Archive for the ‘Psychological Aspects’ Category

What Modern Light Bulbs Are Doing to Us

https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/what-modern-light-bulbs-are-doing?

What Modern Light Bulbs Are Doing to Us

Decades of forgotten research show natural light is an essential nutrient, and the bill to bring back incandescent bulbs just cleared its first vote

A Midwestern Doctor

Oct. 29, 2026

Story at a Glance:

•Sunlight is one of the most important things for our health (e.g., avoiding it makes you 60% more likely to die), yet all we ever hear is how important it is to avoid it.

•Energy efficient light bulbs emit a narrow, blue-heavy spectrum that disrupts sleep and metabolism, while lacking the infrared our mitochondria depend upon.

•Decades of forgotten research (now being confirmed by modern studies) show unnatural light is a root cause of many inexplicable physical and behavioral illnesses.

•The eyes and the blood conduct light throughout the body, and when this process is disrupted (e.g., by glasses), significant illnesses can develop.

•In 2022, incandescent bulbs were effectively banned because their infrared was scored as “waste.” The Senate bill to bring them back has now cleared its first committee vote.

The Importance of Sunlight

Prior to dermatology’s war on the sun (which is immensely misguided as dangerous skin cancers are due to a lack of sunlight exposure), the value of sunlight was widely recognized in medicine. For example, in the early 1900s, heliotherapy (sunbathing) was used with great success for treating many otherwise incurable conditions such as the 1918 influenza1 and tuberculosis.1 The existing data in turn shows sunlight provides an immense degree of benefit:

•A large study found high solar UVB exposure halved one’s risk of breast and prostate cancer.1

•A 20-year study of 29,518 women found that avoiding the sun made one 60% more likely to die, with the greatest benefit of regular sun exposure being a reduced risk of dying from heart disease.1 Likewise, in a 2024 analysis of the UK Biobank, both measures of UV exposure that were examined were associated with a lower risk of dying from any cause, from cardiovascular disease and from cancer,1 and when 88,905 participants wore light sensors for a week, those with brighter days and those with darker nights were each less likely to die over the following 8 years.1

•Sunlight is critical for mental health, and many workers suffer immensely without it (e.g., in hospital night shift workers, a lack of sunlight exposure was linked to worse mental health1).

Note: I really got this point once, where after a long period of hospital night shifts under fluorescent lights, I noticed I was becoming clinically depressed (which has never otherwise happened to me). I went home and bathed under a full spectrum bulb, at which point I almost instantly felt better.

Typically, sunlight’s benefits are attributed to vitamin D. However, I have long suspected that many of the benefits of vitamin D are not due to the vitamin itself but rather that its elevation indicates the body is having regular sunlight exposure. For example, when 24 healthy volunteers were exposed to UVA (which does not produce vitamin D) at a dose equivalent to about 30 minutes of summer sun, their arteries dilated and their blood pressure dropped, as nitric oxide stored in the skin was released into the circulation.1 Similarly, a meta-analysis found that spending an hour or more a day in the summer sun was associated with a 16% lower risk of breast cancer, whereas simply living somewhere with more ambient UV was not.1 (See link for article)

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**Comment**

Excellent article that I can not recommend enough.

The importance of light pertains to all, but especially those of us in the Northern Latitude, like Wisconsin.

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Category:

Activism, Psychological Aspects, research, Sleep, Treatment

Lyme, Dementia, and the Tests Nobody Thinks to Run

Lyme, Dementia, and the Tests Nobody Thinks to Run

Sept. 2026

Dr. Hartman and Dr. Horowitz walk through the 16 factor MSIDS model, why chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia sit at the top of the list of diagnoses worth reconsidering, and the brain markers Dr. Horowitz now asks physicians to run before and after treatment. They also cover how Lyme testing differs across labs, the dapsone protocol he developed over a decade, and why he believes the same handful of factors keeps surfacing in dementia, autism, ADHD and long COVID. That argument sits at the center of Ending Chronic Illness, his new book from Simon & Schuster, and this conversation is for patients who have seen many doctors without getting answers as well as clinicians willing to widen what they measure before deciding what a patient has. —

Dr. Horowitz developed an empirically validated questionnaire for Lyme-MSIDS which is more accurate than current testing. He also wrote: “Why We Can’t Get Better,” an excellent resource for both patients and practitioners. He states that it’s easier to obtain medically assisted death than treatment for chronic Lyme disease, and wrote a thoroughly sourced article showing that the debate about chronic Lyme is entirely political and not based on science.

CHAPTERS

00:00 — Why Lyme may sit under the dementia numbers

02:24 — The scale of the epidemic and why case counts diverge

06:57 — Reading a Lyme test differently

11:53 — Sixteen nails in the foot

12:44 — The first live human case linking Lyme and Alzheimer’s

16:03 — Why the same 16 factors keep appearing

21:26 — How the dapsone protocol was discovered

24:03 — Brain markers, and amyloid as a defense

27:04 — Autism, ADHD, and measuring inflammation first

36:30 — Which diagnoses should prompt a tick-borne workup

41:14 — Dapsone: side effects, risk, and benefit

50:27 — Which tests to order, and Ending Chronic Illness

Category:

Lyme, Psychological Aspects, Testing, Treatment

After These Young People Died, Postmortems Found an Unnerving Parasite Link

After These Young People Died, Postmortems Found an Unnerving Parasite Link

04 September 2026

ByEsra Öz

After These Young People Died, Postmortems Found an Unnerving Parasite Link (Breitschwerdt et al., Parasites & Vectors, 2026, CC BY 4.0.)

He had been athletic and healthy. Then came years of exhaustion, pain, memory problems, and psychiatric symptoms. Eventually, he had to leave college.

By the time the 27-year-old died, six years of illness and specialist care had failed to restore his health.

Tests performed after his death revealed DNA from two species of Babesia, tiny parasites that infect red blood cells, and Bartonella henselae, the bacterium that causes cat-scratch disease.

His was one of six cases in a postmortem investigation driven by families still seeking answers about their children’s illnesses.

Researchers confirmed DNA from one or both groups of microbes in five individuals.

The discovery left a crucial question unanswered: what role, if any, had these infections played in their illnesses?

The individuals were aged 14 to 30, and all had experienced chronic illness and suicidal thoughts or behaviors.

Four died by suicide, one through medical assistance in dying, and another from a severe disorder involving excessive immune activation.

Their parents contacted Edward Breitschwerdt, an infectious disease researcher at North Carolina State University, after learning about his team’s work on Bartonella and neurological illness. (See link for article)

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**Comment**

This is the perfect article to follow up on the research on ‘PTLDS’ as it wonderfully shows how these pathogens are hard to find let alone effectively treat but are causing needless suicides and unbelievable suffering, due to an old faulty dogma that refuses to go away.

Important excerpt:

“They supplied medical histories and arranged for postmortem samples to reach his laboratory. Some had already been tested or treated for these infections while alive. The investigation was therefore not the first indication of infection in every case. At the laboratory, the initial search returned no clear answers. The researchers analyzed 125 DNA extracts from blood, laboratory blood cultures, tissues, and other body fluids. Initial quantitative PCR screening, which searches for selected genetic sequences, was negative throughout. Digital PCR, which divides samples into many tiny reactions, then produced faint signals in some samples. None reached the study’s threshold for a positive result. Additional targeted tests and DNA sequencing, which reads genetic material to identify organisms, provided confirmation.”

These poor folks would have been ignored by most researchers after the PCR screening, but Bart guru, Dr. Ed Breitschwerdt, is no dummy and kept digging. Notice they did additional ‘targeted’ tests AND DNA sequencing. Mainstream research simply quits looking after using tests that are wrong nearly 90% of the time.

In response to the question of whether the DNA points to an active infection at the time of death, Breitschwerdt said that detecting a known pathogen’s DNA in clinical specimens is medically accepted as evidence of “active infection.

Yet – for some reason, this ‘medically accepted’ evidence does NOT hold true for Lyme/MSIDS. It’s the perfect quagmire with no end in sight.

While this was an ‘observational study’, not a prospective case-controlled study, Breitschwerdt states:

“I think the best interpretation is that infections with vector-borne pathogens that have evolved to induce persistent infections in animals and human patients are not a current diagnostic consideration in patients with chronic illnesses or neuropsychiatric symptoms.”

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Category:

Babesia, Bartonella, Inflammation, Lyme, Psychological Aspects, research, Testing

Pineal Gland Calcification as a Convergnt Pathological Mechanism: From Circadian Disruption to Neurodegeneration

https://sayerji.substack.com/p/pineal-gland-calcification-as-a-convergent?

Pineal Gland Calcification as a Convergent Pathological Mechanism: From Circadian Disruption to Neurodegeneration

Sayer Ji

May 25, 2026

A Hypothesis Paper

Prepared for submission to Medical Hypotheses / Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience

Abstract

Background and Purpose

Pineal gland calcification (PGC) affects over 60% of adults globally yet is routinely classified as a benign incidental radiological finding. This paper argues that PGC represents a significant and underinvestigated convergent mechanism in age-related pathology, with downstream consequences spanning circadian dysregulation, melatonin decline, oxidative stress, amyloid-beta accumulation, and neuropsychiatric vulnerability.

Methods

We synthesize peer-reviewed evidence across five domains: (1) epidemiology of PGC prevalence; (2) biochemistry of hydroxyapatite formation and its inhibitors; (3) environmental and physiological contributors including fluoride exposure and chronic stress; (4) melatonin pathway disruption and its systemic consequences; and (5) associations between PGC and neurological disease, including Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and Parkinson’s disease.

Conclusions

Convergent mechanistic and epidemiological evidence supports reconceptualizing PGC as a modifiable pathological process rather than an incidental finding. Known crystallization inhibitors — magnesium, phytate, pyrophosphate, and vitamin K2 — represent plausible preventive interventions warranting prospective clinical investigation. We propose a unified three-stage mechanistic model and a research agenda for longitudinal and interventional studies. (See link for article)

Category:

Activism, Alzheimer's, Psychological Aspects, Supplements, Treatment

Autism Affects 1 in 31: One Doctor’s Search for Answers

https://imahealth.substack.com/p/autism-affects-1-in-31-one-doctors?

Autism Affects 1 in 31: One Doctor’s Search for Answers

Dr. Elizabeth Mumper’s 46-year pediatric career, spanning 600+ patients across 20 states, reveals what medical schools still aren’t teaching about autism.
Independent Medical Alliance
Apr 10, 2026

In 1979, a medical student at the Medical College of Virginia was told to make sure she saw the patient with autism at the children’s treatment center. At the time, the condition was so rare it might be the only case she’d encounter in her entire career. Prevalence was 1 in 5,000.

That student was Elizabeth Mumper. Over the next 46 years, she diagnosed and treated more than 600 children with autism from 20 different states and lectured on their medical conditions in 21 countries. Today she is a Senior Fellow at the Independent Medical Alliance. And autism prevalence has reached 1 in 31 children.

In a new article published in the Journal of Independent Medicine, Dr. Mumper traces what changed and what the medical establishment has been slow to recognize: that autism is not just a psychiatric diagnosis. Children with autism often have treatable medical conditions, including gut inflammation, immune dysregulation, metabolic abnormalities, and mitochondrial dysfunction. When those conditions are identified and addressed, the improvements can be dramatic. Some children no longer meet the diagnostic criteria at all.

“When you find a problem that is treatable, it’s very, very rewarding to see the children feel better, and the families are very grateful.” — Elizabeth Mumper

The gap between published research and clinical training, Dr. Mumper writes, remains wide. Most pediatric residents still learn the behavioral model. Her article lays out the medical comorbidities, the evidence behind targeted interventions, and the opportunity for clinicians willing to look deeper.

📖 Read and Download the Full Paper

How Autism Changed Throughout My Career (JIM Vol. 2, No. 2, 2026)
Author: Elizabeth Mumper

👉 Visit the Journal of Independent Medicine to create a free account and download the full article.

Related Reading

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Category:

Autism, Inflammation, Lyme, Psychological Aspects, vaccines