Holistic Wellness 4 Me

02/01/2026

Experts just linked a number of different mental disorders to one genetic root.

These include autism, ADHD, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, Tourette syndrome, obsessive–compulsive disorder, and anorexia.

A US team has now homed in on specific gene variants and how they act during brain development. By inserting nearly 18,000 gene variants (both shared and disorder-specific) into precursor cells that become neurons, and then examining their effects in developing mouse neurons, the researchers identified 683 variants that significantly affect how genes are regulated in the brain. Many of these “pleiotropic” variants, which influence multiple conditions at once, were found to stay active over long stretches of brain development and to participate in dense networks of protein–protein interactions.

These findings may help explain why psychiatric disorders often occur together in the same individual and why they tend to cluster in families. The pleiotropic variants appear to affect multiple kinds of brain cells and key regulatory mechanisms across different developmental stages, potentially triggering cascades of changes that can manifest as distinct conditions in different people. Rather than viewing this overlap as a complication, scientists like geneticist Hyejung Won argue that understanding these shared genetic pathways could open the door to treatments that target common biological factors underlying several disorders at once. That approach could be especially valuable given that roughly one in eight people worldwide live with some form of mental disorder, according to the World Health Organization.

References (APA style)

Koumoundouros, T. (2026, January 27). Several psychiatric disorders share the same root cause, study suggests. *ScienceAlert*.

The Brainstorm Consortium, Anttila, V., Bulik-Sullivan, B., Finucane, H. K., Walters, R. K., Bras, J., … Murray, R. (2020). Analysis of shared heritability in common disorders of the brain. *Cell, 181*(1), 223–243.

Won, H., et al. (2025). Shared and disorder-specific regulatory variants across eight psychiatric disorders. *Cell, 185*(xx), ###–###.

01/07/2026

01/03/2026

Janet Travell wouldn’t accept that her pain was imaginary.
She documented and proved the existence of myofacial pain syndrome.

Her muscles screamed.
The X-rays were clean.
The labs were normal.
So the pain didn’t exist—until she proved where it lived.

For years, the answer was always the same.

Nothing shows up.

No fracture. No inflammation bold enough to measure. No scan dramatic enough to justify the suffering she described. The pain was deep, burning, relentless—knots of agony that made ordinary movement feel like punishment. But medicine had no picture to point to.

So it changed the story.

Maybe stress.
Maybe anxiety.
Maybe attention-seeking.

When pain can’t be photographed, it’s easy to pretend it’s imaginary.

Patients—most of them women—learned to rehearse their explanations, trying to sound calm enough to be believed and desperate enough to be taken seriously. They were sent home with reassurances, sedatives, or silence. The pain followed them anyway.

This wasn’t ignorance.
It was a blind spot.

Janet Travell lived inside that blind spot—and refused to accept it.

Travell was a physician at a time when pain without visible pathology was treated as a personality problem. If imaging was normal, the case was considered closed. The patient was the variable. The body, supposedly, was fine.

But Travell listened differently.

She noticed patterns in where patients hurt, how the pain radiated, what movements triggered it, and where pressure reproduced it exactly. She found tender, taut bands in muscle—specific points that, when pressed, sent pain shooting to predictable locations.

These weren’t metaphors.
They were maps.

Travell identified what she called myofascial trigger points—real, physical sources of chronic pain embedded in muscle tissue. They didn’t show up on X-rays because they weren’t bones. They didn’t light up labs because they weren’t infections. They lived in soft tissue medicine hadn’t learned to see.

But they were unmistakably real.

She documented them meticulously. She demonstrated that treating these points—through targeted pressure, injections, and therapy—could relieve pain that had plagued patients for years. People who had been told nothing was wrong stood up straighter, slept through the night, moved without flinching.

The pain hadn’t been imagined.
It had been overlooked.

Travell’s work laid the foundation for modern pain medicine and myofascial pain syndrome. It forced medicine to confront an uncomfortable truth: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence—especially when the tools are incomplete.

Before her, pain without proof was psychiatric by default.
After her, it was anatomical.

And this is where women recognize themselves instantly.

Being told nothing is wrong while your body protests every movement.
Being labeled difficult when you are simply hurting.
Being asked to doubt yourself because the machine can’t confirm your reality.

Travell didn’t accuse patients of exaggeration. She accused medicine of narrow vision.

She showed that suffering doesn’t wait for technology to catch up. That bodies can hurt in ways science hasn’t yet learned to measure. And that disbelief is not neutrality—it’s a decision that leaves people untreated.

Her legacy reaches far beyond trigger points.

It lives in every patient who finally hears, “I believe you.”
In every clinician who keeps looking after tests come back normal.
In every woman who learns that pain doesn’t need permission to be real.

Janet Travell didn’t make pain louder.
She made it legible.

She proved that just because something can’t be scanned doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. And for millions who had been told their suffering was all in their head, that proof was life-changing.

Because when pain finally has a place to live, it stops living in shame.

12/31/2025

She Proved Women’s Bodies React Differently to Fasting.
They told her fasting was universal.
Eat less. Wait longer. Push through hunger.
If it worked for men, it would work for women too.

And when women felt worse—more anxious, more exhausted, more inflamed—they were told the same thing they’d always been told.

You’re doing it wrong.
You’re not disciplined enough.
You just need to try harder.

Then someone finally asked a forbidden question.

What if women’s bodies aren’t failing at fasting—
what if fasting protocols were never designed for them in the first place?

Her name is Mindy Pelz, and her work gave millions of women something they hadn’t felt in years.

Relief.

For decades, intermittent fasting research followed a familiar pattern. Male subjects. Male hormones. Male stress responses. Testosterone-driven systems that thrive on consistency and extended deprivation.

Women were handed the same protocols and told biology didn’t matter.

But women noticed something immediately.

They lost hair.
Their sleep fell apart.
Periods disappeared—or became unbearable.
Anxiety spiked.
Weight clung harder than before.

Pelz didn’t dismiss those experiences.

She listened.

What she found was both validating and unsettling.

Women’s bodies respond to fasting through hormones first, not willpower.

Cortisol. Estrogen. Progesterone. Insulin. Thyroid hormones. These systems don’t operate in isolation. They move in cycles, not straight lines. And when fasting ignores those rhythms, the body doesn’t “optimize.”

It protects itself.

Pelz observed that prolonged or poorly timed fasting can signal danger to a female body—especially one already juggling stress, caregiving, under-eating, or sleep deprivation. When cortisol rises too high, the body prioritizes survival, not fat loss or metabolic flexibility.

In simple terms:
If the body feels threatened, it holds on.

That’s not failure.
That’s intelligence.

The breakthrough wasn’t that fasting is “bad” for women.

It’s that timing matters.

Pelz’s work emphasized syncing fasting with the female hormonal cycle—shorter fasts during high-stress or luteal phases, longer fasts when estrogen supports metabolic resilience. Eating more when progesterone rises. Backing off when the nervous system needs safety, not challenge.

This reframing changed everything.

Suddenly, women who had blamed themselves realized their bodies had been protecting them all along.

The shame cracked.

What replaced it was power.

Understanding your hormones doesn’t make you fragile.
It makes you strategic.

Pelz helped popularize a radical idea in modern wellness culture:
Listening is more effective than forcing.

Fasting became a tool—not a test of worth.

Women stopped punishing themselves for hunger cues. They stopped measuring success by how long they could go without food. They started measuring it by how well their bodies responded—sleep, mood, cycles, energy, strength.

And the results followed.

Not just weight changes.
But calmer nervous systems.
Restored periods.
Improved focus.
A sense of cooperation instead of combat.

The emotional shift mattered as much as the biological one.

For women who had spent years believing their bodies were “broken,” this was liberation.

You’re not weak.
You’re not failing.
You’re responding appropriately to signals no one taught you to read.

Dr. Mindy Pelz didn’t invent fasting.

She translated it—into a language women’s bodies actually speak.

And once women understood that language, they stopped trying to dominate their biology and started working with it.

That’s not just better health.

That’s autonomy.

12/29/2025

Not a virus or bacteria.

“He rolled the dying patient's blood, urine, and f***s into a ball of dough—and ate it. His wife ate one too.
April 26, 1916. A medical clinic somewhere in the American South.
Dr. Joseph Goldberger held the capsule in his hand. Inside the dough wrapper: blood, urine, f***s, and scabs peeled from a dying patient's skin.
Across the room, his wife Mary waited with a glass of water.
She wasn't there to stop him. She was there to join him.
They were about to eat it. Both of them.
Outside those clinic walls, a mysterious plague was destroying the South. It rotted skin. It unraveled minds. It killed thousands.
The entire medical establishment insisted it was a germ—something contagious that spread through contact, that required quarantine and isolation.
Goldberger knew they were wrong.
But his data wasn't enough. To save millions, he had to prove the disease couldn't be spread.
Even if it killed him.
For decades, the American South had been haunted by what they called "The Red Death."
Pellagra.
It started as a sunburn that wouldn't fade. The skin darkened into angry red lesions that wrapped around the neck like a collar—they called it "Casal's Necklace."
Then came the internal rot.
The "Four Ds": Dermatitis. Diarrhea. Dementia. Death.
By 1914, pellagra was killing thousands every year. Hospital wards overflowed with patients whose skin peeled off in sheets, whose minds unraveled into madness.
Towns treated victims like lepers. Entire families were ostracized. Panic spread faster than the disease itself.
The government sent Dr. Joseph Goldberger to find the germ and kill it.
The stakes were absolute. If it was a germ, quarantine was the answer. If it wasn't—if something else was causing this—then the entire economic structure of the South was to blame.
Goldberger arrived in the asylum wards of Mississippi.
Immediately, he noticed something every other doctor had ignored.
The patients were dying of pellagra. The nurses were perfectly healthy.
In every other infectious ward—tuberculosis, typhoid, cholera—staff got sick. Germs didn't care about your job title. They spread.
But here? Doctors and orderlies moved untouched among the dying.
Goldberger watched them eat. The staff ate meat, milk, eggs. The patients ate what they called the "Three Ms": Meat (fatback), Meal (cornmeal), Molasses.
It wasn't a contagion.
It was starvation.
The poor weren't catching a disease. They were being slowly killed by a diet lacking a crucial, invisible nutrient.
Goldberger rushed to prove it. He fed orphans fresh milk and meat. They recovered in weeks.
It should have been a victory. Instead, it started a war.
The backlash was vicious. Politicians and local doctors were furious.
Goldberger was a Jewish Northerner telling the South that their "way of life" caused poverty and disease. They refused to believe the noble diet of field workers was deadly.
The attacks grew personal. Newspapers claimed he was faking results. Medical boards demanded he find the germ or go home.
Curing people wasn't enough. Goldberger realized he had to do something impossible.
He had to give himself the disease.
He went to Rankin State Prison Farm. He offered pardons to twelve healthy inmates if they'd volunteer for a "special diet."
They agreed.
For six months, Goldberger fed them nothing but standard Southern fare: grits, syrup, mush.
Slowly, the men began to break.
They grew lethargic. Then the red rash appeared. Then the confusion.
One prisoner begged for release, screaming he'd been through "a thousand hells."
Goldberger had created the disease out of thin air. Using only food.
The critics shifted the goalposts. They claimed the prisoners must have had a latent infection. It was still a germ, they insisted.
Goldberger had one card left.
The "Filth Parties."
He organized secret experiments with his colleagues. And his wife.
They took the most infectious materials imaginable from patients on their deathbeds: mucus, scabs, excrement. They injected the blood into their arms. They swabbed secretions into their noses.
Finally, they rolled the filth into flour pills.
And swallowed them.
They waited.
Days became weeks. The tension in the Goldberger household was suffocating. Every itch, every stomach cramp was analyzed with terrified precision.
If they were wrong, they would die. Slowly. Agonizingly.
No one got sick.
Not a single rash. Not a fever. Nothing.
The "Filth Parties" proved it definitively: pellagra was not infectious.
You could eat the disease and walk away smiling—as long as you had a glass of milk and a piece of meat afterwards.
Goldberger published his findings. He'd proven that poverty, not germs, was the killer.
He expected policy changes. He expected aid.
Instead, the South buried the truth.
Politicians feared that admitting to widespread malnutrition would drive away investors. They declared they would handle the problem in their own "manly way."
Which meant rejecting federal food aid.
Goldberger spent the rest of his life screaming into the void. He searched desperately for the specific chemical missing from the diet (later identified as Niacin, Vitamin B3).
He died of cancer in 1929.
He never saw the cure widely adopted.
It wasn't until the 1940s—when the U.S. government mandated flour fortification—that pellagra finally vanished.
He had saved millions.
But he never got to see them live.
Think about what Joseph Goldberger did. He didn't just risk his career. He risked his life. His wife risked hers too.
They ate human waste from dying patients to prove a point that powerful people didn't want proven.
Because admitting pellagra was caused by poverty meant admitting the South's economic system was built on exploitation. Meant admitting that sharecroppers and mill workers weren't being paid enough to eat properly.
Meant admitting that people were dying not from bad luck, but from bad policy.
So they called him a liar. They buried his research. They let thousands keep dying rather than feed them.
Goldberger's story isn't just about scientific courage. It's about what happens when economic interests are more important than human lives.
The South knew the truth by 1916. They chose profit over people anyway.
Pellagra continued killing for another 25 years.
Not because we didn't know how to stop it. But because stopping it would have required admitting why it existed in the first place.
Dr. Joseph Goldberger ate human f***s to save lives.
And the people in power still said no.
He died at 54, exhausted and heartbroken, knowing the answer but watching people die anyway.
His wife Mary lived with the memory of that day for the rest of her life—the day they both swallowed death to prove it was really starvation.
That's the power of science. And the tragedy of politics.
Sometimes the cure exists. But the will to use it doesn't.
In honor of Dr. Joseph Goldberger (1874-1929), who ate the unthinkable to prove the undeniable—and who deserved to see the world he saved.”

- this day in history