I am a neu­rol­o­gist prac­tic­ing in Tyler, Texas. My inten­tion is to use this web­site  to share my obser­va­tions about med­i­cine and neu­rol­ogy with my patients and other physicians.

This site is not to encour­age you to treat your­self with­out a doctor.This site is intended to share my ideas about neu­rol­ogy and the func­tion of the body to help you under­stand neu­ro­logic problems. My inten­tion is that you share these ideas with your doc­tor to help both of you learn and make your treat­ment more suc­cess­ful. Every­thing on this site is based on pub­lished sci­ence but I have taken it a step fur­ther to try to put the whole pic­ture together. They are hypothe­ses or guesses about how our bod­ies work.

I began to think about mak­ing this site when I real­ized that the expla­na­tions I give  my patients about their neu­ro­logic prob­lems are really “best guesses”. Some are my ideas, oth­ers are from books. The expla­na­tions that come from books are also ideas, they’re just  writ­ten down by other neu­rol­o­gists. Doc­tors have cer­tain build­ing blocks of sci­ence that we all agree on: DNA, the struc­ture of the cell, etc. but most of the “expla­na­tions” of  neu­ro­logic ill­ness, from headache to Parkin­son dis­ease, are hypothe­ses. They are ideas that a  neu­rol­o­gist pro­posed that have been gen­er­ally accepted by other neu­rol­o­gists. That does not mean that they are “the truth”. Our bod­ies did not come with a user’s man­ual. We are piec­ing together infor­ma­tion to try to fig­ure out how it works. There is no book to look in to con­firm that our ideas are “right” or “wrong”.  Now that I’ve been in prac­tice for sev­eral years I’ve real­ized that what I tell you today may not be the truth in another 10 years.

If these expla­na­tions are just ideas, it seems to me that there are many “expla­na­tions” in neu­rol­ogy, par­tic­u­larly about headache and sleep, that are com­monly accepted but don’t really turn out to be “true”. The only absolute truth in med­i­cine is your obser­va­tions about your body. We doc­tors then “inter­pret” your obser­va­tions to try to tell you “why”.  But if my expla­na­tion doesn’t fit your expe­ri­ence with your own body it may not really be the “truth”. All of the ideas on this site are open to inter­pre­ta­tion by you and your doc­tor. Take what seems to make sense and fits with your expe­ri­ence and leave what doesn’t. Don’t be afraid to have your own ideas. We doc­tors have much to learn from our patients. The inter­net has brought you as the patient the oppor­tu­nity to be an equal par­tic­i­pant in your own care.

About Dr. Wal­ter Stumpf:

The ideas expressed on this site are built upon the exten­sive sci­en­tific work of Dr. Wal­ter Stumpf who, sadly, passed away at the end of 2012. He was an amaz­ing sci­en­tist who sin­gle hand­edly clar­i­fied one of the most impor­tant aspects of our endocrine sys­tem. Despite wide­spread resis­tance to his ideas and repeated rejec­tions of his sub­mis­sions by var­i­ous sci­en­tific jour­nals he con­tin­ued to believe in the valid­ity of his con­cept of “soltriol”. His many jour­nal arti­cles describe Vit­a­min D’s actions, and its inte­gra­tion into the other parts of our endocrine sys­tem mak­ing up a triad of gonadal, adrenal and der­mal steroids. It is a brave thing indeed, to face absolute resis­tance and severe crit­i­cism by one’s col­leagues for 30 years of pro­fes­sional life and still hang on to one’s beliefs. It was my plea­sure to meet Wal­ter and to get to know him before his death. Together we added the idea that soltriol is piv­otal to nor­mal sleep. I think of him daily as I teach my patients about the impor­tant role vit­a­min D plays in our biol­ogy. Lack of atten­tion to Walter’s work over the last 25 years has pro­duced epi­demics of pain, suf­fer­ing and death through­out the devel­oped coun­tries of the world that might have been pre­vented had his ideas been accepted ear­lier. It is my pas­sion­ate hope that, when the rest of the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity finally catches on, Wal­ter will receive a posthu­mous Nobel Prize for his work. I also believe that the name of this hor­mone should be changed to the term that he coined for it; “soltriol”. Partly out of respect for Wal­ter but also because it is a term that more appro­pri­ately expresses our bio­log­i­cal con­nec­tion to the sun.

Stasha Gom­i­nak, M.D.