Introducing the Physiological Newborn Jaundice Course

Learn how to support physiological jaundice by nurturing the antioxidant and circadian factors that play significant roles in this process

Learn how to support the physiological processes at play in newborn jaundice

In this course, you will learn a new paradigm for supporting newborn jaundice through a circadian and quantum lens.

For parents, this can help you understand what leads up to newborn jaundice and the choices you can start making now that can reduce your baby's risk. It will also explain how the principles of circadian and quantum biology affect a baby that already has jaundice.

For providers, this course can help you educate families at a deeper level that accounts for circadian biology and oxidative stress, both of which have powerful impacts on the progression of newborn jaundice (and both of which are within parent's control to influence).

This course will also demonstrate that newborn jaundice is a natural, physiological process, and how it can give protective antioxidant mechanisms for babies.

This course is about physiological newborn jaundice (the vast majority of cases) and does not cover the rare instances of disease-driven jaundice. Part of my mission with this course is to make those disease-driven cases more quickly visible. By reducing the risk and severity of physiologic jaundice, it will become all the more obvious when a baby is really sick. And in that way, fewer of those really sick babies will slip through the cracks.

Why does newborn jaundice matter?

Newborn Jaundice is the most common reason doctors keep newborns for extended hospital stays. The phototherapy treatment requires babies to be separated from their mothers for extended periods of time and interrupts bonding. 

Phototherapy interrupts family bonding time.

Newborn jaundice phototherapy treatment is also expensive and comes with known risks (dehydration and adverse skin reactions in the short-term, and DNA damage as well as other possible effects even up to cancer in the long-term).

Finally, babies who have jaundice are at much higher risk of other adverse outcomes, from the newborn period on up through childhood and possibly even across their whole lifespan. Scientists are only just starting to look at jaundice as a risk-factor for neurological disorders and other chronic conditions, and already these populations studies are finding more diverse and long-lasting consequences than previously assumed (and among newborns who had any amount of jaundice, not just severe jaundice).

Outside of certain very rare, disease-driven conditions, the current model can’t explain why some babies get jaundice but others don’t.

We do know that the incidence of newborn jaundice is now ranging from 40-80+% around the world!

And although the current paradigm doesn’t have many answers, cutting edge science shows there may be more we could be doing in pregnancy, birth, and the immediate postpartum to improve outcomes for these families.

What will you learn in this Newborn Jaundice Course?

Here, I am bringing forward the latest research to create holistic jaundice-support protocols that account for what we now know about how circadian and quantum biology affect the processes underlying physiological jaundice of the newborn. 

These protocols are safe, effective, affordable, and families from any walk of life can use them. They can also be used alongside the current medical model of treatment. However, they can not take the place of the advice of qualified medical professionals, of which I am not. 

This evidence-based paradigm aims to take a middle path between the two extremes of thinking about newborn jaundice.

On the one hand, jaundice is usually a self-resolving issue without (visible) lasting consequences. On the other hand, jaundice can progress from benign to causing lifelong brain damage in under 24 hours. 

Between the extreme of dismissing jaundice as a normal part of the Earthside transition, and the other extreme of taking the utmost caution... (which often includes a lot of worry as well as invasive testing that includes painful heel-prick tests)…

How can we best address newborn jaundice?

To answer this question, we need to look into why jaundice arises in the first place, and what makes it have the potential to spiral so quickly into danger. 

And we need to look through the lens of the latest science. 

We can’t get into new frontiers of care using the same old information that got us into the current situation. 

We could do better for newborns with jaundice.

In the old paradigm, people only start to address jaundice after birth:

• We watch skin and eye tone in the days (and weeks) following birth. 

• It becomes clear some babies have too much bilirubin and that causes the yellow color. 

• So, we do what we can to remove the excess bilirubin. 

  • In most of the world, practitioners increase the baby’s fluid intake to increase elimination, and apply light therapy. Light therapy works by breaking the bilirubin down into a form that can be eliminated through the urine and feces, rather than continuing to circulate in the baby. If phototherapy doesn’t work fast enough, blood transfusions may be used.

  • Doctors of Persian Medicine instead use wet-cupping to physically reduce the volume of blood the baby has to process. This has the benefit of taking place quickly, so mother-baby bonding time is less interrupted.

• In rare cases (but more common in premature and sick babies) the bilirubin level gets so high, it crosses the baby’s blood-brain barrier and causes lifelong damage. 

• Practitioners always stand ready to start treatment as soon as the baby nears the predicted possibility of brain damage.

And that’s pretty much the whole conventional model for newborn jaundice. 

Here’s what we don’t have newborn jaundice protocols for:

1. There are many causes for bilirubin to be high. How do we determine which cause is affecting each particular baby, and tailor treatment to address that root cause? How can we do more than just the current standard-of-care? What can we do if phototherapy is not available, declined by the parents, or contraindicated?

2. Hydration is a treatment. Is there something interfering with the hydration process in many of today’s newborns?

3. Light is a treatment. Is something about today’s light environment creating a problem for many of today’s newborns?

4. Most of the time, jaundice is a physiologic condition—that is, a natural part of the process. What natural process is jaundice facilitating, and how can we help that process along?

5. We know 40-50+% of babies DON’T get jaundice. Are there ways we could increase the number of babies who don’t get jaundice?

This course addresses all these considerations that are mostly lacking in the mainstream discussion of newborn jaundice. 

I loaded this course with the latest research about how circadian biology, oxidative stress, antioxidants, mitochondrial health, and quantum biology apply to newborn jaundice, and took it a step further to translate it into simple, evidence-based lifestyle shifts parents can make before, during, and after pregnancy to optimize their wellbeing and minimize the known risks for a baby developing jaundice after birth.

About Nikko and Brighter Days, Darker Nights:

I am a mama and birth-worker dedicated to assembling the current knowledge about how sunlight and circadian rhythms affect the childbearing process. It is always with great joy that I attend to families, whether that is locally, virtually, or through the many resources, such as this course, I have created to share this hard-earned wisdom. You can also find my work at sunkissedbirth.com.

Brighter Days, Darker Nights exists to share the latest research about how circadian and quantum biology affect pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. I was inspired to create this physiological jaundice course after a near run-in with jaundice phototherapy when my third baby needed support in the NICU. Seeing all those babies under phototherapy and wanting to do everything possible to prevent that from happening to my baby (and future babies) spurred me to dig deeper on this subject, and WOW! I discovered there is so much more we as parents and care providers can do to support the natural processes at play in jaundice. Please join me in learning! You can unsubscribe at any time.

DISCLAIMER: All material contained in this publication and course is for informational purposes only. This information is not intended to diagnose, prevent, or cure any medical condition, nor to replace medical advice offered by qualified health care providers. Any application of the material provided is at your own discretion and is your own, sole responsibility.