In my last newsletter, I gave a quick update on Ralph Baric. Since then, a patient shared with me an old op-ed in The Carolina Journal from a year ago regarding the “extreme virology” in North Carolina. To quote the authors:

Transparency is the first step toward accountability. As a state, we must confront the ethical and safety implications of our scientific ambitions. It is time for open dialogue, investigation, and reform to ensure that the pursuit of knowledge does not endanger the world we aim to protect.

The whole article is worth a read. While reading, I had to look up the word “hagiographic” (saint-like biography), which is enjoyable for me because I love learning new words.

Along those lines, I really appreciate Dr. Matthew Walker’s vocabulary. His presentation at Parker Miami last weekend was so lively because he used words like “resolutely” and “Herculean”.

I had the chance to meet him and get a signed copy of his book Why We Sleep last year, but I didn’t miss the chance to see him again because sleep is fascinating (and so is Dr. Walker’s personal lexicon).

Sleep became a priority for me when my oldest son was born because he didn’t sleep through the night for the first 17 months of his existence.

I doubled down on making sleep a priority after my second son was born because I needed deep rest to heal the autoimmune conditions I’d been diagnosed with. For well over a decade, I’ve been leaning hard into sleep as a performance enhancer, a mood stabilizer, and a nonnegotiable. But learning the granular details of what a lack of sleep does is still fascinating.

I’ve shared this before, but it bears repeating: change your court date if you have to go before a judge the day after the clocks move forward in the spring. You’re likely to get a much harsher sentence, even for simple traffic violations. Tired judges are less lenient.

In fact, maybe just stay off the roads. There are significantly greater numbers of car accidents the day after everyone loses an hour of sleep.

There are also more cardiac events.

The direct correlation between losing sleep and shaving off life enjoyment and life itself is significant.

And I’m not talking about massive losses. I’m talking about getting 7 hours of sleep instead of 8.

Decreased sleep is directly correlated with weight gain in a variety of ways (increased appetite, decreased impulse control, increased high-calorie food consumption, and decreased satiety), and is also responsible for lean muscle mass loss rather than fat loss in those who eat a caloric deficit.

Importantly, three-year-olds who sleep 10.5 hours or less have a 45% increased risk of being obese by age seven compared to their counterparts who sleep 12 hours.

I’m almost done, but a final note for those of you who are actively trying to conceive: young, healthy males in their twenties who got five hours per night for just a week had marked drops in their circulating testosterone equivalent to aging 10-15 years.

In females, regularly sleeping 6 hours decreases follicular-releasing hormone by 20%.

The point is: sleep is really important to overall health. But I’m not one for brevity, so you got all of the aforementioned, which can be found in Why We Sleep.

Speaking of health, here’s a prescription for you: if you’re getting your health info from an AI chatbot, do take it with a grain of salt.

A lot of programmers commented on the post the idea of garbage in = garbage out (GIGO). That’s not just for AI or software; that’s good advice for what we’re taking in ourselves: our relationships, our food, our lotions, sunscreens, light exposure, and (of course) sleep: these things make up the outputs our body has available.

Okay, just one last note, which is to encourage you to take a look at this beautiful and quick read from my friend Nicole Sciacca:

Nicole Sciacca: Sweat + Stillness

Pay Attention

As I was driving to deep Orange County Sunday afternoon, I was on an internal high…

Read more

a month ago · 2 likes · Nicole Sciacca

Next time we’ll talk about peach destruction. And who knows what else.

Talk soon,

L

I had two trips to Pacific Daylight Time and two red-eye flights home in April. I’ll go ahead and say that while the trips themselves were amazing, I do not recommend the itinerary. My circadian rhythm is gratefully recovering.

Chiro Courses

The second trip three time zones westward was to teach Your Pelvic Floor Sucks: The Course in Vancouver. It wa…

Read more

I had an incredible 10 days of silence in a desert canyon in Arizona. I knew about half-way through that this experience would change me forever, and one of the things I wrote in my Bullet Journal (I took 40 handwritten pages of notes while there) was that it was up to make to make sure that was for the better.

In addition to the silence, praye…

Read more

Not an April Fools joke: I’m about to embark on a silent retreat, so I’ll be unreachable for almost two weeks. At some point, I’ll share the juicy details with you. I’m just not sure when that will be. For now, just a few quick notes before I leave.

It turns out that, according to a 2026 Journal of Clinical Medicine Randomized Controlled Trial…

Read more

I turned 40 last month and with that, my husband has officially earned himself the title of “Husband of the Decade.”

I share this because I think he’s changing the world, and I don’t mean this in any small way.

I know a lot of women who love like I do; I do not know any men who love like he does.

My close friends have had the opport…

Read more

Learn to De-Stress: Seriously

I signed up for these workshops from Jonny Miller and if you ever feel stress (I’m talking to you), I would recommend you do the same. One of my patients introduced me to his work; I did his Nervous System Mastery course in 2022 and it was brilliant.

He’s the guy who designed the Calm Cards. He teaches Polyvagal …

Read more

If you’re snowed in right now, I hope you’re enjoying it and are safe and warm (when you’re not zipping down a hill on a makeshift sled, of course). I’m hoping to be back to seeing patients tomorrow, but today seemed like a good day to offer something via email since I can’t offer my hands-on healing modalities.

Reading my emails is not the same …

Read more

Last year at some point, I watched Pete Holmes’ comedy special I’m Not for Everyone, and he was making fun of the New Year’s countdown: how it’s going to be a year from today in one year, just like it always is on 12/31, and it’s very absurd that we count down to the switch on one night.

He even went so far as to say that we deserved…

Read more

If you’re near Raleigh, I hope to see you tomorrow at our annual Merry Makers’ Market!

Did you know that the biggest source of CO2 emissions is the oceans? (I would like to state that this interrogative sentence sounds terrible, but is, indeed, grammatically correct. The source is “the oceans”, which is a thing, even though “oceans” is the plural …

Read more

This newsletter is mostly videos. First, we’ll go through the alarming future of AGI, as demonstrated by AI 2027 paper. Then, we’ll dive into some women’s health topics that are (finally) getting a bit of daylight. And that’s it for today because the contents of this require a significant chunk of time and I try not to ask too much of you as a…

Read more

Whenever I’ve returned from international travel, I have felt a buzzing of energy of whatever culture I’ve come from. I was never big on travel by flight: I hadn’t been to Europe until 2023, when I went to Prague for my DNS Certification course.

Since then, I’ve been back to Europe three more times and have just returned from my first trip to Sout…

Read more

The Background

I saw 15 patients one morning, and 14 of those 15 patients cried.

Everyone (except the two-week-old baby) apologized for crying.

I realized people needed a place to just get i…

Read more

It’s been such a long while. I could blame travel. I could blame being present at home with my beautiful family. I could blame plenty of things, but the reality is: I haven’t sat down to tap out this newsletter in almost 6 weeks, and that’s just an unexcused absence from your inbox.

Apologies if you’ve been holding your breath: I’m impressed by y…

Read more

I’m going to dive right in because in my last newsletter, I promised we’d talk a bit about AI, but I’ve had a lot of things running through my mind for the past month that aren’t AI-related. There’s not much of a word count left for preamble and this is certain to be a bit on the longer side.

Your Pelvic Floor Sucks

I named my book a little on the …

Read more

Pattern Recognition

Most of what I do professionally is pattern recognition. I’ve heard (and can understand) that it often looks like witchcraft. (It’s not.) When I learned to speak the language of bodies, I learned to spot where things are tight and how to make them not-so; where things are unstable and make them so.

And because not everyone sp…

Read more

And while I might not always be tapping out a newsletter, I still rely heavily on writing because I’ve been Bullet Journaling for over two years now. But I’ve hardly journaled in my BuJo, either. Task mana…

Read more

I want to start off today by sharing this beautiful website:

https://thedepths.longlead.com/

This site shares the journey and story (through 2021) of Alenka Artnik, the world’s greatest female freediver.

It’s the most beautiful website I’ve ever seen: a combination of artful transitions, audio clips in Alenka’s voice, video, and written bio…

Read more

I can’t get the fancy link for this to work, but Robb Wolf shared a great study on the impacts of regenerative farming as a truly sustainable practice for improving health of humans, animals, and soils.

From the 2024 study: “Among options for atmospheric CO2 removal, sequestering soil organic carbon …

Read more

It’s been a minute. More on that in a bit. For now, let’s dive in.

The Grassy Knoll

For those of you who are paid subscribers and have been reading for a while, you might remember that I sifted through the court-ordered release of the Pfizer documents, which was an exercise in patience and persistence (though it did yield information on the known …

Read more

When I was in elementary school and started getting migraines (a result of a vaccine injury, which had been administered in second grade and delayed because of my first concussion*)…

Read more