Rickets - is a bone disease that can cause a softening of bones. Symptoms may include a wide variety of skeletal problems including scoliosis, knock knees, defective tooth enamel, fractures, stunted growth, beaded ribs, bowlegs, sunken chests (pectus excavatum), barrel chests (pectus carnitum), muscle cramps and hypermobile joints. While rickets may have a number of causes, historically the most notable cases have occurred in sunshine deprived children suffering from a deficiency of vitamin D. (Rickets is uncommon in the tropics). Rickets was rampant at the turn of the 20th century, among poor, sunshine deprived children living in the industrialized and polluted cities of the United States. Normally, our bodies manufacture vitamin D from the action of sunlight on the skin. However, modern medical experts in the U.S, instead of instructing people to get more sun to cure rickets, took the more expedient route of fortifying milk with vitamin D as a national ricket prevention measure.

These days many doctors tell people to use sunscreen and avoid sunlight to prevent skin cancer. Logically, It would seem that following this advice may cause a vitamin D deficiency, especially for people who do not drink fortified milk. And many people, actually most of the people in the world, are lactose intolerant -- they lack the enzyme needed to digest the lactose in milk.

It seems illogical to me for doctors of today to try to keep people out of the sun when a lack of sunshine has been clearly documented to cause vitamin D deficiency disorders such as rickets and the adult version of rickets, osteomalacia, in the past. Our bodies were designed to use sunlight to make vitamin D. We know, or at least we should know, from the lessons of history, that people have gotten gravely ill and deformed from a lack of sunshine, so I don't understand why all of this knowledge of a lack of sunlight causing rickets seems to now be forgotten or ignored. Just because too much sun may not be good for the skin doesn't necessarily mean that no sun is ideal either.

'Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.' George Santayana