Explore the Quantum side of Newborn Jaundice
We can do better for babies with jaundice
I followed your guide and prepared my circadian rhythm by essentially living outside during the summer, getting plenty of sleep, no screens at night, waking with the sun, going barefoot. I am so happy to report that we avoided the NICU despite an ABO intolerance and I had my healthy big baby at home. He is 4 months old and has slept so well at night since day 1.
~ Paid Subscriber at Brighter Days, Darker Nights
Newborn jaundice is a sign mama had significant circadian disruption during pregnancy, and that her baby needs —and deserves—extra attention and support.
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 make now to reduce your baby's risk. You will also learn how the principles of circadian and quantum biology affect a baby that already has jaundice so that you can better help them through this difficult time.
For providers, this course can help you support and educate families at a level that accounts for circadian biology and redox status. Both of these aspects of health have powerful impacts on the progression of newborn jaundice. Both of these aspects of health are also within parent's control to influence if they know what choices provide the most powerful nurturing for their baby.
The main point I am trying to convey with this course is the entire paradigm of newborn jaundice is ripe for a transformation—and I hope you can become a part of it!
Bilirubin, the pigment that makes jaundiced babies look yellow, is NOT a toxin, but an ancient signaling molecule.
So when you next meet a baby with jaundice, see that baby showing is in need of reducing its oxidative stress.
The problem with the current model is that treatments only focus on reducing bilirubin itself, which actually reduces the baby’s ability to reduce the oxidative stress (one of bilirubin’s key roles is as an endogenous antioxidant).
So to work with a baby like that, here are the 2 big things you can offer:
Mother’s circadian rhythm and exposure to natural sunlight—open window, not just through the glass (ideally, 2+ hours per day, paired with 14, yes fourteen, hours of darkness—and there are alternatives in polar climates we can talk about). This boosts her hormonal profile, specifically of melatonin, which is transferred to baby as antioxidant protection via breastmilk after birth. (night-pumped breast milk/donor milk can also support this)
Managing the electrical environment. The earth itself acts as a source of free electrons, essentially balancing oxidative stress in real time. Grounded incubators would be ideal for preterm babies, but since that is not widely available, at the very least we can move all electrical appliances at least 18 inches away from babies. Caregivers can also ground outside and their bodies will carry free electrons to baby when they go skin-to-skin. At home, families can use grounded sheets on beds to give extra electrons overnight and while on postpartum bedrest.
There’s lots more in the course, but I just thought these two points would give helpful context for jumping in.
More about the Quantum Newborn Jaundice Course:
This course is about physiological newborn jaundice (the vast majority of cases).
At present, it does not cover the rare instances of disease-driven jaundice, but I am working on new modules about that right now.
I hope to have modules about disease-driven newborn jaundice out sometime in early 2024, so stay tuned!
Part of my mission with this course is to make those disease-driven cases more quickly obvious to care providers.
By reducing the risk and severity of physiologic jaundice, it will become all the more visible when a baby is really sick.
Right now, regular jaundice is so common, really sick babies sometimes slip through the cracks because care providers think the patient is going through physiological jaundice when there is actually a disease-driven cause for that particular baby1.
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 the crucial newborn bonding and attachment process.
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)2.
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.
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.
And if we were able to reduce the incidence of physiological jaundice, it’s also possible that fewer babies with truly disease-driven conditions would slip through the cracks (such as this case study of a baby with initially unrecognized Rh hemolytic disease).
According to the report, “the key issue was the management of an uncommon disease using markers that are frequently trended for common conditions.”
What will you learn in this Newborn Jaundice Course?
Here, I am bringing forward the latest research to create holistic jaundice-support protocols based on how circadian biology affects 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 normal, 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 and ultimately treatments that themselves come with significant risks)…
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.
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:
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?
Hydration is a treatment. Is there something interfering with the hydration process in many of today’s newborns?
Light is a treatment. Is something about today’s light environment creating a problem for many of today’s newborns?
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?
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, and wraps up with 3 unique protocols that bring in all the latest science. Here they are, if you want to just skip to the end:
I loaded this course and the 3 protocols 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. Take my Quantum Wellness Survey to book a complimentary consultation and find out if we would be a good fit for working together 1-1.
This publication, 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 “quantum” jaundice course after watching an interview with Dr. Jack Kruse where he mentioned the link between circadian disruption and newborn jaundice. I discovered there is so much more we as parents and care providers could be doing to support the natural processes going on with jaundice.
Please join me in learning and sharing this new wisdom!
And as you go through the course, you are welcome to ask me questions in the subscriber chat. As a paid subscriber, you’ll be able to start threads on the things you are most curious about.
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.
Start Module 1 —>
Thomas B. Newman, MD, MPH, and M. Jeffrey Maisels, MB, BCh, DSc (2014). Late Anemia Following Rh Disease in a Newborn. Patient Safety Network. https://psnet.ahrq.gov/web-mm/late-anemia-following-rh-disease-newborn
Xiong, T., Tang, J., & Mu, D. Z. (2012). Side effects of phototherapy for neonatal hyperbilirubinemia. Chinese journal of contemporary pediatrics, 14(5), 396–400.