What vitamin helps heal tendonitis?

Reading the methods sections: the one vitamin that appears, and why it is there

What vitamin helps heal tendonitis is a question that the shelf answers with a list and the honest page answers with a method, because the way to find out which vitamin helps a tendon is not to reason from biochemistry but to read the methods sections of the trials that have actually treated tendons and see which vitamins were ever given to anyone. The tendon literature is small enough to read in full. The loading trials, which are the bulk of it, gave no vitamin to anyone: the eccentric heel-drop programmes for the Achilles, the heavy slow resistance programmes for the patellar tendon and the Achilles, the isometric studies for pain, the rotator cuff and tennis elbow loading programmes, all treated tendinopathy with load alone and measured pain, function and return to sport, and their methods sections contain no vitamin because the researchers were testing the signal the tendon cells respond to, which is strain. The collagen trials are two, and one of them contains the only vitamin in the entire literature. The pre-loading protocol from the Baar group gave 15g of gelatin with around 50mg of vitamin C, in the form of a vitamin C enriched gelatin drink, an hour before a short bout of skipping, and measured a doubling of a blood marker of collagen synthesis against placebo, with engineered ligaments grown in the participants' serum containing more collagen and showing greater stiffness. The vitamin C is in that protocol for a stated reason, and the reason is the whole of its claim: the prolyl and lysyl hydroxylases that fold collagen chains into their triple helix require vitamin C as a cofactor, and the researchers reasoned that if they were going to flood the blood with collagen's amino acids an hour before the cells were told to build, the cofactor the building enzymes need should be present too, so the vitamin rides beside the substrate as an enabling condition. It was never tested alone: no arm of the trial gave vitamin C without gelatin, no tendon trial anywhere has given vitamin C by itself against tendinopathy, and the one tendon outcome trial, which gave 2.5g of collagen peptides beside six months of calf strengthening in Achilles tendinopathy and found better function and earlier return to running than placebo, did not include vitamin C at all. Reading the methods sections therefore yields one vitamin, in one marker study, in a supporting role beside substrate and loading, and a reader who has heard that vitamin C heals tendons has heard a true thing about an enzyme stretched into a false thing about a treatment.

Vitamin D's observational appearance, the vitamins that appear nowhere, and what the trials treated with

Vitamin D is the second name the shelf offers and the methods sections place it precisely: it appears in observational cohorts and in no trial. Several studies have measured vitamin D levels in people with rotator cuff tears or tendinopathy and in comparison groups and found lower levels in some of the tendon groups, inconsistently across cohorts, confounded by the fact that a person with a painful shoulder spends less time outdoors and by age, season and activity, and no study has corrected vitamin D in a trial and measured whether tendinopathy improved or occurred less. Vitamin D's biological route to a tendon is indirect, through the muscle whose function it maintains and the bone the tendon attaches to, which is what its UK register sentences say, maintenance of normal muscle function and normal bones, with no tendon sentence; so a UK adult with persistent tendinopathy may reasonably have vitamin D checked, since winter insufficiency is common and correcting it at ten micrograms a day is right for other reasons, and should not expect the tendon to heal because of it. Every other vitamin appears nowhere: vitamins A, E, K and the B group are absent from every tendon trial and every tendon cohort, and the minerals the shelf adds, copper for cross-linking and zinc for remodelling, have deficiency states that weaken connective tissue generally and no tendinopathy trial, so they are maintenance sentences met from food. What the trials treated with is therefore the honest answer to the question behind the question: every tendon trial that improved tendinopathy did so with a loading programme, isometric holds for pain in the early phase, heavy slow resistance or eccentric loading through the middle months, and a staged return to the energy-storage work the sport demands, because loading is the signal the tendon's cells read and the matrix is rebuilt in the positive window after each session. The vitamin that helps tendons heal is vitamin C, as the cofactor those cells need present, which a person eating fruit and vegetables has in sufficiency already, so that supplementing it adds nothing in a replete person and the protocol's vitamin C is insurance rather than treatment; a reader short of it, on a very restricted diet, has scurvy's signs to look for and a doctor to see. No tendon claim exists for any vitamin in the UK register and no honest tub prints one. The worked example is the cofactor paired with collagen at habit scale, stated on its true terms: two capsules, 1200mg hydrolysed type 1 marine collagen with 12mg vitamin C at 15% of its reference value plus zinc, 120 for £16.99 at 28p a day, lab tested and UK made, the vitamin C carrying its sentence, normal collagen formation for the normal function of cartilage and bones, the collagen below the 15g protocol dose, and no tendon claim on either. What vitamin helps heal tendonitis: vitamin C, found once in the methods sections, riding beside gelatin and a loading session, and the loading is what healed the tendons in every trial that healed any.

What to check on the label