Three Simple Steps for Healthier Sleep

Vitamin D and Sleep by Stasha Gominak MD

Moving indoors has produced a global epidemic of sleep disorders and an abnormal intestinal microbiome. Both are related to vitamin D deficiency and can be treated.

Lecture Title:
Three Simple Steps for Healthier Sleep

Lecture Synopsis:
New brain science discoveries show that sleep is entrained to our planet’s annual cycle by sunlight producing vitamin D on our skin, allowing us to sleep longer and gain weight in winter. Avoiding the sun has left us with a global epidemic of sleep disorders and a changed microbiome that are both linked to our failing health. Learn how to use this new information to help all of your patients sleep better.

Objectives:

• • Recognize that sleep disorders and chronic illness have become pandemic in last 40 years due to behavioral changes that produce vitamin D deficiency.
  • Recognize that illness and chronic pain may occur from inadequate repair during sleep.
  • Acknowledge vitamin D as a hormone that is linked to the brainstem control of sleep.
  • Be able to summarize how D deficiency leads to changes in the microbiome that lead to B vitamin deficiencies.
  • Recognize that B5 deficiency can lead to deficiency of Acetylcholine a neurotransmitter necessary for normal sleep and repair

Dr. Gominak grew up and attended college in California, moved to Houston for medical school at Baylor College of Medicine, where she received an MD degree in 1983. Her Neurology residency was done at the Harvard affiliated, Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. She practiced Neurology in the San Francisco Bay area from 1991-2004 then moved with her husband to Tyler, Texas. Starting in 2004 she began to dedicate more of her practice to the treatment of sleep and sleep disorders. In 2012 and 2016 she published two pivotal articles about the global struggle with worsening sleep, the possible causes and solutions, related to vitamin D deficiency and the intestinal microbiome. In 2016 she retired from her office practice to have more time to teach. She currently divides her time between RightSleep® coaching sessions for private individuals and teaching other clinicians the RightSleep® method of sleep repair.