My son’s wife gave birth at home last month. It was a long labour that started at 3am and ended 23 hours later, supported by a skilled team including a midwife and birth doula. And then, when my grandson entered the world and the room should have relaxed into exultation and joy, my daughter-in-law had to be rushed to the hospital to address a massive postpartum hemorrhage. Thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, and the privilege of having access to it, she returned home 2 days later, after having the necessary surgery and blood transfusions. A hundred years ago, she would not have made it!

Listening to my son in the hours and days that followed, I found myself returning to an observation made by Bert Hellinger, the German family constellation therapist whose Family Constellations work I have drawn on clinically for many years. One of his many profound observations was that he believed that women in the physical process of childbirth, carry a more existential risk and thus carry more “soul weight” or more “gravitas” than the man, in the embedded system of relationships. Because of the very real risk of death during childbirth, he said “during pregnancy, childbirth and nursing, she gives her life to the child. She’s closer to the process of life and death.” than the man.

Soul weight differentials implies an asymmetry in the couple. The woman, having moved through the existential risk of birth, carries more. The man, in Hellinger’s framework, must earn his equivalent weight and compensate, or give back, through the genuine work of taking responsibility, protecting, providing and honouring his wife/partner, the children and the home. When he provides it, the couple finds its balance and the family system stabilises. When he does not, Hellinger observed that the man becomes light and insecure in his role. He may seek to recover his weight elsewhere and the relationship may erode. Thus, it can be summarized that, in his observation, women bear the deeper biological/fateful burden and therefore they hold a deeper existential position for which the man must recognize and balance this asymmetry.

His broader body of work has attracted serious criticism for its rigidity and its tendency toward prescriptive conclusions that many clinicians rightly interrogate. I agree that his observations don’t map well onto modern views of gender, equality or diversity, and it risks romanticising suffering while reinforcing traditional roles. Some critics see this as a spiritualized version of “women suffer more, therefore they are deeper”, which can be interpreted as both patronizing and limiting. It also risks reinforcing paternalistic or transactional dynamics rather than mutual partnership. Of course, the central criticism is that it applies outdated gender ideology that no longer has any weight in our postmodern world.

I hold those criticisms to be true while continuing to work within his framework, because the central observation has proven itself clinically in ways that I cannot dismiss. If perceived through a more symbolic lens, and as seen through my son and daughter-in-law’s own experiences, if you strip away the literal gender claims it posits that women represent the gateway to life via the physical reality of childbirth (as far as I know, no male gender has yet undergone the process of conception and giving birth, although I am always astounded by the proclamations of some activists implying otherwise), and men must develop reverence, humility and responsibility which in that context, is seen as a call for respect and grounding, not domination.

If you strip away the literal gender claims, I believe it should be reframed that human relationships often involve asymmetries of risk, sacrifice and vulnerability and that these asymmetries can create implicit moral or emotional weight and that healthy relationships may require an acknowledgement of those asymmetries and a reciprocity of balancing behaviours. If one places these observations in more universal principles and does not anchor it specifically in female biology, these principles seem to apply.

Furthermore, one of the secondary observations in family systems work is that the health outcomes of the children are highly dependent on the closeness they have to their parents.

The Harvard Mastery of Stress Study followed 126 students for 35 years, tracking incidence of serious illness (cancer, coronary artery disease, and hypertension) against the quality of their relationship with each parent. Of those who reported a strained or cold relationship with their mother, 91% developed significant illness later in life. Of those who reported a close and warm relationship with their mother, only 45% did. The father relationship told a similar story: a tolerant or strained relationship with the father produced an 82% incidence of significant illness, whereas a close and warm relationship reduced that to 50%. Where the relationship with both parents was strained, the rate of significant illness was 100%. Where both relationships were close and warm, it was 47%.

This research demonstrates that early emotional environments profoundly shape stress physiology, attachment patterns, inflammation, coping mechanisms, autonomic regulation, and long-term disease vulnerability. Bert Hellinger viewed the family as being a deeply interconnected emotional system and children will often carry unconscious tension between parents, implying that the emotional and mental health of the children is not separate from the dynamics of the couple. The child does not develop in isolation. The quality of the relational field between the parents becomes part of the child’s inner world. If a couple has achieved an agreeable understanding, consciously or unconsciously, concerning these potential asymmetries and how they have successfully negotiated this balance, the child stands to benefit enormously in understandable ways; cortisol regulation, vagal tone, immune signaling, attachment formation, emotional regulation, inflammation patterns, and future relationship templates. If the parents’ relationship is coherent, the child entrains to that coherence and the emotional life of the child has a much greater potential to achieve self regulation.

Hellinger was precise about this: whatever the couple achieves or fails to achieve between themselves, the children will reflect. The couple system is the first environment the child inhabits and its order or disorder becomes their inheritance. The issue of weight or gravitas on the part of the mother in childbirth and the corresponding response of the father to balance out the asymmetry, is one of the crucial dynamics (among many others) between couples that contributes to the fate of their children.

What I observed in my son in those hours after the birth was a man changed by proximity to something larger than himself. A man who had watched his wife cross a threshold he could not cross with her, and who understood, I think for the first time in a fully embodied way, what it meant to be genuinely needed by the family he had helped to create. That is what Hellinger means by earning the balance: not merely financial provision, but the kind of grounded, purposeful presence that orients a family, and that a woman who has given that much of herself needs to find in her partner on the other side of that threshold.

We have very little language for this in modern culture. We have equality, which is correct as a principle, but we do not have much vocabulary for asymmetry: for the specific and unrepeatable weight that moves through a woman in the passage from woman to mother, and for what is then asked of the man who loves her.

Now, this might be contrary to the “woke” culture that has become so prolific in recent years, and I expect that I might draw some criticism here, but this imbalance in the relationship and family system is playing out in real time. Scott Galloway and others have observed this asymmetry and termed it the “crisis of masculinity”: the epidemic of male disengagement, depression, and purposelessness that follows when men lose their sense of meaningful role within the family. A woman and a man can be equal in dignity and worth while carrying entirely different biological fates, and insisting otherwise, in the therapy room or anywhere else, doesn’t serve either of them.

In my experience treating chronic complex illness across the full spectrum of the 7 Stages model, an unresolved relational fracture that disturbs the “orders of love” within the family, can be transferred epigenetically to the children, and may manifest in the immediate and next generation as illness. Restoring those orders, which is the work of Stage 6 in the 7 Stages Model, is where I see the most remarkable transformations happen.

If you’d like to go deeper, I invite you to join my 7 Stages to Health and Transformation program: a clinical roadmap for practitioners and informed patients working with chronic complex illness.

We meet monthly for a live Q&A – the next one is October 1st.

JOIN US

References

1. Hellinger, B. (2006). Man and Woman. Lecture transcript, March 2006.

2. Hellinger, B. (1998). No Waves Without the Ocean: Experiences and Thoughts. Carl-Auer Verlag.

3. Hellinger, B., Weber, G., & Beaumont, H. (1998). Love’s Hidden Symmetry: What Makes Love Work in Relationships. Zeig, Tucker & Co.

4. Russek, L.G., & Schwartz, G.E. (1997). Perceptions of parental caring predict health status in midlife: a 35-year follow-up of the Harvard Mastery of Stress Study. Psychosomatic Medicine, 59(2), 144–149.

5. Galloway, S. (2023). Adrift: America in 100 Charts. Portfolio/Penguin. (Referenced in relation to the crisis of masculinity and male disengagement.)

6. Yehuda, R., & Seckl, J. (2011). Minireview: Stress-related psychiatric disorders with low cortisol levels: a metabolic hypothesis. Endocrinology, 152(12), 4496–4503. (Referenced in relation to epigenetic transmission of trauma across generations.)

7. Hausner, S. (2011). Even If It Costs Me My Life: Systemic Constellations and Serious Illness. Carl-Auer Verlag.

8. Wolynn, M. (2016). It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle. Viking/Penguin.

My recovery from open heart surgery for an aortic aneurysm repair three years ago has taught me things that 40+ years of practice did not. The gap between what I knew intellectually as a physician and what I was actually implementing in my own life became impossible to ignore, and I have now come to fully appreciate, from a completely new perspective, what it feels like to truly utilize the tools rather than just prescribe them.

My morning routine has since become the most non-negotiable part of my day (well, within reason; being a perceiving type in the Myers Briggs typology score, I always leave a little space for how I feel in the moment, without applying a rigid do or die mindset to the routine). Each step primes the one after it, sun exposure sets up cortisol timing, which sets up autonomic tone, autonomic tone sets up digestion, digestion sets up the neurochemistry of the whole day, so skipping or reordering any one of them shows up downstream in the same biochemistry I spend my clinical life correcting in patients with chronic illness.

Below is that sequence, and the reasoning behind each step.

#1 Regulate the nervous system before it has anything to react to

Before I get out of bed, in that period between waking and going outside, I alternate Buteyko breathing, five seconds in and five seconds out through the nose, with Primordial Sound Meditation. Most people overbreathe chronically, flushing carbon dioxide out faster than tissues can use the oxygen still bound to haemoglobin, a mechanism called the Bohr effect, so the net result is under-oxygenation despite moving more air through your respiratory system.

Rationale: Slowing the breath cycle reverses that trend and shifts the nervous system away from sympathetic arousal toward parasympathetic dominance before the day makes any demands on it. Six breaths per minute is also close to the cardiovascular system’s resonance frequency of about 0.1 H where breathing, heart-rate fluctuations and the blood-pressure baroreflex become strongly synchronized.

As you inhale, your heart rate normally rises slightly; as you exhale, it falls. This is called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. At approximately six breaths per minute, this oscillation becomes larger and more organized, often producing a marked temporary increase in heart-rate variability (HRV). Higher HRV during the practice reflects greater flexibility of autonomic cardiovascular control and it is one of the biomarkers that most people love to track using devices such as the Oura ring.

The benefits of practising primordial Sound Meditation or Transcendental Meditation are multifactorial. Apart from the obvious downregulation of sympathetic arousal, meditation allows you to “slip into the gap” between your thoughts where you can literally “bump into” your true self, your witnessing self. With steady practice you begin to be aware that you are not your thoughts, you are not your emotions, you are not your sensations, but you are the witness to the arising and falling of these sensory phenomena. See my short blog on this subject.

#2 Sunrise sets the clock everything else runs on

I wake at least an hour before sunrise, practice breathing and PSM and then get outside as the sun crests over the horizon. I should get up when it starts to get light outside but when in Canada, I get up a little after it gets light. I usually sit in the hot tub or in a chair, barefoot, no glasses, and watch the morning sunrise and view over the lake for at least forty-five minutes. On cloudy days I follow exactly the same routine because outdoor light is still dramatically brighter than indoor lighting (100-500 lux versus 20,0000 to 50,000 lux). Some red and infrared wavelengths of light still penetrate through cloud layers although their intensity is reduced. UVB is reduced more substantially by clouds with UVA having greater penetrance than UVB.

Rationale: Morning light calibrates the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), the brain’s master circadian clock, which times the day’s entire hormonal cascade. Andrew Huberman’s work at Stanford found that light exposure within 30 minutes of waking produces a 50% sharper cortisol peak than waking without it, which translates clinically into steadier energy and a lower cortisol baseline for the rest of the day. Within minutes of natural light entering the eyes, specialized retinal cells called Intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGC’s) send signals to the SCN which then helps synchronize hundreds of other biological rhythms including cortisol timing, melatonin production later in the evening, body temperature, hormonal and neurotransmitter production, immune function, mitochondrial metabolism, glucose and leptin regulation and sleep quality.

Natural daylight is one of the strongest biological signals the human body receives. Don’t miss it or shrug it off as irrelevant.

#3 Cold water exposure

When I am in Cape Town, I swim in the Atlantic ocean, which averages around 10-15°C (50-59ºF) in summer. (I don’t do this in the morning however, usually mid afternoon).

When in Canada, I swim in the Bow River many evenings but I must confess to being a bit of a fair weather devotee. Cold winds, rain – I am not so brave! So, I compensate by having cold showers in the morning. At present I am trying to increase my endurance beyond 1 minute to 2 minutes. I am not there yet. I find this part of the routine one of the most challenging and the least enjoyable. Although I must say, after emerging from colder temperatures, there is definitely a rush of mental clarity and physical energy which seems to compensate for the sheer unpleasantness of this hack. And I am not even doing ice plunging yet! (seriously, I doubt I ever will – Wim Hof be damned!)

Rationale: A study in the European Journal of Applied Physiology found brief cold exposure raises circulating norepinephrine by 200 to 300% and dopamine by up to 250%, an elevation that holds for hours, unlike the dopamine spike from a phone screen, which decays in minutes. Norepinephrine Improves attention, increases alertness, enhances mood, and improves focus and motivation. Many people describe feeling mentally clear and energized for several hours after a cold plunge.

In my own monitoring, cold water swimming in Cape Town doubled my HRV readings, a signal of improved autonomic resilience. Studies have shown that regular cold exposure activates the sympathetic nervous system during immersion, followed by a rebound increase in parasympathetic activity during recovery. Over time, many people experience:

• Improved stress resilience

• Better autonomic flexibility

• Increased heart-rate variability (HRV)

• Greater tolerance to physiological stress

In other words, you’re training the nervous system to recover more efficiently from stress. Furthermore, repeated cold exposure stimulates thermogenesis. This includes activation of brown adipose tissue (brown fat), which:

• Burns glucose and fatty acids to generate heat

• Increases energy expenditure

• May improve insulin sensitivity and metabolic flexibility

#4 Hydration

Before consuming anything, I drink about a ½ litre of filtered water using the SpringAqua filtration system, with added trace minerals and salt. Water filters such as reverse osmosis systems strip out contaminants but also strip the minerals that give water its electrical conductivity, and without that conductivity, water is not absorbed by your cells. You end up drinking plenty of water but remain cellularly dehydrated. I also add approximately 500 millilitres of deuterium depleted water to my daily consumption of water.

Rationale: there are many benefits of using filtered water such as the reduction of chlorine and chloramine with improved taste and odor, reduced exposure to disinfectant by-products, reduction of contaminants such as lead, mercury, cadmium, pesticides and herbicides, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and PFAS (“forever chemicals”) and some pharmaceutical residues.

Unlike reverse osmosis systems, many SpringAqua systems are designed to retain naturally occurring minerals such as calcium, magnesium and potassium. Using a home filtration system reduces reliance on bottled water, decreasing exposure to: microplastics, plasticizers and environmental waste.

SpringAqua also promotes concepts such as: structured water, vortexing Increased exclusion zone (EZ) water, improved cellular hydration, and enhanced mitochondrial function. These ideas are inspired in part by the work of Dr. Gerald Pollack on exclusion zone water.

#5 Breakfast: When is just as important as what

I eat my largest meal within 90 minutes of sunrise; mostly ketogenic, organic, grass fed, grass finished, meat (usually sausage and or hamburger patties) and eggs with vegetables in smaller quantities, usually sauerkraut. Salmon and sardines are another protein/fat option for breakfast. I sometimes will have half an avocado. I stop eating by 6pm, before the sun sets (in Canada in winter, it’s even earlier). In order to stay in ketosis, (I use the Keto-Mojo, a handheld finger-stick blood meter to measure my blood sugars and ketones), I will often have a teaspoon of coconut butter and some macadamia nuts.

Rationale: Digestion has its own circadian rhythm, and a high-protein and fat breakfast keeps blood glucose stable through the morning, decreases late morning blood sugar crashes, supports neurotransmitter synthesis and avoids the insulin spike a carbohydrate-led breakfast reliably produces. Eating in this way improves satiety and results in more consistent energy throughout the day. Whether someone needs to remain in nutritional ketosis all day is a separate question, but beginning the day with a nutrient-dense, protein-rich breakfast is, in my view, one of the simplest dietary interventions for improving metabolic health.

#6 Movement

After the surgery and six months of sitting writing and teaching my 7 Stages to Health and Transformation Program, my hips seized up and my mobility narrowed with them, surfing has been the biggest casualty. Three times a week I attend a range of movement class with a personal trainer working through functional patterns. I find these exercises genuinely unpleasant but I have no choice so I do them anyway. Once a week I get hands-on myofascial work through Tom Myers’ Anatomy Trains framework. One technique stretches the fascia, the other teaches the body to move inside the new range. I did not understand how necessary either was until I had lost the capacity for both.

Rationale: The purpose is not simply about “stretching tight muscles.” It’s about restoring the body’s mechanical and neurological capacity to move efficiently. After surgery and prolonged immobility, the body doesn’t just lose strength, it loses movement options. Muscles shorten, fascia becomes less adaptable, joints lose excursion, and, perhaps most importantly, the nervous system begins to regard those restricted movement patterns as the new normal. It felt terrible to find myself in this restricted pattern.

Fascia is a continuous connective tissue matrix that links muscles from head to toe. Following surgery, inflammation, or prolonged sitting, fascial tissues may become stiffer, less hydrated, and less capable of transmitting force efficiently. Hands-on treatment may reduce local stiffness, improve tissue hydration and sliding between fascial layers, and alter the sensory input coming from the fascia. In many cases, the immediate benefit is neurological as much as mechanical: the brain perceives less threat and temporarily allows greater movement.

What was affected the most was my surfing ability. No longer could I “pop-up” from lying to standing when catching waves. Thank god for YouTube and hundreds of videos of “how to improve your surfing popups”. I send my trainer at least one video a day of these self help exercises and they seem to be working (although a little too slowly for my liking). Working on hip flexors, quads, gluts and hamstrings, external and internal rotators is my new jam! Who would have thought this is where I would end up. Having once surfed 15 foot waves with impunity and fearlessness, now struggling to stand up in 2 foot slop is humiliating!

Closing the Day

When in South Africa, I usually watch the sun set over the Atlantic ocean, a sublime experience. Then its darkness. I usually read for an hour or so using a red light lamp before sleeping. I also deactivate the electrical wiring to the lamps behind my bed.

Rationale: Melatonin’s oldest role is not as a sleep aid but as the body’s master intracellular antioxidant, and evening blue light of the kind an LED screen provides can suppress its secretion by 50% or more. During deep sleep, astroglial cells shrink, increasing the interstitial space available for cerebrospinal fluid to clear the day’s neurotoxic waste, a mechanism Xie and colleagues documented in Science in 2013. A screen at 10 PM stops that process before it even starts so watching TV at night is fraught with potential problems. If I do watch TV it is with dark orange to red glasses, a practice that I find quite annoying but I do it anyway. I do have a black and white Daylight tablet which I occasionally look at at night. The Daylight Computer is a 10.5-inch black-and-white tablet/computer designed to be easy on the eyes and to reduce digital distraction.

Summary

In my career treating complex chronic illness, I have watched practices like these, unglamorous, repetitive, easy to dismiss, do more for a patient’s trajectory than almost any single prescription I have written. Foundational work rarely announces itself. It just quietly becomes the reason everything else finally holds.

One of the biggest challenges post-surgery has been my sleep. Sorting it out sent me back into the literature on what actually produces the need to sleep and what repairs the body overnight. I was reminded of key things about sleep that I had almost forgotten and came across some new information that has been genuinely helpful. I have written a series of articles on sleep, the first being “The Mitochondrial Architecture of Sleep”. Read it here.

Yours in health,

Bruce

I often have patients arrive in my office having followed a strict dietary protocol with real discipline. Ketogenic for three years, or carnivore for two years, or scrupulously plant based for a decade, and they feel no better than when they started. Keto, vegan, paleo, high fat, low fat, carnivore, intermittent fasting, each has its own literature, its own converts and its own explanation for why the others fail.

The problem is that every one of these diets is an argument about macro and micro composition: which macronutrient, which micronutrient, in what ratio, at what total. But your mitochondria are reading and relying on a different signal altogether. What each of these diets is missing is far more fundamental:

Food is more than just fuel. It’s structured sunlight encoded with photonic information your mitochondria are built to read.

A local, seasonal, organic diet does more than lower inflammation, steady insulin and glucose, and support mitochondrial repair. It tells your body what season it is, what latitude it is sitting at, and what the coming months are likely to hold. When you eat food that doesn’t match your environment, because it was flown in from another latitude and another season, you feed your cells misinformation and create metabolic confusion.

Living food still carries the light that made it

Every living thing gives off light. In the 1970s the German biophysicist Fritz-Albert Popp found that living tissue emits a faint, steady stream of photons, far too dim for the eye to see but easy enough to measure in a dark chamber. He called them biophotons, and he argued that this light is not background noise but a means by which cells regulate one another.

How brightly a food glows tracks how alive it still is. Seeds give off more light when they germinate vigorously than when they are weak. Organically grown fruit glows more brightly than conventionally grown fruit of the same species. Popcorn does not glow at all! Popp himself could tell an organic tomato from a supermarket tomato, and a free-range egg from a battery egg, by how they glowed.

A tomato picked green in another hemisphere, gassed into color and trucked for three weeks has been metabolically winding down that entire time. Ultra-processed, irradiated and long-shelf-life foods emit almost no coherent light at all. Dead food, dead signal. It may still deliver calories, but not the cellular instruction your mitochondria depend on.

Biophotons are the language your cells listen to, and the language they speak back in. They guide how genes are read, how a cell manages its electrons, and how mitochondria signal to each other. When you eat a fresh vegetable and you take in the life-giving light held in its chlorophyll, along with the antioxidant enzymes the plant builds while standing in that light, both go to work on repair once they are inside you.

Mitochondria read light

Mitochondria are quantum engines. They decode the electrons and photons in food to produce ATP, redox signals and light of their own, and to do that well they need a clean signal coming in. Michael Hamblin’s work showed where the light ends up. Inside every mitochondrial inner membrane sits an enzyme called cytochrome c oxidase, or Complex IV of the mitochondrial electron transport chain. It sits at the end of the assembly line, handing electrons to oxygen, and it doubles as a photoacceptor. Shine red or near-infrared light on that enzyme and it speeds up, and the cell’s battery charges. The same machinery that handles the electrons stripped from your food handles photons. Food and light arrive at the same door.

Jack Kruse puts the geography of it plainly: “The photons of light that are hitting the food in that particular latitude and longitude should be eaten by the people in that latitude and longitude.” Food ripened under the same sun you are standing in arrives with the nutrients, the water and the plant compounds that match the season your tissues are already keeping time with.

Blueberries from Peru in Calgary in January tell a mid-winter body that it is somewhere warm and abundant, while the light through the window tells it the opposite. A body told one story by its food and another by its light is running on mixed signals, and mixed signals sit upstream of most of the chronic disease I treat.

Summer metabolism and winter metabolism are different machines

The body takes seasons far more seriously than most medicine does. Close to a quarter of our genes rise and fall over the course of a year. Through the northern winter the blood carries a measurably more inflammatory profile, in the very months when heart disease, depression and autoimmune flares peak, and in summer the whole pattern runs in reverse. A body that rewrites a quarter of its gene expression between February and August knows what month it is, and it works that out from light, from temperature and from what arrives on the plate.

Metabolism keeps the same calendar using two switches. mTOR is the growth switch (anabolic metabolism). In summer, prolonged UVB exposure activates mTOR and enhances POMC and leptin signaling, promoting growth, energy storage, reproduction and satiety. AMPK is the repair switch (catabolic metabolism). In winter, shorter days and cold exposure stimulate AMPK, triggering fat burning, repair, autophagy and mitochondrial biogenesis.

Seasonal foods reinforce these pathways. Summer fruits deliver antioxidants to counter UV-induced stress, while winter root vegetables support gut health and short-chain fatty acid (SCFA) production, feeding AMPK-driven repair.

Eating summer carbohydrates through February in Calgary keeps the growth switch on when repair should be happening.

Inflammation carries on, the leptin signaling that governs appetite and fat storage degrades, and the repair window that winter exists to provide never opens.

I use this seasonally with my patients. Summer mode is the permissive one. Winter mode runs more efficiently with high fat, moderate protein and carbohydrates below 25 g a day, alongside cold exposure, dim evenings and strict circadian alignment.

Food resets the clock in the liver

Meal timing carries instructions of its own. Feed animals at the wrong part of the day and the circadian clocks in the liver, kidney, heart and pancreas shift by as much as 12 hours, while the master clock in the brain does not move at all. The liver resets the fastest. Within a week, every organ stops listening to the brain and starts following the food.

A person eating their largest meal at 9pm is running their liver on one time zone and their brain on another. Meal timing alone creates that split, and meal timing alone corrects it. The largest meal of the day should be breakfast, built on 50 to 75 g of protein along with fat, from pastured eggs, grass-fed and wild meats or fish, and no carbohydrate. The last meal should finish before 5 or 6pm, leaving three to four hours before sleep. Nothing between meals, and nothing at night.

Why diet comes third

Understanding this changes how we think about diet. It explains why diets that “should” work often don’t, and that the real signal is further upstream.

In my practice food is the third intervention, not the first. Eating local and seasonal food is essential but not enough. Your mitochondria respond to a number of inputs, not food in isolation, so any dietary interventions must be integrated within the broader health cycle principles, including but not limited to:

Light: Mitochondria are tuned to red and infrared light frequencies. Sunlight contains visible red light (~620–700 nm) and substantial near-infrared (NIR, ~700–1400 nm), as well as longer-wavelength infrared. Morning sunlight stimulates POMC, or pro-opiomelanocortin, a large precursor protein (prohormone) that can be enzymatically cut into several biologically active peptide hormones. Morning light also raises mitochondrial melatonin and redox potential, while artificial blue light after dark does the reverse, depleting mitochondrial function and suppressing melatonin. A patient eating flawlessly under blue light until midnight has undone the meal before they finished it.

Hydration: Structured or EZ water, the ordered water that forms against the surfaces inside a cell, is what protein-based enzymes need in order to work efficiently, and that includes the enzymes that break down histamine. Without it, even the most carefully planned anti-inflammatory food on the plate may never deliver its effect.

Circadian rhythm: Food is a powerful zeitgeber, a synchronizer of biological rhythms. Eating at the wrong time, especially late at night, disrupts leptin, insulin, and mitochondrial energetics, while daylight-aligned meals restore redox homeostasis.

Cold exposure: Seasonal adaptation supports mitochondrial uncoupling, increasing thermogenesis and metabolic flexibility. This also improves SCFA production and gut-brain axis regulation.

Jerry Tennant’s work on voltage explains why the order cannot be shuffled. Pathogens and inflammation thrive in tissue that is low in voltage, low in oxygen and electrically unstable, and taking food off a plate does not change that on its own, because you cannot fix a light, circadian and seasonal signaling problem by rearranging the fuel.

Patients with chronic fatigue, mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), histamine intolerance and chronic inflammatory response syndrome (CIRS) learn this the hard way. They will often follow a flawless diet for a year with nothing to show for it, until the light, the sleep and the seasons are corrected as well.

If you have already spent months cutting foods and are no better for it, the food list was probably never your problem. The first things I want to know about a patient’s diet are where they live, what month it is, and what exposure they have to circadian rhythms and day/night light and dark cycles. When your food, your circadian and light environment and your biology are telling the same story, healing becomes possible.

The diet itself

OK, so you want to know what to actually eat?

I generally use four versions of the same diet with my patients: paleo-autoimmune, paleo-autoimmune low-histamine, paleo-ketogenic, and paleo-ketogenic low-histamine. All four of these options go a long way to lower the food-driven, antigenic inflammatory burden.

There are further subsets of these diets, depending on what other conditions the patient may present with: oxalate sensitivity, SIBO, salicylate sensitivity, and/or chronic candidiasis or metabolic syndrome. Which diet I recommend depends in large part on the symptom presentation of the individual, and I prioritize local and seasonal produce within each diet category. The handout below is the one I have been building and correcting for years.

One warning before you use it. Restriction has to be purposeful and time-limited, with an endpoint decided before the first food comes off the plate. I have watched elimination diets applied indefinitely do real harm to a patient’s relationship with food, resulting in restrictive eating disorders.

This dietary approach works because it addresses three of the most important triggers behind many chronic diseases at once: a leaky gut lining, a carbohydrate load the body can no longer compensate for, and the antigenic food triggers, additives and chemicals that come with manufactured or ultra-processed foods.

The protocol I give my patients covers:

• Which of the four versions to run for a given presentation, and the specific symptom picture that moves a patient from paleo-autoimmune to the low-histamine version rather than to the ketogenic one

• Where oxalates, FODMAPs, histamine-rich and salicylate-rich foods occur, and when restricting them is recommended

• How long to hold the restriction before anything gets reintroduced

• The composition and timing of the day’s meals, including the size and makeup of the first meal, and the hour after which nothing further is eaten

• The complete food list by category, with every inclusion and exclusion marked, in the form I hand to patients in my office

The full protocol is below, and it is available to paid subscribers, along with my other clinical protocols and patient handouts that I use in my own practice.

Paleo-Autoimmune Low-Histamine Diet

The New Medical Curriculum

If this is consistent with what you observe clinically, or with your own experience of chronic illness that has not responded to a well-constructed diet, the 7 Stages to Health and Transformation Model is the roadmap I have developed over 30+ years of diagnosing and treating chronic complex illness, the kind that defies both allopathic and functional medicine models.

Since May 2025, I have personally coached 80+ practitioners and patients through my 7 Stages to Health & Transformation program.

What’s included:

• 12 comprehensive modules across all 7 Stages of the model: environmental, biophysical, electromagnetic, emotional, intellectual, soul and spirit

• 60+ clinical handouts, intake forms, diagnostic checklists, and treatment sequencing tools built from my own clinical practice

• Monthly live Q&As with me to work through your questions and deepen your understanding of the framework

• A bonus module on MCAS, POTS and hypermobility, including the triad, pentad and septad with diagnostics and treatment

• A deep dive module on mitochondrial medicine and the cell danger response, the framework that explains why chronic illness persists and how to address it

7 Stages Program

Yours In Health,
Bruce

References

Popp, F.-A. (1999). About the Coherence of Biophotons. In Macroscopic Quantum Coherence, Proceedings of an International Conference at Boston University. Singapore: World Scientific.

Gallep, C. de M., & Robert, D. (2020). Time-resolved ultra-weak photon emission as germination performance indicator in single seedlings. Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology, 1, 100001. DOI: 10.1016/j.jpap.2020.100001.

Rubio, A., Barbaro, A., Montalvo, G., Ortega-Ojeda, F. E., & García-Ruiz, C. (2025). Influence of External Light on Ultra-Weak Photon Emission of Fruits: Forensic Differentiation of Organic and Conventional Fruits. Sensors, 25(6), 1799. DOI: 10.3390/s25061799.

Karu, T. I. (1999). Primary and secondary mechanisms of action of visible to near-IR radiation on cells. Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology B: Biology, 49(1), 1–17. DOI: 10.1016/S1011-1344(98)00219-X.

Hamblin, M. R. (2018). Mechanisms and Mitochondrial Redox Signaling in Photobiomodulation. Photochemistry and Photobiology, 94(2), 199–212. DOI: 10.1111/php.12864.

Kruse, J. (2013). Epi-Paleo Rx: The Prescription for Disease Reversal and Optimal Health. Optimized Life. (Together with The Leptin Rx and associated lectures.)

Castro Dopico, X., Evangelou, M., Ferreira, R. C., Guo, H., Pekalski, M. L., Smyth, D. J., Cooper, N., Burren, O. S., Fulford, A. J., Hennig, B. J., Prentice, A. M., Ziegler, A.-G., Bonifacio, E., Wallace, C., & Todd, J. A. (2015). Widespread seasonal gene expression reveals annual differences in human immunity and physiology. Nature Communications, 6, 7000. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms8000.

Hardie, D. G., Ross, F. A., & Hawley, S. A. (2012). AMPK: a nutrient and energy sensor that maintains energy homeostasis. Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, 13(4), 251–262. DOI: 10.1038/nrm3311.

Damiola, F., Le Minh, N., Preitner, N., Kornmann, B., Fleury-Olela, F., & Schibler, U. (2000). Restricted feeding uncouples circadian oscillators in peripheral tissues from the central pacemaker in the suprachiasmatic nucleus. Genes & Development, 14(23), 2950–2961.

Pollack, G. H. (2013). The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid, and Vapor. Seattle: Ebner & Sons.

Tennant, J. L. (2010). Healing is Voltage: The Handbook (3rd ed.). CreateSpace.

Most of the patients I see have already been on an elimination diet, often several. They arrive with a list of foods they no longer eat that has grown steadily over the years, assembled from a practitioner’s suggestion here, an food intolerance panel there, and a period of trial and error eliminatio…

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Ever taken a trip to the grocery store only to forget why you went there in the first place? Or perhaps you have difficulty concentrating on something you usually enjoy, like reading a book. In either of these cases, you usually don’t feel as if your brain is working normally.

• Maybe you’ve lost confidence in your mental abilities.

• Maybe your doctor has dismissed your brain fog as a consequence of aging.

• Maybe you’ve struggled with chronic migraines or cluster headaches for what feels like forever.

• Maybe you’re apprehensive regarding a future that involves living with neurodegenerative disease.

Sound familiar?

Well, I’m here to tell you not to lose hope. There are ways in which conventional Western medicine is letting us all down. The idea of losing cognitive functions, your memory becoming poorer, or even not being able to recognize the faces of your family, is all pretty scary. Every 65 seconds a patient in the US develops Alzheimer’s disease and there’s no magic pill that cures it.

Fortunately, there’s another way.

As a functional and integrative doctor, I find the issue of cognitive decline to be on my mind regularly. My patients are concerned that they won’t be able to work, socialize, or enjoy hobbies for much longer. They even worry that they’ll have to give up on life.

However, I’m able to help them treat their neurodegenerative progression from the inside out. By adopting the ketogenic diet for neurodegenerative diseases, you can change your life and turn back the clock. Dr. Dale Bredesen’s extensive research and treatments have shown that the effects of Alzheimer’s disease can be reversed with simple lifestyle changes. A modified version of the ketogenic diet is the backbone of Dr. Bredesen’s protocol and the science behind this is truly incredible.

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Fasting reached the public as a weight loss strategy, and as a weight loss strategy it has now been shown to add nothing beyond the calorie deficit inside it. The trials that tested it properly found that compressing the eating window added almost nothing to the weight loss equation, and raised a serious question about how much of what weight was lost was muscle rather than fat. Both findings are below, with the numbers.

The more interesting question, and the one I have been examining as a physician treating chronic complex illness, is whether intermittent fasting or time restricted eating can earn a place in a comprehensive treatment plan for the patients I see: mold illness, mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), dysautonomia, post-viral illness, autoimmunity, chronic fatigue syndrome, and the multi-system, multi-symptom presentations that defy conventional and even functional medicine frameworks; most of them falling under the collective umbrella of the mitochondrial cell danger response. In my experience, for some of those patients a compressed eating window is one of the most useful things they can do. For others the same protocol may backfire. The difference between those 2 outcomes has nothing to do with the length of the eating/fasting window.

Part One of this series covered how intermittent fasting and time restricted eating work, along with the associated health benefits. This article is the practical side: how to structure a fast, who should not attempt one, and where a fast belongs in a treatment plan for chronic complex illness.

What follows in the article below covers:

• What the enzymes mTOR and AMPK are each doing at the cellular level, and why healing is supported by alternation between them.

• Why the cell danger response decides whether a fast repairs a patient or drains them.

• The 14 situations where I will not recommend a fast, and the 9 where I will.

• What has now been disproven about fasting for weight loss, and what it costs the people still trying it.

• The first randomized fasting trial in long COVID: real symptom relief, and a flare in 58% of the same patients.

• Why women, and perimenopausal women especially, should not fast the way the research was designed.

• A practical guide to time restricted and intermittent fasting schedules, including all the different schedules and how to structure them.

A fast is a demand for energy before it is ever a source of more energy. A body that cannot meet the demand may deteriorate further, and it can remain there for months. Knowing which body circumstances you are working with is the essence of a clinical workup and the individual precision needed, case by case, and almost everybody finds out by getting it wrong first.

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There’s a war on seed oils. Artemis Simopoulos put the omega-6 to omega-3 ratio of the modern Western diet at somewhere between 15:1 and 16.7:1 against an ancestral ratio close to 1:1. Her work has been cited for two decades as the case against seed oils, and the case is sound, but somewhere along the way, omega-6 fats (especially seed oils) became the scapegoat for modern metabolic dysfunction. The prevailing message: “avoid at all costs.”

This, frankly, is nonsense.

The ratio I measure on the fatty acid panels of my own patients often runs the other way. These are not people eating fast food. They have read the same literature, cleared every seed oil out of the kitchen, and taken high-dose fish oil daily for years. They’re not overloaded with omega-6s. They’re deficient. And paradoxically, they’re often over-supplemented with omega-3s. Their panels come back with depleted linoleic acid, low gamma linolenic acid and low arachidonic acid, and on the Kennedy Krieger profile I use, markers suggesting demyelination. They have corrected a population-level problem they did not personally have, and they have corrected it past the point where the correction stops helping.

This has real consequences. A cell membrane is built from fats. Strip out the omega-6 fats that form its structure and the membrane loses its integrity, the mitochondria inside it lose the voltage they run on, and the immune and neurological signalling that depends on that architecture starts to drift. Patients arrive describing exhaustion, cognitive dulling, and reactivity to everything, having spent years removing the raw material their membranes are made of. Meanwhile, excess omega-3s can suppress myelination, deplete arachidonic acid (AA), inhibit GLA pathways, and destabilise membranes.

In short, we’re treating modern illness with the wrong fats, and destabilizing the very membranes we need to heal.

What follows in the article below covers:

• How omega-6 fats came to be treated as a single dangerous category and how to distinguish healthy omega-6s from rancid ones.

• My membrane mandate and why a mitochondrion cannot hold its membrane potential without a supply of intact omega-6 fats.

• What the research on fish oil oxidation (rancidity) actually shows, including the two studies that tested the same market and disagreed sharply about how much of the shelf is rancid.

• The Membrane Repair Protocol: 5 steps in the order I run them, the oils and food sources I use, the sequence and the three tests that make an invisible imbalance visible.

If you have been avoiding an entire class of essential fats on the strength of an Instagram headline, two questions are worth putting to your own case. Are the fats your membranes are short of the ones you have spent years removing? And has the supplement you take every morning been quietly deepening the shortage it was bought to correct?

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In January 2024 Biogen discontinued the drug named Aduhelm. The FDA had granted the drug accelerated approval three years earlier, against the recommendation of its own advisory committee, and it performed the way it was designed to do. It cleared amyloid out of the brain. Lecanemab, its successor, cleared amyloid too, and did so inside a large and properly run trial. Christopher van Dyck and his colleagues reported the 18-month result in the New England Journal of Medicine: 1,795 participants, and on the Clinical Dementia Rating sum of boxes, an 18-point scale, a decline of 1.21 points in the treated group against 1.66 in the placebo group. The entire benefit of removing amyloid came to 0.45 of a point. Muir and colleagues, reviewing the question in Alzheimer’s & Dementia in 2024, put the smallest difference a patient or clinician would actually register at around a full point. Brain swelling or bleeding showed up on imaging in 12.6% of the people treated.

The plaque came out. The people carrying it declined anyway.

Dale Bredesen has spent 20 years arguing for a different reading of that result. Amyloid is a protective response. A brain manufactures amyloid as a defensive strategy against inflammation, withdrawn hormonal and trophic support, and toxic exposure. Clear the amyloid response, but the underlying mechanisms that drive plaque formation continue unabated. The analogy he originally conceived was: imagine a roof with 36 holes in it. A roofer patches one, stands back to admire the work, and the water keeps coming through the other 35. Bredesen identified 36 mechanisms that push a neuron toward destruction, and mitochondrial dysfunction sits underneath all of them. The 36 holes were never meant as a final inventory. In Bredesen’s later work, the roof has become less a list of 36 defects than a network of interacting metabolic, inflammatory, trophic, toxic, vascular and infectious pressures capable of pushing the brain toward degeneration.

A brain runs close to a quadrillion synapses, every one an energy-hungry junction that has to be powered, maintained and rebuilt. The mitochondria supplying that grid begin to fail, and the brain does what any system does when its power supply runs short: it shuts down the 36 mechanisms that least essential circuits first. The pathology runs for roughly 20 years before it earns a name. By the time a diagnosis is made, most of the decline being measured has already happened.

What follows in the article below covers:

• Why every single-drug approach to Alzheimer’s has failed, and what Bredesen’s ReCODE protocol does instead.

• The 6 subtypes of Alzheimer’s, and why the subtype decides the treatment.

• What the ApoE4 gene actually does, and the one behavior that works with it rather than against it.

• The full therapeutic system that was built to close the metabolic shifts and hence the 36 holes in the roof.

• The 10 warning signs, set against the changes that genuinely belong to normal aging.

• The 7 things to start now in order to prevent and reverse cognitive decline.

We’ve come to accept cognitive decline as simply part of getting older, but it’s not. Age increases vulnerability, but the patterns we now associate with Alzheimer’s are better understood as the accumulated expression of decades of system-wide imbalance. And while treatments for other chronic diseases (heart disease, diabetes, cancer) have steadily advanced, Alzheimer’s remains a frontier of therapeutic failure. Cases are rising, outcomes are bleak, and the prevailing medical approach is missing the mark.

This article details what you can do now to prevent brain fog, cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease in 20 years.

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If you’re interested in living a healthier lifestyle, you’ve probably heard of time restricted eating, or intermittent fasting, and the success stories associated with incorporating these practices into your daily life. Despite living longer these days, the health span of many Americans is actually cut short as the average person spends seventeen of their final years living in poor health. This is due to chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. In fact, 80 percent of older adults have at least one chronic condition, which is primarily lifestyle-related.

What if time restricted eating or intermittent fasting could be a solution, one of the tools to help combat the underlying factors that contribute to such diseases? Is it simply a diet trend, or is there a substantial and credible scientific basis to warrant its therapeutic use? There is, and it is not seriously in dispute. The harder question is the one that sits downstream, and it is the one I keep running into in practice.

Two people begin the same protocol on the same morning. Sixteen hours fasted, eight hours fed, identical on paper and identical in adherence. Three months later one has dropped visceral fat, is sleeping through the night, and has watched her fasting insulin fall into a range she has not seen in a decade. The other is more depleted than when she started, sleeping worse, and has lost nothing except lean mass. Nothing in the schedule accounts for the difference.

Part of the explanation is that intermittent fasting is not a single intervention and never was. It is one label stretched across at least five distinct metabolic states that do not produce the same physiology. Collapsing these into one category dilutes the exact insight the research was designed to produce.

The rest of the explanation sits in the timeline. The fasted state is not so much a state but a sequence of switches that open at different hours. Whether a given body reaches any of them at all depends far less on the clock than on what it was doing metabolically when the fast began.

What follows covers the mechanism in full:

• Where the real line falls between time restricted eating and intermittent fasting, and why the fasting-mimicking diet, alternate day fasting and 5:2 are not variations on the same thing

• Insulin, mTOR and AMPK: what each is doing in the fed state, what each is doing in the fasted state, and which one you are actually recruiting

• Autophagy’s decline with age, and what starts failing alongside it: neurodegeneration, cardiomyopathy, cancer, metabolic syndrome, immune suppression

• The hour-by-hour timeline of a longer fast, from the ketone switch at twelve hours to new stem cells at seventy-two, and precisely where a sixteen-hour window stops

• The 17 documented clinical benefits, and the disease states where fasting has been studied most seriously

Most of the fasting conversation is an argument about arithmetic. Sixteen hours against eighteen, forty-eight against five days, as though the number itself were the intervention. The number is the least important variable in the room. What decides the outcome is which of those switches a body can still reach, and how much repair capacity it has left to spend once it gets there.

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This isn’t just allopathic, or “traditional medicine”, even functional medicine practitioners are getting this wrong with their pills and potions, inputs and outputs, following prescribed protocols they learnt at their last functional medicine learning module.

Mitochondria are not just ATP producing cellular engines. They are ancient, semi-autonomous bioenergetic entities that dictate whether a cell thrives or dies. Their health, function, and coherence determine the trajectory of everything from energy production to immune resilience to neurodegeneration.

If your mitochondria fail, no gene therapy, supplement, or surgical intervention will reverse the collapse. The body will slowly lose coherence and with it, the ability to regenerate.

Bioenergetics: Where Health Begins

Each mitochondrion is a quantum machine. Through oxidative phosphorylation, it produces ATP, the energy currency of life. Up to 90% of the body’s energy is generated by mitochondria (Wallace, 2005). Every organ system, especially the brain, heart, liver, and skeletal muscle is utterly dependent on this bioenergetic flow.

But ATP isn’t the only product of mitochondrial metabolism. Mitochondria produce water, heat, redox signals, and electromagnetic fields, all of which are essential for biological coherence and order. As Nick Lane writes in Power, Sex, Suicide (2006), mitochondria are “thermodynamic engines” that sit at the crossroads of biology and physics.

Disease Is a Bioenergetic Collapse, Not a Genetic Destiny

Nuclear genetics has failed to provide answers for most chronic diseases. As mitochondrial geneticist Dr. Doug Wallace explains:

“Virtually all the common diseases of aging, diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, are linked to mitochondrial dysfunction, not inherited nuclear DNA mutations.”

-Wallace, D. C. (2005). Bioenergetics and the epigenome

The real story is that diseases are energy failure states. When mitochondria can no longer generate sufficient energy or redox balance to support cellular repair, the body shifts into a low energy survival mode called the cell danger response (CDR). This is at the root of chronic illness. This state easily describes your brain fog, chronic fatigue, gut issues and muscle pain.

Mitochondria Are Environmental Sensors

In groundbreaking research, Dr. Robert Naviaux proposed the Cell Danger Response (CDR), a state where mitochondria detect threat in the environment (pathogens, toxins, EMFs, nutrient stress, amongst many others) and shift the cell into a defensive metabolic pattern.

“Mitochondria are the central hub for sensing and responding to environmental stress. They are not just engines; they are sentries.”

- Naviaux, R. K. (2014). Mitochondrial and metabolic features of the cell danger response

This is why people living in toxic, artificial environments with fluorescent lights, Wi-Fi radiation, processed foods, emotional trauma, circadian disruption, experience a systemic breakdown that no lab test can fully capture.

The Aging Clock: Heteroplasmy and Entropy

Mitochondria contain their own DNA (mtDNA), inherited maternally. But unlike nuclear DNA, mtDNA accumulates mutations over time, a phenomenon called heteroplasmy.

As heteroplasmy increases, the percentage of dysfunctional mitochondria rises, energy output falls, and oxidative stress increases. This is aging at the cellular level.

According to Doug Wallace and others, multiple toxic environmental inputs may accelerate heteroplasmy. These include:

• Blue light and artificial lighting

• Non-native EMFs

• Chronic circadian misalignment

• Poor fatty acid intake (oxidized oils)

• Low sun exposure and lack of natural infrared light exposure

Mitochondria Require Quantum Inputs

Mitochondria are not fueled by calories alone. They require coherent environmental light signals to function.

What mitochondria actually need:

• Sunlight: UV and infrared light enhance mitochondrial function through cytochrome c oxidase and structured water (Alkhalili, 2019).

• Red/Near-Infrared Light: Activates complex IV of the ETC and improves membrane potential.

• Minerals & Electrolytes: These stabilize charge across the inner mitochondrial membrane.

• Circadian Alignment: Mitochondria are clock-regulated. Sleep/wake cycles profoundly affect their efficiency.

• Phospholipids & Fatty Acids: Omega six and omega three essential fatty acids along with phospholipids, shape the membranes’ biophysical properties including redox signaling and electron flow.

A New Paradigm: Mitochondrial Medicine through Biophysics

Most medicine is still Newtonian in understanding, focused on parts, not patterns or systems. But the emerging science of mitochondrial health is inherently quantum and vitalistic.

Jim Al-Khalili explains in Life on the Edge (2014) how quantum effects such as tunneling, coherence, and proton gradients govern bioenergetics at the subatomic level. Mitochondria use quantum phenomena to maintain biological order. When that breaks down, disease emerges.

If we want true healing, not disease management, we must stop treating symptoms and start restoring mitochondrial integrity. This means not only rebuilding membrane architecture and fatty acid ratios, but also returning to biological coherence with sun, seasons, circadian rhythms, water, and light exposure on a daily basis.

On Sunday 2 August at 12pm MST I am running a free two-hour webinar on exactly this. It is the material that the 7 Stages to Health and Transformation Model is built on: mitochondrial medicine, the cell danger response, and the exact sequence and inputs I have found most impactful to shift patients out of chronic complex illness involving the cell danger response, and restore growth and repair.

Register Free for Sunday

What’s covered:

• How the cell danger response drives chronic illness, and how to recognise which of the three phases a patient is stuck in

• The reason mitochondrial dysfunction sits underneath conditions that appear to have nothing to do with each other

• Salugenesis and the creation of health in practice, and why sequencing of interventions determines whether an intervention helps a patient or sets them back

• The place all of this holds in the New Medical Curriculum involving the 7 Stages of Health and Transformation model, and how to work through the stages in the correct order

• Live questions with me for the last part of the session

Yours In Health,

Bruce

References

1. Wallace, D. C. (2005). A mitochondrial paradigm of metabolic and degenerative diseases, aging, and cancer: a dawn for evolutionary medicine. Cell.

2. Naviaux, R. K. (2014). Metabolic features and regulation of the healing cycle. A new model for chronic disease.Mitochondrion.

3. Lane, N. (2006). Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life. Oxford University Press.

4. Al-Khalili, J., & McFadden, J. (2014). Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology.

5. Wallace, D. C. (2010). Mitochondrial DNA mutations in disease and aging. Environmental and Molecular Mutagenesis.

NAD+ is the latest molecule everyone wants to buy. You can quite easily walk into an IV clinic and get it through a drip, via patches that claim to feed it through the skin, other injectable forms, and a fast-growing shelf of precursor supplements sold on the promise of more energy, slower ageing, and improved neurological function. The enthusiasm is not misplaced. NAD+ is one of the most important molecules in human metabolism, and the science behind that claim is genuine. The order in which people reach for it is where the trouble starts.

Inside the mitochondrion, NAD+ is not where the work begins. It sits near the end of a long chain of dependent reactions, and every link ahead of it requires cofactors that have to be in place before the molecule can be built, recycled, or spent. If one delivers NAD+ into a cell whose upstream machinery is depleted, most of it will be wasted. The real deficiency sits upstream, in the cofactors and conditions that allow the cell to build and utilize NAD+.

None of this makes NAD+ less essential. If anything, it raises the stakes on understanding the molecule properly: what it does, why its levels fall with age and illness, and what genuinely restores them.

What follows in the article below covers:

• What NAD+ actually is

• The two forms of NAD, and why the distinction matters

• The role NAD+ plays in health and disease

• Why increasing levels of NAD+ is important

• What sirtuins are and how they require NAD+

• The role sirtuins and NAD+ play in vascular aging

• Health conditions that benefit from increasing NAD+

• The three ways the body produces NAD+

• Natural ways to increase NAD+ levels in the body

If you have paid for NAD+ by drip, patch, or capsule and felt far less than the promise implied, the variable that nobody is measuring sits one step upstream of the molecule you were sold.

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Nearly every patient who arrives at my clinic, no matter their diagnosis, is battling the same hidden adversary. The labels they have been given by well-meaning practitioners may differ; mold illness (CIRS), mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), Lyme disease, long COVID, autoimmune disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, and the list goes on, but underneath all of them, at the cellular level, is a protective, defensive metabolic shutdown that has outlived the threat that set it off.

The Cell Danger Response is not a diagnosis, but it is the fundamental cellular response underlying most chronic conditions, and understanding it is what makes healing them possible.

“All diseases have at their root origin a “stuck” cell danger response” – Robert Naviaux

The root of all chronic disease

Doug Wallace, who did more than anyone to establish mitochondrial medicine as a legitimate field, estimates that 95% of chronic diseases are mitochondrial in origin. Mitochondria are best known as the powerhouses of the cell, the source of its ATP (energy) production. But another primary function, one that medicine has been slower to notice and incorporate into meaningful clinical practice, is that of an environmental sensor and the first responder to internal or external threats.

When the mitochondria register or sense danger, whether from pathogens, toxins, electromagnetic stress, or sustained emotional trauma (the list of potential stressors is considerable), they shift from an anabolic growth state into a defensive, inflammatory one. In this defensive state energy production stalls, inflammation ramps up, cell-to-cell communication shuts down and healing grinds to a halt, because the mitochondria have essentially prioritised protection over growth. This is the Cell Danger Response; the body’s intelligent adaptation to threat.

Naviaux describes the response as a survival programme running in three phases. In the first phase the cell senses danger and goes into battle: the electron transport chain slows, oxidative phosphorylation gives way to glycolysis, and the mitochondria switches into a pro-inflammatory form whose job is to contain damage rather than continue to make energy. In the second phase, if the danger recedes, the cell begins to clear the debris, rebuild what was lost, and repair its own molecular machinery and cell membranes. Only in the third phase, if safety is reestablished and the threat has passed, does the cell re-enter growth, repair, and reintegration.

The Cell Danger Response is highly adaptive; Naviaux calls the whole sequence a waveform, and in a healthy body that is exactly how it behaves: the cell moves through the phases in response to a threat and comes out the other side. In chronic illness, however, the safety signal never arrives and the cell gets “stuck” in defense, unable to return to growth and energy production.

This explains why seemingly disparate conditions share common symptoms: the body’s defensive mechanisms run through similar biochemical pathways regardless of the trigger. Fatigue, brain fog, digestive issues, and pain arrive together because they are all expressions of the same underlying cellular protective state. This model dismantles the old paradigm that sorts illness by isolated symptoms and organ systems, and at the same time moves us beyond genetic determinism. The Cell Danger Response describes a functional shift, not a fixed defect, and a functional shift that can be reversed, given the right inputs and sequence of interventions.

What modern medicine is missing

Conventional medicine overlooks the Cell Danger Response entirely. Clinical practice has yet to catch up to this advancing science. It continues to fragment the body into separate organ systems, assigns each fragmented “silo” to a different specialist, and treats symptoms in isolation without ever asking what the fragments have in common. Functional medicine frequently falls short too, and in a more frustrating way, because it gets close enough to see the problem and then reaches for inputs and outputs: test and treat, kill and fill, supplement and detox. But suppressing a symptom does not resolve what produced it and does not address the multiple interlocking components of a systems biology network.

The trigger/s holding the cell in defense need to be identified and removed, and the mitochondria have to receive the signal that the threat has passed, and that it is safe to return to growth and repair. This is the process of salugenesis; the deliberate input of the signalling molecules a cell needs in order to know the emergency has ended and growth, repair and health can continue.

The cell danger response is the only explanation I know of that unifies the complexity we are seeing in chronic conditions today, and understanding the underlying mechanisms changes disease outcomes far more than another isolated diagnostic label. The body is intelligent; it protects itself until it has reason to trust, and it will keep protecting itself for as long as the reason for healing is missing. As a practitioner treating in this space, the work is to identify the incoming toxic signals and then send the biophysical and biochemical signals that are needed to return the mitochondria to healthy functioning and their original purpose of energy/ATP production, and most importantly, in the correct hierarchical sequence.

On Sunday 2 August at 12pm MST I am running a free two-hour webinar on exactly this. It is the material that the 7 Stages to Health and Transformation Model is built on: mitochondrial medicine, the cell danger response, and the exact sequence and inputs I have found most impactful to shift patients out of the cell danger response and restore growth and repair.

Join Free on Sunday 2 August

What’s covered:

• How the cell danger response drives chronic illness, and how to recognise which of the three phases a patient is stuck in

• The reason mitochondrial dysfunction sits underneath conditions that appear to have nothing to do with each other

• Salugenesis in practice, and why sequencing determines whether an intervention helps a patient or sets them back

• The place all of this holds in the New Medical Curriculum involving the 7 Stages of Health and Transformation model, and how to work through the stages in order

• Live questions with me for the last part of the session

The webinar is free and places are limited. Register below.

Yours In Health,

Bruce

References

1. Naviaux, R. K. (2014). Metabolic features of the cell danger response. Mitochondrion, 16, 7–17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mito.2013.08.006

2. Das, A., Huang, G. X., Bonkowski, M. S., Longchamp, A., Li, C., Schultz, M. B., Kim, L.-J., Osborne, B., Joshi, S., Lu, Y., Treviño-Villarreal, J. H., Kang, M.-J., Hung, T.-T., Lee, B., Williams, E. O., Igarashi, M., Mitchell, J. R., Wu, L. E., Turner, N., Arany, Z., Guarente, L., & Sinclair, D. A. (2018). Impairment of an endothelial NAD⁺–H₂S signaling network is a reversible cause of vascular aging. Cell, 173(1), 74–89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2018.02.008

3. Lonsdale, D., & Marrs, C. (2017). Thiamine deficiency disease, dysautonomia, and high calorie malnutrition. Academic Press (Elsevier). ISBN 978-0-12-810387-6.

Every new patient arrives holding the same piece of paper, and somewhere in the first ten minutes they say a version of the same sentence. They have a positive urine mycotoxin test. Finally, they believe that everything now makes sense: the mast cell reactions, the exhaustion, the brain fog, the depression, the years of being told nothing was wrong. It must have been the mold all along!

But the test in their hands doesn’t say that.

A positive urine mycotoxin result tells you that mycotoxins are being excreted. It reflects recent or ongoing exposure, and it says nothing whatsoever about whether an immune system has been dysregulated by that exposure. A person with efficient detoxification pathways can test positive and be entirely well. A person with poor detoxification pathways can test for low urine levels while carrying a heavy intracellular mycotoxin load bound to DNA and cell walls. The test measures excretion, and excretion is not an illness.

Diagnosing mold illness off a positive mycotoxin test, and then putting a very ill patient onto a heavy binder protocol on the strength of it, is the most damaging intervention that I have witnessed in this field. I consider it medical malpractice. A patient deep into the cell danger response with a chronic inflammatory response syndrome (CIRS), who is given cholestyramine or Welchol too early does not get better; they get stripped of the lipids their cell membranes are built from, at the precise moment those membranes are the least able to spare them. The intervention arrives before the diagnosis has been earned, and the patient pays for the shortcut.

Mold rarely stays as just a mold problem. It is one of the triggers, often occurring alongside other conditions such as mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), POTS and dysautonomia, Candida, hypermobility, heavy metal burden, tick-borne illness, retroviruses, mood disorders, and trauma responses. Mold and mycotoxins are direct mitochondrial poisons, disrupting the Krebs cycle and the electron transport chain, so the damage propagates outward from the cell’s power supply into whichever organ system was already closest to maximum mitochondrial heteroplasmy.

By the time such a patient reaches me, mast cells are firing indiscriminately, the autonomic nervous system is already highly dysregulated and any treatment aimed at only the mold issue without addressing the rest, destabilises them further until the downstream issues are sorted out first.

What follows in the article below covers:

• The thirteen symptoms most commonly reported in mold illness, why they arrive as an incoherent list rather than a recognisable syndrome, and why that incoherence is the diagnostic signature itself rather than grounds for dismissing the patient who reports it.

• Why the name is a misnomer, and what circulates in a water-damaged building alongside the fungi: the endotoxins, actinomycetes, beta glucans, hemolysins, and volatile organic compounds that make chronic inflammatory response syndrome a considerably broader problem than a mold count on a lab report can capture.

• The genetics that decide who gets sick, why roughly three quarters of the people exposed to the same building clear these biotoxins without ever learning they were there, and what the remaining quarter’s immune systems fail to do that everyone else does automatically.

• Why leaving the building, the one step almost everyone assumes is sufficient, so often fails to end the illness, and what carries on running an inflammatory cascade long after the exposure itself has gone.

• The treatment sequence, from remediation and air filtration through MARCoNS testing, binders, and the hormonal and inflammatory markers worth correcting, including the one circumstance in which reaching for binders too early will make a very ill patient considerably worse.

Mold illness has two problems at once, and it falls into the gap between them: it is wildly over-diagnosed, because a cheap urine test hands anyone who takes the test a story that is often taken to explain all their symptoms. And it is poorly understood, because the same test tells you almost nothing about the actual illness. The article that follows fills in the gaps, covering everything about the misconceptions, diagnosis and treatment.

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That gap between the marker and the patient is where vitamin D is still so poorly understood. Vitamin D isn’t actually a vitamin; it’s a pre-hormone synthesized of sunlight, cholesterol, and cellular timing that regulates up to 2,000 genes – one-sixth of the human genome.

To reduce it to a number on a lab test and a prescription for a pill completely misses the point of what vitamin D actually is and its real benefits.

What is the real cost of vitamin D deficiency?

An article in the New England Journal of Medicine (Holick, 2007) estimated that roughly a billion people worldwide were vitamin D deficient and around 50% of the global population had vitamin D insufficiency.

To demonstrate just how serious that is, low levels of vitamin D track reliably with higher rates of cancer, infection, autoimmunity, fracture, and cognitive decline. Whereas populations with higher vitamin D levels record lower levels of respiratory infections (including flu and COVID-19), reduced risk of cancer progression and improved cancer survival rates, lower rates of osteoporosis and fracture, and lower rates of neurocognitive decline and dementia.

Meta-analyses confirm this; vitamin D sufficiency correlates with stronger immune resilience, lower inflammation, and reduced mortality. But supplementation has failed to consistently reproduce the same outcomes. The VITAL trial, following more than twenty-five thousand people given 2,000 IU of D3 daily, showed that supplementation raised blood levels exactly as intended, but did not translate to better outcomes on cancer, cardiovascular disease, and overall mortality.

The biomarker trap

Vitamin D is synthesized when Ultraviolet B light strikes the skin converting a cholesterol precursor into D3. The liver turns that into 25-OH vitamin D, the storage form and the only thing a standard lab measures. The kidneys and, critically, the immune cells themselves then refine a portion of that into 1,25-OH vitamin D, the biologically active hormone, which goes on to regulate genes governing immune function, cell differentiation, and metabolic control. A capsule delivers the raw material for the first step and skips every checkpoint after it. It also delivers only one form of a molecule that exists in over 15 known isoforms across several active and intermediate metabolites in the body, each with distinct roles in immunity, inflammation, neuroendocrine regulation, and mitochondrial function. Capsules typically deliver only one, leaving out the broader biological conversation that natural light initiates.

This explains why patients with seemingly ‘normal’ vitamin D levels from supplementation often remain symptomatic. The benefits are not simply derived from the molecule itself, but by the physiological event initiated by light exposure and built from regular skin synthesis. Treating them as interchangeable is the biomarker trap that too many clinicians have fallen into, keeping patients sick.

Why the pill fails the process

The gap between the supplementation is vitamin D from the sun isn’t just biochemical, it’s photobiological. Ultraviolet B is one narrow slice of what full spectrum sunlight actually delivers. Reiter and colleagues have documented that infrared and near-infrared wavelengths, the wavelengths most present at sunset, penetrate tissue and drive local melatonin synthesis inside the mitochondria, independent of the pineal gland, where it functions as a direct antioxidant against oxidative stress.

Separately, Weller’s group at Edinburgh showed that UVA exposure to human skin lowers blood pressure through nitric oxide release, measurably and independently of vitamin D synthesis altogether. Morning light entrainment of circadian rhythm is a third effect layered on top of both. None of it shows up on a vitamin D panel, and all of it goes missing when the sun is replaced by a capsule.

The clinical evidence for the health benefits for vitamin D from full spectrum sunlight goes back further. Ulrich reported in Science in 1984 that surgical patients recovering in hospitals with beds closer to a window would recover faster and get discharged sooner than those further from natural light. At the turn of the 20th century, hospitals were often designed with rooftop wards and verandas so that beds could be wheeled into direct sunlight. And today, modern hospitals are returning to ancient wisdom; King’s College Hospital in London recently opened the UK’s first outdoor rooftop critical care ward. Light is part of the healing process.

The Light Prescription

This is not a call to abandon vitamin D testing or supplementation. I prescribe vitamin D for patients living at high latitudes where the sun disappears for months at a time, but I don’t consider that a compromise for the real thing. A capsule may provide support for a system that’s been interrupted, but not a replacement for the system itself. What changes, once you take the photobiological view seriously, is the sequencing: restore the light exposure that actually drives the whole cascade first, and let supplementation fill the specific gap, rather than reaching for the bottle as the entire strategy.

Vitamin D deficiency is not a nutrient gap. It is a marker of disconnection; from light, circadian rhythm, and the environment. The real work of healing lies in restoring the system that produces vitamin D: regular light exposure, rhythmic living, and balanced cofactors. The myth of deficiency has shrunk a vast photobiological conversation into a single number and a pill. True healing means reclaiming coherence with the oldest medicine: the sun.

For readers who would like to go further and get my clinical guide “How to Build a Solar Callus” which provides my step by step protocol for building sun tolerance safely, covering the biology of melanin, why most people burn, and how diet, timing, and grounding all play a role, you can read and download it at the link below.

How To Build a Solar Callus Protocol

Yours in health,
Bruce

P.S. If you would like to go deeper into my 7 Stages to Health and Transformation Model, please see my 7 Stages Program, a 12 module course I am teaching to practitioners and informed patients who would like to learn a complete roadmap for healing multi-system, multi-symptom illness, the type that falls through the cracks of the conventional medicine system.

What’s included:

• 12 modules rooted in mitochondrial and cell danger response theory across 7 stages of the human experience

• 60+ clinical handouts and live Q&As with me, covering the questions this article cannot anticipate for your specific presentation

• A bonus module specifically on MCAS and POTS, for the significant number of patients whose sleep disruption sits alongside mast cell activation or dysautonomia and cannot be treated as a standalone problem

• A bonus module on the cell danger response itself, the framework underneath everything argued in this article, taught from first principles through to clinical application

• The complete protocols, treatments, and diagnostics I use in practice, not a summary of them, along with the full roadmap for sequencing this work correctly in a real patient rather than a textbook case.

7 Stages Program

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

References

1. Holick, M. F. “Vitamin D Deficiency.” The New England Journal of Medicine, 357(3), 266–281, 2007.

2. Manson, J. E., Cook, N. R., Lee, I. M., Christen, W., Bassuk, S. S., Mora, S., Gibson, H., et al. “Vitamin D Supplements and Prevention of Cancer and Cardiovascular Disease.” The New England Journal of Medicine, 380, 33–44, 2019. (VITAL Trial)

3. Carlberg, C. “Genome-wide (over)view on the actions of vitamin D.” Frontiers in Physiology, 5, 167, 2014.

4. Reiter, R. J., et al. “Melatonin: Both a Messenger of Darkness and a Participant in the Cellular Actions of Non-Visible Solar Radiation of Near Infrared Light.”

5. Liu, D., Fernandez, B. O., Hamilton, A., et al. “UVA Irradiation of Human Skin Vasodilates Arterial Vasculature and Lowers Blood Pressure Independently of Nitric Oxide Synthase.” Journal of Investigative Dermatology, 134(7), 1839–1846, 2014.

6. Ulrich, R. S. “View through a window may influence recovery from surgery.” Science, 224 (4647), 420–421, 1984.

For two generations, the guidance on sun exposure has been avoidance, built on a perceived risk and generalised into something the evidence never actually supported; that the sun, in any dose, at any time, is a carcinogenic threat to be minimised. The majority of Americans, with their ingrained beliefs of the danger of sun exposure, spend less than 4% o…

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Almost three years ago, I awoke in a hospital bed following open heart surgery for an aortic arch aneurysm repair, a physician who had spent thirty years constructing, for the benefit of patients, a detailed roadmap for approaching and managing chronic illness. However, I could not work out why, after this aneurysm event, I was unable to sleep. The irony required no elaboration.

What that recovery forced upon me, through necessity, humility, and a return to the primary literature, was a fundamental revision of how I understood sleep, fatigue, and mitochondrial repair. Not at the level of only symptom management but at the level of all layers and levels of the human experience. For the purposes of this article, I have concentrated mostly at the level of biophysics and the mitochondria - the energy drivers of the body. I will concentrate other issues concerning sleep in later posts.

What follows in the article below covers:

• The photobiological mechanism connecting morning sunlight directly to mitochondrial ATP production, and why ten minutes sitting at a window cannot replicate it

• Why melatonin’s role as the body’s master intracellular antioxidant matters more than its reputation as a sleep aid, and precisely what evening artificial blue light exposure costs you when you override it

• The bioenergetic reframing of sleep disorders itself: why waking exhausted after a full night’s sleep is primarily a mitochondrial problem, not a sleep disorder, and what that distinction changes about how it should be treated

• The exact sequence; morning light, mid-day sun exposure, and enforced evening darkness, that determines whether the nocturnal repair programme can run to completion, and why the order matters as much as the inputs themselves

If you have already tried the conventional advice; more hours in bed, a consistent bedtime, a blackout blind, and none of it has moved the needle, this is very likely why: not one of those measures addresses the mechanism actually driving your exhaustion. The article below does.

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There is a common misconception that meditation is concerned with “quietening” or stopping the activity of the busy mind. Nothing could be further from the truth.

While it may downregulate the biological consequences of an active or stressed mental field, (by lowering cortisol and the stress hormones, adrenaline and noradrenaline), the truest and deepest benefit of meditation is the gradual awakening to the reality that we are more than just our physical bodies.

In deep meditation states, we become aware of the many layers of our human experience – the movement of our physical bodies, the fluctuations in our moods and emotional states and the thousands of thoughts that pass across our consciousness. We may also stand the chance of becoming, for the first time, deeply aware of our true, subjective, core nature.

Our body changes year to year, our moods come and go, and our thoughts flit across our consciousness at an alarming rate. We have approximately 60,000 thoughts a day, the majority of which are the same as the day before. But the fundamental question is: to whom are these changing events taking place?

The answer is YOU, the real you, the witnessing subjective sense of oneself. Only in the deepest states of witnessing meditation do we stand the chance of arriving at our true, authentic selves.

While it has many health benefits, the deepest and most enduring benefit of a daily meditation practice is that we may, for the first time, become aware of our core nature, our deepest selves. Like a cloth that we dip into dye every day with a meditation practice, we stand the chance of permanently colouring our daily lives with the qualities of our core, unchanging, authentic selves. We slowly wake up to the realization that our daily waking consciousness and the incessant movement of our internal dialogue do not represent our deepest identity.

If we make meditation part of our daily practice, we may also experience many of the well documented health benefits of a daily practice. Forty seven studies on meditation were analyzed and published in JAMA Internal Medicine in Jan 2014. Conditions such as anxiety, depression, hypertension, IBS, chronic pain, cancer, HIV, tinnitus and insomnia have all been positively influenced by a meditation practice.

MRI scans have shown that after 8 weeks of a meditation practice the area of the brain associated with fear and the fight or flight response (called the amygdala) shrinks. Mean while, the prefrontal cortex, the area associated with concentration and decision making, increases in size. The scale of change is influenced by the number of meditation hours practiced.

Furthermore, in deep meditation, we may transcend all awareness of a separate, symptomatic self and experience the opening into a sense that my separate, subjective self is no different than anyone else’s. We wake up to the awareness that at the deepest core of the human experience lies the awareness that there are no boundaries between you and me.

Yours in health,

Bruce

Over thirty years sitting across from patients with complex chronic illness, I have come to regard the electromagnetic environment as one of the most consistently overlooked contributors to their symptom picture, and increasingly one of the most severe. The evidence has been accumulating for decades, but the clinical conversation has not kept pace with the technology. Most practitioners are not taking a thorough environmental health history before asking personal health questions and most patients are unaware of the extent to which their homes, their workplaces, and the city they live in are contributing to their chronic ill health.

In my view, the rate of electromagnetic advancement that is saturating our environments with electrosmog represents one of the most serious unacknowledged health crises of our time. I watched the rollout of 5G networks over the past several years and saw, in direct clinical correspondence, a worsening of the picture I was already tracking. A significant proportion of the patients I see, I would estimate close to ninety percent of those with complex multi-system illness, show measurable adverse biological responses to electromagnetic exposure. Now we are told that 6G is being developed with commercial deployment expected in the early 2030s, operating at frequencies for which there are no internationally agreed safety standards. We are building a world that is, quite literally, making people sick, and we are planning to accelerate it.

I am not, by temperament, an alarmist. I follow the research carefully, and I have made very deliberate choices about my own electromagnetic exposure for years, because I understand what the evidence shows and I regard it as one of the most important modifiable variables in health and longevity.

In this article, you will find:

• The inflammation and oxidative stress response that underlies how electromagnetic exposure drives illness, and how it is contributing to a worsening chronic illness picture across clinical practice

• Why patients with mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) are especially vulnerable to electromagnetic load, and why reducing that load is often the fastest-acting clinical intervention available

• The evidence linking electromagnetic exposure to cancer risk, Alzheimer’s disease, and male infertility in industrialised countries

• What 5G and 6G are, and why 6G represents an unprecedented layer of unregulated biological exposure arriving into a population already under strain

• My protocol for reducing exposure, and the practical steps I apply personally and with all my patients, plus my diagnostic and treatment protocol for electromagnetic hypersensitivity

The current international safety guidelines cover electromagnetic exposure up to 300 gigahertz. 6G will operate above that threshold, and there are no agreed standards covering what is being built. The patients who are most exposed to these technologies will arrive in consulting rooms before any research framework exists to assess what those frequencies are doing to them.

This article tells you what the evidence shows and where to begin, including the protocol I use in practice.

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“The soul does not waste what the ego perceives as dramatic loss.”

Over four decades of practice as a healer, from a young medical student living rough in the Noordhoek Valley outside Cape Town, to building and then walking away from a successful integrative medical clinic in Canada, to losing a magnificent home, a fiancée, and the proceeds of the only home that I had ever truly loved, in the space of a single year, I have arrived at one understanding that altered everything: the soul does not waste what the ego may perceive as a dramatic loss. Every rupture in my biography carried within it what the ancient Greeks called a daemon; a guiding intelligence, invisible at the time, that was redirecting my life towards something my conscious mind could not yet see or accept.

This is the central insight of the Platonic tradition, explored by Emerson, given philosophical weight by James Hillman in The Soul’s Code, and made rigorously and practically applicable by Dr. John Demartini, whose method I have spent years studying and teaching: your biography is not a random sequence of gains and losses, but a calling towards what is termed your daemon, an archetypal summons that pushes you toward your authentic life. Just as an acorn is destined to become an oak tree, you too are called from above, sometimes without mercy, toward the life you were meant to live. The daemon protects and nurtures this blueprint, continually attempting to bring it into expression.

As this story unfolds, what I thought was recklessness and irreversible loss turned out to be the precise mechanism through which I traded a geographical view for a cosmological one and in doing so, found the foundation for everything my healing work has since become. This story emphasizes the primary insight that I still hold to be true, that all the support and challenges that I have experienced in my life have served the unfolding of this daemonic calling.

Furthermore, to add to this insight, this conviction was never tested more severely than when my own professional life began to be questioned. At the same time as I underwent open heart surgery for an aortic aneurysm repair, the Alberta College of Physicians and Surgeons amplified their takedown of my practice of functional/integrative medicine, eventually succeeding in closing down my practice, laying off my 15 staff members and having to walk away from hundreds of patients that I was able to help outside of the traditional health care system. In addition, in cooperation with CTV National News, they attempted to smear my reputation for “double billing” and for practicing private medicine in a socialist health care system. I have never “double billed” a single person in my entire career, as my appeals have carefully laid out, but that saga is a story for another time.

After four decades of practicing medicine, the role around which I had organized my identity disappeared almost overnight.

If I had not been able to transmute these experiences into transformative, cognitive and spiritual refrains as I was able to in this story below, I believe my life’s trajectory and career arc may have terminated in a victim-type mentality, imprisoned by bitterness with no possibility of transmutation. This is not the case.

Therefore, I must emphasize the primary insight of this story below; I firmly believe that everything you do or experience is in service of who you are eventually meant to become. The apparent catastrophes of one’s life are not interruptions to one’s calling but the very instruments through which one’s calling is revealed. Looking back, I can see that none of these events simply took things from me. Each one dismantled an identity that had become too small for the life waiting to emerge.

As the cliqué goes, your wounds become your wisdom and your voids become your values.

This is that story. If this story has any value, it is not because it is unique, but because I believe every life contains moments that appear, at first, as catastrophe and only later reveal themselves as vocation, events that quietly serve a becoming far greater than anything we could have imagined while living through them.

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Somewhere in the training of every physician, a line was drawn. On one side is the body, its chemistry, and its measurable dysfunction. On the other is the patient’s inner life, their psychology, their history, their meaning-making. Medical school teaches physicians to work on one side of that line: to understand illness through molecules, receptors, neurotransmitters, genes, pathology, drugs, and surgery. What happened on the other side was, broadly speaking, someone else’s problem. And in that separation lies the central problem I have spent my 40+ year career attempting to address: that even integrative medicine, despite its promises, is not truly integrated. We treat one link in a thoroughly diseased chain and send patients back into the same environment, the same belief systems, and the same lives.

What we lack is a coherent framework that organises the full complexity of human experience into a sequenced diagnostic and therapeutic roadmap. That framework is the 7 Stages to Health and Transformation Model. It moves through seven distinct layers of human experience, from the body’s environment and its biochemistry through the electromagnetic, emotional, and intellectual bodies, into the deeper territories of soul and spirit, and it rests on five core principles:

1. Mitochondrial heteroplasmy and the Cell Danger Response are at the root of most chronic disease

2. An expanded diagnostic and treatment model is needed, one that accounts for all layers of human experience, not just the physical

3. Health exists on a spectrum of possibilities, from the mere absence of symptoms through to longevity, active wellbeing, and ultimately a genuine shift in consciousness

4. Physics and the bioelectrical field dynamics, not biochemistry alone, represent the dominant organising principle governing health outcomes

5. The doctor-patient relationship must be fundamentally reframed, from doctor as hero dispensing protocols to doctor as healer who assists in activating the patient’s own innate capacity to heal

The article that follows is Chapter 2 of my unpublished book on the 7 Stages Model. It brings to light the historical perspectives underpinning two of those five principles: the need for a fully expanded model that holds outer remedies and inner work as inseparable and sequential, and what it actually means for a healer to carry wisdom alongside knowledge.

In this article, you’ll find:

• The ancient Greek healing temples of Asclepius, where patients were required to travel long distances before any treatment began, and why that intentional journey turns out to be one of the most clinically significant design features in the history of medicine

• The outer sanctum and the inner sanctum, the two sequential chambers of the Asclepian temple, and why the order in which patients moved through them reflects the same logic that determines whether modern integrative treatment holds or eventually collapses

• The Caduceus, the twin serpent symbol carried by every physician, and what it has always been trying to tell us about the relationship between knowledge and wisdom

• Hippocrates, who understood symptoms as the body’s attempt to heal itself, versus Galen, who was the first to treat symptoms as the problem to be eliminated, and why that single disagreement, never resolved, is still quietly governing the way most patients are treated today

• What Descartes actually did when he formally separated mind from body in the 1600s, and why that philosophical move, more than any particular drug or protocol, is the deepest structural problem in modern medicine

The ideas at the centre of the 7 Stages Model are not new but ancient. And then, through a series of historical shifts, these ancient healing modalities were systematically dismantled, and what we are left with is a medicine that is extraordinarily powerful within its own domain and genuinely incomplete outside of it.

The uncomfortable question this chapter raises is not whether a better model exists, but whether the practitioner has been trained to inhabit it, and what has been left untreated in every patient who never encounters it.

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