Beyond Sleep: Melatonin's Unique Healing Properties
Melatonin is a hormone naturally produced in the pineal gland from the amino acid tryptophan. Tryptophan is one of the nutrients that used to be a part of the daily diet through corn, wheat, and soy. Today, these foods no longer contain tryptophan because these are now primarily present in the diet only as Genetically Modified foods (GMOs). As such, they don’t go through the shikimate pathway and thus, they do not produce tryptophan, tyrosine, coenzyme Q10, vitamin K2 / MK-7, or vitamin B9 / methylfolate. To fully understand the importance of melatonin for autism, epilepsy, ADHD and more, you have to know that food does not contain the basic building blocks to produce melatonin anymore.
Click here to read more about nutrient deficiencies caused by a lack of non-GMO foods in the diet.
At night, starting when lighting conditions start to get dim in the evening, melatonin is released from the pineal gland into the rest of the body. Melatonin receptors have been found throughout the body, including in the pituitary gland and in the pars tuberalis, the brain, the retina, the suprachiasmatic nucleus in the hypothalamus, the ovaries (in women), the kidneys, and the pancreas. Adipocytes (fat cells), immune cells, and cerebral and peripheral arteries also have melatonin receptors. As such, all of these areas of the body are sensitive to high or low levels of melatonin in the body, and conditions affecting these areas respond to melatonin supplementation as well as supplementation with L-tryptophan.
Click here to buy L-Tryptophan powder.
Melatonin is a relatively popular and well-known supplement for adults, but few people know that melatonin can also be used in babies and children too. While melatonin is most commonly used as a supplement for improving sleep, it can also also be used to treat certain mental health conditions (and physical health problems as well) in people of all ages. Melatonin can be used to treat the following health conditions in babies, children, and adults:- Sleep disorders
- Insomnia
- Delayed sleep phase syndrome (DSPS)
- Jet-lag
- Autism
- ADHD
- Epilepsy and febrile seizures
- Adolescent idiopathic scoliosis
- Oxidative stress, especially in newborn preterm babies
- Seasonal affective disorder (SAD)
- Pineal gland calcification
- Depression / Anxiety
- Cancer
- Alzheimer’s disease
Melatonin for Epilepsy and Seizures in Children
The pineal gland has been known to play a role in the severity of seizures in people with epilepsy for some time. Research done in the 1970s found that removal of the pineal gland in rats who had also had their parathyroid gland removed induced violent convulsions. Later, a study done in 1997 found that melatonin antibody injections in rats caused epileptic attacks. A 1996 study observed that melatonin suppression in rats produced by removal of the pineal gland increased brain damage after seizure induction in the rats. The researchers in this study thus concluded that this suggested the potential neuroprotective role of melatonin, specifically on neural tissues. Other more recent research has also found that baseline melatonin levels are notably lower in patients with epilepsy compared with healthy controls; however, after a seizure, melatonin levels increase 3x above baseline.One case study on a 29-month old girl with severe myoclonic epilepsy demonstrated the efficacy of melatonin in the treatment of seizure disorders. The girl was receiving phenobarbital and was in a pre-comatose state when treatment began. Melatonin supplementation got the girl’s seizures under control after only 1 month of treatment, and the seizures remained under control even after 1 year of treatment with melatonin.
Another study was done in a group of children with severe, intractable seizures. This study administered 3mg of oral melatonin each day, 30 minutes before bedtime, along with a conventional antiepileptic pharmaceutical drug. After 3 months of treatment with this protocol, the children demonstrated significant improvement in seizure activity; these improvements were seen throughout all hours of the day, but were especially notable at night.
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One study on a group of 62 children with epilepsy specifically observed the antioxidant, neuroprotective effects of melatonin in the treatment of epilepsy. The children had been on pharmaceutical antiepileptic drugs (half on carbamazepine, and the other half on valproate) and had all been seizure-free for 6 months or longer. Melatonin supplementation was added into the children’s existing protocols at a dose of 6-9mg of melatonin per night for 2 weeks. At the end of the 2 weeks, increases in glutathione peroxidase and glutathione reductase indicated that melatonin has potent neuroprotective properties that may be valuable for treating patients with epilepsy or other seizure disorders.
Melatonin can also be valuable in improving sleep quality and anxiety levels in young patients with epilepsy. One study demonstrated that supplementation with oral melatonin for 3 months led to improvements in sleep quality, as well as a reduction in seizure severity, in children with intractable epilepsy. Another study on a group of children with seizures demonstrated that a dose of 3mg of quick release oral melatonin given at bedtime indeed improved wake-sleep disorders in these patients.
Many of these studies indicate a direct connection between the pineal gland and epilepsy; since melatonin is an important supplement for pineal gland health, it makes sense then that melatonin would also play a role in epilepsy and seizures. Pineal gland issues are also implicated in other serious childhood disorders such as autism. Some experts on this subject believe that melatonin’s anti-epileptic properties may also come from its interactions with the GABA and glutamate receptors in the brain, but autism and epilepsy are also regarded as iconic representations of soul loss in the shamanic system of medicine (which is the oldest system of medicine on the planet). Epilepsy and autism have both been linked to pineal gland dysfunction and the pineal gland is regarded as the “seat of the soul”. If we were going to mix the idea of shamanism with the science of epilepsy and autism, you might say that epilepsy and autism are both forms of soul loss in children that occurs, at least in part, as a result of some form of disruption in the functioning of the pineal gland.
Click here to buy the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, about a young U.S. immigrant Khmer child with severe epilepsy who was treated by both American doctors and shaman.
Click here to read Sandra Ingerman’s book about modern-day soul-retrieval work.
Click here to buy The Origami of Autism: Transforming 2-Dimensional Thinking about ASD into 3-Dimensional Solutions.
Melatonin: Natural, At-Home Supportive Autism Treatment
Melatonin can help treat pineal gland dysfunction in children (and adults) with autism. In fact, this is one of the most important supplements to include in any supplementation protocol for a child with autism, along with other nutrients like the B-complex vitamins, Lugol’s iodine, and vitamin K2. We discuss how and why melatonin works to treat autism spectrum disorders in detail in this article.Melatonin as a Supportive ADHD Treatment
Melatonin is also an essential treatment for ADHD. Improved sleep quality can make a huge difference in how well a child is able to focus, learn, and self-regulate during the daytime hours. We discuss melatonin supplementation for children with ADHD in this article. Many children suffer from ADHD seizures and in fact, ADHD is the most common co-occuring disorder in children with epilepsy. For this reason, we include ADHD in the autism disease family tree. Autism and epilepsy are related through Valproate, an anti-epilepsy drug that can induce autism in rats when administered on the twelfth day of gestation. Indeed, we have worked with children with severe autism who have daily seizures. Both ADHD seizures and the symptoms of ADHD can be cured using a combination of specific herbs and nutrients to rebuild the dopaminergic system in the brain. Click here to buy the Cure ADHD Now book.Dopaminergic malfunction causes attention deficits and drugs that treat ADHD are addictive and they cause further damage to the dopaminergic system. In fact, trauma and ADHD are related and many children who have been diagnosed with a hopeless case of ADHD are actually suffering from birth trauma (trauma that occurs during the child’s birth). When parents give their child drugs that cause a massive release of dopamine (such as Ritalin or Adderall to name just two), these drugs damage the dopamine neurons. In fact, damaging the dopamine neurons DOES inhibit the release of trauma. In other words, drugs like Adderall and Ritalin make it hard for children and adults to release trauma from the autonomic nervous system. A steady and reliable supply of dopamine that trickles into the synapses between the dopamine neuron and dopamine receptors is ideal. A massive release of dopamine, in contrast, leaves dopamine neurons in a state of dopamine-drought.
ADHD seizures are the body’s way of releasing trauma that can’t come out through trauma integration. Normally, trauma integration occurs when some trauma-informed therapy releases the trauma, which has been divided into two parts, the logical memory of the traumatic event and the “felt sense” or physical-remembering of the event and how it felt in the body). When trauma is “released” it finds and rejoins with the original logical memory and the two parts of the traumatic event then become “integrated” into something that we experience as “meaningful”.
Click here to buy the Cure ADHD Now book.
In order for there to be a connection between the logical memory in the left brain and the felt-sense that originates in the body and then processes in the right-brain, we need dopamine. Dopamine gives us the sense that life has meaning, that’s why dopaminergic drugs that release massive quantities of dopamine are so addictive. But if you administer these ADHD drugs to children, the massive release of dopamine is toxic to the dopamine receptors, like overwatering a garden of flowers. The dopamine receptors die as a result, which traps traumatic memories in the right brain and autonomic nervous system. Seizures become necessary in order for a child to off-load trauma.
We wrote a book called Cure ADHD Now that details how we cured my grandson’s severe ADHD. He had daily seizures for years before we were able to administer this treatment due to an estrangement of family members. Children with ADHD should also work with trauma-informed therapies as a part of using this system to regrow dopamine neurons naturally.
To better understand the connection between ADHD seizures and trauma, click here to see a video of how it looks when animals “off-load” trauma through seizure-like movements.
Melatonin Treatment for Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis
Melatonin levels have been found to be unusually low in patients with adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS). Some research in chickens, rats, mice, rabbits, and Atlantic salmon indicates that removal of the pineal gland, and the subsequent dramatic drop in melatonin synthesis and release, also frequently results in the development of scoliosis that is remarkably similar to AIS. Most research is unclear as to whether or not low serum levels of melatonin actually cause or contribute to the development of AIS; some alternate theories propose that it may actually be an abnormal response to melatonin in osteoblast cells that causes AIS to develop.Anyone who is even remotely familiar with systems of energy medicine should note, however, that the spine and the chakras, which are spinning wheels of energy, are located together along the same axis of the body. Kundalini is the vital force and life-energy that is stored in the root chakra and that can travel up along the spine to the crown chakra. Scoliosis is surprising in terms of its relationship to melatonin deficiency, a deficiency that represents pineal gland dysfunction. If you look at this spinal problem as an energetic disturbance that occurs, once again, as a result of soul loss, or vital force suppression, it specifically relates to the loss of the Ajna Chakra associated with intuition, the feeling sense or “felt sense” (to use Dr. Peter Levine’s terminology) and the third eye. The third eye allows us to “see in the dark” using the feeling senses that are latent the body via the autonomic nervous system which is under the control of the pineal gland as this structure that acts as a sort of sense organ of time and space on planet earth.
The idea that adolescent idiopathic scoliosis is related to autism, epilepsy, and ADHD via disruptions in melatonin production signals that perhaps they are, in fact, related though conventional medicine as a system and model does not provide the inspiration regarding how they might be connected. As we note above in the introductory paragraph, however, the nutrient deficiencies caused by consuming a high-GMO diet combined with the devastation of being constantly exposed to organophosphate and bromide-containing insecticides plays a role. Click here to read more about the relationship between bromide and organophosphates and autism, ADHD, epilepsy, and more. Exposure to toxins is more devastating to a body that is deficient in the specific nutrients that would protect it from reacting to toxic exposure. If the staple foods don’t contain the proper nutrients and if those staple foods are also specifically being inundated with toxins that cause a reaction in nutrient-deficient people, one of the most basic connections to nature, namely the food we eat, becomes another facet of this problem of being disconnected from nature as a state of dis-ease. If the pineal gland is disrupted by nutrient deficiencies, toxic exposure, and perhaps soul loss (though soul loss may occur because of the lack of nutrients and toxic exposure too) and then, as a result, a child either cannot orient themselves properly in time, (this causes a perpetual feeling of jet lag) or they develop abnormalities in the energy configuration of chakras that govern the position and growth of the spinal column, you have several new models of medicine with which you can work to reverse scoliosis, autism, epilepsy, ADHD, and other related diseases and disorders.
One study observed a group of 16 patients with adolescent idiopathic scoliosis who also exhibited low melatonin levels. The patients were given 3mg of orally administered melatonin between 1.5 to 2 hours before sleep time. Of these patients, 12 demonstrated improvements and had stable scoliosis after 3-6 years of melatonin treatment.
Melatonin 3mg Supplement(NOTE: You can open capsules like this and put the appropriate amount of the powder into a drink or a little bit of organic, Grade A maple syrup to administer melatonin safely to an infant or small child at home)
Melatonin Supplementation for Neonate Oxidative Damage
Melatonin supplementation is surprisingly common in neonate care units, with there being numerous studies detailing how melatonin can be used specifically to prevent conditions caused by oxidative damage in newborns. Melatonin can be particularly effective as an oxidative damage treatment in premature infants, but full-term neonates who are at risk of developing conditions caused by oxidative damage can also benefit from melatonin treatments.So what are we really looking at here? Westernized minds that have been marinating in Big Pharma marketing are trained to look at melatonin as a supplement that 1) might be a hoax of some kind given that it is a natural substance and 2) that has effects on different what seem to be very different states of disease. We are not trained to look at those different states of disease as a category of something that might be intimately related. We are trained to never look beyond the safety of Big Pharma’s loving embrace. Yet, other systems of medicines easily bring the science of melatonin into focus around root causes that should be compelling for any parent who is trying to figure out how to overcome autism, take care of a premature baby, or treat severe scoliosis. Much of what’s written in energy medicine is as inaccessible and arrogant as Big Pharma’s model of medicine, but in fact, these other systems of medicine, when used with nutrients, herbs, and even certain pharmaceuticals, can achieve miraculous healing effects.
A premature baby may not have fully incarnated on a soul level when he or she is born. If the soul takes its seat in the pineal gland, the gland in the body that helps the soul orient itself specifically to time, then one of several things might be happening when melatonin in administered to neonates: 1) the melatonin may help the soul incarnate more quickly and more smoothly 2) the melatonin may not have an effect on incarnation of soul energy, but it in fact, would help protect the pineal gland from oxidative damage in the meantime until the baby is old enough to orient itself to time and space. Because we can’t measure a person’s sense of “orientation to time”, our culture doesn’t want to look at things like “orientation to time” as a relevant thing to care about in newborn infants. But then, let’s look at birth trauma and trauma specifically as a relevant construct in psychology that can ground these ideas regarding melatonin.
Rene Descartes once wrote about the “binding problem” of human consciousness and human thought via the pineal gland, the tiny little almond-shaped structure that ensures that we can surmount the challenges of gravity and know whether it is day, night, summer, or winter, etc. In the scientific literature, studies have found that the pineal gland and several other structures in the brain like the suprachiasmatic nuclei control endocrine glands and rhythms. The endocrine glands, in turn, are directly related to the chakras. In other words, each chakra energetically represents an endocrine gland. Or rather, the endocrine glands are the material representations of the chakras. Pineal gland dysfunction and melatonin imbalance are a different way of talking about an energy problem in the body that can impact the mind, the emotional “felt sense”, as well as the spine itself. Indeed, adolescents with idiopathic scoliosis have been observed scientifically to have a higher rate of emotional and mental health issues than adolescents who do not have this disorder.
High-dose, therapeutic melatonin supplementation has been given to neonates in a hospital setting to reduce mortality (and prevent extreme soul loss) in cases such as:
- Perinatal asphyxia
- Sepsis
- Respiratory distress
- Surgical stress
Melatonin for Birth Trauma in Babies and Children: Looking Beyond Conventional Medicine for Alternative Treatments for Epilepsy, Autism, and More...
The word “trauma” has been marketed to the masses as a concept that applies most often to men who have been to war. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder / PTSD is not considered often enough as the primary, driving issue that causes mental illness in general and instead it is considered to be an untreatable mental condition that happens primarily only to soldiers. In fact, everyone has experienced trauma, or an experience of being overwhelmed by a physical / biological problem, an overwhelming event that involves pain in the body, an overwhelming emotional event, or any event that even momentarily makes us feel fear about losing our lives. It is a massive tragedy that so few people know about how trauma can impact human health and mental health especially since treating trauma is such a gentle process that can lead to miraculous healing outcomes.Birth is often the first traumatic event that we experience as humans. Women giving birth usually experience some aspect of the birthing process as traumatic (meaning that their physical body experiences it as traumatic even if they mentally felt like the entire experience was pleasant and not-traumatic), especially during “transition” when the baby drops and women experience the feeling of their organs shifting inside their body as the sense that they’re going to die. This momentary sense that one “might die” is often an ingredient in trauma even if the prospect of actually dying doesn’t really exist at that moment.
So traumatic experiences are relatively commonplace, but few people are in-the-know about trauma as a thing that can cause physical disease or extreme emotional issues, especially in children. Interestingly, according to various models of trauma, the traumatic event is something that gets frozen in time. In other words, the “felt sense” or the experience of the event gets trapped in a loop that replays itself in the unconscious mind repetitively until it can be released into conscious awareness. Often, when trauma is released into the logical, verbal mind, it has been encoded symbolically into something that may or may not resemble the original experience. This happens because the linear-sequential experience of the traumatic event has been separated from the “felt sense” of the event. The encoding of a “symbolic” substitute storyline for the traumatic event is often what determines the kind of emotional / mental illness that develops. Releasing the trauma from the body allows the logical memory of the event to fuse with the way it felt in the body to experience the traumatic event.
The systems of trauma-informed therapy known as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing / EMDR uses a very gentle and elegantly simple back-and-forth eye movement that mimics of all things, REM sleep. REM sleep is the type of sleep that allows the brain and body, the right brain and the left brain, to process the events of the day. So these REM-inspired eye movements normally take place at night when we sleep, when melatonin levels are highest.
Click here to do a free trial of EMDR online.
Most people in modern culture that do not regularly do rituals or encourage the use of trauma-informed therapies to release trauma, are unable to feel anymore. When I talk about “feeling” what I’m referring to is not necessarily “emotions” per se, but rather, emotions-as-a-form-of-knowing-and-intuition. This is something that is practically unknown or that has been entirely hijacked in most people, including children. What I mean when I say “feeling” in this context is the experience of emotions that may belong to the person themselves or that may involve an intuition about the environment or people that the person in question is closely connected to. The pineal gland is the part of the body that represents our “third eye”, which is the eye that does NOT “see” in the same way as our physical eyes, but that rather, can “see in the dark”. The third eye / pineal gland involves our intuition and our ability to “feel” using this other sense. Sadly, many people diss these ideas as being “not scientifically validated” though in fact they are. Intuition has been scientifically validated, but it has not becomes a popular idea in mainstream culture. Needless to say, many people who might derive some benefit from connecting the dots on the pineal gland, intuition, time-space orientation, and trauma, often miss the boat because it challenges some of the basic assumptions that we have about the mind and the body and the connection between the two.The pineal gland and melatonin orient us as humans to time and space. When our time-space orientation has been lost or hijacked in some way for any reason, we can experience non-traumatic events as traumatic. This is jetlag. Jetlag feels a bit like what it feels like to have PTSD. I can attest to this only because I’ve had both at separate times in my life. When our time-space orientation is hijacked, we then become “dissociated” into individuals who have to ruminate about the past or send our minds into the future to plan compulsively. Future-worry is related to ruminations on the past in that both are futile in our real, present-day lives. Children with autism may send themselves into comfortable “thought or behavior loops” to console parts of themselves. Children with epilepsy may literally send a soul part or several parts into an unreachable realm during seizures. The Internal Family Systems model created by Dr. Richard Schwartz acknowledges that emotionally charged, traumatic events cause a piece of us (i.e. a piece of the soul) to break off and become independent as a “self” that can, at times, take control of us. This concept is related to Multiple Personality Disorder / Dissociative Identity Disorder, a mental illness that is known to be caused by trauma. It is also related to concepts of demon possession or spirit possession. Since the beginning of the human race, epilepsy was viewed as a “gift from the gods” that conferred special healing powers on the one who had seizures because they were able to “travel to other realms”. This is food for thought for anyone who is looking for a new line of thinking to get out of the hell of living with a child who is suffering with a disease or disorder that can’t be cured and can’t be treated. Maybe these diseases are not as “untreatable” was some would like for us to believe. As a general rule, in conventional medicine and psychology, psychologists and doctors do not believe that trauma or any disease or mental health issues caused by trauma can be “cured”. But conventional medicine is not the only system of medicine on the planet. It is just the system that has been marketed most frequently to the masses. Needless to say, the relationships between childhood diseases that respond to treatment with melatonin, a hormone released by the pineal gland in healthy children, is compelling in terms of how it can lead us into new ways of thinking about and healing autism, epilepsy, and more. Studies on melatonin and the pineal gland should give us all pause and help us see the connection to ancient shamanic medicine and soul retrieval and soul loss among other things like sacred medicines which are notorious for their ability to release trauma.
We offer health coaching sessions online as well as access to alternative therapies for childhood disorders. When we work with parents of sick children or children in need of mental health treatments, we consider the entire family system and aim to help the entire family system using things like herbs, sacred medicines (if access to these medicines is possible and if families are willing to work with them), nutrition, trauma-informed therapies, and more. We have also trained under a curandera in Mexico to do soul retrievals as well as to administer several forms of energy medicine including Constellation Therapy and Reiki. Parents are asked to decide which types of therapy appeal most to them for their child such that the parents themselves are empowered to act as their child's healer.
Click here to schedule a health coaching session with us today.
Melatonin Dosing in Babies and Children
For sleep disorders, a dose of between 0.3 to 1mg is generally administered in babies over 1 year of age. Toddlers are often given a slightly higher dose of 2mg nightly, and up to 3mg can be administered in older children. Teenagers can receive the adult dose in most cases. Note that up to 0.15mg/kg of bodyweight can be given in more extreme cases when necessary.When children are given a dose of 5-10mg of melatonin in the evening, without any other conventional pharmaceutical drugs or supplements, this can significantly reduce epileptic attack frequency. As noted above, however, a dose of 3mg of melatonin can also produce beneficial effects in the treatment of epilepsy. For younger children, start with a lower dose, and gradually increase the dose as seems appropriate.
One study was done on a group of 55 infants under 1 year of age (the median age in the group was 5.5 months) who had been admitted to intensive care at the hospital. This study suggested a daily evening dose of 0.31mg/kg of bodyweight, or a fixed dose of 1.5mg. Some patients in the study received a nightly dose of up to 3mg of melatonin. A different study used a dose of up to 5mg of melatonin each night in ICU patients under 12 months of age. No adverse effects were observed from melatonin supplementation in any of the babies who were included in either of these two studies.
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Resources:
• Sanchez-Barcelo, Emilio J., et. al. (2011). Clinical Uses of Melatonin in Pediatrics. Retrieved April 10, 2024 from: https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijpedi/2011/892624/
• Kostoglou-Athanassiou, Ifigenia, et. al. (2013). Therapeutic applications of melatonin. Retrieved April 10, 2024 from: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2042018813476084
• Bradford, Caitlyn, et. al. (2023). Melatonin Use in Infants Admitted to Intensive Care Units. Retrieved April 11, 2024 from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10681084/
• Procaccini, David E., et. al. (2021). Melatonin Administration Patterns for Pediatric Inpatients in a Tertiary Children’s Hospital. Retrieved April 11, 2024 from: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34706877/
• Van Geijlswijk, Ingeborg M., et. al. (2010). Dose finding of melatonin for chronic idiopathic childhood sleep onset insomnia: an RCT. Retrieved April 11, 2024 from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2952772/
