Essays

A field guide anyone can run on any bottle: three questions that sort the serious from the sold. The move a grifter never makes — run it on the bottle you already believe in, too

A lab report that says 'normal' is describing a crowd, not you — but 'optimal ranges' is also the exact phrase used to declare healthy people sick. How to tell the few places your normal genuinely is not good enough from the many where 'optimal' is being invented to sell you something

The big fish-oil trials seem to flatly contradict each other. They do not — the contradiction dissolves the moment you read each one by dose, form, baseline, comparator, and endpoint. A worked example of how to read a literature without cherry-picking the answer you wanted

Type 2 diabetes can be put into remission for a definable group of people — what the evidence actually shows, and, just as importantly, where it stops

Magnesium — a real deficiency the standard blood test routinely under-detects (it can only see the one per cent that sits in your blood), a few genuinely proven uses, several modest ones, and at least one thing it is sold hardest for that it does not do. The discipline is telling them apart

Type 2 diabetes, fatty liver, polycystic ovary syndrome, much hypertension and much cardiovascular disease are often not five diseases but one upstream fault wearing five names — and what that means for the person carrying them

How a national food diagram actually gets made — and why the honest response to a captured guideline is not a better diagram, but an assessment

Fatty liver is the most common liver disease on earth and, caught early, largely reversible — but not by anything sold as a 'detox.' Why the fat is there, how far it can be undone, and exactly where that stops

Aging is a genuinely modifiable process — but the interventions with real human evidence are unglamorous, and almost everything sold as 'anti-aging' rests on mouse data, a surrogate marker, or nothing. The whole discipline is knowing the difference

The gut microbiome is a real metabolic and immune organ — and almost everything sold under the words 'gut health' is marketing running years ahead of the science. How to tell the organ from the industry that grew up around its name

The traditional Asian pharmacopoeia was not ancient wisdom to be revered — it was a vast, unindexed library of molecules. The handful that became medicine did so only after modern chemistry isolated the compound and a trial tested it. The credit belongs to the molecule and the method, not the mysticism

Why the resistance the previous article described is a rear-guard action — and the forces, scientific and demographic and economic, that are moving mainstream medicine toward the framework nutritional and functional medicine already practises.

And why the most contemporary-sounding category in medicine turns out to be one of the oldest ideas in it — formalised over eighty years, and rooted in a clinical principle far older than that.

How the region that originated the clinical philosophy at the centre of this medicine became the region least likely to recognise it — and the regulatory trap that keeps it that way.

The structural mechanisms behind the resistance to nutritional and functional medicine — and why naming them honestly matters more than complaining about them

Why telling kidney patients to eat less protein may be doing more harm than the protein itself

Why the patient told to wait for dialysis is being given an incomplete map — and what serious functional medicine can offer instead

How a 60-million-year-old genetic accident became the most under-investigated cause of human cardiovascular disease — and why the dose conventional medicine recommends would never satisfy a goat

Why country of origin is a weak signal, and why the bottle on the pharmacy shelf is not the same product as the one in the clinic

What the daily maintenance protocol actually looks like — and why the answer depends on the patient as much as on the molecule

Why your monthly vitamin D capsule is probably not doing what you think it's doing

Why most supplements answer the wrong question — and why the right question demands a clinician, not a pharmacy aisle