THE ACCRESCENT™ PODCAST EPISODE 252

Leigh Ann Lindsey (00:01.068)
Well, Dr. Gominak, welcome to The Accrescent Podcast. I’m so excited to have you.

Stasha Gominak (00:04.659)
I’m excited to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (00:10.2)
So we always have to start with an origin story. I’ve done, of course, a little bit of research into you and your history, and the way that you started to get into sleep and how this became a target for you is such a fascinating story for me. But before that, you were, I think, 35 years maybe in neurology. But give the audience a little bit of an introduction to who you are, and then ultimately what made you shift and pivot into sleep coaching.

Stasha Gominak (00:41.213)
Thank you for the opportunity to talk about that. I am in love with sleep.

I was a general neurologist and I did my training in in Boston and then went to California and and served with a big multi-specialty group as a neurologist there and then moved to Texas in the early 2000s or about 2004 in a smaller town and was in private practice. And one of the things that happens then is most of the headache patients come to the new neurologist because we have such poor

treatment for them so they’re always looking for hope. And I so I had a lot of young healthy females with headaches in my practice and one of my patients demanded a sleep study. And at the time I really had no interest in sleep. Now keep in mind that that’s 20 years ago now and at the time we were told that middle-aged overweight males had sleep apnea and we really didn’t incorporate sleep into our treatments.

So there were no articles connecting headache and sleep at the time, but she turned out to be one, an someone who exercised, she wasn’t overweight, but she also had sleep apnea, and a CPAP device took her headaches away, which to me was totally ridiculous. And there was just no way that was gonna happen. But very difficult to picture how a CPAP mask could have a placebo effect.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (02:08.398)
Hmm.

Stasha Gominak (02:09.187)
And so I thought, well, let’s see if we can get the other patients to feel better because treating headache is very difficult. We have a very poor idea. Even though it’s the most common neurologic illness in the world, our treatment is poor and our understanding of it is very poor.

I think I understand it in a different way, but that’s for a different day. so she got better and then I did a whole bunch of sleep studies. And I had not been specifically trained in sleep, but I knew all the techniques that they were using to to measure things. And so I had a pulmonologist who was doing the sleep studies, and over a longer period of time of about a year, I had a a whole bunch of sleep studies in young, healthy females.

And most of them did not have sleep apnea. So I I had no nothing to suggest to them except for sleeping pills. And then finally I had a conversation with a guy who was reading the sleep studies who said, gee, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but your patients that you’re sending us, number one, it’s a very different group than what they were getting. They were getting older males, and there’s this whole fantasy about having a big neck because they have their fat and they have a big tongue, and it’s all a anatomically related to the airway.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (03:15.842)
Right.

Stasha Gominak (03:26.597)
Okay.

but it turns out you can have sleep apnea and have nothing wrong with your airway as well. And these young women, some of them had sleep apnea, but most of them did not. But he said, look, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but most of them have trouble with their rapid eye movement sleep, which is in the second half of the night, it is mostly parasympathetically run. that means it has high acetylcholine. So the first half of the night is epinephrine, norepinephrine, sympathetic, fight-flight sort of control. The second half is more parasympathetic.

Sympathetic control. They had a consistent finding that their REM sleep was delayed, or they had none, or they had REM-related apnea. And at that point, because I’m still thinking fat neck, something’s wrong with the tube that you’re breathing through.

it didn’t make any sense to me to say it could only be in this one particular phase of sleep. And he said, yeah, we get the most paralyzed of all. And in fact, we only paralyze our airway during rapid eye movement sleep. Now we’ve said that’s because we don’t want to cry out since we’re dreaming them. But you can look at it in a different way, which is we have to be able to repair this part of the body sometime, and if you then enlarge that idea to

Leigh Ann Lindsey (04:31.896)
Hmm.

Stasha Gominak (04:44.337)
Holy crap.

really seriously dangerous to get paralyzed at any time. But while I’m unconscious and extremely vulnerable, I’m unconscious and I’m paralyzed. Like that really freaked me out. So I I was like, wait, I’m a neurologist, how come I didn’t know this? And the only way to get at that is through the primary literature. Nobody really talks about this paralysis stuff in the at the sleep study, at the sleep meetings. It’s it’s a very little sub

Leigh Ann Lindsey (04:51.052)
Right.

Stasha Gominak (05:15.949)
specialty area, but the original videos are available online on YouTube about Dr. Dement and having these one of the upsetting things is it’s done in cats and there are cats who have lesioned a certain area and they’re up hunting while they’re measuring that they’re in REM sleep.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (05:17.582)
Right.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (05:31.345)
yeah.

Stasha Gominak (05:38.662)
And they’ve lesioned the area that par paralyzes them. So they take away the paralysis. So we’ve known about that since the 60s, but still no one knows why we get paralyzed. It’s an assumption that I have made that we must paralyze the moving parts in order to repair. That grows out of the other discovery, which is that in deep sleep or slow wave sleep, which is the deep sleep that happens in the first half of the night, and the word deep is used because.

When they were doing these original studies in the 1970s, in lighter sleep, they were able to wake the person easily. And that they would just wake up. In deep sleep, both periods of deep sleep, the first one is called slow wave sleep.

Both of them, it’s harder to wake them up. And in slow wave sleep, the person appears a little confused and disoriented. In REM sleep, they frequently say that they were dreaming when you wake them from those states. But having said that, it gives you an idea of how how little we know. We we know so little about sleep. It’s just weird. So

Leigh Ann Lindsey (06:48.291)
Right.

Stasha Gominak (06:53.433)
If you realize that in deep sleep, if you’re using a tracker, it’s called deep sleep, it’s slow wave sleep, growth hormone is only released in that phase of sleep in children who are growing. That means the relaxation of the body probably is linked to the fact that you don’t want to be

Leigh Ann Lindsey (07:08.546)
Mm-hmm.

Stasha Gominak (07:18.393)
encouraging this part of your body to elongate while you’re actually running across the basketball court. So there’s an assumption there, but it’s it’s a logical assumption that we paralyze things to repair them. So going back to this part, we have to paralyze the tongue, the throat for growth as a kid, but also the next can hypothesis

which has not been proven so far, is that we paralyze moving parts in order to repair them during the night. And did you lose me there?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (08:00.846)
I gotcha.

Stasha Gominak (08:01.947)
Okay. I’m sorry, mine is saying that I’m reconnecting. so there were aspects of this whole set of sleep studies that showed there was a specific

That was happening to my patients who are young and healthy, had a couple kids, maybe had thyroid disease. They didn’t have any reason to have anything wrong with their brain function. Yet these recordings of their sleep studies were quite abnormal. And the other thing was they frequently had two other complaints. I can’t remember anything, and I’m in a bad mood. Frequently, these are women who’ve just had a couple of children.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (08:38.662)
huh.

Stasha Gominak (08:43.131)
I realized over time that they wouldn’t have usually come in and say, you know, I don’t sleep very well. I wake up at 3 a.m., I can’t go back to sleep, and by the way, I have an 18-month-old and a four-year-old. And why can’t I sleep? Because the doctor’s gonna respond, Well, you have two little kids, what do you expect? But what if you don’t assume that it’s because of that? And what if they tell you my baby is sleeping through the night at 18 months, but I’m not?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (09:01.806)
Right.

Stasha Gominak (09:12.709)
And then I have this sleep study that shows a very specific abnormality that’s completely unexplained, and there aren’t any other reports of that. So as I start to look around in the literature, nobody is publishing this because they aren’t studying these young healthy women with headache. And if you weren’t studying a whole bunch of them, you wouldn’t see that it was a consistent finding. And then the other thing that was very upsetting was that finding was not on the report.

It’s in it’s in the the page two, three, four, five, but it’s not on the front page. So it says no significant apnea. And it wasn’t until my pulmonologist pointed out to me that there was this consistent finding that I said, wait a minute. I’ve been struggling with the fact that some of them have sleep apnea and some of them don’t, but they all have the same complaints.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (09:42.146)
Right.

Stasha Gominak (10:02.53)
i.e. they’re starved of a deeper phase of sleep that helps them make memories. Perhaps it helps them make neurotransmitters that put them in a good mood. There are things about this that are really important and

It’s not even on the report. Like why? And and this is still the case. That’s why I’m bringing it out again. Twenty years later, this is still, if you get a report back that says no significant apnea, it does not mean that your sleep study is normal. It means that if you have 20% of the REM sleep you should have, let’s say you have a half an hour and you should have two hours.

It’s there in the report, but your clinician is not gonna say, gee, Leslie, you only have a quarter of the REM sleep that you should have. Why aren’t they gonna say that? Because what would I, as Leslie, say back to them? that sounds important. What the hell? Let’s fix it. And I as a clinician am going to say, well, I have no idea how to do that.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (10:51.522)
Right.

Stasha Gominak (11:09.968)
So it’s been overlooked, and by accident I had a whole bunch of people that that means this is not about the airway. This is about a neurologic function of the brainstem. No one’s writing about it. And some of your next questions and why we would get into these weird things that we’re gonna talk about are because.

No one else is talking about it. I have a whole bunch of patients who I have sleep studies that support that they’re abnormal in this funky way, but it’s a neurologic problem. And I’m fascinated in the biochemistry of how things happen.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (11:47.898)
Yeah, to that point it’s frustrating sometimes, and I I get why, but it’s frustrating how reductive some of these medical reports can be, where it’s like, this is a sleep apnea test. So all we’re gonna do is say yes or no to sleep apnea, even though there’s all of this other data that can be really rich and informative, and it can be really misguiding in for patients who go, okay, I did it, I guess I don’t have sleep apnea.

I guess I don’t have a sleep issue.

Stasha Gominak (12:18.769)
Yes.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (12:22.861)
When really there’s all of this detail deeper down in the report that those practitioners maybe aren’t trained to share or highlight or they don’t actually know what it means, so they’re not gonna highlight it that can tell us a lot of there are sleep disorders, even if it’s not sleep apnea.

Stasha Gominak (12:39.782)
Yes, and and w where that leaves me is desperation.

Because I’ve already seen the CPAP device wear off. I’ve been doing five years, I had five years of CPAP and sleeping pills, and none of it re none of it really lasts. The CPAP device, they’re still wearing it, but the the feeling of being refreshed, of of being restored by their sleep is getting less and less over time. The sleeping pills always wear off. So it it’s not that sleeping pills are bad, it’s that they aren’t the whole answer, and neither is the CPAP.

And that leaves us with, okay, none of us know what to do. Let’s let’s see what happens.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (13:24.695)
Yeah. Well, I love how you’ve said in the past every medical textbook ever written is really just that person’s best guess at that point in time. And we have to take it with a grain of salt and we have to really look at the patient’s experience and the medical profession or professional’s anecdotal experience. That is data.

That is, in my opinion, scientific evidence of what is being seen. So I love that you, and this is probably where you’re going, you got to a place where with your patients, you were just like, hey guys, we’re doing an experiment here. The textbook answers aren’t working for us. We’re gonna try some new things. It’s new to me as your doctor, it’s gonna be new to you as a patient. Are you on board? If so, buckle up, basically.

Stasha Gominak (14:15.868)
Yes. And and the and the part that’s important, we talked about this before we started recording. Every doctor should be a patient before they become a physician. It’s a such a different place to sit. I was also having a sleep disorder at this time. Doctors are not encouraged to take the same treatment that their patients are, but they should. They should be thinking about that.

And when I get a sleep disorder myself, because I’m perimenopausal and I’m waking up all the time and I’m already on replacement hormones and it’s not helping, then I’m like, well, what else are we gonna do? You know, I’m not overweight, I don’t have sleep apnea, I’m still exercising, I eat a good diet, etc. So there you ha you have to see it from the point of view I I completely agree that what your patients tell you.

Is the data. The idea that single the the pharmaceutical industry has made this about evidence-based through the lens of we’re making a drug that we’re going to profit on. Evidence-based is really: did five patients tell me the same thing? Because we did not make this.

This is observational and there’s never a single variable in a human being or any other animal for that matter. Even in a plant, there’s no single variable.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (15:49.099)
Exactly, exactly. And what I want to rewind to really quickly is this whole path of inquiry for you began with these patients coming in with headaches. And then by chance you had that patient say, I w really want to do a sleep study. And then you were kind of off to the races going, Whoa, how might sleep be connected to all of these chronic headaches these patients are having?

Stasha Gominak (16:15.536)
And it turns out that the headache patients are the the hardest of all. You you have to get their sleep completely clean for a long period of time before they go away. And that that turns out to be really important. There’s a different chemistry to that than the stuff we’re gonna talk about with acetylcholine. So

They because of the observations they made about vitamin D and other things that we’re gonna talk about,

you had to be really, really good at doing this stuff, which is hard, and they had to be very observant about their bodies also. And and the other part that makes it a little bit different is they don’t have a lot of other drugs on board. So if you’re talking about chronic illness and you know they’re already on nine medicines, that get kind of gets in the way of the way you’re perceiving what what changes in them. So I’ll stop there and let you go on to any other questions you might have.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (17:13.978)
Let me pause ’cause I see my

Stasha Gominak (17:20.122)
Okay, good. Yeah, you’re you’re delayed for me.

Stasha Gominak (17:37.247)
good.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (17:39.41)
So this led you on a whole line of inquiry that took us and we’ll get in more into the nitty-gritty of this down the road of vitamin D, vitamin B12, acetylcholine. And I had so much fun listening to some of your previous conversations on this because you get so into the weeds of what mechanisms are happening in the body, the research that you know, the the

Deep dive research you had to do to find this information because it wasn’t just laying on the shelves. It wasn’t immediately available. You really had to go, something’s missing here, and I’ve got to go on a scavenger hunt to figure out what’s going on. But you did, and there is so much rich information that came from that. And I know we’re gonna get into a bit of history here in the 1800s and all of these different things that I I’m so jazzed to get to talk about.

Stasha Gominak (18:33.924)
Okay, so I I wanted to paint the picture for my I’m desperate, my patients are desperate, they have something that’s painful, so they’re they’re willing to do things that are somewhat experimental. And then I have a patient who’s eighteen, who has a terrible sleep study.

She has headaches, but nothing else is wrong with her. When I ask her how she sleeps, she says fine. She sleeps ten hours a night. But her sleep study shows she has no deep sleep at all. She has neither one of these two types of deep sleep, which was really horrifying because to me that meant okay, her future is going to be terrible. And why on earth would her brain be doing this?

And she turned out to have a B12 deficiency. and I I tested that by accident. So there’s this one totally desperate. Now my mind is open. I test something that I I’ve never tested in headache patients, a B12 level. I know nothing about vitamins because I was interested before I went to medical school, but I was trained away from them, despite the fact that they are the center of our biochemistry. There is every single thing we do in every cell in our body is linked.

Through these basic biochemical pathways that each of the vitamins play a central role in. So she has a B12 deficiency. We start to give B12 shots. I start to do B12 levels in all my headache patients. So now I have a little five-year collection of people I’ve done sleep studies in, and now I’m doing sleep studies in everybody. Everybody will let me. And I’ve got so I’ve got all these sleep studies, I’ve got what you know different neurologic problems, and I do B12 levels in all

them and one of my patients at the time ironically is a pulmonologist who is on disability because she has so many things wrong with her and she says I believe she has the core problem that we’re going to talk about she says my doctor did my D level and it was low and she gave me vitamin D and my wrist pain went away.

Stasha Gominak (20:39.57)
And there’s this aspect of paralysis and sleep that I had noticed was linked to pain. So there were a lot a lot of women who are 32 years old, had a couple of kids, but when they have the headache complaint and they’re seeing me for that, they also have like their foot hurts, or they’ve been told they have a stress fracture in their foot, or they have knee pain. And I run three times a week and I don’t have any knee pain. And

All the time I’ve been practicing, 32-year-old women should not have knee pain. I don’t care if they just didn’t have kids. so I I kept wondering about that. So for me, there was no place to put it when the when she mentioned this vitamin D, but I thought, okay, maybe it’s helping their bones or something, and I’m just gonna throw it in because I’m testing B12 levels, I’m drawing blood anyway, let’s put it in there too. So then I have about four months between September and December of 2009.

Where I draw D and B12 on all the people who happen to walk into the office for follow-ups who I have sleep studies on, they have pain complaints, they have sleep complaints. So I have a whole stable of these people, and by the about the third week of doing that, I’m writing a note every night.

Your vitamin D is low, please take a thousand IUs of vitamin D because I had no idea what the dose should be, nor am I really interested in that. But everybody’s D was low. And then two guys say, you know, this is in the fourth month, so they’re coming back for follow-up.

And they say, you know, I’ve been wearing this CPAP mask for a whole year, and my headaches have not gone away, even though you promised me they would. But you sent me that note last time I was in here. You sent me that note, told me to get vitamin D, and I took, I went out and got the vitamin D, and I took it for about three weeks, and my my sleep got better and my headaches went away. Now, the thing that’s odd about that is there were both guys whose D’s were actually a little higher than the the women that I was studying, and they were both already on C.

Stasha Gominak (22:42.974)
CPAP devices. And it turns out the people who are successful in wearing a C CPAP device actually have an additional helper in that machine that helps their sleep get better faster. So then

Leigh Ann Lindsey (22:44.453)
Mm-hmm.

Stasha Gominak (22:58.606)
My question is, well, the B12 has a literature. So if you go to the the PubMed, the place where we have most of the medical literature, scientific literature, B12 is already described as having to do with sleep. Though the connections to the biochemistry are very difficult. I still don’t have a clear idea how it’s how it’s related. But

Vitamin D at the time had no hits. If you put in vitamin D and sleep, no hits, if those are the search terms, but vitamin D in the brain turns up a guy named Walter Stumpf who’s been writing about vitamin D and studying where the vitamin D receptors are in very specific parts of the brain. And at the same time, I have been learning the brainstem anatomy to try to figure out: okay, this is weird, but

We get paralyzed, and here are the cells that paralyze us. Is it possible that apnea and the leg movements that we record on these sleep studies that are called periodic leg movements of sleep, which are actually alternating movements of the legs usually? Those two areas could be that this paralysis switch is kind of wobbling back and forth. It is not

Achieving perfect paralysis. So it’s it’s doing its job but in a sloppy way, let’s say. Could that be the origin of these things? If you view it through a different way and you’re saying it’s not just the air tube. So I’ve been looking at this particular set of cells with this long scientific name, the nucleus reticularis oralis caudalis. And this guy has published an article where he’s actually shown that that group of cells has vitamin D receptors all over it.

And I go, whoa, this is fascinating. Everybody’s D is low. It’s low in the fall when the only thing I know is we make it from the sun, therefore it should be the highest of the whole year, which means, wait, what’s it gonna be next May?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (24:50.531)
Uh-huh.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (25:04.047)
Right.

Stasha Gominak (25:04.346)
It’s going to be profoundly lower. Could it be that this is the origin? No. You have to picture that the five years preceding that, I have the same training that you guys do, which is diet, exercise, toxins. We have this house in Mexico. We drive back and forth. I’m constantly thinking about, well, do they have do they have all these toxins that we’re seeing that we that have glyphosate? Are they spraying for?

insects and I I’m thinking about what would be the things that would have put United States humans only at risk for this failing of sleep. The other thing is every animal on the planet sleeps and they’re all just sleeping. You don’t see them with CPAP masks on. We have the same sleep control. So one of the other questions you have is about this is the same brain stem that the dinosaurs had.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (25:52.183)
Right. Right.

Stasha Gominak (26:03.287)
Sleep is extremely old. As soon as animals started to appear on the planet, they had to be able to, presumably, get paralyzed and repair their body every single night for them to live several years. And we and we know that the dinosaurs were the prominent animal on the planet for a very, very long time. We’ve only been around for a small period of time compared to that. That means

These pathways, this engineering diagram to put the body at rest, paralyze it, and repair everything, has already been around forever. It’s like version two billion of this engineering diagram, okay? And that humans are all failing at the same time, because if you look at the sleep literature around the globe.

Every single sleep study center in Germany and Japan and Brazil and every place they open a study center, they’re all abnormal. And they’re not all abnormal in sleep apnea.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (27:00.759)
Mm.

Stasha Gominak (27:04.443)
That means this is a global epidemic, and because I lived before sunscreen existed, I know when sunscreen came. And I also know that I still don’t use sunscreen. It’s not bad for you, it’s just I didn’t really need to use it. And is my life a lot different than it was in the 60s when I was growing up, when no one had air conditioning and computers did not exist. And what has happened from the mid-80s? So I’m putting this within the within the

Leigh Ann Lindsey (27:12.913)
Yeah.

Stasha Gominak (27:34.37)
Context of the diseases that were present when we were in medical school. So my generation, I went to medical school 79 through 83. We did not learn about sleep apnea, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, IBS.

Autism wasn’t common. ADHD has become an epidemic since then. So those in my generation still had a lot of illnesses that when we’re told about them, we go, that sounds like a bullshit diagnosis. I mean, anybody would call it irritable bowel syndrome, means they don’t know why. They don’t have any good idea. So I know which things were not present in epidemic proportions. Not that that stupid apnea did not exist. It didn’t exist.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (28:12.635)
Uh-huh.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (28:21.864)
Right.

Stasha Gominak (28:22.139)
And many of these diseases are things that when you look at it through another lens, are things that old people get. They get chronic fatigue. they’re 85. What do we say? they have chronic fatigue syndrome. No, we say they’re 85 years old. It’s just when a 25-year-old comes in with it, okay? When they get constipated in diarrhea and all the time, they go, gee, old people have that, you know? So

Leigh Ann Lindsey (28:36.209)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (28:44.281)
Right.

Stasha Gominak (28:46.253)
The time frame was something that I was already thinking about, that the toxin increase, insecticides, you know, changes in our diet. I had all the same stories that we made up to to to explain this.

But I’m faced now with one, if I’m sitting across the room from my patient and I say, you know, there are a lot of toxins in the environment, that’s what’s probably pro poisoning your brainstem, isn’t this terrible? Or the the common thing that everybody says is the stress of modern life. Well, unless I have three steps that are gonna fix you, which is really what you’re working on, but unless I have something that’s really

Leigh Ann Lindsey (29:19.42)
Right.

Stasha Gominak (29:30.489)
concrete that that person can do to change their life. I’m not helping. I’m having a chat, you know. Isn’t life stressful? It’s not that helpful. Now it’s it’s not that those things like stress are not important to put in your head because things we’re going to talk about later, like, this same group of patients who has headaches is sitting on my examining table with a heart rate of 110.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (29:36.413)
Yeah.

Stasha Gominak (29:59.664)
And she’s a triathlete. She wants to know why her resting heart rate is one ten. That fits within the context of what you will see on the internet the the

The things that the habits that we’ve been taught, meditation, look at your heart rate variability. We’ve been focusing on the fact that many different diseases and many people who come in freaked out about various things have a connection to being in fight-flight. We know that that’s been well documented. So within that context, for the first time I’m thinking, wait, this vitamin D thing.

How does that fit into the way I’m thinking about the timing, the diseases that have and I start to read about all the epidemiologic studies that say vitamin D occurs in the you know in concert with, okay? Cause and effect is very difficult, but there is a huge epidemiologic study that says if you have a low vitamin D, you have a higher risk of X. Okay? Now, does that mean it proves that it’s the the cause? Not necessarily, you know.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (30:57.095)
Yeah.

Stasha Gominak (31:10.227)
But because no one else is suggesting anything better, I’ve tried everything I have at my fingertips. Let’s try this. So then Walter Stumpf and I

Published a paper in 2012 that was two years of me trying to figure out how to dose vitamin D. And I had a very simple question. If everybody’s vitamin D blood level, not the dose, the level in your blood that we get from drawing blood, if the level is low, and to give you a context, most of the labs say that the D vitamin D level ranges from 30 to 100.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (31:50.642)
Mm-hmm.

Stasha Gominak (31:51.078)
But nobody really knows what the normal level should be, okay? And if most people’s D’s are below 30, mine was 35. I tested mine at the same time in August, okay? 35, that’s within normal range, so I didn’t do anything about it. Well, wait, wouldn’t it be nice to be right in the middle?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (31:55.014)
Right.

Stasha Gominak (32:13.519)
Like, wouldn’t a level rate at 60 be right in the middle of that range? Why is it that we’re saying that we only recommend that somebody get to 32? Then it’s considered to be normal. If there’s already a literature suggesting that these 20,000 diseases, diabetes, hypertension, all these things are related to having a low D, wouldn’t you want to shoot a little bit higher than that? So there were things that weren’t cause and effect, but were still suspicious.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (32:25.948)
Uh-huh.

Stasha Gominak (32:43.473)
That, well, okay, let’s just see what my patients say about their sleep. So it was a very simple question: Is there a vitamin D level that seems to consistently have my patients saying, my sleep is better? Okay, wasn’t fixed, but it was definitely better. That was very clear as they crossed a level of 60. And because I was, in this case, only moving one variable.

Everything else remained the same, okay? So the the questions about whether or not our diet, our exercise, you know, I have a whole bunch of patients with all these different diseases and I’m not concentrating on them, and most of the people that I’m talking to about this have have been looking at the literature online, or at least what the

Leigh Ann Lindsey (33:09.073)
Mm-hmm.

Stasha Gominak (33:32.655)
People are advising about what’s the right diet to have if you have hypertension. If you you know, they’re they’re interested in that. It’s about their own body. But the things that they’ve tried have not made their sleep better. So we find something that does make their sleep better at a level of of 60, and then I’ll 60 and above, and and I’ll stop there and see if you have any other questions.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (33:55.9)
Well, I just wanna reiterate for the audience blood level of sixty or above. And I think the interesting factor to get into here is what

What then I you, what dosage of vitamin D is gonna get each person to that level could be completely different for all of these different reasons, right? Maybe my body’s using vitamin D differently, so I get depleted faster. Maybe so-and-so is in the sun more, etc. And so that’s why, of course, having a practitioner involved in this is so important to be able to go, it’s not a one-size-fit-all with dosing that’s gonna get the patient.

to a blood level vitamin D of sixty or above.

Stasha Gominak (34:40.485)
Beautifully said, and that is one of the biggest stumbling blocks is you named this thing that’s a hormone, you named it a vitamin. That was a big mistake. It is not a vitamin, it does not come from food. Yes, it’s in food. If you eat salmon, it has some vitamin D in there that the salmon made to run their life. Okay. And you happen if you get a female salmon, you’ll get some salmon estrogen too. Does that mean you you’ve got all the estrogen you need? No.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (34:48.84)
Right.

Stasha Gominak (35:09.743)
You have to make this hormone yourself. So saying it’s a vitamin or a nutrient is a big mistake. And it turns out that we really have no way of knowing how deficient each cell is.

What I saw that was that changed my mind was I had some patients who were profoundly sick, 32 years old, autoimmune disease, endometriosis, terrible pain, burning in the feet, you know, seeing five different clinicians at 32 years old who ended up taking 30,000 IUs a day for four years to keep the level the same.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (35:42.802)
Yeah.

Stasha Gominak (35:52.026)
So we’ve been told these these overarching comments like, you must not absorb it.

And that’s been that’s been generated by the medicine as well, not just by the supplement industry. And there’s a good there’s a good reason why they they assume that you didn’t absorb it, but it’s wrong. It turns out you are actually sucking that stuff up, and the stuff you you measure in the blood is the leftovers. It is the stuff that’s just hanging out in the blood, and the rest of it is hidden away in your cells doing its job.

So there’s this problem with the supplement industry that we’ve been all it’s been allowed to make these comments like, B vitamins, you just pee out the excess, they’ll never hurt you. You know, everything with the vitamin name, and then it becomes generalized to every single vitamin. No, that turns out to be very wrong. And part of the problem in my being able to communicate what I found is to t is that I’m

I’m questioning a lot of the dogmatic statements that have been made. We’re gonna get into that in a minute, about B5. And if you question three or four statements, you kind of alter our way of looking at the world, which is very unsettling and it’s very difficult for you to kind of digest that. So it’s not like I immediately jumped into this.

you know, I’d love to be working in supplements. You know, I was like, I don’t understand this stuff. I’m not a endocrinologist, I’m working with a hormone, this is frightening. So I had to do a lot of reading, but more importantly, my patients were willing to come back and tell me how they were doing, what they were experiencing. And that goes on to the next discovery that’s even more important than this vitamin D connection.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (37:27.815)
Right.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (37:52.114)
Take us there, Stasha.

Stasha Gominak (37:53.594)
Okay, so this is the most important part. You know, everybody’s talking about vitamin D, and the reason why this is the most important part is vitamin D went through a popularity phase during COVID. So many people around the globe started taking D. And as far as I know, I am the only clinician who has a stable of patients who were taken to a vitamin D level of around 60.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (38:12.562)
Mm-hmm.

Stasha Gominak (38:23.323)
Their sleep got better. We stayed there for two years, and then we all went to shit. I mean, terrible things happened to us that are D-related, but are not directly from the D itself. That means, yes, well, it was for my patients, it was not during COVID. For my patients, it was from 2010.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (38:38.344)
During that COVID time. Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (38:44.734)
okay.

Stasha Gominak (38:47.941)
To 2012, when Walter and I published this article. Okay, so I have a lead time of approximately 10 years on what I know is going to happen to the people who’ve been taking D since COVID.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (39:01.155)
Mm, mm-hmm.

Stasha Gominak (39:01.699)
And bad things are gonna happen to them, and it’s kind of inevitable in my experience. So it’s my experience then says, any of you have been taking D since COVID. Here are the other things that might show up, and here’s why. All right. So my pro my experience is now around 2012, we published the article. I think I’m gonna be a hero. D is wonderful. And then my patients start to come back and they say things like, I have.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (39:17.689)
Okay, got it.

Stasha Gominak (39:31.663)
Burning in my hands and feet that started in the last two months. I want to know if it’s related to that vitamin D stuff because I’ve never had this before. I don’t have diabetes. So I have two women who have been seeing me for headaches who have exactly the same complaint, happening at exactly the same time frame.

And I’ve been a neurologist for 30 years now and a neuropathy specialist. That means I see the people who are referred for burning and stuff. Burning in the hands and feet happening at the same time is very, very unusual. Maybe some burning in the hands, maybe burning in the feet, but very rarely that it happens at the same time. And these two women have nothing to do with each other. And B12 is one of the things that will help that. And they’re already on B12.

Their B12 levels are normal. That leaves me with no answer. I have other patients coming in and saying, gee, all my joints hurt. And that started within the last two or three months. Time frame is the same because I started all of this with my varied patients who have not changed their diets. They, you know, they have different neurologic illnesses. So there’s only one variable. It starts at a certain time. These people are all coming back, they don’t know each other, and they’re saying these unused.

Usually routine things. All my joints hurt now. Could it be related to vitamin D? And I’m like, how are those Astros doing this year? Isn’t this a wonderful baseball season? Because I don’t have a clue. But in the background, it’s two years later. Their dose is no different now. We figured out the dose, their level is the same.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (41:04.176)
Right.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (41:07.57)
Yeah.

Stasha Gominak (41:17.477)
But I’m looking at this vitamin D through a different lens. So one of the really important things about vitamin D research is everybody who comes into it joins in from a different place. There are some people who are studying the skin. I’m studying sleep. My

Outcome that I want is that they make more repairs. Not that they’re unconscious for 10 hours, not that they’re unconscious for eight hours. They are making more repairs because they’re getting into deep sleep, which is where the repair processes are opened. We make these repairs at certain times in the 24-hour period. That’s my belief system. Otherwise, why would we spend time lying down and going into these weird phases? Okay, I’m I it’s a high

Hypothesis because we don’t exactly know why we sleep, but it seems most logical. Also, all these women who don’t have this REM sleep, they feel like crap. And they tell you exactly the same thing. They’re tired, they can’t think, they you know, so

Even though we don’t know for sure, it’s quite obvious that if they’re all missing this phase of sleep and it gets better when we give them D, and by the way, they won’t pay the thousand dollar copay to go back and get another sleep study when they feel better. They’ll just say, No, that’s okay, I’ll skip that. Okay? So I don’t have before and afters, but they’re feeling better. And then we all take a dive at the same relative time from starting this stuff.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (42:35.57)
Yeah, I got mm hmm.

Stasha Gominak (42:49.314)
And at that point, I think, well, is it possible that maybe they’re using more of other vitamins? Because now I’m thinking about deficiency states all the time. I found one deficiency state, and it’s from going outside. And we’ve been told that the B vitamins come from food. But these two women, they haven’t changed their diet.

Is it possible that this is some sort of B vitamin deficiency? Because I know that B12 is one of the things that has improved this in other patients I’ve had. So I’m thinking, well, maybe the vitamins are deficient because we’re using more, we’re making more repairs, we’re using more, and their diet can’t keep up. And then I start to read articles about the B vitamins. And it turns out that the first article I pick up is from 2013.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (43:35.986)
Hmm.

Stasha Gominak (43:44.015)
To review article and it says thiamine. So there are eight B vitamins, which is a peculiar, but it I never really thought about it. Okay? Most of us don’t think about this stuff. Why would there be eight? You know, that’s weird. So thiamine has a gut bacteria source and a food source. Riboflavin has a gut bacteria source and a food source. Niacin, the same. We can sort of make it, but some of it comes from the poop. All eight have a gut source. Now

Leigh Ann Lindsey (43:54.962)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (44:08.882)
Hmm.

Stasha Gominak (44:13.044)
In the setting of 2013, I’m hearing about these guys from Oklahoma that are doing fecal transplants. And I’m joking about this because who would let anybody do a fecal transplant? You you have to be desperate and dying. And that’s what’s happening. They’re dying of C. diff in the hospital, and they’re doing fecal transplants, and they’re getting better. Now

Leigh Ann Lindsey (44:29.266)
Right. Right.

Yeah.

Stasha Gominak (44:36.75)
That then takes you to a whole new place and I start to read about what’s happening in the GI literature. And in fact, as I’m reading that review article I’m telling you about, my husband hands me this Economist Journal Economist magazine that’s about making money and investment. And he says

I think you’re gonna wanna read this. And there’s this three-page article that’s called Me, My Microbes, and Us. And it’s in review, it’s beautifully written, though it doesn’t have an author on it. It’s got multiple authors. It’s a summary of all the things that they’re finding in the GI literature, like fecal transplant. Now, a lot of people know about this stuff now because you know 12 years has passed, but if you get a transplant stool from somebody who’s fat, you’ll get fat.

If you get a transplant for somebody who’s skinny, you’ll get skinny. Well, that’s weird. Like what’s about here’s another experiment. You take a mouse, you do a gastric banding, the thing that was popular at the time instead of the GLP1 shots which are happening now. You do gastric banding at a mouse, and you take the poop from that mouse and you put it into a sterile mouse, the second mouse loses weight.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (45:29.552)
Remember.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (45:52.454)
Without any has to.

Stasha Gominak (45:52.719)
That means it is not it is not the gastric banding. It is what happens to the microbiome in response to that. And that leads to all these interesting things about the microbiome. The microbiome, if you have this bacteria, it makes this short chain fatty acid that goes right up into your nose and makes high fat, high calorie foods smell especially good to you. That means

Leigh Ann Lindsey (46:19.024)
my god.

Stasha Gominak (46:20.406)
Obesity is not about being a fat slob and eating too much. Obesity is about the fact that you have a bacterial intestinal contents that are telling you that you’re starving all the time and that you are constantly hungry, your feeling of satiety has been manipulated by the bacteria that live inside you. What a bizarre concept. Now, if you look at it then through that lens and say,

you know what? Now I’m back again with my patients. They’ve been on D for two years. One of the things that I thought would go away with D was your IBS symptoms. Well, they haven’t. They still have IBS symptoms. I thought D was gonna fix that. I had assumed that D was a bacterial growth factor.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (47:02.416)
Mm.

Stasha Gominak (47:11.566)
Because there are so many other things that it’s involved in. I mean it explains why these same groups of women have thyroid disease and have gallbladder disease. They’re all linked to vitamin D in various ways. But the IBS did not get better. Which implies that if the IBS symptoms are about having the wrong microbiome, it implies that the vitamin D by itself, and I think a level of 60, should be plenty so that your bacteria have all that they need.

But they didn’t get better. So at that point, one, I’ve got an article that says the gut bacteria really.

Are where the Bs come from. And the reason why I’m particularly interested in this is my recollection from medical school was this was the only thing I remembered, if you give one B, you have to give it all of them. Because they’re very intertwined metabolically. Okay? They’re metabolically intertwined in the bacteria that make them. So if I’m gonna make, it turns out if I’m gonna make coenzyme A in the human, you have to have thiamine and you have to have B5. So there are many places in our biology where there are two or three of these guys that coincide.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (48:00.735)
huh.

Stasha Gominak (48:15.89)
If the bacteria in our belly are going to make this, that means they need all eight. And then there’s another article that I didn’t actually have at the time, but has proven that the four phyla that are shown to be the normal phyla of human intestinal contents.

All need one bee at least and make one or two bees. So they hang out as a foursome because they are interdependent on these these this B supply. Okay, now all that is looking back. What actually happened was I didn’t have a clue. I’m thinking these things in my head. I told you I read this article, but then what happened is this woman brings in a book. She’s one of my patients. She knows I’m

Leigh Ann Lindsey (48:54.418)
Mm-hmm.

Stasha Gominak (49:06.722)
Maniacal about sleep, and she brings me a book that’s about B5, pantothenic acid. And it’s called The Pain-Free Promise of Pantathenic Acid. And it’s a woman who’s a lay person who has rheumatoid arthritis. She takes pantothenic acid and all of her pain goes away. And she starts recommending it to other people who have autoimmune disease. And she has references that go all the way back to the 1950s, where they have these experiments where they deprive, they do an

In convicts, so there’s there’s all these other aspects that means that this has never been done again since the 50s. They give this pantothenic acid blocker, and within two weeks, the population, which is very small, like five convicts are in this study. But within two weeks, when you block pantothenic acid, you get a funny gait, insomnia, that’s why she brought me that book, and burning in the hands and feet.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (50:02.888)
Stasha Gominak (50:06.35)
The two things that are I’m thinking about every night as when I’m going to bed going, how am I going to get out of this terrible situation? So now here’s a B vitamin that clearly has power in sleep. You take it away, boom, the sleep goes away. So I think, well, maybe I’ve made my patients B vitamin deficient by giving them D, increasing the demand.

But they can’t increase the supply because their intestinal bacterial mix is wrong. Now, the next question would be: what do those little guys want? I mean, talk about being demanding. What I gave them D already, what else do they want? In response to the fact that my patients were complaining, and I had this peculiar buttock pain.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (50:37.02)
Hmm.

Stasha Gominak (50:53.624)
That was not explained in any way. I hadn’t fallen on my butt. It hurts to sit down, which is very peculiar. I’d never had that before, and it’s happening in the same time frame as the stuff that they’re having. So it’s also pain related. And I’m pretty sure it’s related to what my legs are doing while I’m sleeping. So I start on pantothenic acid, 400 milligrams, because that’s the recommended dose in this book. And that is the dose that’s sitting on the shelf at the health food store, 400 milligrams. But then I think.

Okay, we have to give all Bs because that’s what I remember. And I go and I grab this thing called B100, completely by accident. B100 is 100 milligrams of thiamine, 100 of riboflavin. It determines that they’re going to supply 100 milligrams or 100 micrograms of each one of the Bs. So I go home and I start taking this, and for one week I recommend this combination to everyone who comes in that week to see me who has a sleep study, who’s been on D for two years.

And now has new pain complaints. The two gals with the burning immediately better. Big hero.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (51:55.504)
Mm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (51:59.356)
Wow. And just for clarity, it was the it was two things, the pantothenic acid and the B100. Mm-hmm.

Stasha Gominak (52:05.584)
Correct. So that means I’m giving eight variables. Okay? Now, for from my point of view, after g stumbling through vitamin D, which was a nightmare, and my colleagues were not happy with me, but my patients were better and I was better. So but it’s a very difficult topic. So now I’m into something that has eight variables, which is scary. But if you believe the concept that these come from the bugs, then

Leigh Ann Lindsey (52:08.732)
Right.

Stasha Gominak (52:33.676)
If these are really and one other historical article that talks about the fact that these eight chemicals were really described as bacterial growth factors first. So they had a pivotal part to play in studying bacteria at the very beginning. Okay? I’m not gonna go down that whole path, but this means that they were all discovered in the same liquid.

That was a yeast bacterial liquid, that means, okay, if I want to think about the bacteria in a different way, what we’ve been doing is probiotics, which means we freeze-dry these bacteria and we swallow them. And then we go, we hope that that they do the right thing. Okay? If they don’t have the growth factors they need, sitting down there in your intestine, nothing’s gonna happen. You just ate a dead bacteria, it’s never gonna divide again. Okay? So when you’re thinking about this a lot, which I was at the time.

The bacteria that are in the small intestine, the very beginning, right after the stomach, they are reproducing rapidly. You know, the guys that are sitting right now as we’re talking, they’re gonna be pooped out by tomorrow. Well, who’s gonna be there tomorrow? Their great granddaughters are gonna be there tomorrow. They’re constantly turning over, constantly and we have different bacterial populations at

Leigh Ann Lindsey (53:49.349)
huh.

Stasha Gominak (53:56.411)
Probably every foot of the small intestine, every foot of the colon has a different population that does different things. We just started into this area of study, but the GI literature is coming out just amazingly fast. Now, if you picture it then sort of like a river, okay, we’re looking at this water, you and I are standing there, we’re looking at the rocks and the water’s coming by. Ten minutes later we look at the river, it looks exactly the same.

But it’s not the same water there that was there when we were looking 10 minutes ago. It’s it’s moved down. But it looks the same, okay? That means the growth factors that support the rapid, huge division of this population of bacteria are what needs to be supplied. Once I give B100.

What happened to me was one, the 500 milligrams, so I’m on 400 milligrams of pantothenic acid plus B100. My restless leg syndrome goes through the roof. My legs are jumping around all day long. And by the end of the week, I think, my God, I’m on the wrong dose. It has to be some it’s making everything worse. So I stop the 400 milligrams and I’m on the B100 for just two days. My butt pain is completely gone.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (54:59.496)
Leigh Ann Lindsey (55:15.56)
Hmm.

Stasha Gominak (55:15.79)
Which is ridiculous, okay? No everybody thinks I’m a weirdo anyway, nobody’s gonna believe me, but it goes away really fast and it’s been there for months.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (55:21.36)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Stasha Gominak (55:25.476)
That means there’s not only a variable of eight things, but that the pantothenic acid in huge dose was a big loser, and it has something to do with my brain system and this weird thing that I have that’s my sleep disorder, which is restless legs, which is about neurochemistry. This is where I live all day. Now, the people come back and they say, This 400 milligrams, were you trying to kill me?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (55:54.69)
huh.

Stasha Gominak (55:54.766)
Because I couldn’t sleep at all and I felt so agitated, I only took it for two days. Some of them yelled at me and then fired me, which I can’t say that I blame them, but there is no literature to support that. They couldn’t sleep at all. That’s the complete opposite from what you would think. Okay, if they’re low in B5 and they take this and it’s 400 milligrams, I’m doing it according to the book.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (56:00.732)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (56:09.778)
Mm-hmm.

Stasha Gominak (56:24.258)
No, it makes them worse. Something is making their reaction and it’s forty different people. So some of them do the same thing I did, which was stop the four hundred milligrams. I’m on the B100 and all my pain went away in two days and I was like that’s what happened to me. Wha what what’s up with that?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (56:26.576)
Mm.

Stasha Gominak (56:42.992)
And and they know more about vitamins than I do. So I’m asking them. We’re taking part in a discussion about this. No one has heard about pantothenic acid in sleep because

Every single book says there is no such thing as pantothenic acid deficiency because it’s in every food. Even that review article, all the articles that came since say the same thing. But that is not true. I just had 40 people who don’t know each other saying exactly the same thing. This caused insomnia. When I went down to this dose, which seems to be the perfect dose for those of us who have been on D for two years, very specific and very important.

modifier, we needed a hundred milligrams of pantothenic acid. Okay? Now the other thing that I was suspicious about was if I’m right in thinking that this combination of eight high dose bees is the growth factor mix that the human microbiome needs, then I just then made a B and D soup

Leigh Ann Lindsey (57:29.928)
Mm-hmm.

Stasha Gominak (57:51.616)
inside their intestinal contents that’s going to bring back the natural bacteria. Now what’s wrong with that? Well, if they come back and they do their job, they’re probably going to be making the equivalent of B100.

Because those of us who are a little deficient now are tak are may are taking B100 and picture it as you’re feeding two populations. You’re giving it to the bacteria who are using it for their own stuff and making things that we use. And then it appears that this stuff goes right across the intestinal contents and it’s pumped by the same pump into the brain, and it has an effect in a half an hour.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (58:07.077)
huh.

Stasha Gominak (58:31.127)
My patients will say, I took this a half an hour later, I felt either agitated and uncomfortable in this weird way, like I’m just revved up, or completely calm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (58:31.301)
Wow.

Stasha Gominak (58:43.949)
Like I felt amazingly calm. If you get the amount that the nervous system wants, so there are two aspects happening there. There’s the nervous system of the patient who can relate to me that this dose felt comfortable to them. And then there is did I give enough to make the bacteria slowly get happy, have enough of this starter soup that they start to all come back, and now they’re making the normal amount that the human nervous system was supposed to be exposed.

To on a daily basis. Okay? There’s an assumption in the background which is none of the animals out there are taking stuff from GNC. They’re not taking supplements. They just eat. If all of these Bs always come from the microbiome, that means that the microbiome that they have naturally related to, let’s just stay with mammals, related to their mom’s D and their mom’s microbiome, and they pass that D and B’s into my mouth with their breast milk.

And then I had D enough to establish this population and I live outside, so I am getting D from the sun. All those other animals are succeeding, as far as we know, and we’re not. Okay, that means.

When they get the bacteria back, all of a sudden that pain and sleep interruption is going to return because they will be on double the dose. And the only way I knew that is by accidentally giving 500 milligrams that I took, that they took, they yelled at me, I would never forget that. So I start to tell my patients: look, I suspect

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:00:10.898)
Right.

Stasha Gominak (01:00:25.165)
That when you’re taking this, you are priming your bacteria and that they’re gonna grow back. And I’m thrilled that your pain is gone and your sleep is better, but

I think you should be paying attention to if that stuff comes back, you stop this B100 right away. Because I think you’re gonna be on double the dose and bad things are gonna happen to you. And that’s exactly what happened. So, and it turns out over time it became clear that most people needed to stay on that D and B100 combination for about three months. Then

What happened to me was I’m on B100, one of my patients comes back, and I started to modify what I would advise when a new patient would come in. So I would start to give D at a certain dose based on my experience with two years before, plus B100, and one of the gals who had come in with just headache, she didn’t have endometriosis, she didn’t have autoimmune disease, she wasn’t as sick again after her second kid, lots of things similar.

to the other population, but she said, you know, you put me on that B100 in the D and I started to wake up and feel achy all over and really like I would be all stiff and I would have to go, ooh, ooh, ooh. And she said, I feel old. And I went, that’s what I feel like in the morning. I thought I had the flu or something, you know? And then I thought and then she said, no, no, what happened was I broke that B100 in half. I’m taking B50, I feel great. In a day.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:01:57.7)
Mm-hmm.

Stasha Gominak (01:01:59.544)
Now, if you aren’t really well seated and thinking about sleep all the time, this idea of aching.

Is really more about the inflammatory system, which it might be related to. But there’s another way to look at it, which is if my paralysis and sleep is screwed up, then my muscles can actually be activated during the phases of sleep where I’m supposed to be completely unconscious and I’m not aware that they’re activated. So there’s an inflammatory aspect plus there’s a sleep and paralysis aspect. It turns out that both of those are related to acetylcholine, which is where we’ll finally wind up.

Go, maybe my bugs are back, because I really never had any IBS symptoms. And I stop the B100 and all my aching goes away in a day. So there are aspects to this that are really weird. One, the timing that it happens so fast. That there are aspects to inflammatory things. Many people had other skin things that would show up: unexplained rashes, itchy stuff, hives.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:02:53.255)
Yeah.

Stasha Gominak (01:03:04.611)
So there are inflammatory things, plus there are things that are related to sleep. And now I get to see what happens using now B50, which is what I use now in the RightSleep Program, and the D together. The reason why this is important is if you started taking COVID, even if it was only 5,000 IUs, and you took it for four years, let’s say you took it from 2020 and then COVID’s gone and you stop it in 2024, and you’ve gotten your D level up into the 60s so that you’re in the

Same situation as my patients. Your sleep is a little better, making more repairs, but your bugs are not back. They’re gone because the D was so low, but they do not come back with just D as the single growth factor. Then you can start to have painful things that when you go into the doctor, they say, you have neuropathy. you have lupus. you have anxiety disorder. There are things that are showing up, and we have names for all of them.

We’ve already made up stories to explain them, but they are actually a deficiency state that came about because you were on D for four years, even though you’re not taking it now.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:04:16.634)
Yeah. my gosh. It’s so fascinating. And what I think is so tricky from the patient side of it is you’re not necessarily gonna be thinking, What did I do four years ago? You’re gonna be thinking, I just started feeling pain. What happened in the last two months, three months, maybe twelve?

Stasha Gominak (01:04:28.687)
No y no. Neither is your doctor.

Stasha Gominak (01:04:39.637)
Exactly. Very there’s just no way anybody else is gonna clue into this. And especially if I start publishing so I published a second article in twenty sixteen that talked about

the connection between this and that if you pushed your patients with D alone into a deficiency state and again said these Bs are coming from the microbiome. That now is relatively accepted. At the time nobody was saying that except this one other article. But it pushes you into a hyperinflammatory state that includes all sorts of other things that has a not just joint pain and skin, but

You know, atherosclerotic heart disease and you know everything that you’re seeing online right now about health and wellness talks about this generalized inflammation. So I I published this article in 2016, but you know, it’s like a little blip on the screen. Nobody’s gonna be reading that unless they’re really interested in B five. And luckily, since 2020, B five is kind of famous again.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:05:40.702)
Right.

Stasha Gominak (01:05:48.816)
Because there are articles that are talking about B5 deficiency now from a pathology standpoint where they’re measuring this the contents of the cells. So it’s something you can’t really argue with and say, it’s not really B5 deficiency. No, we have this, we’re measuring every vitamin in the cell of a person with Alzheimer’s disease, and we’re showing that Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, and all these other things have a B5 deficiency state. And that lab, that was a single report out of a single lab, but that lab.

said the same thing that I did which was I don’t know why everybody says there’s no pantothenic acid deficiency because it’s in every food because it’s obviously not.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:06:28.37)
Hmm. Right. And so where does that lead us to your work? And I think I know there’s so many places we can go. but we’ll have to land the plane. But

Stasha Gominak (01:06:41.154)
Okay.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:06:43.224)
The work you’re doing now with sleep coaching, where has that led you to ultimately figuring out when sleep’s disturbed? Here are some of the biggest factors we need to be looking at. And I do want to close with giving the audience in a second just a little bit of like if they want to work with you, what does that look like? How can they get in touch? But let’s come back to that acetylcholine and yeah.

Stasha Gominak (01:07:08.451)
Let me just make one other comment. Since you’re coming out of a your job is related to people who have cancer, that piece is really important and

I I don’t feel completely confident saying that my treatment plan that’s about sleep is safe or unsafe for people with cancer. I don’t think that’s clear, okay? So I want to give that caveat at the beginning. Ultimately, what I stumbled into was the literature explaining what B5 becomes and

In so many ways, how many ways it’s important in our body. So B5 becomes what is called coenzyme A. And coenzyme A is a pivotal part of basically a hundred different things in the body. One of the important things it does is it helps.

To make acetylcholine, which I mentioned several times. And acetylcholine is the only neurotransmitter that’s used by the parasympathetic nervous system. That means you can meditate or do breath work or do anything you want, but if you don’t have the juice that those things, so what you’re doing as you’re meditating, you’re trying to get the brainstem, you’re attaching your consciousness to what your brainstem is doing, and you’re actually asking it to increase the

Amount of acetylcholine tone in your brain. How much compared to epinephrine? These two sides are always kind of trying to measure and stay in the middle unless something happens. And then, you know, if you get rear-ended, then your epinephrine goes up. But if you’re trying to go to sleep and stay asleep, you want your acetylcholine to be where it’s supposed to be for that phase. And it turns out that the second half of sleep is acetylcholine dominant, and that that was the P.

Stasha Gominak (01:09:11.489)
That we started with. All these young healthy females who have nothing else wrong with them and shouldn’t have any sort of a neurotransmitter deficit, don’t have enough acetylcholine to last till 3 a.m. and then, they can’t sleep. They wake up at 3 a.m. and they can’t go back to sleep. And it turns out, if you just look at the literature and say, what does acetylcholine do in our brain? It says acetylcholine is responsible for being able to focus and stay attention.

Attentive and be distracted and come right back during the day. And it’s run in these frontal lobe cholinergic center that’s right underneath our frontal lobes. And the second thing it does is it runs REM sleep. There’s all this literature, there’s 40 years of literature about how acetylcholine really runs the second half, especially REM sleep.

That means that ADHD and ADD started to be increasing at the same time as the sleep disorders did. That means this is both connected to a single neurotransmitter.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:10:10.364)
Yeah.

Stasha Gominak (01:10:16.971)
In the last 10 years, there’s another use of acetylcholine, which is the acetylcholine anti-inflammatory pathway. New discovery 10 years ago. Stimulate the vagus nerve and the neck to try to help with seizures. Part of it goes to the spleen, the spleen releases T cells, the T cells release the enzyme that makes acetylcholine. That means I’ve actually, when I’ve given D for two years, I’ve in the in the brain stem, it makes the enzyme.

The final enzyme that makes acetylcholine. So choline acetyltransferase. So that is a beautiful article that exists there since the 80s, but no one really put that together.

Then it turns out that acetylcholine is used in our body in specific locations for specific things in the brain, the two things I told you about, the predominant ones. But then it’s also used as a hormone throughout our body. It’s in the subcutaneous tissues, it’s everywhere. And you can give B5 in the wrong dose and cause hives within a half an hour. That also means that this hyper-inflammatory state.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:11:19.342)
Uh-huh.

Stasha Gominak (01:11:26.189)
that everybody’s talking about at the same time they’re talking about fight flight. The reason why it hasn’t been available to completely cure is because you’ve run out of the juice that makes it.

You ran out of the juice that makes it because medicine told you to go indoors, because they told you to lather skin cream all over yourself to protect yourself from the sun. And that started 40 years ago. That means we now have two generations. That means that the recent generation of moms that are giving birth to babies, their D’s are low. Their D’s are low, and mom’s microbiome is wrong. And it turns out there are many things that are supposed to be supplied.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:11:38.877)
Right.

Stasha Gominak (01:12:08.835)
From the microbiome into her bloodstream, into the baby in utero, which is also related to the increase in autism. And autism is not a genetic disorder, it is a it’s on a spectrum. That’s why they call it a spectrum disorder. So that means that there are aspects to this that I think can be reversed, even in adults with spectrum disorders, because I was able to see that if you give supplements, supplements are really

The tools, they are not what repairs the brain. What repairs the brain are these repair processes. The brain knows exactly what to do, which is phenomenal. I I had some kids who were very developmentally delayed, bad seizure disorders, who I’d been following as a neurologist, who over a period of five or six years, when I started to think, I never asked about his sleep. You know, we’re just following a seizure disorder. He can hardly talk, he doesn’t walk right, he’s wearing a helmet.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:13:05.372)
Right.

Stasha Gominak (01:13:08.625)
Helmet, you know, he’s in 22 and he’s in a sort of a residential care sort of situation. And over a period of five or six years, he starts. I start to be able to understand him. He’s making jokes. He doesn’t have a helmet on anymore. From the neurology standpoint, we were told that this was a static.

It’s not going to get improved. I think that opening up the possibility of making someone sleep better means that the brain will say, I know what to do. It just hasn’t had the time to make these developmental stages. So then I start to see this in a totally different way. Now I’m very interested in what does acetylcholine do? How is it acetylcholine linked to diabetes?

I just asked that for the first time two weeks ago. And it turns out that the autonomic nervous system comes in and starts helping the pancreatic islet cells to secrete more insulin under certain circumstances. It helps with management of sugars, both at the liver and at the pancreas.

That means I’ve taken the half of the autonomic nervous system out of the picture. There are people walking around that really only have one half of their autonomic nervous system. Why are they constantly agitated and anxious? And that’s only a small piece because that means it’s day to day. Then you take their sleep away. Now you take away the ability to repair their channels, to repair other disorder other chemicals that we.

Use every single day, you can wind up in a pretty messed up place because you did exactly what your doctor told you. Your doctor told you to avoid the sun. One other small mention that D supplementation, though it’s what we have, is not actually the same as being out in the sun.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:14:50.952)
Mm.

Stasha Gominak (01:15:04.323)
There are more there’s more and more literature about the other wavelengths of energy, even things we don’t see, so we don’t call it light, infrared light, things that we don’t see that have major effects on our biochemistry. Medicine is so conservative that they will be the last ones to actually accept these ideas.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:15:09.128)
Right.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:15:25.498)
huh.

Stasha Gominak (01:15:25.781)
That means we’re dying, our friends are dying, our family’s dying, and we are told that that is a goofy way to think. Go outside more. Raise your kids outside more. You do not have to be in direct sunlight to be able to get these energy bands that come from the sun.

That literature is getting more and more and it’s really, really interesting. So supplementation is what we’re doing, what I’m doing to treat a disorder that has led to other medical problems. But if you think about it in a different way.

Prevention would be so much easier if the kid never develops a disease, if mom’s D level is perfect. So she sleeps during her pregnancy. She has a normal microbiome. She’s providing all the things that the baby was supposed to get. The baby starts a sleep-wake cycle at 30 weeks. Normal infants should start sleeping with mom at the same timing.

At 30 weeks, that means at 40 weeks they’re already kind of on their way. So when you put picture it through a lens of, you know, humans have had 15 babies. And some of them are living to adulthood now. So they can have 15 babies that live to adulthood. That means that’s the ideal possibility. And that woman didn’t die. You know, I mean we we’re having a hard time picturing even that happening.

You have to look at it now through an evolutionary lens to see how screwed up this idea that infertility is about toxins or a million other things. Infertility is all about D. And it’s not as simple as just give back D for the reasons I just said. You don’t want to be pregnant when you don’t have these other things that the baby is supposed to receive, that is heavily about the baby’s development in the first 12 weeks.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:17:03.708)
Hm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:17:08.816)
Right.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:17:19.323)
Mm-hmm. Tell me okay, go ahead. Well what I wanna understand and I do have a hard stop at eleven thirty, so then then my patients are coming in. what I wanna understand a little bit of is

Stasha Gominak (01:17:20.726)
So one of go ahead.

Stasha Gominak (01:17:28.27)
Okay.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:17:35.505)
The prevention is we need to get outside. And I’d love a rough number. I know it’s so different, but how much should we be outside? But when we’re getting outside more, we’re getting the natural source of vitamin D with what we might call the other cofactors, the light cofactors that are gonna help that vitamin D be more effective. How is that then affecting the B levels and the acetylcholine? Or is it not? We’re still needing to supplement with those?

Stasha Gominak (01:18:03.65)
Very, very good question. You you have you connect the dots very well, Lee. The actual answer is I have no idea. I I I hypothesize that this idea of using supplements, this those supplements have only been available for maybe 50, 60 years at most. If I can look back in history and say, you know, there was a guy that was put in the Tower of London and

the thirteen hundreds and he actually got left he came out ten years later because the king changed and now he’s you know high up in the king’s and he’s writing these books when he’s seventy eight years old.

That means there had to be some way that that guy who was in a in a cell for 10 years and profoundly D-deficient, without a doubt, came out with white hair and big non-healing ulcers on his legs, and there are these very detailed descriptions of things happening long time ago. I think that the B vitamins were coming from rotting food.

Because the food was always rotting, because there was no refrigeration. Now, there is a parallel industry of fermented foods, of fermenting being a way that we get healthy.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:19:09.521)
Uh-huh.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:19:15.837)
Uh-huh.

Stasha Gominak (01:19:20.642)
That actually, I’ve had a couple of people who converted their microbiome by using nutritional yeast. Because nutritional yeast is dried yeast bacterial mixture, and things like beer and bread, you make a yeast bacterial mixture. The reason why you sit it there at a certain temperature, and it has to be warm, not too hot, not too cold, is you’re letting the bacteria grow. You’re letting this rot, really. You’re letting bacteria grow, and those bacteria are pushing out little vitamins.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:19:45.255)
Yeah.

Stasha Gominak (01:19:50.839)
That means there are ways that you can imagine that you could use fermented food in combination or nutritional yeast in combination.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:19:50.888)
Stasha Gominak (01:20:00.653)
The problem with being that as a practitioner is my patients can’t sleep. They don’t want to wait around for two or three years, or maybe they do. You know, if you’re preventing something that’s mild and you wanna say, what I would do is go outside and eat more fermented foods, do more sauerkraut, yogurt, they are all really B vitamin sources as well, because they have bacteria growing in there.

Kimchi, where they leave it on the stove and they boil it. Well, some of those vitamins are actually resistant to breaking down and boiling. Okay, that means you are really eating a rotting food source that has all these vitamins in it. That’s not the way we’ve thought about it in the past. Also, be less compulsive about washing your food. It turns out that probably our compulsive washing means that we are not eating the same amount of dirt. So I want you to think about it in terms

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:20:39.559)
Uh-huh.

Right.

Stasha Gominak (01:20:54.464)
Of I have to make sure my microbiome comes back, it’s very difficult for me to give recommendations about how to do that because I, you know, I we don’t have enough time. These ideas are like planting an idea, and then people are going to generate. They’re going to have their aura ring, they’re going to have records of their sleep, they’re going to have their D levels, and they’re going to say, I did this and I got better. And I’m hoping that that will be out there in the future. And that’s an excellent question. If it for me and I were.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:21:02.406)
Right, right.

Stasha Gominak (01:21:24.324)
I i I was young and I didn’t have any medical problems, I would just go outside more and eat more fermented foods.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:21:30.439)
Yeah. Well, and to your point, we also there’s no way to track dosage when you’re eating fermented kimchi or whatever, and where there’s no way to track vitamin D dosage accurately. So when we’re in an when we’re in a pretty severe state of health, poor health, we gotta know exactly what we’re giving them. But to your point, and I think this is what all of us integrative practitioners are ultimately trying to get to, is we gotta use the supplementation for a time.

Stasha Gominak (01:21:37.475)
Exactly.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:21:57.702)
to get you out of this really severe state so that you can then go back to, you know, the sun and the fermented foods. And that might be your main source. And then when we need it, we bring it back in. So

Stasha Gominak (01:22:09.632)
I love that because I really don’t think supplementation is n natural or normal. So eventually your body will tell you that it doesn’t want these extra vitamins. So the way that we know that the B50 needs to stop is your brain tells you, uh-oh, pain. So too much and too little feels the same in so many of these parts of supplementing.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:22:29.958)
Yeah, yeah. So last last thing is, and then I’ve gotta run, but we could talk for another three hours, is so you do sleep coaching. Can you tell the audience if they’re interested where they can find you and just maybe a little bit of what that looks like.

Stasha Gominak (01:22:47.649)
Okay.

I have a YouTube channel that has lots of other videos, either interviews like this, or I have made a series of what are called sleep chats that are single four to five minute videos about different topics. What does sleep have to do with carpal tunnel? What does sleep have to do with ulcerative colitis? And then I have a website where I give you lots more written material about the various ways that this can present. And there you can become a RightSleep member. So I have a membership that then includes a workbook that is

Designed to have a step by step over a full year what you exactly what you need to do, and most importantly, how to write it down and pay attention to what your body is saying because we moved out of the at least I have it’s not except for the D levels, you have no blood levels that help, but your body will tell you what you need to do. I also do individual coaching, I do individual visits. If you want to just say, Here’s what’s wrong with me, do you think this is the

right thing for me to do. I also have strategy appointments and we have a whole community that is supported on this membership site where you can talk to other right sleepers, say what was your experience with this. And really this is it’s still

A growing education because there are many other supplements that turn out to go low later on, or certain elements like iron and sulfur, and what are the signs that I need those in a very, very different way connected to what my sleep is doing. So it’s a learning space where you can come and learn from other people. And I I have all sorts of other educational material on that membership as well.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:24:29.416)
Yeah, it’s amazing. And what I love is how empowering you are. You’re really giving the power back to the patient or the client in this case to be able to go, I wanna help you know yourself, know your body so you’re not so dependent on me at the end of the day.

Stasha Gominak (01:24:44.396)
Yeah, I th this whole way of looking at it, I have to be able to tea if I take on a client who I’m working with for a whole year, for instance.

They really need to know how to do all of this themselves because it’s not about the lab test level. I want them to correlate that physical symptom they’ve had with what their D level comes back when they go to the lab. So that over time they only have to do one, two, three per year. They don’t do it all the time. It’s a pain in the rear to have to do blood levels. And then if you’re functioning well, you don’t have to do any of them. You just go, you have to pay attention. These are the things I’m doing well now. Wow, that’s interesting.

And you have to remember that because as soon as we’re doing well, we forget we ever had anything wrong with us.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:25:29.016)
Mm-hmm. Exactly. my gosh. Well, Stasha, thank you so, so much. This was fascinating. I think we all got our our times worth in how much you were able to share.

Stasha Gominak (01:25:40.328)
Thank you, Leigh Ann, for asking me. I’ve loved sharing my ideas.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:25:44.389)
Yes. Thank you, thank you, thank you.