Excerpt from my upcoming book, The End of Autoimmunity
In my upcoming book The End of Autoimmunity, I explore how light shapes our biology and influences immune balance. The following excerpt explains the healing power of sunlight and its profound connection to autoimmune health.
Sunlight is one of the most powerful healing forces of nature. As we move further and further from the equator, we get less and less sun during the year. As we move further and further from the equator, we also see the incidence and severity of autoimmunity rise.
This is not a coincidence. The sun is a powerful protector of the immune system. If I had to give you a single analogy, sunlight “modulates” your immune system to tolerate your own cells and tissues, while attacking what it should attack (pathogens, toxins, cancerous cells, and so on).
What does this mean?
The more sun you get, the lower your risk of autoimmunity.
The less sun you get, the greater your risk of autoimmunity.
Working nights and evenings usually means getting less sun during the day, but it also means exposure to artificial light at night. This destroys melatonin, which creates repair deficit and therefore autoimmunity.
Yet many patients with autoimmunity notice that they cannot tolerate strong light.
Patients may have light sensitive headaches. They may develop terrible skin rashes if exposed to too much sunlight. We call this photosensitivity.
You should consult a qualified practitioner about how much sun to get, because there are cases in which we have to be careful with the dose.
Most of all, avoid getting sunburned. The skin cancer literature is clear that sunburn does increase your risk of skin cancer, and it ages your skin.
For most patients, more sunlight is better. Here is a quick story from our practice to illustrate the power of the sun.
David’s Story
I try to email patients on their birthdays. I am always curious to hear back from patients who have been “lost to follow up.” This means that I have not seen them in over a year and I have no recent labs on their case.
David came to me years ago with severe psoriatic arthritis and an elevated cardiac C-reactive protein (cardiac-CRP). His cardiac-CRP had been elevated for years. Nothing brought it down. He went through one round of testing and supplementation in our program. At the time he lived in the Midwest.
I emailed him in 2025 on his birthday, asking how he was doing. He had spent several months of the past year living at the beach in Central America. He had watched every sunrise and sunset, embraced absolute darkness at night, and spent many long hours with his toes in the sand.
His cardiac-CRP had dropped to the lowest range. His disease was entirely in remission.
I sometimes joke that the short version of what I do is, “sell all of your worldly possessions, move to a tropical location, and eat a local, seasonal diet.”
This works for some people. I have other patients who have tried the same thing and not had the same results. Everyone is different. This is why we offer personalized care at our practice.
Sunlight and Health
Sunlight is one of our most powerful healers. The oath physicians took in ancient Greece, the Hippocratic Oath, historically began with the words, “I swear to Apollo the healer.” Apollo was the Greek god of healing and the sun.
Modern medicine has missed the healing power of the sun. Avoiding the sun for fear of skin cancer is bad medicine, as we will cover shortly.
The healing power of sunlight is why the 14-Day Reset includes three ten-minute walks. It is why the reset also includes a strict bed-time (to help you get up and spend more time in sunlight).
If you have a testimonial about the healing power of sunlight, please share it with us:
Share your story here
Next, we will cover light therapy. Sunlight is our first and foremost light therapy, but we have a variety of other light therapies we recommend in addition to sunlight.
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Until next time, be well,
Dr. Stillman