A listener of Super Human Radio called the studio to ask about a supplement we talked about on an older show. I learned during the conversation that he lost his sight as a young boy. I thought to ask him a question that has occupied my mind lately. Every time I see the commercial for the pharmaceutical drug called Hetlioz made by Vanda Pharmaceutical.

I asked him “have you ever used the drug for non-24?”. He said no but a gal he knows has and she didn’t like it. It made her feel ill and didn’t improve her sleep one bit. I have no idea what it’s like to be blind so I asked him “why not just use melatonin?” He began to laugh and said that’s what he does.

Non-24 is a bull$#!t diagnosis. Not because it doesn't exists. Because it doesn't require a pharmaceutical drug to treat it! A drug for Non-24 makes no sense to me. Except as a way to generate money for Vanda. So let’s look at the definition of Non-24.

This is right from the FDA website about the drug approved to treat Non-24. Notice the identification of the melatonin receptor as the target of the drug.

So the drug is designed to act on the melatonin receptor. Wait.. Melatonin does that too. Yet another example of how the pharmaceutical companies manufacture illnesses to take advantage of patented drugs that do nothing more than over-the-counter supplements to bilk people out of billions of dollars. All under the watchful eye of the enabling FDA.

The reality is that non-sighted people don’t produce melatonin when it gets dark out because the signals from the retina to the pineal gland don’t work. Period. What every physician out there should be telling them is to take melatonin! NOT Hetlioz. But that’s not going to happen. Don’t be fooled.

While I am not a doctor and nothing I write should be construed as medical advice.. If I were blind and suffered from circadian rhythm disruption, I would simply set my alarm for around 8:00PM each evening and take 3mg to 10mg of melatonin as my way of correcting this problem. But that's just me.

Sources:

J Biol Rhythms. 2016 Jun 16. pii: 0748730416650069. [Epub ahead of print]
Circadian Melatonin and Temperature Taus in Delayed Sleep-wake Phase Disorder and Non-24-hour Sleep-wake Rhythm Disorder Patients: An Ultradian Constant Routine Study.

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=drug%20non%2024

http://www.hetlioz.com/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=non-24-hour