Well,

hello Dr.

Gomenak.

Welcome to True Hope Cast.

Really appreciate your time today.

How are you?

What's going well?

Everything is great on my side.

I'm living in Texas and we have a beautiful

spring.

All the azaleas are in bloom and thank you very

much for inviting me.

No,

wonderful.

And just as an introduction,

just to kick things off,

why don't you let people know who you are and

what it is that you do?

I am a retired neurologist and now I'm a sleep

coach.

There's a new industry because so many people have

a hard time sleeping of helping people learn how

to sleep better.

And because of a series of events in my neurology

practice,

I actually learned about some deficiency states that

are quite common now that lead to sleep problems

of various kinds.

So I have coaching programs.

I have a workbook,

it's called The Right Sleep,

Workbook that you can actually buy on my website

and follow to try to get your sleep better.

Amazing!

Can you just kick in?

So why do we have more people?

Why have you noticed that?

Was that just a really clear,

obvious pattern that you were seeing in your

medical career?

It was kind of slow in occurring and it was I

have to thank my patients for being demanding.

So at the beginning,

I was asleep.

Time that I started into sleep,

which was about 2005,

so now more than 15 years ago,

not much was being written about what to do about

sleep disorders.

We had a very set idea.

Fat people,

males get sleep apnea.

They have to wear one of those masks.

And that was about it.

And one of my daily headaches suffers.

So I had about half of my practice treating

usually fairly young,

healthy females,

have very little wrong with them,

except they have daily headache.

And so they were seeing me and one of them asked

me to do a sleep study after the medications that

I would usually use did not work for her daily

headaches.

She turned out to have sleep apnea,

which is not something I would have expected.

She was not overweight.

She did not have a fat neck.

She didn't look like what we were told to look

for.

And most importantly,

she put on a CPAP device,

which was really weird because she,

her head hurts so much.

She can't really brush her hair.

So she puts on this torture mask,

wears it at night and in about three weeks,

her headaches are gone.

And I've been treating headache for 25 years

already.

So pretty much anything that will make headaches

better,

I'll try.

And all the people with daily headaches are

desperate too.

And in those 20 and 25 years that I'm treating

daily headache,

we really don't have a good answer for those

patients.

They get better for a while if you're lucky,

but then they usually get worse again.

And it hit me.

I'm like,

I'm going to go to sleep.

I'm going to go to bed.

I'm going to go to bed.

And it never occurred to me that their primary

problem could be a sleep disorder.

And because this first patient actually did have

sleep apnea,

but she did not have drops in oxygen.

So what we had been told,

the pulmonologist took responsibility for sleep apnea

because they make the little machines.

But,

in actual fact,

you're going to hear me talk about the fact that

the brainstem really controls what happens to this

part and that we get paralyzed when we're in deep

sleep.

So,

as soon as you get paralyzed,

this part can collapse.

So it's really a neurology problem,

at least to some degree.

So I started to do hundreds of sleep studies in

daily headache sufferers,

and most of them did not have sleep apnea.

They didn't have drops in oxygen.

So they didn't fit the explanation that the

pulmonologist had given us that,

oh,

these drops in oxygen stress out the body and then

disease results from it as though sleep apnea is

the primary problem.

So over a period of a couple of years,

it turned out that the pulmonologist had no problem

with the reset.

And that's because my patients who are younger and

healthier had very distinctive findings on their

sleep studies.

They had no rapid eye movement sleep.

Delayed rapid eye movement sleep or REM rapid eye

movement sleep related apnea.

So they would only stop breathing in the half an

hour that they actually were able to make REM

sleep.

And that took a while before my pulmonologist

actually reported that to me.

So it was not an upfront page.

Dr.

Lisa Jones Dr.

Lisa Jones Dr.

Lisa Jones Dr.

Lisa Jones,

No apnea.

Then there's no comment about the fact that there's

no rapid eye movement sleep or the deep sleep is

abbreviated or shorter than it should be because

nobody knows why.

Right?

Because as a patient,

the first thing I would say: 'Okay,

I have no RIM.

Let's bring it back.'

What do you say and I'd say: 'Uh,

don't have a clue.

Don't have a clue why.

Don't have a clue of how to help you,'

so those results sat there with me for a long

time with me questioning...

interesting.

So just take a step,

just take a step back like when you were in

medical school and you you know surrounded by your

peers and your professors and you're learning about

everything to do with the body.

What what do they talk about when it comes to

actual sleep because

It's obviously something that we all do,

massively necessary,

but you know,

unless you specialize in sleep apnea or um being a

doctor,

um,

actually get into the importance of sleep.

Why do we why we sleep?

Like,

how how dangerous a lack of sleep can be,

how dangerous of too much sleep can be.

Is this something that gets,

um,

a lot of traction?

That's an excellent question,

and I want you to keep in mind that I'm in

medical school end of the 70s and early 80s,

and at that time there were no epidemics of uh

sleep apnea,

fibromyalgia,

chronic fatigue,

irritable bowel syndrome,

ADHD,

autism.

All of those diseases have epidemicly increased in

the last

40 years all in the same time span,

so the first question is what did we study about

sleep?

The first studies came out of Stanford in the

1960s and they were done in normal young people,

medical students,

and Stanford students.

And I was growing up there,

so your question is a very good one because at

the time,

what we had was animal studies,

um,

one of which is really important if you liege in

a certain place in the brainstem,

the reason why we know we get paralyzed is they

actually buzzed a little place,

killed the nerves and watched cats walk around

while they were dreaming.

So watching that happen led us to believe that

Oh,

we get paralyzed while we're dreaming so we don't

act out our dreams.

I want you to picture the fact that we can't

really go inside the brain and see what's

happening.

What we can do is make little destructive lesions

in animals and then we can observe humans that are

not sleeping well,

are humans that are sleeping well,

and sleep deprive them.

Okay,

starting in the 60s,

that's what we've done coming up to today,

that is still what's done.

So when I go to the American Academy of Sleep

Medicine which is an amazing conference,

what I see are incredible experiments done on rats

and mice with electrodes in their brain while

they're Sleeping while they're awake and they're,

uh,

humans that are said to be normal who are then

sleep deprived,

kept awake for two or three days,

and then we study what happens to them.

Now the problem is that those are not my patients;

my patients are people who have insomnia,

who have sleep apnea for no apparent reason because

they They don't have anything wrong with their

throat; not to say that there aren't anatomical

problems that can occur.

But the problem is that in a general sense,

we've ignored sleep complaints of our patients

because we don't really know what to do about it.

So when I've got now hundreds of sleep studies

that show there's no REM,

what I'm doing is looking for articles that suggest

why wouldn't they have any REM?

And what I've got is really studies of normals.

So we've come at it in a way that was based on

the fact that we have very limited ways to look

at this question.

But your question is still a really good one.

And what's happened in the last four years is

there's become an epidemic of sleep disorders of

many kinds.

Most of them are not about the anatomy of the

throat.

Most of them are about insomnia.

I wake up at 3 a.m.

I can't go back to sleep.

And many of the patients that I work with are not

about the anatomy of the throat.

I was looking at,

at the time,

had a pretty routine presentation.

They're young,

healthy females that just had their second kid.

They can't get back to sleep again.

And the kid isn't sleeping either.

And because I trained in the 70s and 80s,

I know it's normal for infants at about four to

six months to start sleeping through.

And none of their kids are sleeping through.

This is a much bigger epidemic within the last two

generations of children as well.

So we're looking at something that has become

epidemic.

In the last 40 years around the globe,

not just in the U.S.

or the U.K.

So,

that would just be listening to you say that

that's amazing,

amazing information that would just that just kind

of translate to me that we've had this significant

rise in these sleep-related disorders.

We clearly don't know enough about sleep and we're

maybe not doing the right studies and we're not

looking at the right individuals,

not looking at the right parameters when we're

actually conducting these studies.

We're clearly not doing it right at the moment.

So,

is there a way?

Considering you've had so much experience with your

patients coming in and talking to you?

I mean,

that's obviously that's obviously great information

and great data to collect and observe.

And having the feedback from your patients must be

must be just wonderful information because,

you know,

they're coming to you with similar similar issues.

And you say there's people with no REM sleep or

delayed or other issues.

So my question to that would be,

what's the type what's the best possible type of

study that you think?

We could be doing to actually evaluate why most

people have got a massively poor relationship with

sleep?

Great question again,

and you're you're asking your questions in the way

that a sleep scientist would ask them.

And I just want to let you know that at the same

time frame,

two other important things happen.

One,

around the early eighties,

medicine decided that vitamins were well-known,

completely understood.

And that.

Vitamin deficiency states didn't happen if you had

a good diet before that medicine was taking full

responsibility for vitamins because they are the

core of our biochemistry.

The second piece of this is over the same ensuing

four years,

the pharmaceutical industry has begun to run medical

research because our federal government,

which was really the only good guy,

let's say,

has no nothing to gain monetarily,

and has backed off.

So we have now changed in medicine also to devalue

clinical observation and value more hundred of

thousand dollars studies by that can only be

afforded to be done by.

By a pharmaceutical company.

Now,

in the meantime,

I'm just practicing as a neurologist.

Okay.

I don't have any resentment about what I do.

I love what I do.

I'm trying.

I'm trying the best I can,

but I'm desperate.

I'm starting to be perimenopausal and starting to

sleep badly for the first time in my life.

And I'm noticing that every single person who comes

into my office really want,

now that I'm doing sleep studies on everyone,

little kids with epilepsy,

little kids with headaches,

little kids with ticks,

all of them have sleep disorders.

If you do a sleep study,

you'll see that their sleep is not normal,

even though they don't actually know that.

So there's an idea developing in the back of my

mind that,

you know,

every single one of these diseases is really a

genetic disease.

It's a tendency to turn the nerve cells on at an

inappropriate time,

or it doesn't turn on an appropriate time.

It's something about the electrical system that's

out of balance because the normal repair processes

that would be happening during sleep are not

happening.

So for the very first time in my life,

your first question is,

how did I learn about this?

I was never taught about this.

I was never taught about it in medical school.

We are still not taught that sleep is the most

important thing that we do.

We're still not taught that if you don't sleep

normally,

all disease that is common right now actually flows

from that.

That the real miracle is not what doctors do.

The miracle is that our body is self-sustaining and

self-repairing for 75 to 100 years.

That's miraculous.

Now step back for a moment and say,

well,

how would I set up a study?

You can study this.

I don't have a way to do that.

I'm just a clinician.

OK.

So one of the things that happened,

everything that happened to me was by accident.

So a gal comes in,

she's 18.

She's perfect.

She has daily headaches.

She has a sleep study that has absolutely no deep

sleep.

And your original question also is,

what happens if we don't sleep?

But sleep deprivation of a normal person over two

or three days is not the same thing as,

what if I fall asleep and stay asleep?

So this gal sleeps for 10 hours.

She sleeps for 10 hours every night.

So if I say anything wrong with your sleep,

she says,

no.

But I say,

how do you feel in the morning?

Terrible.

I feel awful.

I'm tired.

I don't feel refreshed.

When I can see her sleep study and I can see

that she is asleep for 10 solid hours in the

sleep study center,

but she does not go into deep sleep.

I have a correlation there saying,

well,

you can sleep,

but if you don't get into these phases,

these particular phases,

then there are all these diseases that start to

show up suggesting that there are certain phases of

sleep that allow us to repair.

And in those phases,

we are paralyzed,

which is also a really weird idea.

So this gal has no deep sleep and she turns out

to have a B12 deficiency.

That's low enough that even I,

who've never really been interested in vitamins,

I was before medical school,

but not after medical school,

even I am thinking,

you know,

I'm reading these weird articles about how we get

paralyzed and these single cells and how they're

pacemaker cells and how they fire at a certain

rate.

And there's this scientist dropping these little

chemicals on them and making them fire faster and

slower.

Because I have no other answer,

I'm at a single cell level about sleep,

which is bizarre.

Okay.

That's not the way we look at it.

We look at it from a scientist's point of view.

We would say,

what about these nuclei?

And how do they,

when you look at the new newest articles about how

sleep happens,

there are 22 arrows,

which usually means one is really complicated too.

Am I going to duplicate that in any way by toying

around with some medicine?

No,

I'm not going to.

So in the background,

I'm thinking of it in this naive way.

That's looking at neurotransmitters.

That's looking at norepinephrine and epinephrine,

because that's the way the scientist is looking at

the single cell.

So I think,

wow,

what if the cell that's firing all the time and

never gets a break,

gets B12 deficient,

what will happen to its metabolism?

Does that mean it'll start to fire wrong?

So I'm really set up in a place where I could

actually think of the possibility that a deficiency

state of some cellular chemical could make the cell

misfire and not get paralyzed correctly,

not get paralyzed correctly so that they could

actually collapse their airway,

or they could kick their leg.

Dr.

Anneke Vandenbroek,

Dr.

Anneke Vandenbroek,

Which is the other thing we'd record on those

sleep studies.

And at that point,

I start to measure B12 levels.

And I've got now hundreds of people who've had

sleep studies.

And I start to measure B12 levels.

And then one of my patients mentions vitamin D,

and that her doctor told her vitamin D was well,

they gave her vitamin D and her wrist pain got

better.

And at the time,

I was not the least bit interested in vitamin D,

nor did I know anything about it.

It's a big deal right now because of COVID.

But at the time,

it was for me still a bone vitamin.

I'm not interested in vitamins.

So but I'm drawing blood in everybody.

And there was another really interesting observation,

which was,

I don't think 32-year-olds should have any pain

when they wake up.

But a lot of these women with daily headaches

would have ankle pain or knee pain or hip pain or

foot pain.

And I would think,

you know,

when we put on that CPAP device,

or if I give them a sleeping pill,

we're not fixing those leg movements were measured.

And why are those legs and why are they periodic?

Dr.

Anneke Vandenbroek,

Dr.

Anneke Vandenbroek.

And it turns out,

there's an old walking nucleus right in the same

area of the brainstem where our sleep switches are,

that if it's not appropriately repressed,

or turned off during deep sleep,

we walk.

So they have all that's why it's called periodic

limb movement disorder,

they walk,

they have alternating movements of even just the

big toe or the foot or the knee.

And I'm thinking,

you know,

this perfect paralysis is one kind of scary when

you think about the fact that we could,

we could get paralyzed here and stop breathing and

die.

Like,

why would we?

Why would we do that?

Why would we get paralyzed?

It is such a compelling thing to that we just

say,

oh,

we get paralyzed.

And then there's no,

well,

why?

And what happens if you don't get paralyzed?

And what if I got?

I mean,

that's scary stuff.

So one,

it's in all animals.

It's always been that way.

Or it appears that that's the case.

This part of the brain is the same in the

dinosaurs as it is in us.

Why would we get paralyzed?

Dr.

Anneke Vandenbroek.

And then if we,

Dr.

Anneke Vandenbroek do get paralyzed,

what if we get paralyzed incorrectly?

What if it's not perfect paralysis?

What would result?

Could it be that this pain that's in their ankles

or their hips could be about that.

And so I'm not,

it's not that I'm interested in vitamin D it's

that I've got these other complaints that are

common within this population and no explanation for

it.

So I start doing vitamin D levels in hundreds of

people.

And over a period of four months in 2009,

between August and December,

again,

I've done vitamin D levels.

And I'm thinking,

well,

this is the end of summer into when the D level

should be at its climax.

And then it should go down.

If we get deep from the sun,

which is all I knew,

and everybody's D is low,

everybody's.

And I'm thinking,

well,

I have no idea about that,

nor am I that interested?

And I'm just writing a little note,

take a thousand.

I use a vitamin D because that's what the FDA

says.

And I'm looking for the B12,

and the B12 is not that common.

It's maybe one in every five people that are

really,

really sick.

Dr.

Anneke Vandenbroek And then,

and then,

and then,

and then,

and then,

and then,

and then,

and then at the end of those four months,

two guys come in just in the end of December

before Christmas break and say,

'Hey,

you know,

I've been wearing the C-CAP device because you told

me my headaches would go away.

I've been wearing it a year.

My headaches didn't go away.

But that note you sent me last time I was in

here about the vitamin D,

I went out and I bought the vitamin D and in

about three weeks,

my sleep got better and my headache went away.

Two guys tell me that in one week.

And I thought,

yeah,

this is all clinical observation.

Dr.

Anneke Vandenbroek Okay.

So your first question,

which I have to admit to you,

you were the first person who's interviewed me who

asked it in that way,

because this is the way medicine asks the

questions.

How could I set up an experiment to see what

we're doing in sleep?

But that is not really how medicine operates since

the very beginning.

I'm a human being.

I'm waiting in my little office for people to walk

in,

you know,

picture sheep farmers out in Yorkshire.

And I've got this tweet,

I wouldn't be a woman at that time,

but everybody from town who either got injured or

something happened to them wanders into my office.

So medicine actually goes based on clinical

observation.

It is Parkinson's disease that you could see across

the street.

So medicine has begun to minimize clinical

observation.

However,

the reality is that doctors are asked to make a

user's manual for something they did not make.

So completely clinical observation,

two guys come in and say that vitamin D,

and I'm giving them a low dose,

you know,

the first experience was 1,000 IU,

which in these two guys turns out to be their DS

were higher than everybody else's.

They were outside workers,

they had these in the 40s,

not in the 30s and the 20s.

So they had a clinical observation that then

prompted me to go to the scientific literature.

Now here's the really sad part.

I type in 'sleep'

and 'vitamin D'

and nothing comes up.

Those two search words have no connection.

The first article making one clinical observation is

published in 2010.

And,

but the brain,

so brain,

and vitamin D pops up this whole body of

literature by a guy named Walter Stump,

who is a neurologist and an endocrine chemist.

Who's been publishing articles since 1979,

when I entered medical school,

that vitamin D has all sorts of places in the

brain and many other organs in the body where it's

active.

And since 1979,

he has put together.

And since 1982 is his first publication,

putting together the fact that vitamin D is a

hormone,

not a vitamin.

It was never a vitamin.

This error is still plaguing medicine.

It is not a vitamin.

It does not come from our food.

It is a hormone that runs other hormones so that

we can change things about what we do as animals.

It came from a,

on this planet since flowering plants.

I mean,

it is so old and it only started with flowering

plants because you have to start to adjust.

As soon as you have two sexes,

you have to start to adjust when you mate.

That means if you're out on land and there's snow

on the ground and there's no food,

you'd want to have your babies when there was food

available.

So he has already put together a very logical

construct where D effect,

our metabolism,

So we can put on weight to get through the winter

when there's no food,

actually schedule our,

our fertility to match when the food's available.

And why would we have something related to sleep

because of hibernation is really about lowering the

metabolic rate and sleeping.

So even humans actually sort of hibernate,

they don't exactly go in a hole and stay there

for six months,

but they slept much longer.

So this D would allow them when their D was in

the 40s to sleep much longer,

when it was in the 50s,

60s,

70s,

they would sleep less,

and they would be more metabolically active.

That's already in the literature.

I stumble on an article that says exactly that.

And I think,

how come I don't know this?

I can already think of hundreds.

Of patients in my practice that have died,

you know,

about five years before this,

somebody stood up one of the neurology meetings and

said,

'Multiple sclerosis is a vitamin D related

disorder.' And there were thousands of us sitting

in that room.

And I don't think a light bulb went off in most

of us,

certainly not in me.

All we did was,

'Oh,

well,

that's why it doesn't happen at the equator.' And

it's got these two rings around the planet that

where it has a higher incidence.

But ultimately,

that means...

That vitamin D has been studied in the relationship

to immunity and autoimmunity since for a very long

time.

And yet it's still not being treated as a hormone.

The idea that it would be connected to sleep and

sleep disorders is an idea that's so logical.

So,

what happened next was Walter and I,

so I called this guy up and he's retired.

So,

I took my phone call and I said,

listen,

you don't know me.

I'm a neurologist.

I'm in East Texas and he's in North Carolina.

And I said,

there's this really interesting clinical observation

that all these people that I have sleep studies on

that have really disordered sleep on a brainstem

level have low vitamin D.

And you wrote an article about these cells that no

one knows about.

I mean,

I've been looking at them,

this nucleus pontus oralis caudalis that paralyzes

us.

And I've been reading all these articles about

that.

You've written an article that shows there are

vitamin D receptors in those cells that paralyze

us.

Like that's mind-boggling.

Has anybody written an article about vitamin D in

sleep?

And he says,

no.

I was like,

whoa,

this is amazing.

I'm just sitting here and this.

So what we did over another two years was to keep

using his scientific articles and my clinical

observation so that then there was a very simple

question.

If everybody has a low vitamin D,

including me,

is there a vitamin D blood level,

not dose all hormones?

Or about the blood level?

Is there a vitamin D blood level that would make

my patients sleep better?

And it's a very simple question.

How's your sleep?

Simon,

how's your sleep today?

Better.

Really?

Oh,

my God.

Let's send you down for a D level.

So it's not like I'm setting up a scientific

experiment because I'm sitting with patients trying

to answer their issues.

So it is a clinical experiment.

It's not a prospective case control trial.

So,

but it turns out that the great majority can say

as soon as their D crosses 60 level,

not dose,

they start to sleep better.

Mind boggling.

So what,

why do I think that you've never heard of Walter's

study?

Like,

surely you would think that something like that

would be quite mainstream.

It would be quite exciting to hear about,

you know,

that's kind of breakthrough,

especially the whole idea that vitamin D is a

hormone.

Not just a vitamin and how crucial it is and how

we have receptors for it all over the place.

Why do I think that you'd never heard of that

study?

Yeah,

this is very good science.

This guy's got,

you know,

there are other people who have done not his

experiments in the direct way.

So that was my question.

Why would the rest of the vitamin D community not

accept Walter's point of view when it was so

completely logical?

Yeah.

I mean,

he actually was overarching to the fact that he

showed that the same kinds of receptors are in the

same locations in insects,

in reptiles,

in mammals,

in birds; the veterinary population knows that

there's a preening gland where the birds preen

their feathers and the vitamin D goes into this

gland.

And if you have your birds inside,

they get cranky and they peck each other and try

to kill each other.

And you have to give them a vitamin D so they

won't be cranky.

I'm like,

how can I read this in the veterinary literature

and not know about it?

I'm like,

how can I read this in the veterinary literature

and not know about it?

And ultimately,

here's my explanation.

I don't know if it's right.

But so in the meantime,

I want to trace this out to why it became so

important to me.

In the meantime,

I'm talking to all my colleagues in my town who

used to think I'm smart.

And now they think I'm crazy because all I'll talk

about is sleep.

And I do sleep studies in everyone.

And I'm completely fixated on the idea that all

the chronic illness that we're seeing now,

keep in mind that I'm not seeing,

you know,

in neurology,

that I'm not seeing,

you know,

in neurology,

that I'm not seeing,

you know,

in neurology.

In 1910,

I would have been seeing people with tuberculosis

of the spine and paralysis,

syphilis,

diphtheria,

scarlet fever,

I would have been seeing these complications of

infectious diseases that were common.

So what I'm seeing now is really chronic illness

that so medicine has really overcome hundreds of

things,

but it's narrowed down now the things that I see

in neurology.

And I think most of those things can be impacted

to some extent by making their sleep better.

So then the final question is,

why aren't we treating sleep as the most important

thing?

Why aren't we doing that?

Then I become a complete fanatic about vitamin D.

And now they really think I'm nuts because the

vitamin words coming out of my mouth all the time.

So one of the problems is that we named it a

vitamin.

It's never been a vitamin.

It's never been about nutrition.

It's not a nutrient.

Medicine decided that rickets was a nutrient-related

disorder.

I'm going to come back and finish your question.

100 years ago,

November of 1921,

a guy named Alfred Hess presented to a pediatric

meeting,

his findings of putting children in New York City

out in the in the sun,

and his description is heart-wrenching.

His first sentence says rickets is the commonest

nutrient-related disorder.

Among infants and toddlers.

And then he goes on to say that if you put the

kids out in the sun,

and he makes logical comments like you have to put

them out in the sun based on the temperature,

and how dark their skin is,

and the length of time and as the weather gets

warmer,

you can put more of their skin,

but you can actually see the problems of rickets.

And what he doesn't really state very clearly is

these kids are all colicky babies.

They don't sleep,

they don't sleep.

They cry all the time,

they have belly complaints,

or at least that's what we think is wrong with

them.

And the thing that got into literature was the

X-ray,

the X-ray result of the bones,

because at the time,

we really didn't know what the cause was vitamin D

had not been discovered.

So it's a disease,

it's a clinical syndrome.

And the thing that got into literature was the

bone,

because you could show pictures of it,

you keep those pictures,

and you can show them to your colleagues.

But in the background,

this is a description of all the kids who don't

sleep.

Now,

they're not being tested for rickets; they all have

low vitamin D.

So he puts them out in the sun,

he describes that there are now bulbs that exude

UVB light that actually emit UVB light,

that other experiments have shown,

that's the frequency that makes the rickets go

away.

All of that is in the literature in 1921.

And then in 1940s,

they actually purify a chemical called D2,

that was really coming from yeast growing on rat

food that's being fed to rats.

So there's this peculiar history,

which means that these sun exposure experiments were

already well documented.

And then we name it a vitamin.

And then we decide vitamins aren't for doctors

anymore.

And then the next question would be,

why is Walter's completely logical framework not

accepted?

And I really didn't understand that until I went

to a thing called the Vitamin D workshop.

Keep in mind,

I am very interested in the concept that I have

just practiced for 30 years,

with these ideas sitting there in the literature,

but I wasn't taught them.

Okay.

And that means my patients have suffered because of

my lack of knowledge,

even though the knowledge is there.

Okay.

Now I'm getting all wired up.

I'm getting all wired up to actually start a new

business.

I've retired from neurology.

And my intention in the world is for this

information to be spread.

But my colleagues have done nothing but roll their

eyes at me.

Okay,

so now I'm in a place,

it's kind of in between,

I'm not in functional medicine yet.

I haven't found my tribe that will accept the word

vitamin in my sentences.

And I go to this thing called the vitamin D

workshop,

and I'm hanging out at the social things because I

want to hang out with the big dogs who I've been

reading their articles.

And I'm hanging out at the social things because I

want to hang out with the big dogs who I've been

reading their articles.

Okay,

so now I'm in a place,

it's kind of in between,

I'm not in functional medicine yet.

I haven't found my tribe that will accept the word

vitamin in my sentences.

And I go to this thing called the Vitamin D

workshop,

and I'm hanging out at the social things because I

want to hang out with the big dogs who I've been

reading their articles.

Okay,

so now I'm in a place,

it's kind of in between,

I'm not in functional medicine yet.

I haven't found my tribe that will accept the word

vitamin in my sentences.

And I go to this thing called the Vitamin D

workshop,

and I'm hanging out at the social things because I

want to hang out with the big dogs who I've been

reading their articles.

Up the smarter I look,

but that's not what I want to accomplish.

Okay.

So I've been trained for 30 years to write my

articles in these very cryptic ways.

This is,

this is really how so in the background,

the other thing you have to analyze is,

is medicine really about this completely open-minded

I'll do anything to make my patient better?

No.

Medicine is about human beings that are primates

and primates are all about status in any tribe,

any tribe you go into,

it's all about status.

And in medicine,

we've decided that having an honorific doctor,

where I went to school,

how big my words are.

So it set me off on a path of thinking this

tendency for medicine to set themselves above

everyone else has led to terrible,

terrible,

terrible,

terrible,

terrible,

terrible,

terrible,

terrible,

terrible,

terrible,

terrible care.

And what I'm doing now is a coach.

And we are always on an equal footing.

I am one human being,

you're another; we're helping each other.

Now,

interestingly,

in the background,

things have changed dramatically.

My daughter is saying things like,

'You don't have to have it accepted by your

colleagues.' All you need to do is make yourself a

website.

And I think,

what?

No way.

And the reason why you're interviewing me is in

the last 10 years,

medicine hasn't noticed it yet.

But the way to teach ourselves is through thought

leaders who are reading the literature themselves;

they don't have an MD degree.

You don't have an MD degree.

I don't really need one.

I can actually get access to any information that

an MD can get to.

I can teach myself everything I need to know about

all the special words that medicine uses.

That means there's been such a huge shift.

We've educated ourselves.

We've educated ourselves.

We've educated the lay person to such a degree

that lay people are starting with,

why can't I sleep?

I just asked my doctor.

He avoided the question.

And now I'm going to go to the internet.

So several things have happened in parallel.

But the most important is your original question.

How do we study sleep?

How is medicine looking at studying it?

How is science looking at it?

And then the next question would be,

how is the lay person who can't sleep looking at

it?

Where do they go for help?

And why isn't medicine filling that in?

And I'll tell you,

when I'm trying to get continuing education credits

for other doctors,

currently,

they won't give me any CME credits for anything

having to do with vitamin D.

Because not only is it scary,

it's challenging medicine's place within this pecking

order.

Because the lay person is going to know that

they're not going to be able to sleep.

And they're going to know more about it than their

doctors.

Certainly.

I think the amount of ego wrapped around the whole

idea of conventional medicine,

and we have this tier system of going to your

doctor and just listening to what they say.

Don't ask questions.

You kind of go with the program or the protocol.

But I think if you were to do a lecture to 1,000

people in the general public,

and then 1,000 people who are doctors,

and you were discussing vitamin D as a way to get

them to sleep,

I think that would be a very holistic way.

I think the people in the general public would,

one,

be all ears.

And two,

more people would understand what you're actually

talking about than a lot of doctors.

Primarily because they're not really taught about it

in school.

And also,

vitamins are not medicines and drugs.

Yeah,

I'm sure it's massively frustrating.

And it's a really interesting dynamic.

But I want to ask you about,

I'm sure it's a really interesting dynamic.

But I want to ask you about,

so we've quite clearly got this global sleep,

chronic disease issue,

everything's rising.

You would think we'd be our healthiest as a human

population in 2022,

but we're clearly not.

There's no arguments about that.

And the issues or the problems or the concerns

that have created this health epidemic are,

without question,

most likely not biological evolution,

but our health.

And I think that's a really interesting topic.

And I think that's a really exciting topic.

And I think that's a really interesting topic.

And I think that's a really things happening in

our environment,

things that happen in our society,

our communities,

that are causing these sleep issues,

rather than our biology massively changing,

you know,

our revolution changing so much so quickly,

it doesn't really work like that.

So what can you can you maybe hit a few of the

key points?

Like what are the I mean,

there's obviously loads of them.

So tell us a few of the in your clinical

experience.

Okay,

so and this leads us into what happened next.

So and this is what's going to happen in the

public sphere.

So my viewpoint as a physician was,

okay,

we get this vitamin D,

right?

We find the blood level and everything's going to

be fixed.

And what we had at the time,

but I had what you have still is that the reasons

why we are failing and we're so fat is because we

do it wrong.

We don't sleep right.

We don't exercise.

We don't eat right.

There are toxins in our environment.

I was still in the toxins affecting the brainstem

point of view,

okay?

That was what medicine was teaching at the time.

The idea could be a deficiency state was completely

erased from my brain as a possibility.

So now I'm thinking of a possibility of a

deficiency state.

Two years later,

two years after we start giving vitamin D,

my patients start to come back.

Again,

another clinical observation.

And what this clinical observation is going to lead

to,

which is really important,

is that vitamin D runs the microbiome.

The vitamin D that we make on our skin goes into

the intestines and it feeds the bacteria.

That means it determines which species of bacteria

live inside you.

So the similar parallel epidemic of IBS and the

wrong microbiome.

And since I'm not a GI doctor,

I'm not reading the literature about the microbiome,

but I'm taking probiotics.

My doctor is a biologist.

So I'm kind of aware that the microbiome isn't

right,

but I've been taught the same toxin,

you know,

we're doing it wrong thing.

And I think,

you know,

Walter's framework of understanding this suggests

that vitamin D probably played a role in why the

microbiome went bad and why IBS started at the

same time and why autoimmunity is going sky high

at the same time.

But the vitamin D did not make the IBS go away,

made the sleep better.

But at the end of two years,

three things that were still around: one,

they didn't lose weight,

which is really important; exercising more,

feeling better,

walking every day - didn't lose weight.

The second was by now they're starting to have

more and more body pain.

Something else is happening.

By keeping the D high has caused another thing to

occur.

Very important.

And the third thing is the IBS symptoms didn't go

away.

So even though D might've been one of the

cofactors,

and the first article about that,

that really documents my hypothesis.

And,

and I think that's a good thing.

I think that's a good thing.

I think that's a good thing.

And I think that's a good thing.

I think that's a good thing.

So it just actually is a relatively new observation

that actually scientifically looked at if you drop

the vitamin D or if you increase it,

does that change the population that lives in the

belly and that in humans and that study's now been

done.

So in the background,

my patients are coming back saying,

'You know,

I came to you for daily headaches,

but now I have joint pain.' I'm going to see the

rheumatologist.

They're telling me I have rheumatoid arthritis and

I'm kind of feeling kind of paranoid.

Like,

you know,

I'm not like I'm doing something kind of out

there.

You know,

I just published at 60 to 80 is the right place

for better sleep.

My concept should be that when you sleep better,

you don't get any diseases.

So this is clearly not the whole story.

And then a couple of gals come in within a month

of each other saying they have burning in their

hands and feet,

which is extremely rare.

My neurology subspecialty is neuropathy.

And that's not something that walks in the door

often,

especially hands and feet,

and they don't have diabetes.

And they're already on B12,

which are the two things that have been blamed for

that presentation.

So I don't have an answer for them,

but I'm really suspicious in the background that

some other deficiency state has crept up.

If we're looking through a lens of sleep,

sleep is about repair.

What do we need to repair?

We need the tools to repair.

So vitamin D is one of the tools that is needed

to actually get the cell into a repair phase.

But every repair is latched onto other vitamins,

minerals.

Why do we need those?

Why are those vital things?

Because we use them to make repairs.

So it's feeling like there's a secondary deficiency

state that's coming along.

And right at that time,

one of my patients brings me a book about

pantothenic acid,

which is also a vitamin.

And at this point,

I'm like,

'oh,

no,

another vitamin.' They're bringing those essential

oils in.

They're bringing those crystals in here.

No,

thanks.

But it turns out that this book she brought me at

that time when I was desperate and didn't know

what to do with it.

And I'm like,

'oh,

no,

I don't know what to do with it.

I don't know what to do.'

Actually,

it clarified a path.

And I'm going to give it to you as a summary

now.

Ultimately,

when you're D deficient,

that's not the only problem.

And having a D that's low is not what makes

people sick.

It was always meant to go up and down.

But if it's low enough or long enough that you

lose the normal four phyla,

then you lose all eight B vitamins and a bunch of

other things.

So in the final analysis,

the B vitamins do not get rid of all the B

vitamins.

So you're telling me that you're taking those B

vitamins out of the food,

but they never came from the food.

They are being made by the bacteria that live

inside us.

And that those eight cofactors were actually in the

1920s and thirties,

first described as bacterial growth factors.

So the first place that we started to do the

biochemical pathways that we know of the citric

acid cycle or how to make DNA,

those first studies were about growing bacteria in

petri dishes.

And the eight chemicals,

if you've never thought about this,

why do we have vitamin here?

Yay?

A.

Then we have eight things called B.

What's up with that?

Then we have C and D.

Why would they call eight chemicals B?

It's because they all came out of this liquid

preparation of yeast plus bacteria that grow from

the air and the water.

They make these growth factors that help each other

grow.

They have four phyla.

They trade these B vitamins.

They don't even know we exist.

They live in their own little world.

Our biology came second.

The bugs have been here for billions of years.

We've been here for millions of years.

That means that the intestinal microbiome actually

makes a chemical called pantothenic acid that must

be used with the vitamin D to make acetylcholine

or acetylcholine.

Acetylcholine is one of the major neurotransmitters

that allows us to go to sleep,

to get paralyzed correctly in sleep,

and to concentrate,

be distracted,

and come right back again during the day.

It runs our daily level of concentration and

alertness and our ability to sleep at night.

In summary,

your D goes low for long enough,

you lose your microbiome,

and now you are actually in an acetylcholine

deficiency state.

That means if you look at what the parasympathetic

and the sympathetic sides of the autonomic nervous

system,

sympathetic is run by epinephrine and norepinephrine,

parasympathetic is run by acetylcholine.

That means you are constantly in a fight-flight

state,

not because the world is that stressful,

not to say that it's not,

but because you are lacking in the actual juice

that we use to run the rest and digest side.

Wow,

what an incredible summary.

Really appreciate that.

That's very,

very interesting.

In regards to the actual supplements that you might

recommend,

because there's obviously so many different

supplements out there that you might recommend,

because there's obviously so many different

supplements on the shelves in different markets.

I mean,

you can go to Walmart and they've got loads and

loads of supplements,

and not every company puts in the research,

puts in the quality control into their product.

So can you talk about the actual supplement forms?

I mean,

vitamin D,

the form that you would be recommending would be

quite important,

but for the other vitamins that you might be

recommending quite commonly in your practice as

well.

Let me give a little history there too.

I started into this path through the lens of

sleep.

So I have a parameter that you can actually feel.

Is it better or not?

It is my belief that if you're going to use

supplements,

you better have something that you're actually

trying to fix,

and that you better follow whether or not it's

better or worse.

Because what I got to see was if you run your

vitamin D too high,

your sleep falls apart.

If you use these vitamins in your correctly,

your sleep gets worse.

All the same physical ailments you had before can

come rushing back if you do this incorrectly.

So that means one,

these chemicals are not extra and that you can't

play around with them without being attentive to

what you're doing.

So it's not that I'm against supplementation.

It's that every time we find out a chemical and

we think we know the pathway,

or even if we decide that UVB light is the right

thing to make D humans tend to want to simplify

things and say,

Okay,

well,

let's just make a UVB light.

And I'll just sit under that ball.

What we miss in the background is that there are

many,

many other wavelengths of energy that are affecting

your body.

And you've taken one wavelength,

it doesn't have the same effect.

If you take one chemical and you give it as a

pharmaceutical,

you don't get the same effect that our bodies were

really meant to be in a homeostasis.

It's not that we didn't have any supplements to

get there.

It's not that antibiotics are bad.

Antibiotics were actually stolen from the bacteria.

We didn't make them up.

The bacteria make them.

That means when you get your microbiome back,

you have this cloud of antiviral,

antifungal and antibiotic chemicals that are being

made by your own viruses,

bacteria,

and fungus that protect you,

keep you in balance.

So at the end point,

the question is,

should we be supplementing aggressively with things

that we don't know about in a group of things?

So you have to be careful of what you're doing.

This is why I have a workbook.

This is why I have a website.

Okay.

Bad things also resulted from giving B50,

which is one of the things that I gave.

So there's a whole story about what happened with

that,

that led to this knowledge about acetylcholine.

The other important thing,

remember is I'm taking care of people who are not

interested in supplements.

This is regular allopathic medicine.

They're coming to see a neurologist.

They embrace routine medicine.

That means I'm trying to convince somebody who's

already like only 32,

but it's on four meds already,

which I thought was normal until I got into this

to take four additional pills or maybe eight pills.

If I have them take three DS and a bottle,

you know,

I'm,

I have to convince them that the extra expense and

the extra four to eight pills is worth the

trouble.

That means I'm not interested in high-priced,

better vitamins.

I'm doing all this primary research at Walgreens,

CVS,

Walmart,

wherever,

and trying to get them.

And I'm not making up my own branded vitamins.

I don't believe in that.

I want my patients to be sure that I am not

monetarily gaining from their vitamin D that they

buy from me.

Okay.

I have some really,

really good,

really good,

really good,

really good,

really good,

really important things I want to see happen to

their life.

So I don't want them to think that I have a

basis for gaining money from them.

So I'm doing this with routine supplements and it

works great.

What does that mean?

Sorry.

Yeah.

Quick question though: what's the recovery time for

somebody who you do see come in,

who has got,

has got low vitamin D and they've had it for a

long time?

Um,

the low pentothenic acid,

they're not producing enough acetylcholine.

And it's affecting their microbiome; the whole

thing's affected the microbiome significantly.

And they do come and see you,

they get on a protocol,

like what's the recovery time,

but how does that,

I mean,

I know that the microbiome is quite remarkable in

its ability to change quickly and change the

different environments.

And,

you know,

we obviously know that the effect that antibiotics

have on it and depending on your post-routine,

you know,

you can maybe take a couple of years to get your

microbiome back together,

but you know,

depending on what you do,

it could be shorter than that.

When someone experiences this,

how quickly do people recover?

And,

you know,

hopefully they think they're being very conscious

about what they're taking.

They're taking it every day.

They're taking it very seriously.

And then they are,

you know,

how is their sleep changing?

Is it getting better?

Is it getting worse?

You know,

like that's obviously very important information.

They need to be aware of that.

What's the recovery time on,

uh,

on that,

like initial deficiency state.

Good question.

Okay.

So the first answer is those bugs.

Remember the bugs that we're trying to get back.

They've been here for billions of years and they

don't know we exist and they're not that picky.

What was missing was that the D by itself was not

the whole story.

There were still survivors of those four phyla

we're supposed to have,

but they have piles of bad poop bacteria that

don't require D in between.

And remember that I told you that those four phyla

are symbiotic.

So one makes riboflavin and another one makes Simon

and they train.

So what was missing is I'm flooding the GI tract

with D,

but I'm not giving bees.

So it turns out when you give B 50,

which is 50 milligrams of each,

if you give large dose,

all eight,

that's what they wanted.

So it's really,

it's quite simple to bring the normal microbiome

back D over 40,

a blood level of D over 40 plus B 50.

For most people,

brings the bugs back in three months.

And when they start to be producing the normal

amount of those eight chemicals,

you better take away that supplement,

or you will experience what it's like to have too

much.

And it feels just the same as too much and too

little.

Okay.

Now,

and we don't have time to go over that,

but your next question,

which is a good one,

is one.

Okay.

You've brought back the microbiome.

How does that change my life as the person who,

who entered this program?

Okay.

We've said all these things about; it takes all

this special work to bring the microbiome back

because they really didn't have the key.

The key is.

They make all these eight bees and they want those

eight bees.

And you have to give them that is you have to

give them the growth factors they require in this

little bee soup,

but they come back in three months.

That's not hard.

The next piece is a little,

is much more difficult to understand: if I have

diagnosed celiac disease,

I don't have just a bio.

I have the wrong microbiome for years and I don't

sleep for years.

And my immune system has been affected on multiple

levels by both D deficiency and these bees and

multiple other hormonal things.

For instance,

coenzyme A,

which is needed to make cortisol.

That means when I lose my B5 from my microbiome,

not only do I not have this acetylcholine,

but I don't have cortisol.

So there is a.

A multi-layered effect on the immune system.

So the second piece that you're referring to is a

very good question: the length of time it takes

you to fix this is directly related to how sick

you've been for how long.

And the key is that the repair is always sleep.

If the person never sleeps,

doesn't matter their microbiome can be back.

If they're missing neurotransmitters that are not

being given by the bugs or by the vitamin D,

like they're missing epinephrine,

they're missing norepinephrine,

they're missing glycine,

they're missing GABA.

Their sleep never gets better.

They don't get better.

So I look at these supplements in a very different

way because I don't think that it's vitamins that

make the sleep better.

I think it's the neurotransmitters that make the

sleep better.

And in actual fact,

the vitamin protocol has as its primary player,

the acetylcholine.

And there are many daytime diseases that have been

linked to it too.

And it's also linked to.

Autoimmune disease,

but ultimately the key to getting anyone better is

to say anything that makes you sleep better,

including your doctor's sleeping pill,

CBD,

THC,

Benadryl,

whatever you can get your hands on that makes your

personal unique sleep better is what your brain has

been missing.

That means it's a much bigger question.

So your question is a real good one.

I can give you two examples of the engines,

like what's the fastest and what's the slowest.

Okay.

Is that interesting to you?

Yes,

certainly.

Okay.

So the fastest and easiest,

really the fastest and easiest is to prevent this

disease.

That's by reversing this blanket recommendation that

no human should be out in the sun.

That is a big,

big mistake.

Okay.

So you can say,

I don't think I should burn the skin of my child,

but still say,

but it's important for your child to be outside as

much as possible,

but not burn their skin.

And we've moved over this last 40 years from

'don't sunburn'

to the American Academy of Pediatrics recommending

not touching the skin of a kid until they're six

months old.

That's insane.

Every animal on this planet lives outside.

Unless they live in the ground,

like a mole.

That means our biology was.

Really?

Related to that.

And there's all this other literature about infrared

light and all these other things.

So one,

we could prevent it infinitely easier than treating

the disease that it has resulted.

And all you have to do is look at the incidents

of infertility,

of early delivery,

and neonatal care.

My grandbaby was born at 27 weeks.

Why is he perfect?

Because we've gotten so incredibly good at keeping

infants alive when they're born way too early.

So that's one way to look at it.

Now,

the real question is: now that I'm on this podcast

for this webinar and I don't sleep well,

what's the shortest period of time?

A kid who's always been a lifeguard,

who's been outside,

who's never had a problem,

not tired,

learns easily,

not distractible,

who gets their first job at the Target warehouse

and now spent the last two summers working inside

instead of waking outside,

who comes to see me for daily headaches.

Now they're into the third,

you know,

this would be their third summer.

It's May.

They've had a headache since March.

So there's an annual cycle to this.

Their sleep has been terrible for the last two

months.

Usually,

in teenagers,

it's can't fall asleep.

That kid is relatively easy to fix.

You get the D back,

you get the bugs back.

That person hasn't been existing as a human in a

deficiency state for very long.

And the brain knows exactly what to do.

You give it the right materials and boom,

it'll just work.

This is great.

Okay.

On the other hand,

you have a,

let's even say,

a young person.

These are the people that build my practice.

35 years old,

one pregnancy,

that pregnancy results in a kid who's got an

autoimmune disease.

Like women,

the first two years,

she's got 18 diseases: rheumatoid arthritis,

endometriosis,

chronic pain,

fibromyalgia,

rheumatoid arthritis.

And she's on,

you know,

12 pills plus injections.

And she's a hundred pounds overweight.

That gal went up to $30,000.

I use a day of D for three or four years.

So all of our recommendations about dosing are

based in false assumptions.

Fat people.

This is a fat-soluble vitamin.

No,

it's like testosterone.

Would I give a fat man more testosterone because

he's fat?

Testosterone is fatty.

Also,

it's made from cholesterol,

fat,

saw,

soluble vitamins.

It's made our dogma of treating people to be very,

very wrong.

She needed 30,000.

I use because every single cell in her body has

got holes like Swiss cheese,

where the vitamin D has not been used.

And her D level was like 10.

But if you keep following those people over time,

even if they don't lose weight and the frustrating

thing for them is that it doesn't start to lose

weight until most things are fixed.

It does that last.

So she's still 180,

70 pounds overweight.

And now in the third or fourth year,

her D levels are way too hot.

And she's still taking exactly the same.

We've been doing this for years.

Now it drops pretty abruptly.

And now she's down to 15,000.

That means if you keep the level of the same in

the blood,

that means she's using 15,000 I use a day.

And in actual fact,

the way it should be pictured is I take the

vitamin D whether it's on the skin or take it in

every single cell that needs it goes.

And she's still 180,

70 pounds overweight.

And now in the third or fourth year,

whoa,

awesome.

Give me that.

And it sucks it all up.

And then the leftovers are what we measure in the

blood.

And it doesn't have anything to do with what's

happening in the brain compartment.

That means the leftovers is the homeostatic

leftover.

That means if it goes down and it stays down,

it's not going into her fat.

She has hundreds of thousands of repairs that it's

being used to repair.

That means one,

I still have to give her sleeping pills.

She's still not exactly right for another six or

seven years.

Then she's,

once we were using all these things to try to get

her sleep better,

then her diseases start to fall off.

So it's actually a really different what you'll see

when you look at the vitamin D literature is every

single author enters the vitamin D arena through a

certain lens.

And there's a guy who's writing really important

stuff.

Who's entering it through dermatology.

And then the next person is entering it through

chemistry of calcium metabolism.

And then the next person is entering it through T

cells.

I'm entering it through sleep.

That means sleep is still the most important thing.

D is a player,

but so is A.

Vitamin A is a cofactor that sits with D.

Nobody talks about that online,

but we know that the receptor has two things that

have to sit on the vitamin D receptor.

There's another one that has to be with it next

door when certain things happen.

So it's a huge topic.

And every single author,

including me,

has a belief system.

Those belief systems help us direct our attention,

but they have blinders.

All of them do,

including mine.

So it's complex.

Your question is a good one,

but sometimes it's not going to take her 30 years

to get better.

It's going to take her two or three or four.

And the reason why I look at it the way I do

and I give a workbook is I want the person to be

able to see it.

And I want the person to understand that the

vitamins are not the answer.

Sleep is the answer.

Vitamins are some of the tools,

but sleep is really the key.

In this significant career that you've had in

regards to the complete switch from conventional

training,

conventional practice.

And then what I also think is amazing and

remarkable,

Stasia,

is that you've clearly had this big change because

you listen to your patients and you've been

observant.

And,

you know,

so many practitioners,

so many doctors practice their whole lives and

don't engage in that skill set whatsoever and don't

listen and don't learn from their patients,

which is,

you know,

it's quite criminal.

But you've obviously not gone down that route.

You've had this big change in regards to your

practice and your belief systems and you've

challenged them.

And I think that's really remarkable and courageous.

And you've come out the other end with this

wonderful practice and this,

you know,

much more functional,

holistic approach to healing.

And,

you know,

obviously sleep is so incredibly valuable.

How has that massive transition through your life

and career affected you personally from what you're

learning about vitamin D,

what you're learning about other necessary vitamins

and how the microbiome plays into all of that?

I'm assuming you didn't learn about the microbiome

in the 1970s,

but you obviously had to learn and brush up on

these topics.

How has that affected you personally in your

day-to-day,

like how you eat,

how you supplement,

how much you stay outside?

And I think what you said about the whole

sunscreen covering up,

not going outside,

I'm super,

super skeptical about like why we're being told

those types of things,

because obviously it makes absolutely no sense if

you know anything about human evolution and where

we came from,

because it certainly wasn't from apartment buildings

and being inside offices.

So that's a whole new topic.

That's a whole new change of it all has affected

you personally in your day-to-day.

Thank you for that question,

Simon.

You're asking really good questions.

The first is that most of the time,

and I want to just comment that medicine has moved

in the last 30 years into a state where even it's

very difficult to be a doctor now.

And I really do feel that the people who stay in

medicine are extremely committed that their patients

should do well.

Their underlying intent is good.

Other people are not.

And I think that's a really good point.

And I think that's a really good point.

Otherwise,

they would have left medicine.

And they're being asked to have that intention

within a framework of an insurance company that

really cares about things like percentages,

you know,

insurance is really about how likely is the ship

about to come back from India with a full cargo.

It's betting.

It's like legalized gambling.

Insurance companies have nothing to do with

gambling; they're just betting.

They're just betting.

They're just betting.

They're just caregiving.

So if an insurance company that's focused on

actuarial tables is running how I care for a human

being,

that's crazy.

That's just not going to work.

And I when I left medicine,

it was partly because they started with saying you

can't use that drug because it's so expensive.

Then they were using the phrase 'you can't give

that drug'

because I say so.

And I'm like,

sorry,

you don't you don't read the literature.

You don't you don't have the ability.

So medicine in its essence is a human being taking

the hand of another human being and helping them

through a difficult time.

They may cure,

they may not.

The thing that we all want and the and the thing

that's also been important for me is the only

thing that is valuable for a doctor is being sick.

When we're sick,

and somebody has to take care of us,

or somebody misses a diagnosis,

and bad,

bad things happen to us.

That's when we really understand.

What do I need as a human being from this other

person who's my caregiver.

And now I spend a lot of time thinking about how

we should teach me in medical school because you

now I'm a patient much more often than I thought.

I go in my cataract surgery,

I go with my mother-in-law to see your

cardiologist.

And I sit and I analyze what does my mother-in-law

want?

Because she'll tell me after we leave,

what do I want as a patient?

So now that I'm...I,

you know,

I have this thing where I'm getting injections in

my eyeball.

I mean,

that's scary enough just to talk about it.

And then I'm in the office,

and I'm seeing how the people are interacting with

me.

So you'll see this throughout medicine that most of

the time,

the books that are written by a surgeon or by a

neurologist or a doctor after they've been a

patient are really where they analyze what do I

want?

So they still swing back around this arrogance,

I still slip into arrogance.

I still slip into,

but I think I have the answer.

But what I found is,

if I keep an open mind,

every single client that I have is a single

coaching patient,

or every person that I interact with ends up

teaching me stuff.

And if I keep an open mind about it,

it means that I can be a conduit to give that

information to somebody else.

And go,

oh,

so and so just did this,

you know,

I'm still learning things that actually fit into

this program,

right?

Fascinating way.

I just talked to one of my patients who lives in

Romania.

She's a brilliant architect.

She's been sick her whole life.

She had one pregnancy and just fell apart.

She's been doing my program and we just discovered

she started taking iron supplements and immediately

her requirement for B5 went down to like one

tenth,

and her sleep and her,

what she felt like during the day.

So I'm pulling out these metabolic pathways ways

and doing a search about does acetylcholine have

any place along its pathway where iron is a

cofactor?

Yes.

It turns out an enzyme that I knew nothing about.

So that's fascinating because all of us who try to

take out single things.

And even if I say,

oh,

the bugs are pretty easy.

That's not going to be completely true.

I'm going to do D and B 50 and some people.

And you know,

once we get 85% of them to be better,

there's going to be one outlier that has something

else,

some other thing that we don't know yet.

So it's affected me personally,

because now I'm curious about everything.

I'm also willing to take part in stuff.

There's a guy named James Nestor,

who just wrote a book called 'Breath' that all the

dentists.

So the dentists are the ones that started taking

my stuff off the internet.

So I just hung out since 2016,

I've been hanging out with sleep dentists.

And they taught me so much about oral anatomy,

about the nervous system of the mouth,

the face,

all these things that I'm supposed to know as a

neurologist.

No,

they taught me all sorts of other things.

And I would,

I would be sitting in the lectures that they would

get because I was giving a lecture and go,

oh my God,

they're right about that.

That's fascinating.

That means that now I interact with oral

myofunctional therapists.

Well,

they would be treated like they're like the lesser.

Oh,

you know,

they're professionals,

but you know,

most of the time they're females and they're not,

you know,

they're not in my cast.

So what the dentists have taught me and every

single one of the,

you know,

the oral hygienists who know more than most doctors

about the makeup of the mouth and the face of

children and what is that everybody has something

important to contribute and this idea.

So it's much more important to me,

this cast system that humans have,

no matter what,

where they are on the planet is always in the

background because we are primates.

We're not going to lose that.

Dogs have chickens.

We do,

you know,

pecking order.

Why do we have these?

Because every animal that exists is a tribal sense.

We're always aware that doesn't mean we can't be

aware of it.

Then we can be aware that we think that way that

we think,

oh,

this person is all only a dentist because the

dentists are constantly saying,

well,

as soon as you teach me about this,

when I try to talk to my referring physicians,

what they're going to say to me is 'you're only a

dentist.' How can that be?

These are people who know just as much about this

one part of the body.

So ultimately it's led for a much more satisfying

life for me because I don't feel as isolated

because keeping this arrogance and this feeling of

'I'm on a certain place'

when I'm,

especially with a patient,

it isolates me.

I don't know,

I don't realize it at the time,

but all of us have been slapped in the face by

COVID.

The fact that we need other humans around us all

the time and that the arrogance of medicine

isolates us and means that we do not really play

the role that the patient wants because they'll be

willing to,

they're okay with,

I don't know everything.

When I do my question and answer sections,

I say,

you know,

I really don't know why you're not sleeping.

Dr.

Justin Marchegiani Yeah.

Dr.

Anneke Vandenbroek What I do know is what's helped

other people.

Dr.

Justin Marchegiani Certainly.

It's being able to humanize the experience between

a doctor and a patient,

I think is a really big step forward in regards

to being able to actually actively listen to what

somebody is saying and how is somebody saying it,

being able to look at body language.

You know,

we do that with our like friends and our good

friends,

you know,

we're actually like having a conversation with,

we know when they say Dr.

Anneke Vandenbroek Dr.

Justin Marchegiani how are you feeling today?

I'm okay.

We know when that's not genuine because of,

you know,

we're humanizing the experience.

We're looking at their face where,

you know,

we can feel it and it can be very difficult for

doctors.

I'm sure when they're seeing so many sick people,

they're seeing the same people coming in all the

time who are maybe not getting better and not

taking on the recommendations or not,

not taking medications or whatever it might be.

And I think that egotistical side of medicine is

valuable in regards to that.

Dr.

Anneke Vandenbroek: So we need those types of

driven individuals who are confident,

who do want to learn and do their best,

but that obviously it slips into,

as you said,

like having blinders up at some point and,

you know,

the egotistical mindset of,

you know,

I've got my core beliefs,

I've got my belief systems and I'm going to defend

them if they get challenged and I'm going to

attack ones that,

you know,

I might not see as being in parallel to mine.

So yeah,

it's a very interesting dance,

but there are lots of practitioners.

Dr.

Anneke Vandenbroek: And it's quite interesting.

We had so many doctors on the show and their

journey from strict conventional one-way protocol

medicine into a bit more of an alternative mindset.

It's quite interesting that the groups of

individuals that do that,

it's always most likely nine times out of 10

individual of a particular age.

It's very rare that you get like a 25-year-old

doctor with this type of mindset,

because obviously it takes the experience of maybe

working within the system,

working with those insurance companies,

working with the restrictions that come with being

a medical doctor,

especially in America.

Yeah,

it's just,

it's not,

it's not,

it's not an easy dance and,

you know,

I don't envy those individuals,

but there are just amazing people that do come out

of it.

Just going to finish up.

I just want to ask about your blog post that I

read.

It was titled 'Why Right Sleep May Improve Out,

Improve the Outcome of Coronavirus.' It's a really

good read.

I'm going to make sure it's noted in the show

notes so people can get a link to that and read

that.

But can you give a very brief introduction about

like what the links are between good quality sleep

and their immunological capabilities?

Thanks for introducing that.

And Simon,

you really are very insightful in the way you

really do have to get to a certain age within

your practice,

because when you're in your first part,

you're reading books,

you're really,

you went to medical school,

you paid all this money,

you have access to the library,

really.

And so you really do have to get to a certain

place where you realize what I was taught that was

the truth is no longer the truth.

Well,

then what's the truth?

You know,

did they just make that shit up?

Yeah.

I mean,

we,

I remember very clearly when the pulmonologist said

to me,

well,

gee,

your patients don't have apnea,

but they don't have any REM sleep.

Yeah.

And I was like,

well,

that's a sleep disorder.

Why isn't that on the front page?

And where did these guys come up with this idea

that it was fat,

elderly males that have sleep apnea?

Did they just make that up?

Yeah.

They just made it up.

I mean,

they did the best they could,

but all of this stuff we're talking about is a

human being making up a story about something.

Okay.

That means this concept,

as we get older,

as older individuals,

we begin to realize that these things are very

important to us.

And that's what we're talking about.

And that's what we're talking about.

And that's what we're talking about.

And that's what we're talking about.

And if they're written down,

then old people think,

oh,

it must be the truth now,

it's on the internet.

Okay.

Everything's transition now in the background.

About Colvin,

what we have are these observations that if you

have low vitamin D,

you'll have a worse outcome.

If you have darker skin,

you'll; if you're obese,

if you have chronic illness,

you'll have a worse outcome.

All of those are also the same settings of people

who have low vitamin D.

I mean,

they,

so,

that's already been in the literature.

Now,

the change in the way to look at COVID is: if

you don't have any of those factors,

and you've lived outdoors,

and your immune system is therefore completely

normal,

then you'll see COVID,

you'll maybe get a little cold,

and that'll be it.

So,

it and what we're getting more and more in the

literature is the sickness of COVID is not just

about the virus itself coming into contact with a

human.

The sickness is about what the human's immune

system does in response.

That means one,

if your D is good,

and your sleep is good,

you'll just get the COVID.

This is like every virus,

you get the virus,

and then your immune system kills it and keeps a

record,

and you go on and nothing bad happens to you.

Or things are a little bit goofed up.

And let's just say everything is okay,

chemically in the background,

but you just cared for your mom.

And then you get the virus,

and then you get the virus,

and then you get the virus.

And you have mom and dad who both had COVID.

And therefore,

you've been up every night for the last three

weeks.

And oh,

by the way,

you just have a two-year-old as well,

so that you have practical aspects that have

cheated you of the healing parts of sleep.

Even though your chemistry and the way your immune

system is functioning is normal,

you'll have a little bit more of a bad outcome

from COVID.

It won't be terrible,

but it'll be longer and it'll be,

you know,

body will be weaker,

we kind of understand that concept.

And then there's the next one: who's going to die

of COVID?

Well,

the person who has what they're now talking about,

this storm effect of the immune system going

completely nuts and releasing all these chemicals.

That's a person who has one,

no reserve to an app,

really abnormal immune system in the background.

Our immune system was very carefully designed to

never attack ourselves.

Never.

That means for you to get to the point where it

does attack yourself and just does a mistaken thing

that secretes chemicals that kills you.

That's a very screwed up system.

And then ultimately there's going to be this,

I hope I'm answering your question,

but there's going to be this other thing that's

going to happen that we're just starting to see,

which is when we have a whole population of

children who are looking like normal humans,

but have lived their whole life without an organ

of the body,

the GI tract,

the microbiome,

therefore their immune system is going to be

destroyed.

And that's a very screwed up system.

And that's a very screwed up system.

And that's a very screwed up system.

And that's a very screwed up system.

And that's a very Since the beginning,

because they've been told they can't go outside,

therefore their D is low.

Their mom's D was low.

They are not operating with a normal immune system.

That means even if they say kids don't have the

same infection,

what you're going to see is that prompting of the

viral infection is going to cause an autoimmune

disease to be found because their immune system is

not normal.

That's why you're going to see all these autoimmune

diseases like diabetes,

type one disease occurring after COVID infection.

For the first time,

we have national and global records of the timing

of an infection.

And then the autoimmune disease is going to happen.

It's not like that wasn't already known.

I mean,

we know that there is a link between viral

infection and autoimmunity in young kids.

We also know that the immunizations that we gave

to my generation,

the generation before me and after me,

worked great.

But they were given to human beings who had a

normal physiology.

If you take a whole population and you take away

their microbiome,

we know so much about how that affects the

immunity that you can't really blame the

anti-vaxxers.

The anti-vaxxers just saw their kid change and

become autistic after a vaccination in age three.

They're not wrong.

You have to be able to hold two belief systems at

the same time.

This population is not going to be able to get

the same vaccine.

The population of children we're injecting these

vaccines into are not the same human beings as we

had four years ago.

That means we can change their microbiome,

get it back to normal,

get their D into a normal range before we give

them the immunization.

Yeah,

I'd love to get you back onto the show to discuss

your experience in regards to the massive increase

in so many different diseases,

childhood and adulthood.

That would be amazing if you could get back on

there.

But I just want to finish up there.

I would love to talk about that.

Yeah,

it's a huge topic.

It's fascinating,

the history that goes into something like that.

And the graphs and the correlations are kind of

unmissable at this point.

But we're going to finish up there.

How can people connect with you,

Sasha?

Yeah.

My website is drgominak,

no period,

drgominak.com.

If you put in something,

it's going to be there.

It's going to be there.

It's going to be there.

If you put in something like Gopinac,

like Gomaflage and vitamin D,

my website will pop right up.

I have lots of free information.

I have lots of webinars,

podcasts,

written information,

all the information about the why to do this.

I personally feel like the why is really important.

If you want to know the how,

then you actually buy the workbook.

The workbook is designed to be your personal

assistant.

It takes you through in a very directive way.

This is what you do.

This is when you get your level.

This is how you do it in Great Britain.

This is how you do it in the US.

Why it's the D level have to be done in a

certain way is on the website.

The how to get it done is in the workbook.

And it also has,

the second half is all about journaling.

What it is you observed about your body at a

certain phase with this certain amount of vitamins.

Because it turns out there's a timeline that's

pretty complex about how to get better.

Well,

that's amazing.

And I'll make sure that- That information is easily

clickable for our listeners.

But I want to thank you very much again.

I think this is the 62nd episode of True Hope

Cast,

and probably the most enlightening for me.

So again,

I really want to thank you for your time and your

wonderful words today.

Thank you,

Simon.

Thanks for inviting me.

I'd love to come back.

Perfect.

Yeah,

we'll get you back on the show.

I promise you that.

Well,

thank you so much for listening,

everybody.

This is True Hope Cast,

the official podcast of True Hope.

Again,

we'll make sure that everything that you need to

connect with Stasha will be in the show notes.

Don't forget to subscribe.

If you're listening on iTunes,

please write a little bit of a review.

That would be wonderful.

Very much helps.

But we'll see you next week.

Thanks.