 46 years of clinical practice, working as a GP in Horden, a village near Peterlee in County Durham. During that time, he looked after an average of 5760 people, many of whom had lived in Horden their whole lives, been born, grown up, got married, had their own children, all under the care and love of this local GP. In some cases, up to 5 generations fell under his care (obviously in that 40 years only the last few generations were born!)
Dr Chandy noticed that people were suffering from symptoms that looked to him like B12 deficiency. Whereas he’d seen it previously with Brahmin (who are strict vegetarians and don’t eat any meat or dairy), here he was seeing it in British people who did eat meat. He asked for tests, and they were refused at first. When the tests eventually confirmed B12 deficiency, he began treatment and then saw how often the same symptoms came up, and how well they responded to treatment.
Dr Chandy was the first to notice that B12 deficiency can occur without macrocytosis – the view at the time was that this was a blood disease, whereas we now know that the main symptoms are in the nervous system but the cause(s) could be much more difficult to determine.
Dr Chandy was also the first to note that folate levels in the blood are far more affected by B12 deficiency than by folate intake. With the same folate in the diet, blood levels of flate rose rapidly when a patient received B12 supplements by injection.
The book describes what B12 deficiency is, how to diagnose it, how to treat it, and then goes through body system by body system, how it manifests in different ways. We’ve illustrated it with 26 case studies of the more than 1000 patients who received treatment at the surgery.
The book can be downloaded as a PDF file. It is 283 Pages and 6.9 MB filesize.
Black and white copy https://www.amazon.co.uk/Vitamin-B12-Deficiency-Clinical-Practice/dp/1090400810 (ISBN 978-1090400819) is available for (prices approximate) £6.15 (US $8.05),
Colour copy https://www.amazon.co.uk/Vitamin-Deficiency-Clinical-Practice-colour/dp/109678291X/ (ISBN 978-1096782919) for £23.55. Note that although there is a lot of colour in the book, it is designed to be readable in the black and white version. I’m sorry but that really is the price difference and cost of printing – the charity doesn’t get any money from selling these books.
It’s 299 pages, which means that if you want a paper copy, it’s almost certainly cheaper to buy from Amazon than to print at home unless you have a very expensive work printer which prints very cheaply.
Also see the Table of Case Studies, Tables and Figures to help you download the right chapter.
The full book can be downloaded from <here>. The full book is in Quarto layout (international book size), the individual chapters are on A4.