I always found it odd that everyone insisted I avoid sunlight and wear sunscreen during outdoor activities, as I noticed that sunlight felt great and caused my veins to dilate, indicating the body deeply craved sunlight. Later, I learned that blocking natural light with glass (e.g., with windows or eyeglasses) significantly affected health, and that many had benefitted from utilizing specialized glass that allowed the full light spectrum through. This ties into one of my favorite therapeutic modalities, ultraviolet blood irradiation, which produces a wide range of truly remarkable benefits by putting the sun’s ultraviolet light inside the body.
Once in medical school, aware of sunlight’s benefits, I was struck by dermatologists’ extreme aversion to it. Patients were constantly warned to avoid sunlight, and in northern latitudes, where people suffer from seasonal affective disorder, dermatologists even required students to wear sunscreen and cover most of their bodies indoors. At this point my perspective changed to “This crusade against the sun is definitely coming from the dermatologists” and “What on earth is wrong with these people?”
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The Monopolization of Medicine
Throughout my life, I’ve noticed the medical industry will:
•Promote healthy activities people are unlikely to do (e.g., exercising or quitting smoking).
•Promote unhealthy activities industries make money from (e.g., eating processed foods or taking a myriad of harmful pharmaceuticals).
•Attack beneficial activities that are easy to do (e.g., sunbathing or consuming egg yolks, butter and raw dairy).
Much of this issue appears rooted in the controversial history of the American Medical Association (AMA). In 1899, the struggling organization revitalized itself by offering the AMA seal of approval to manufacturers who simply disclosed their ingredients and advertised in AMA publications. This strategy boosted AMA’s advertising revenue fivefold and its physician membership ninefold in a decade. For example, the AMA widely encouraged cigarette smoking, even when it was known to be dangerous:
The AMA then monopolized medicine by establishing a general medical education council, that allowed them to become the national accrediting body for medical schools, effectively eliminating the teaching of competing medical practices like homeopathy, chiropractic, naturopathy, and, to a lesser extent, osteopathy, as states often denied licenses to graduates from “low-rated” schools.
The AMA then further solidified this monopoly by having the media widely promote AMA campaigns against “medical quackery” (e.g., treatments they couldn’t buy the rights to) and mobilizing the FDA or FTC against competitors. Many remarkable medical innovations hence were successfully erased from history and part of my life’s work and much of what I use in practice are the therapies the AMA erased from history.
These monopolistic tactics never stopped. For example, after Dr. Pierre Kory testified to the Senate about using ivermectin to treat COVID-19, he faced intense media and professional backlash. Professor William B. Grant, then emailed Kory, stating that the same thing had been done to vitamin D research for decades.
Note: a few doctored trials were published that “debunked” ivermectin, thereby allowing the AMA to erase the vast body of evidence supporting the use of ivermectin—a standard tactic identical to what they did 72 years ago to bury Ultraviolet Blood Irradiation.
The Benefits of Sunlight
One of the oldest proven therapies in medicine is sunlight exposure, which effectively treated the 1918 influenza, tuberculosis, and various other diseases. The success of sunbathing even inspired the development of ultraviolet blood irradiation.
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Given its safety, effectiveness, free availability and lack of a lobbyist to protect it, it’s hence plausible that those aiming to monopolize medicine would seek to restrict public access to it. Medicine’s campaign against sunlight has been so effective that many are unaware of its benefits, including:
- Mental Health: Sunlight is crucial for mental well-being, notably in conditions like seasonal affective disorder, but its benefits extend further, as unnatural light exposure disrupts circadian rhythms.
- Cancer Prevention: A large epidemiological study discovered that women with higher solar UVB exposure had half the incidence of breast cancer, and men half the incidence of fatal prostate cancer. This 50% reduction greatly exceeds the effectiveness of current prevention and treatment approaches. Likewise, unnatural light has been repeatedly observed to worsen cancer outcomes.
- Longevity and Heart Health: A 20 year prospective study of 29,518 Swedish women found that sunlight avoiders were 60% more likely to die overall (and 130% more likely to die than the highest sun exposure group). Notably, smokers who got sunlight had the same mortality risk as non-smokers who avoided the sun as the greatest benefit of sunlight exposure is a reduction in death from cardiovascular disease.
Note: the link between losing natural light and conditions such as infertility, diabetes, cancer, poor circulation, depression, ADHD, and poor academic performance is discussed further here.
Skin Cancer
According to the American Academy of Dermatology, skin cancer is the most common cancer in the United States, with current estimates suggesting that one in five Americans will develop skin cancer in their lifetime. Approximately 9,500 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with skin cancer every day.
The Academy emphasizes that UV exposure is the most preventable risk factor for skin cancer, advising people to avoid indoor tanning beds and protect their skin outdoors by seeking shade, wearing protective clothing, and applying broad-spectrum sunscreen with an SPF of 30 or higher.
The Skin Cancer Foundation states that more than two people die of skin cancer in the U.S. every hour, which sounds alarming. Let’s break down what all this means.