What is Vitamin D deficiency?

Vitamin D is a vitamin and, like all vitamins, it is essential for our health and well-being. Vitamin D is mostly made in the skin by exposure to sunlight. Vitamin D deficiency means that there is not enough vitamin D in your body. Vitamin D is essential to human health for its role as a catalyst for calcium absorption, yet many people are deficient, especially those that live at higher latitudes, far away from the earth’s equator. Vitamin D protects against the development of many chronic diseases, including: osteoporosis, type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, hypertension, and depression.

Narrowband Therapy for Vitamin D deficiency

For six months of the year (October to April), much of western Europe (including 90% of the UK and Ireland) lies too far north to have enough UVB rays in sunlight necessary to make vitamin D in the skin. So, many people in the UK use UVB Narrowband lamps such as our Philips TL-01 lamps, producing a more concentrated UVB light source and providing only the most therapeutic wavelengths of UV light. Artificial light sources allow much more accurate UVB dosing than using natural sunlight, which controls the possibility of sunburn. Typical treatment times range from a few seconds to a maximum of a couple of minutes. Our home UVB light therapy units are very low maintenance with the lamps lasting as long as 10 years (over 1000hrs usage).