There is an epidemic right now, and it’s not a disease or illness. It’s an epidemic of the mind, a thought pattern so pervasive that there are precious few areas left untouched. Luckily, its completely curable, and I’m going to give you the solution in this article. I will give you the tools to heal very nearly any disease, the tools to transform your life. But first, we need to understand what the problem is.
Nobody wants to take responsibility for their own health. They look to doctors and science to tell them what they should or shouldn’t be eating, doing, or thinking about. Many people might even have firm beliefs themselves about health, but, when push comes to shove and they are stricken with disease or illness, they run like everyone else into the waiting arms of doctors.
Maybe that sounds like a normal situation to you, not really a problem. After all, doctors are the ones who cure sickness and disease, right? I am about to show you how you can be your own “doctor”, take responsibility for your own health, and why the vast majority of people don’t even need a doctor at all.
First, lets consider how medical science has never once in its entire existence touched upon the root cause of all diseases. It has only ever been concerned with the symptoms, the consequences. There are many reasons for this, the primary one today being that doctors need sick people as much as sick people need doctors. The percentage of sick to healthy people is greater today than ever before, so what exactly has this science done? It has improved disease, just look around. The results speak for themselves.
If you look at the vast majority of animals in their natural habitats, you see very little sickness, while we humans, who consider ourselves the highest form of evolution, cannot deal with our own ailments. The answer to our problem lies within. Lets uncover it together. Its a long story, so stay tuned, and stay focused. I promise you, it will be worth your time.
Our natural state of health—our essence
Lets begin by breaking apart one of the great lies of our age—the myth of the human as this frail creature. We walk this earth burdened by a story we’ve told ourselves—that we are delicate, fragile creatures, easily broken by hardship. According to this myth, our bodies are weak, susceptible to the smallest injuries or illnesses, unable to withstand the forces of nature without constant protection. Our minds, too, are cast as brittle, crumbling under stress and unable to endure trauma. We are seen as needing protection from a world too harsh for our tender forms and brittle spirits.
But this story, is a lie. We walk this earth not as brittle beings teetering on the edge of survival, but as the culmination of countless generations of endurance, adaptation, and triumph. Our physical bodies are extremely robust and adaptable, as is clear when you witness humans living at basically all the various conditions present on this planet—from frozen tundras to hot desert wastelands. In truth, we are forged from the same iron will and tenacity that has seen our ancestors survive ice ages, natural disasters, and unthinkable hardships. We are creatures that have outwitted predators, crossed oceans on fragile rafts, and shaped the very landscape to our needs
The truth is that the human being is powerful. Our bodies and minds will overcome a great number of obstacles on the quest to survive, even thrive. Our natural state, is health. Vitality, strength, focus, energy, creativity, these are all natural qualities of the human being. The only reason they might seem elusive to some of us, is due to the way we are living. Our lifestyles are actively preventing these qualities from emerging, actively suppressing them. If we change our lifestyles back to the way they were, for the vast stretches of time over which we evolved, then these qualities will emerge again.
This is why the vast majority of us don’t need doctors. If our natural state is health and vitality, then we simply need to return to our natural state. The doctor very often interferes with this process, because the medical science used is flawed. Lets try an example.
You go in to the doctor because of a skin rash. It’s probably nothing, but you want to be sure. You go in, he gives you a pill or a cream, and you resume living your life. The rash gets marginally better, but you end up seeing the doctor again as it seems a little persistent. Eventually it goes away, but it comes back every few weeks or months and you just use the cream again when it does. All good, right? Wrong!
The skin rash was serving as a notice that something is wrong. It could be something in your environment (or missing from your environment), it could be something you are eating, or it could just be the way you are living your life. Whatever it is, the dis-ease, in this case the skin rash, was a big red flag that something needs to change, that your bodies natural systems maintaining health and vitality are not functioning optimally. If you turn to a pill or cream, removing the symptom, the red flag, without actually changing anything in your environment or the way you are living your life, then you place yourself in a precarious situation.
Most people just want to get on with their lives, living the way they want to live. Give me a pill and let me get back to it, I’m busy. Many will even acknowledge that an illness arose because of poor decisions in their life, and commit to making a change. At least, they will while the symptoms are there, the red flag, the pain, the rash, the nausea, the cancer. Then, once the symptoms are gone, removed by medical science, they completely forget and resume living their life the way they did before.
The symptoms are a critical part of the feedback mechanism of a healthy individual. We need the symptoms, to show us how to live a healthy, radiant life. And this is why modern medicine and medical science is flawed, at least as it concerns chronic conditions and overall health. It only ever treats or is concerned with the symptoms, not the root cause of the disease.
Beyond flawed, it is actually dangerous. Chronic diseases account for around 70% of deaths worldwide, and in most developed countries up to 80% of healthcare budgets are spent on managing chronic conditions. Cardiovascular disease, diabetes, respiratory diseases, mental health conditions, obesity. These are entirely preventable in the vast majority of cases, but not if we only treat the symptoms and therefore mask the underlying process which is causing the disease in the first place.
Of course, sick people need doctors, but let’s keep in mind that doctors need sick people equally as much. Here, lies the problem. Globally, healthcare is more than a $12 trillion industry. The United States alone represents over a third of this: ~$4 trillion. So, this must mean the US is the healthiest country in the world, right? Wrong again. The US consistently ranks among the highest globally for all of those chronic conditions we discussed before.
This of course makes perfect sense when we consider that modern medicine is only concerned with the symptoms. By treating the symptoms, we ensure a steady supply of patients for doctors, and a steady supply of money for the global monstrosity that is modern medicine and the pharmaceutical mega-corporations.
Let’s look at mental health disorders specifically for a moment: depression and anxiety disorders. These affect around 20% of the US population annually. How can someone with depression ever hope to truly heal it, to move beyond it, if the only help they receive is a treatment of the symptom? Not happy? Here’s a pill, go be happy, just like in the commercials (don’t listen to the suicidal thoughts).
How many people have went to a doctor with depression, or heart disease, or an autoimmune disease, or anything, and met a doctor truly interested in their complete healing? How many doctors ask their patients: what time do you go to sleep at night, how is your sleep, what time do you wake up, how many hours of sunlight do you get a day, how much water do you drink, how much sugar do you eat, how much fast food do you eat, whats your screen time on your devices, how many walks do you take a day?
Unfortunately, most doctors don’t receive the proper education. According to Gilbert Ling, a groundbreaking cell physiologist, true scientific progress comes from challenging accepted dogmas and rethinking the very foundations of biology. He claimed that at least 50% of the literature in medical textbooks, 50% of the experiments in medicine, are wrong.
I want people to understand that what we are dealing with is the most insane conglomeration of wealth and power that human beings have ever conceived. They, these pharmaceutical corporations, have politicians and media outlets in their pockets, to the point that the biggest lawsuits ever filed—and won—have all been against pharmaceutical corporations. They will not go quietly, not by a long shot. And we are dealing with a situation where every year medical doctors are graduating with MDs and 100s of thousands of dollars in debt, and the only knowledge they really have is how to prescribe pharmaceutical products to their patients in an effort to treat their symptoms. Remember, we are talking about the treatment of chronic conditions specifically, not all doctors. Trauma, acute disorders, doctors are great. But the treatment of chronic conditions is 80% of the healthcare industry in the US, so lets focus there.
Medical research and laboratory animals
Lets consider the conditions under which most medical research is practiced. Some cells are removed from an animal, examined directly under intense artificial lighting and tested with isolated compounds. Sounds completely analogous to nature, right? A rat, placed in a cage, inside a laboratory with intense artificial lighting, surrounded by similar cages… Are these experiments on animals, conducted under unnatural and abusive conditions, truly advancing our understanding of human health? As one of Earth’s most intelligent species, shouldn’t we already know what’s good for us?
In a 1981 study, medical researchers at the College of Virginia conducted an experiment on monkeys. They tranquilized them, pried their eyes open with clamps, and then shined a 2,500 watt xenon-lamp into their fully dilated eyes for 16 minutes. This light had high levels of UV radiation, and this type of lamp is used to mimic sunlight. The monkey’s retinas were, obviously, damaged and the researchers then concluded that UV radiation can cause retinal damage in laboratory animals.
Except, what can actually be concluded from this experiment? How could any of this information be useful to humans in any way whatsoever? Our pupils normally constrict (let in less light) in the presence of such intense light (at least, when we aren’t tranquilized they do). And, even better, we close our eyes. Under what circumstance are we staring directly at the sun with fully opened eyes and fully dilated pupils for 16 minutes? They might as well have set the monkeys on fire and concluded, “our research suggests that in laboratory animals, heat is extremely dangerous.” Great, thanks guys.
This research, and others like it, are why you are told you must wear sunglasses that block UV. You must wear sunscreen when you go into the sun. The sun is dangerous, UV from the sun is dangerous, you need protection. Don’t you remember the monkeys!!!
This makes much more sense when you consider the massive global empire modern medicine and these mega-pharmaceutical corporations are constructing. In fact, UV radiation has an immense amount of health benefits to the human body. Beyond health benefits, it is absolutely necessary for optimal health. Obviously! We evolved for millions of years under natural sunlight.
Circadian Biology
Ok. I told you at the beginning we would talk about how to heal any disease, and I will keep my promise. It was important to paint the full picture though, otherwise you just read the next article, or watch the next random video on how a glass of wine a day is healthy, pour yourself a tall one, and pat yourself on the back for living a healthy life. This is a long story, so lets stay focused.
For the last several hundred million years, the Earth has spun around its axis at a rate of once every 24 hours, giving us a day/night cycle. The exact cycle depends on where you live and what time of year it is, but here in Costa Rica it means 12 hours of light and 12 hours of night. We humans evolved over millions of years, with this 24 hour cycle going on the entire time.
For the entirety of this timeless saga of human evolution, save the last 140 years, we were chained to this day/night cycle. Electric lights were only widespread beginning in 1890. As a result of this, inside your body there are hundreds of thousands of biological processes that are altering in some way between day and night. We can call this circadian biology.
Now at the end of millions of years of evolution, we have the capacity to make our own light, not having to rely only the sun. However, in the process, we are interfering with an ancient system built into the body that governs basically our entire biology. Your body is expecting a dark period, and it’s expecting it right on time. When something interrupts the dark period, it interrupts the circadian rhythm.
Sleep-wake cycle, hormonal secretion (cortisol, melatonin, growth hormone), body temperature, metabolism and digestion, cardiovascular function, immune function, cellular repair and division, neurotransmitter levels (serotonin, dopamine, and others), liver detoxification. In fact, there is very little that happens in the human body that is not touched in some way by this circadian rhythm. We don’t have time in this article to go into all the different ways these processes are affected, but it is of massive significance.
Why then do we mess around so much with this system, without considering at all the effects it might have on our bodies? And an even better question is, how can we live in a way that aligns with these circadian rhythms?
The former question can be answered by reviewing the first half of this video, and this latter question can be answered very simply. When it is dark outside, it needs to be dark. Your central circadian clock (the suprachiasmatic nucleus) depends on this darkness so it can signal the multitude of different processes to begin, end or change accordingly.
Lets take one example: melatonin. You wake up in the morning (at sunrise hopefully) with a low level of melatonin, and the level continues to drop off throughout the day. This promotes wakefulness and helps maintain alertness, focus and coordination. As ambient light levels go down closer to night, the body begins making melatonin. Now, getting closer to sunset, you turn the lights on in the living room. According to your eyes, its now the middle of the day! No need for melatonin, so your body tapers off production. High levels of melatonin are needed for deep sleep, so its harder to get to sleep, and you don’t sleep as good anyway. As well, reduced melatonin levels during sleep affects means the immune system is affected as well as some other hormones like cortisol.
That was just one example. Now imagine this times a thousand, happening every single night. Flip to the other side: sunrise. Humans have for millions of years risen with the sun every single morning. There were no options for artificial light, so what choice was there but to use up every ounce of sunlight that was offered to us?
Back to melatonin, getting those first rays of morning light ensure that we are suppressing melatonin, letting the brain know its time to wake up and be alert. It helps reset the circadian clock and prevents daytime drowsiness. Morning light also triggers a cortisol spike in the morning that leads to better energy, focus and reduced stress.
We are just scratching the surface here, from a lens of just the circadian benefits of light vs dark and 24-hour cycles. There are precious aspects of morning sunlight that makes it worth it on its own merit, but we can’t go into that here.
The takeaway is pretty simple. Get up early with sunrise, and eliminate lights after the sun goes down, especially screens. If you really need a light, try a red light turned down low, as this wont affect you as much. Even still, consider if you actually need the light. What are you really trying to accomplish? Could you accomplish it by simply going to bed and getting up earlier?
Personally, I turn off all lights and screens after 7pm at the latest, usually earlier (sunset in Costa Rica is around 5:30.) I will admit, it takes determination to make this shift. I often saw those later hours as some of my most creative hours of the day, and I wasn’t excited to give them up. I noticed right away though that simply getting up earlier to maintain those hours resulted in even more creativity. Now, I get up at 4am every morning, meditate, and then begin writing. This time is now my favorite time of the whole day.
The main block initially to making this transition was that I simply wasn’t tired enough to go to bed earlier. Eventually though, having that hard limit of 7pm for lights and screen time, I would drift off to sleep earlier and earlier, as there simply wasn’t anything to do.
I would imagine also that people not living in the remote jungle of Costa Rica might struggle to adapt to this lifestyle. However, I would ask you to consider what you are putting on the table by not doing it. Look around. Depression, anxiety disorders, cardiac disease, obesity, diabetes. Is it really as simple to fix all these diseases? Let’s keep going and find out.
UV Light
Life has evolved on Earth for millions of years, always under the constant influence of natural sunlight. People have always felt their connection to sunlight, and many cultures around the world worshipped the sun as a god. Somewhat recently, however, this god has turned evil and dangerous. At least, that is what modern medicine would have us believe.
Go to your eye doctor and they will tell you to make sure your sunglasses protect you from UV. Go to the skin doctor and they will tell you take extreme caution in direct sun, and use sunscreen always. And if you ask why? Well, there is study after study supposedly confirming that all UV light is harmful.
Do you remember the monkeys? The sun produces UV radiation as part of its full-spectrum sunlight, the same type of UV radiation that the 2,500-Watt xenon lamp shone into those fully dilated, pried open monkey eyes for 16 minutes. What else could possibly be concluded from this study except that UV light is dangerous?
A similar study in 1993 placed albino hairless mice in cages and used special UV lamps that irradiated them uniformly across their bodies. After irradiating them regularly for awhile, they waited to see if they developed cancer. And guess what? They developed skin cancer. This is pretty conclusive evidence that: humans are really fucked up. Can you imagine a more pointless experiment devised seemingly by a middle schooler who enjoyed burning ants with a magnifying glass? What possible useful information can this study offer to the human race?
If the study isn’t fucked up enough by itself, imagine that it is often cited as a reason to avoid UV light from the sun. Where are the studies that drowned mice in water to prove that water is dangerous as well?
It is critical to understand that light is a nutrient, just like vitamins and minerals, and like all nutrients, there are optimal levels for optimal health. As well, there are dangerously low and deadly high levels as well. Look at a micronutrient, selenium: we need 55 micrograms/day for most people, but at 400 micrograms it starts to become toxic to the body. That is 1 grain of sand worth of selenium, and this is extremely critical to health that we receive it everyday.
We need to think of UV light in this same way. First, UV light is just part of the spectrum of light the sun is bathing us in constantly. We wont go into the infrared, visible light, and other portions of the spectrum here, but know that each has its own benefits to health, and help explain why the full spectrum is so critical to human health. We evolved under full spectrum sunlight. UV in particular though begs for more detail, especially considering the war being raged against it.
UV light plays a crucial role in health, activating vitamin D synthesis which is necessary for calcium absorption and supporting mineral balance. It lowers blood pressure, enhances heart efficiency, improves EKG readings, and benefits individuals with atherosclerosis by reducing cholesterol levels. UV light may assist in weight loss by stimulating the thyroid gland, boosting metabolism, and breaking down cholesterol. It is also an effective treatment for psoriasis and increases sex hormone levels, with studies showing significant boosts in male hormones, underscoring its broad physiological impact.
These are just some of the benefits of UV light that have shown up in studies recently. They aren’t hard to find, so I’ll leave it to you to put your focused awareness into locating them if you want to read. More importantly, it makes sense. We evolved in natural sunlight which contains UV light, so obviously UV light would be healthy for us. The point is, you need UV light, every, single, day.
There really should be a recommended daily allowance for UV light, just like there is for certain other key vitamins and minerals. Most people are chronically deprived of UV light, both on their skin and through their eyes. Let’s think about it, people spend the vast majority of their time indoors. Windows let most light through, but they don’t let any UV light through. Then, when people go outside, its just quickly walking to the next building they are going inside of, not enough time to get the UV light they need. In addition, if they ever find themselves outside for longer stretches of time when they could get the UV light they need, they put on sunscreen or sunglasses to block out the UV light!
Many people are walking around getting essentially no UV at all! Now we arrive at the fun part, when you start asking yourself why are all the doctors telling you to avoid UV light at all costs, when there are numerous studies out there showing the health benefits of UV light? It is proven that vitamin D can help and reduce the risks of skin cancer, but the only way to make vitamin D is UV light…
There is something going on here, and it isn’t pretty. I’ll leave it to you to develop your own theories. The bottom line is, get outside. Take off your sunglasses, toss out your sunscreen, and get some sunlight. Do it everyday, as much as you can stand. If you can get something done outside, then don’t do it inside.
I’m not telling you to go roast yourself in midday sun, especially if you aren’t accustomed to high levels of sun exposure. Ease into it. You will know when its enough. This is how you heal disease, this is how you transform.
Taking responsibility for your health
It is a troubling reality that people don’t want to take responsibility for their health and well-being. They want to play the victim, running around blaming everyone else for problems they inflicted upon themselves. Isn’t it time to take responsibility for our lives, to understand that every action (or inaction) comes with its own consequences?
If we lose completely our ability to think logically, then we will no longer be able to see and understand the situation we are being pushed into. In choosing to not think for ourselves and taking other peoples definitions of reality, we risk losing sight of truth entirely.
And what is the truth? Our natural state is health and vitality, that our bodies want to live, to thrive. Is this the truth you feel when you go to see your doctor?
The traditional doctor-patient relationship often leaves patients feeling invalidated and helpless, especially if you should ask about more natural approaches rather than pharmaceutical ones. Many doctors view patients as problems to “fix,” while the patients often believe their health depends solely on medical intervention. This dynamic perpetuates a sense of dependency and reinforces the patients sense that something is wrong with them that only a doctor can “fix.”
Well, if there is something wrong with you, it’s simply that you are getting in the way of your bodies natural ability to thrive. The responsibility, therefore, rests solely on your shoulders to get out of the way, to allow the natural conditions of life on this planet to nurture your body: sunlight, water, plants, sleep, darkness. Again, if you can do something outside, don’t do it inside.
In this video we have only been discussing a couple ways to initiate this process of taking responsibility for your health and healing any disease, but of course there are many more ways to approach this. I chose to discuss circadian biology and UV light specifically because I believe these are the absolute most important ones to get right. It doesn’t matter how much you run, exercise, eat an impeccable diet, or praise Jesus: if you don’t align with the natural circadian cycle of the planet, if you don’t get UV light every single day, you are running a race with a torn hamstring.
Taking personal responsibility for your health is the lynchpin in this whole process, and without it very little can be accomplished on your own. You are the only one that can wake yourself up at sunrise to get that morning light. You are the only one that can go expose yourself to the delicious rays of the sun.
And if you don’t, when you end up at the doctor, they will do their best to help you, with the pharmaceutical products they are comfortable with. And round and round you will go, therapy to therapy, chemo to radiation, pill to cream. Until finally you arrive at the end of the line, confused and questioning why you, why this disease.
I don’t claim that any person on the planet can heal any disease 100% of the time. For many people, depending on their lifestyles, location on the planet, genetic predisposition, and the specific disease, lifestyle transformation may not be enough. This is the other part of accepting personal responsibility. Arms don’t grow back. You can’t always undo a lifetime of neglecting your health and your body, a lifetime of running to doctors and taking whatever pill or cream they gave you.
Your body has been sending you signals your entire life whenever it needed you to shift something, and you very often covered it up, fixed the symptoms and ignored the change that was being asked for. I certainly did for many years, and paid my own prices for that. Regardless of your present circumstance though, taking personal responsibility for these decisions will be your only liberation.
Maybe you felt lied to, or cheated, but it doesn’t matter. You are the one who chose to listen to the lie rather than your own inner knowing. You are the one that allowed yourself to be cheated, that placed yourself in that situation gave up your agency.
If you can take the responsibility, accept it and move forward, you break the bonds that grip you. This very often is the root of the disease itself, and is certainly the case in many major depressive episodes and anxiety disorders. How many parents enter into depression after the loss of a child? And when do they move beyond the depression? Often it’s when they finally accept the full responsibility of their actions or inactions.
Neglecting your body and its basic needs, avoiding listening to it and providing what it is asking for, or preventing what it is asking to be prevented, is very similar. When it starts to fail you, you ask why?
Round and round we go, where we stop, nobody knows. Or, we can break free from this cycle. We can decide, in this moment, to take complete responsibility for our entire lives, for all of our actions or inactions, and all the consequences that followed. Being thus liberated from being a victim, we empower ourselves to transform ourselves.
History repeats itself, but only as a trend, only when we walk blindly. It doesn’t have to. You can, in this moment, decide to act differently, to live differently. This is the beginning of how you can heal any disease, by transforming your life.
