Well, welcome everyone. This is Dr. Mercola helping you take control of your health and today we are joining Dr. Stascha Gomanek who is going to enlighten us about who a synergy of two epidemics.

One is the vitamin D epidemic and the other is a sleep epidemic and how they connect.

I believe I was probably one of the first physician journalists to catalyze the interest in vitamin D at about year 2000.

And I thought I knew a lot about it, but I wasn't aware of this connection. I met Dr. Gomanek at an ACAM event earlier in late in 2019 and ACAM is the American college for the advanced medicine and her topic was ways to improve your sleep.

And I thought I knew most of those ways, but she really surprised me and she's going to present some novel information here. So welcome and thank you for joining us.

My pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.

So I think the crux of your argument, a research, not argument, but research revolves around the connection to vitamin D and sleep and the impairment and the brain stem when one is vitamin D deficient.

So you're neurologist by training too and I collected dimension that and MD and you've actually got this is not just a hypothesis you formulate it, but you've actually I think treated over 5,000, 7,000 patients with this.

Yes, which is quite a substantial number and you've published papers on it. So why don't you tell us your journey. You were a very good storyteller. I was very impressed with your ability to present a compelling presentation.

That was really one of the best at the whole event. So that's why I invited you to come on.

Great. I'm glad I'm glad you thought so.

I think you'll enjoy your story.

And it is kind of a story and one of the one of the really difficult parts of this is that most of us feel like we stay up with the current publications and that we read a lot of articles and therefore we think that we know about vitamin D.

And frankly, I was never interested in vitamin D. I was interested in sleep. So I got interested in sleep. I got frustrated by the fact that most of my young healthy patients.

So I was sending a different population for sleep studies was daily addict sufferers. They were young healthy females to start with.

And over a period of years, what came out of that was most of them didn't have sleep at me, but they just didn't have enough ram sleep. They didn't have enough rapid eye movement sleep.

And there was nobody publishing anything about that. Not only was it not on the report on the front page. It was hidden within the study. And I had to actually learn that it was in there because my pulmonologist pointed out to me.

But over time, I then did a lot of sleep studies and teenagers kids and the great majority of the relatively healthy people by that I mean they didn't have terrible sleep apnea. They had a neurologic problem. That's why they were seeing me.

They all had lower amount of deep sleep than what they needed. So the presumption was, oh, they're complaining of being tired. They have epilepsy. They have daily headache. They have things that are linked to our ability to repair our brain every night.

So once finding that they had no REM, I was pretty much stuck. I was stuck with using CPAP devices for those who had apnea and sleeping pills. And that was very unsatisfying for myself and the patients. And then pretty much by accident, I stepped into a finding that one of the young headache patients who was extremely tired and had absolutely no deep sleep on her sleep study zero.

She slept for 10 hours, but she did not get into the healing phases of sleep. And she had to be 12 deficiency. So by accident, we then did be 12 levels. I added vitamin D to that over a period of time. It turned out that everybody's vitamin D was low.

And that in and of itself is not enough to get excited about except that it turns out there are numerous articles showing the anatomy of the brainstem where we actually flip in and out of the phases of sleep.

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