About Dr. Hackett

I was born and raised in the rolling foothills outside Chico, California—a place where the rivers are cold, the air smells like oak and dirt, and kids still learn how to gut trout before they know how to use a microwave. I grew up outdoors. Fishing, hiking, camping, barefoot under the stars. That wildness never left me. But somewhere along the way, like most everyone else, modern life took its toll.

I spent most of my teens and twenties struggling with chronic gut issues—IBS, GERD, inflammation, all the usual suspects. I blamed genetics. I blamed food. I blamed everything except the environment I was living in.

I went to medical school in St. Maarten, at the American University of the Caribbean. In many ways, it was paradise. Looking back, I felt great, consistently better than I had in years. The sun was beautiful, I was grounding in the ocean and shirtless playing volleyball in between studying. But it wasn't until my third year of medical school—when I moved to England for clinical rotations—that I truly understood what was happening.

England was a gray wall of sky. A place where you could go weeks without seeing the sun. It was the most light-starved I'd ever been. My gut issues flared, histamine intolerance exploded. My skin broke out. I couldn't sleep quite as well. It was at this point that I began to realize that sunlight wasn’t just "nice to have"—it was a core biological input. A hormone. A signal. A lifeline.

From that point on, I became obsessed with my health. Light as therapy. Food as medicine. I wasn’t just some guy who liked being outside. Now, I was that guy. It took me years of study, work and self-experimentation to earn the laser focus on circadian medicine that I have today. I have spent well over a decade honing in on the ancient blueprint of human biology that no textbook had ever taught me.

During residency in Long Island, I became the odd one out. While others talked about call shifts and case logs, I was dreaming of paddle boarding the Long Island Sound, surf fishing the beaches, disc golfing in the woods, or scaling rock walls with dirt under my nails. I started to realize that hospital life was killing me in slow motion. 70-hour work weeks under fluorescent lighting. Blue light and non native frequencies abound in the operating room. Microwave meals. Plastic-covered, disposable everything. It wasn’t just draining—it was anti-life.

And that was when the second layer of disillusionment hit: the medical system itself.

I saw patients every day who were broken in the same ways I had been, only they hadn't discovered the truth in their youth like me. Instead of being handed light, nature, and rhythm, they were handed pills, surgeries, and diagnoses. Myriad patients, like women in their early 40s, come in with years of vague abdominal pain, fatigue, and "IBS" that never gets better. They lose vital organs to "standard" procedures like cholecystectomies, or removal of the gallbladder. Its protocol. Easy, slick. While procedurally speaking this is absolutely true, physiologically speaking it is not. Patients don't ask questions, and physicians rarely know a better option anyway. This is centralized medicine 101. Countless procedures I have been a part of where I think, you don’t need a knife—you need the sun and a damn plan.

Burned Out by the System. Rebuilt by the Sun.

Casualties of symptom-first medicine. That was the moment I realized: this isn’t medicine. This is damage control.

I believe patients deserve more. And providers do too. You weren’t meant to live in fluorescent cubes, popping pills, and waiting to be cut open. You were built for light, magnetism, movement, and real food. You were built for rhythms older than civilization itself. My mission is to bring people back to that.

This isn’t wellness. It’s a rebellion. A return to what works. What lasts. What made us human in the first place.