Is The Sun the Universal Medicine?

Hal Cranmer
June 04, 2025

The other day I received a text from one of my favorite referral agents. Referral agents help assisted living homeowners find residents for their homes.

Unfortunately I was full and could not help.

As you know I try to work hard to make and keep my residents as healthy as possible as long as possible.

One of the benefits is that my residents tend to stick around for a while. Healthy living is a good thing.

And one of the reasons my residents do well I believe is that we try to take them outside into the sun.

Sunshine became a big emphasis item for me during Covid. I was reading about sun exposure during the Spanish flu pandemic in the early 20th century. Hospitals at the time were overwhelmed and had to put beds outside of the hospital.

Then they started to notice the patients stuck outside had a 30% better survival rate than the patients inside the hospital.

I put a lot of my residents outside each day and we didn’t have a single fatality from the disease at our homes.

Now there may be a lot of other reasons for our success rate. Good food. Sleep. Exercise etc.

But I’m sure the sun helped.

Now it looks like the sun may help more than your immune system.

A 20-year study of almost 30,000 Swedish women (mostly fair-skinned, blond hair) age 25-64 started around 1992 to see how sunlight exposure correlated with overall health.

The results were quite significant. After 20 years there were about 2,500 deaths of women in the study.

“Most comparisons showed significantly lower HR values amongst those with the highest sun exposure habits, as compared to those who avoided sunshine. In model 2 (Table2), BMI and physical exercise were included, and the data were censored before the year 2000. HR values were similar, and the CIs were wider. In both models, the summary sun exposure variables showed a ‘dose-dependent’ inverse relation between sun exposure and all- cause death.”

"We found that all-cause mortality was inversely related to sun exposure habits in a ‘dose-dependent’ manner. The mortality rate was increased twofold amongst avoiders of sun exposure as compared to those with the highest sun exposure habits.”

HR is hazard ratio. It’s a statistical number showing the likelihood of an event occurring in one group vs another group. CI is confidence interval - whether something is statistically significant.

Basically the results of the study showed that the women who had more sun, had less all-cause mortality.

Yet what does the medical establishment and all the dermatologists tell you?

Avoid the sun at all costs.

But what about malignant melanoma (MM) you say? Skin cancer can kill.

The study found:

“Women with ‘normal’ sun exposure habits were not at significantly increased risk of MM or of MM-related death.”

“Sun exposure increases the risk of MM mainly through episodic sunburn or frequent use of tanning beds in individuals with unprotected fair skin.”

So go out in the sun. Enjoy. Just be smart about. Avoid sunburn. And ask your Mom and Dad to join you.