Dr Michelle VDW

Dr Michelle VDW I’m Dr. Michelle—an MD who found a more connected way to heal through rhythm, nature, and regeneration.

I help health-aware individuals return to simplicity, trust, and true wellness—after stepping beyond the system to follow what actually worked.

10/08/2026

Light just won a Nobel Prize in Medicine. And I couldn’t be more excited to see this recognition.

The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Peter Hegemann, Georg Nagel and Karl Deisseroth for discoveries that led to optogenetics, a technique that allows researchers to control the activity of nerve cells using light.

Here’s what they actually did.

It started with tiny algae that could swim towards light. Scientists discovered a protein called channelrhodopsin that responds to blue light by opening a channel in the cell membrane, allowing electrically charged particles to move through it.

They then introduced the gene for this protein into nerve cells.

When they exposed those cells to blue light, the neurons fired.

Think about that. Light could be used to trigger an electrical response in a living cell.

This discovery has transformed neuroscience, allowing researchers to investigate how brain circuits influence memory, emotions, movement and behaviour. It’s also opening possibilities for new therapies, including approaches to restoring vision.

Now, an important distinction: the researchers genetically engineered these nerve cells to respond to light. This isn’t the same as exposing ourselves to sunlight.

But the bigger conversation is one I’ve become increasingly passionate about as a physician.

Our biology doesn’t operate through chemistry alone.

We are responsive to light, temperature, timing and other physical signals from our environment. We already know that natural light plays an essential role in our circadian rhythms, sleep, hormonal signalling and so much more.

This is part of what draws me to quantum biology: exploring how physics contributes to the extraordinary complexity of living systems.

The Nobel Prize isn’t proof of every quantum biology hypothesis. But it is a wonderful reminder of how much we can discover when we bring physics and biology together.

Perhaps medicine’s next breakthroughs will come from broadening the way we look at the human body.

And perhaps nature still has a great deal to teach us.

I’d love to see these conversations become much more mainstream.

Blue light isn’t the problem.Timing is.During the day, I want full-spectrum natural light reaching my eyes. Blue wavelen...
10/07/2026

Blue light isn’t the problem.

Timing is.

During the day, I want full-spectrum natural light reaching my eyes. Blue wavelengths are part of the signal that tells the brain it’s daytime, which is why I don’t wear blue blockers outside.

The issue is artificial light at the wrong time.

I’m also picky about the glasses themselves. A clear lens labelled “blue blocking” doesn’t necessarily mean it is doing what I want for circadian protection. What matters is which wavelengths are actually being filtered, not just the percentage on the label.

During the day, if I’m on screens or under overhead LED lighting, I wear yellow lenses.

After sunset, I move to deep orange. For most people, this gives substantial blocking while still allowing you to see well.

Red lenses go further into the spectrum and can be useful if sleep is a real struggle or you’re particularly light-sensitive, but they are more visually restrictive.

For nighttime use, I’m especially interested in blocking roughly the 420–480 nm range. The best quality check is actual spectrometer data showing what gets through the lens.

The goal isn’t to fear light.

It’s the right light at the right time.

Comment GLASSES and I’ll send you a couple of my favourite brands.

10/06/2026

I’m a medical doctor. And I’m not sure I belong in the medical system anymore.

That’s a strange thing to say after spending so many years becoming one.

And I haven’t walked away from medicine. I still hold my licence. I still value so much of what I was taught, and I have enormous respect for the people working inside healthcare.

But over the last decade, my understanding of health has expanded far beyond the boundaries of the system I trained in.

Functional medicine opened one door.

Environmental medicine opened another.

Then circadian biology, light, mitochondria, nervous system health, community, nature, emotional health and eventually the realization that some of the most important determinants of health happen long before someone becomes a patient.

And somewhere along the way I started asking a different question.

Not, “How do I fit all of this back into conventional medicine?”

But, “Do I need to?”

I think there are a lot of healthcare professionals quietly sitting in this space.

You still care deeply about people.

You haven’t lost respect for medicine.

You may even still love parts of being a doctor, nurse, pharmacist, therapist or practitioner.

But something in you knows your work has become bigger than the box you were trained to work inside.

I don’t know exactly what my relationship with the medical system will look like five years from now.

What I do know is that leaving a particular system is not the same thing as leaving your calling.

Sometimes it may be the beginning of finding it again.

If you’re a healthcare professional who has been quietly wrestling with this too, I would love to hear where you are in this journey?

10/05/2026

I moved my office outside for a reason.

Whenever I can, this is how I take meetings: phone on a tripod several feet away, sometimes air-tube headphones, bare feet in the grass and my eyes in real daylight.

No blue blockers.

Because during the day, I actually want blue light.

Natural blue light is part of the full-spectrum signal telling the brain, “This is daytime.” The problem isn’t blue light itself,it’s mistimed artificial light, particularly at night.

I also use distance as one of my simplest strategies around devices. And while I love grounding and being connected to the Earth’s natural electrical environment, I don’t think of bare feet as cancelling out Wi-Fi. It’s one piece of a much bigger principle:

Put the body back into the environment it recognizes whenever you can.

Real light.
Fresh air.
Earth beneath your feet.
Technology a little farther away.

In winter, sometimes “outside office” becomes “window wide open office.” I have a few other ways I reduce unnecessary tech exposure too, which I’ll share in another post.

We don’t have to abandon modern life.

We can just get much better at remembering what makes us human.

10/02/2026

Somehow, the stars aligned.

When I first started using these patches, I was interested in what they might do for my health. I had no idea they would open a door into something much bigger.

The timing mattered too.

Not long before maternity leave, I unexpectedly lost a job I had thought would be part of my future. It wasn’t something I had caused, but it still left me feeling pretty knocked down at a time when I was already stepping into a huge life transition.

And somewhere in that season, I started asking a different question:

If I could build my ideal work from scratch, what would it actually look like?

I wanted flexibility. Meaningful work. Income that wasn’t completely tied to hours. The ability to be present with my children. To work from home or from wherever life happened to be. To keep learning. To help people. To be surrounded by strong, growth-minded women. To have mentorship. To build something that could grow with me rather than pull me away from my family.

When I actually wrote it all down, I realized this strange, unexpected business ticked almost every box.

That was not what I expected from network marketing.

I had spent most of my adult life in medicine, and there was definitely a version of me who would have dismissed this world very quickly.

I’m glad I stayed curious.

Because yes, the patches have become part of my own wellness story. But they’ve also brought new friendships, mentorship, personal growth, income, community and the opportunity to help other people create change in their own lives.

They’ve also made me question some of my old assumptions about what “professional” work has to look like.

I can work from home. Take a call while I walk. Build during nap time. Be there for the ordinary moments with my boys that I don’t want to miss. And I get to decide how big, or how small, I want this to become.

For me, that freedom has been one of the biggest gifts.

The patches were the beginning.

What came from saying yes to something I never expected has changed far more than my health.

If you’ve ever wondered why a doctor would choose network marketing, or what I saw here that made me rethink it completely: comm

09/28/2026

I’ve been reading The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Dr. Joseph Murphy, and it has made me think much more carefully about the thoughts we repeat without even noticing.

We tend to think of thoughts as fleeting.

But what if the thoughts we repeat become beliefs?

And what if those beliefs begin shaping what we expect, what we notice, what we attempt, how we behave, and ultimately some of the circumstances we create around ourselves?

“I can’t afford that.”
“I’m always exhausted.”
“Nothing ever works out for me.”
“I’m not good at this.”
“I could never do that.”

These sentences can become so automatic that we stop questioning whether we actually want to keep reinforcing them.

One practice I’ve been playing with is catching the thought as it appears and deliberately replacing it.

Instead of:

“We can’t afford that.”

Try:

“That is available to me. My subconscious mind can help me find the way.”

Instead of:

“I’ll never be able to do that.”

Try:

“I may not know how yet, but I can learn.”

Instead of:

“Things never work out for me.”

Try:

“Things can work out in ways I can’t see yet.”

This isn’t about pretending difficult circumstances don’t exist or forcing yourself to feel positive all the time.

It’s about becoming aware of the instructions you repeatedly give your own mind.

Because if you’re going to rehearse a thought hundreds of times, it might as well be one that moves you toward the life you want to create.

Catch it. Question it. Replace it.

What is one thought you’ve been repeating that you’re ready to change?

09/08/2026

Most people wait until winter to think about winter sleep, mood and energy.

I think about it in fall.

As the days shorten, I start paying more attention to the signals my body is receiving from the environment.

Morning: I get outside for sunrise and natural light into my eyes. That morning light helps set the timing for processes involved in hormones and neurotransmitters that matter for sleep, mood and circadian rhythm later in the day.

Evening: once the sun is down, the orange lenses come out. I’m increasingly intentional about reducing artificial blue light at night rather than telling my brain it’s midday when nature is saying otherwise.

And temperature matters too.

As the weather cools, I deliberately spend some time outside in slightly fewer layers than would be perfectly comfortable. Not extreme cold. Just allowing my body to actually experience the season and begin adapting to it.

Cold adaptation and energy production deserve their own post, so I’ll come back to that one.

None of this is about doing fall perfectly.

It’s about noticing that our biology is paying attention to when it is, what the light is doing and what season we’re living in. If you want an easier way to track your light exposure and circadian rhythm, I’ve been using the MyCircadian app. I have an affiliate code if you’d like to try it—just message me and I’ll send it over.

Do you change anything about your routine as the days get shorter? Would you like to know more about Fall prep?

09/08/2026

FOUNDATIONS started with a question I kept coming back to after almost two decades in medicine, functional health, environmental illness, circadian biology, and my own health journey:

How do we raise healthy humans from the beginning?

The more I learned, the more obvious it became that health is not one protocol, one supplement, one diagnosis, or one expert.

It is food.
Light.
Rhythm.
Nature.
Movement.
Environment.
Connection.
Context.

And motherhood changed the urgency of that question for me.

I don’t want my kids to only learn about health after something goes wrong.

I want them to grow up understanding how their bodies respond to the world around them.

That is really what FOUNDATIONS is about.

Not perfection.
Not fear.
Not more rules.

A clearer way of seeing health.

Adults learn. Kids explore. Families come back together.

September 20 | Privato Winery | Kamloops

Come curious. Bring the kids.

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Kamloops, BC

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