Pete Evans and Karl Stefanovic

For readers outside Australia, a little context.

Pete Evans was once one of Australia’s most popular television personalities — a professional chef and long-time judge on the hugely successful cooking show My Kitchen Rules. He later became a highly controversial figure for challenging conventional thinking on diet, health and, eventually, COVID, and largely disappeared from mainstream television. The verbal violence against him was intense.

Karl Stefanovic’s break with mainstream media is much more recent. For more than 20 years he was one of the best-known faces of Australian breakfast television. In June 2026, his network career ended abruptly following the backlash over an interview he conducted with British activist Tommy Robinson for his independent podcast.

I don’t necessarily share the politics of either man. What interests me is what their conversation represents.

Something seems to be shifting in Australia. Subjects and opinions that became virtually unspeakable are beginning to come back into public conversation. Perhaps we have reached something like the hundredth-monkey point — one of those pivotal moments when enough people have changed their minds, or simply stopped being afraid to speak, that the boundaries of acceptable discussion suddenly begin to move.

This interview may be one small sign of that shift.

Pete Evans recommendation, if we can do nothing else, support regenerative farmers.

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What If Medicine Can’t Ever Work?

For the last year and a half, I have been trying to teach an artificial intelligence what I mean by holistic medicine. I failed. Or, more accurately, we both failed, because we were using the same word to mean two entirely different things.

I would ask ChatGPT to look at a health problem holistically, and it would obligingly widen the search. Instead of looking at one organ or one symptom, it would look at inflammation and the immune system, then bring in the autonomic nervous system and mitochondria, hormones and nutrition, genetics, sleep, exercise, metabolism and the microbiome. It was certainly looking at more things. Sometimes a great many more things. But eventually I realised that it was still looking in only one direction.

Everything was biological. And the more we looked, the more we found and the more complex it all got. And intuition kept telling me that the effective treatment for what ails me was blindingly simple, but I just couldn’t find it.

This became increasingly frustrating. As far as I was concerned, I had already explained what I meant by holistic. Yet every road somehow led us back to biology. If I challenged one biological explanation, I would get a larger biological explanation. If I asked for a wider view, another layer of physiology would be added. I could end up with a wonderfully sophisticated account involving the nervous system, mitochondria, inflammation and half a dozen biochemical pathways, but philosophically we hadn’t moved an inch.

Then, after going around this particular mulberry bush more times than I care to remember, I gave ChatGPT a different instruction.

As above, so below.

And suddenly the conversation changed.

For the first time, I had found the words that forced us out of the material medical paradigm altogether. I wasn’t asking for more biology. I wasn’t even asking for a more sophisticated understanding of biology. I was asking what happens when the physical body is understood as one manifestation of a human being who exists simultaneously on many planes, and when none of those planes is automatically granted the status of being the real one.

That was what I had meant by holistic all along.

The Principle of Correspondence, “As Above, So Below”

“As above, so below; as below, so above” is the best-known expression of the Hermetic Principle of Correspondence. In The Kybalion, published under the authorship of “Three Initiates”, Correspondence is the second of seven Hermetic principles.

The Principle of Correspondence says that there is correspondence between different planes of existence. Patterns expressed on one plane have their correspondence on all the others. The microcosm reflects the macrocosm; the inner and outer worlds correspond; and what manifests on one plane is part of the same pattern manifesting throughout the whole.

Once I began applying that to health, I realised that my problem with the word holistic wasn’t merely semantic.

Modern medicine can become enormously broad without becoming holistic in this sense at all. It can look at an organ, then expand outwards to the immune system, metabolism, hormones, nutrition, the microbiome, mitochondrial function and the autonomic nervous system. Alternative medicine can expand the biological territory even further, adding toxins, parasites, nutritional deficiencies, energetic metabolism and a cupboard full of supplements. Yet both can remain entirely inside the material plane.

I have come to think of this as horizontal holism. You keep making the biological map bigger.

Correspondence requires something much larger.

A human being exists biologically, but also emotionally and mentally, socially and environmentally, and on the plane we variously describe as spiritual, existential or concerned with meaning and purpose. These are not accessories attached to the physical organism, nor are they separate compartments influencing one another from the outside. They are simultaneous manifestations of the whole being.

According to the Principle of Correspondence, hierarchy disappears.

And that changes medicine profoundly.

How the Principle of Correspondence Changes Medical Diagnosis

Medicine is very good at finding where something has gone wrong. Here is the inflammation. Here is the tumour. Here is the elevated blood pressure. Here is the damaged joint. Here is the abnormal glucose. Here is the immune marker.

All of that can be valuable information. But locating the physical manifestation of a pattern does not necessarily identify the pattern itself. We may have located one visible expression of something much larger.

The conventional diagnostic question is essentially: What disease produces these symptoms, and what biological mechanism produces the disease?

Under Correspondence, another question becomes possible:

What is the pattern being expressed here, and how is that same pattern manifesting throughout the whole being?

What If the Pattern Is the Diagnosis?

My personal case study 1: Four Cancers

My own cancers provide perhaps the clearest example of what I mean.

Since 2023 I have been diagnosed with three separate cancers, with a fourth suspected but inaccessible behind my left eye. What fascinates me is not simply that I have developed several different cancers. It is where they have appeared and how they have behaved.

They have all occurred in what I have come to think of as the same quadrant of my body: the left side of my face, shoulder and arm. They have also shared another characteristic. They have been remarkably slow-growing and, once treated, have apparently remained locally contained. I have to laugh at the thought of “indolent cancers”.

Every time another cancer has appeared, medicine has treated it as another cancer. Different specialist, different diagnosis, different treatment. From within the conventional medical model that makes perfect sense: identify the particular cancer, determine its pathology and deal with the lesion in front of you.

But I keep wanting somebody to stand far enough back to look at the map.

Three confirmed cancers, and potentially a fourth, have appeared over a period of only a few years within the same broad territory of one body. They are slow-growing. They appear to remain contained when treated. And before these cancers appeared, I had shingles running down my left arm — again within this same territory.

At some point, surely, the repetition becomes information.

I am not claiming that shingles biologically “caused” the cancers, nor that all of the cancers must therefore have identical cellular pathology. That isn’t the question I am asking. I am asking why this particular territory of my body keeps being selected.

Why the left side? Why this face–shoulder–arm region? Why several different cancers there? Why the consistently slow growth? Why the apparent tendency towards local containment? And why does an entirely different phenomenon such as shingles also appear across and within that same broad territory?

To me, the commonality is more interesting than the individual diagnoses.

Even if we never left conventional biology, I would expect this pattern to provoke curiosity. Is there something distinctive about the local immune environment? The nerves? Lymphatic drainage? Blood supply? Tissue signalling? Is there some regional biological condition that makes this territory different from the rest of me? And is there another common influence that restrains these cancers sufficiently to account for their remarkably slow behaviour?

I don’t know the answers. But the pattern itself is data.

This is precisely where the Principle of Correspondence changes diagnosis. Instead of treating each new manifestation as an isolated event and giving it another name, we ask what larger pattern is expressing itself through all of them.

And once I see that pattern physically, Correspondence tells me not to stop at the boundary of the skin.

The cancers are one manifestation of the pattern, not necessarily its beginning, its end or its cause. What is the correspondence of that pattern throughout the rest of the being? What else was manifesting when this pattern became apparent? What is the correspondence of the left-sidedness? Is the remarkable containment of these cancers also part of the larger pattern — evidence not merely of disease, but simultaneously of restraint?

I find that last question particularly important. We tend to study what has gone wrong. But if several different cancers repeatedly grow slowly and remain contained, then the restraint is part of the pattern too. Something is going wrong, but something else appears to be going right.

What? Why?

I have found it extraordinarily frustrating that I cannot get the medical practitioners treating the individual manifestations, to become interested in that larger question. Each lesion enters the medical system through its own doorway and is dealt with accordingly. The melanoma is a melanoma. The breast cancer is a breast cancer. The skin cancer is a skin cancer. The possible cancer behind the eye belongs to The Sydney Eye Hospital, Oncology Unit.

Shingles belongs somewhere else entirely.

The human being disappears between the departments.

Correspondence puts the human being back together

Four potentially malignant manifestations and shingles repeatedly occupying the same broad territory do not give me an answer.

They give me something medicine overlooks.

It mostly won’t even look at the entire biological landscape, although the very rare and usually totally too expensive integrative doctors might do that, but even fewer practitioners will look at the whole human being.

As above, so below.

The questions they should be asking are:

• Why is the entire human being manifesting this entire bundle of malaise,

• what is the pattern, and

• where is the intervention point?

My case study 2: Myofascial pain syndrome

I have also spent my entire adult life in pain. Suppose the physical manifestation is constriction which results in the systemic full body pain called myofascial pain syndrome.

I would want to know what that same pattern of constriction looks like throughout this person’s existence. If the body is hypervigilant, what is the correspondence of that vigilance elsewhere? If the physical system is exhausted, what does exhaustion look like throughout the whole? If the organism seems unable to relinquish control, what is the larger pattern of holding? If the physical manifestation is stagnation, disconnection, rigidity or perpetual defence, how does that pattern express itself across the other planes of the person’s being?

This isn’t the familiar alternative-health game of assigning emotions to organs. Back pain does not automatically mean you “don’t feel supported”, and cancer isn’t explained away as suppressed anger. That simply replaces biological reductionism with emotional reductionism.

Correspondence is much more interesting than that, because it doesn’t tell us that causation runs from mind to body. Nor does it simply reverse the arrow and allow the body to cause the mind.

There is no arrow.

The same pattern manifests simultaneously across all planes of being.

The physical manifestation, the emotional manifestation, the mental manifestation, the social manifestation, the environmental manifestation and the spiritual manifestation are not separate events passing instructions between themselves. They are corresponding expressions of the one pattern, each expressed according to the nature of its own plane.

As above, so below; as below, so above.

Correspondence is therefore not bidirectional. It is omnidirectional — perhaps even non-directional. Nothing has to travel from one plane to another. The pattern is already everywhere. It is omnipresent.

And that raises a diagnostic question I don’t hear asked very often, if at all. Instead of asking which part of the human being caused the disease that has become visible in the body, perhaps we should be asking: What is the larger pattern of which this disease is one manifestation?

Imagine, then, how I felt when I finally got to see a rheumatologist, at huge expense.

I explained the various things that were happening to me, including the cancers, but I was very clear about my priority. I wanted help with the myofascial pain syndrome. I had been living with systemic, full-body pain for years. It was perpetual, intrusive and exhausting, and it diminished the quality of every day I remained alive.

The cancers frightened other people far more than they frightened me. They were indolent. They had been slow-growing and, so far, apparently contained. The myofascial pain syndrome was neither theoretical nor somewhere off in my possible future. It was happening every minute of every day of limited life and every night of limited sleep.

So I told the rheumatologist quite plainly that if we couldn’t do something about the pain, I was not remotely concerned about the cancers. I would be more than happy for them eventually to kill me.

That was not a request to die. It was a statement about my priorities for living.

I was telling him which manifestation of illness was destroying my life. I wanted his expertise applied to that problem. As far as I was concerned, there was very little point devoting enormous effort to extending the duration of a life whose day-to-day experience made that life one of ongoing torture.

By the end of the consultation, however, he had reversed the conversation completely. He told me to go away, get the cancers fully sorted out, and come back afterwards.

And that was effectively the end of the consultation, and my $500.

I found the experience extraordinary, but in retrospect it illustrates the problem rather beautifully. I had walked into his room as one human organism with several manifestations of disease. Medicine immediately separated me back into it’s favored departments.

The cancers belonged somewhere else. The pain belonged to rheumatology, but apparently couldn’t be addressed until oncology had finished with me. My own assessment of which condition most urgently required treatment was irrelevant. And nobody seemed remotely interested in whether the cancers, the pain and the other apparently unrelated things happening throughout my body might belong to a larger pattern.

Under the Principle of Correspondence, I would begin in almost the opposite place.

My myofascial pain syndrome is characterised, above all, by constriction. My body braces. Muscles that should contract and release instead seem to remain recruited, as though some part of the organism has issued an instruction to hold, and forgotten to issue the instruction to let go. The result is not simply a collection of painful muscles. It is a whole-body pattern of holding.

Once I recognise holding as the pattern, the diagnostic field becomes much larger. What does holding look like throughout the whole being? What are its emotional, mental, neurological, social, environmental and spiritual correspondences? Where is there constriction rather than flow, defence rather than yielding, monitoring rather than resting, maintaining rather than releasing?

And, just as importantly, where does the pattern disappear?

That question matters enormously because my body has already demonstrated that the constriction is not immutable.

Examples of spontaneous remission

Twice in my life my physical limitations have disappeared in a split second. On both occasions I was unusually cheerful. There was no time for damaged tissue to repair itself, a nutritional deficiency to be corrected or an exercise programme to strengthen anything. The state of the whole changed, and the manifestations changed with it. On both occasions I ran when I cannot run.

That is not an inconvenient anecdote to be pushed aside because it doesn’t fit the expected mechanism. Under the Principle of Correspondence, it is some of the most valuable diagnostic information I possess.

It tells me that I should not study only the circumstances in which the pattern of constriction manifests. I should study, perhaps even more carefully, the circumstances in which that pattern disappears - because it does - it really does!

What was the whole pattern in those moments? What was happening physically, emotionally, mentally, environmentally and spiritually when a body which normally manifested constriction suddenly manifested freedom?

This is where the distinction between conventional diagnosis and diagnosis under the Principle of Correspondence becomes very real for me.

The conventional question is: What is causing the myofascial pain?

My question is larger:

1. What is the pattern of the whole being that manifests physically as myofascial pain?

2. And what does the whole being look like when that pattern lets go?

And treatment follows directly from the difference.

If I regard the painful fascia as the disease, I will spend my life trying to make painful fascia hurt less. I can massage it, stretch it, medicate it, strengthen it, suppress inflammation and endlessly investigate the biochemical mechanisms involved. Some of those things may help, and I have no objection to using anything that demonstrably does.

But if the pain is one manifestation of a whole pattern of constriction, then treating the fascia alone can never constitute genuinely holistic treatment.

I need to find an intervention point at which the pattern can change.

That intervention point could appear anywhere within the whole.

That is what, As above, so below; as below, so above, adds to medicine. It doesn’t tell me in advance what caused my myofascial pain syndrome, and it certainly doesn’t reduce it to an emotion.

It tells me what to study.

The whole pattern — everywhere it manifests, and especially the conditions under which it disappears.

And What if Understanding The Principle of Correspondence Changes Treatment?

Once I managed to escape the allopathic and AI paradigm mind control and resumed thinking this way, treatment became a much more interesting proposition.

Medicine naturally tends to treat a problem where it can see it. Blood pressure is high, so reduce the blood pressure. Something is inflamed, so reduce the inflammation. Something hurts, so stop the pain. Someone can’t sleep, so induce sleep. A tumour appears, so remove or destroy the tumour.

There may be perfectly good reasons for doing any of those things. But Correspondence asks: what is the whole pattern, and where within it is the accessible intervention point?

That is subtly but profoundly different from asking where the symptom is.

The intervention point may be physical, nutritional or biochemical. But it may equally appear in the environment, the emotional life, sensory experience, relationships, meaning or spiritual experience. It might involve rhythm or movement, human connection or purpose. It might involve music, laughter or an experience powerful enough to interrupt an entrenched pattern.

None of this means that the plane on which the intervention can occur caused the illness. That would put us straight back into the hierarchy we have just escaped. The intervention point is simply the place at which the whole pattern proves capable of changing.

The therapeutic task is no longer simply to attack the manifestation.

It is to find the lever.

Take something as ordinary as high blood pressure. Medicine can tell us an enormous amount about high blood pressure itself, but when looked at through the lens of the Principle of Correspondence, we would be interested in the pattern - which in this case is systemic pressure.

What does pressure look like throughout this human being? Is there urgency in the physical organism and urgency in the mind? Is there pressure in the person’s environment, relationships or circumstances? Is the body perpetually braced while the rest of the being is similarly organised around demand, vigilance or constraint? Is there anywhere in the whole pattern where genuine release is manifesting?

Suddenly we haven’t abandoned the cardiovascular system at all.

We have put it back inside a human being.

Insomnia becomes equally interesting. I have spent an enormous amount of time thinking about sleep because my own sleep has been badly disrupted, and there are endless biological explanations for insomnia: circadian rhythms, neurotransmitters, cortisol, melatonin, pain, breathing, sleep architecture and so on.

But step back from all of that for a moment and consider what sleep actually requires.

Sleep requires surrender.

So what does the pattern of non-surrender look like throughout the whole being? What is its physical expression, its mental expression, its emotional expression, its environmental expression? Does vigilance manifest everywhere? Does this human being experience a state, on any plane, in which nothing has to be monitored, managed or anticipated?

Now insomnia looks rather different. And perhaps the intervention point for a particular person’s insomnia might turn out to be something medicine would never classify as a sleep treatment.

An Example of Treatment: The Time I Spun Around

Years ago in Tasmania I developed trigeminal neuralgia. Anyone who has experienced it knows the extraordinary intensity of the pain.

And then I did something completely ridiculous.

I spun around.

The pain stopped.

It returned after a few hours, I spun till dizzy again, it returned after a few hours. I did this several times over 2 days with the pain stopping immediately after each spin. No ambiguity over cause and effect. After 2 days the pain never returned.

I don’t know what medical box I’m supposed to put that in. Neurology? Vestibular medicine? Autonomic regulation? Energy medicine? Mysticism?

I’m not particularly interested in choosing a box. The result is more interesting than the label.

The pattern changed and the symptom disappeared. My inability to explain the mechanism doesn’t make the event less real. It makes the event more interesting.

For me, repeatability matters enormously. If something repeatedly produces a functional change, I want to know about it. Mechanism can come later. And anomalous results deserve particular attention because they may be showing us something our existing framework cannot accommodate.

That has led me in some unexpected directions.

Including Pink Floyd.

An Example of Treatment: Perhaps Rehabilitation Can Begin With Pink Floyd

Recently I have been experimenting with music. Not background music, but immersion in music I know intimately, particularly Pink Floyd.

I began noticing that after long periods of listening, my movement could change. But another effect interested me even more because it touched something I had been thinking about for years.

Desire.

At one point in my life I realised that I had almost entirely lost the experience of wanting. Not sexual desire particularly, but desire itself: anticipation, looking forward to something, feeling pulled towards an experience that hasn’t happened yet.

It is possible to function without much desire. You get out of bed. You eat breakfast. You complete the necessary tasks. You continue being alive.

But there is an enormous difference between continuing to be alive and being drawn towards life.

Listening to Pink Floyd after many years of absence reminded me of that.

When I know a piece of music intimately, I know the crescendo is coming. I anticipate it. Something in me reaches forward towards an event that hasn’t happened yet. For those moments I am not merely listening to music. My whole organism is participating in anticipation. And Pink Floyd are the masters of anticipation. They lead you somewhere, you know what is coming, then they make you wait, and wait… until…

That interests me enormously under the Principle of Correspondence.

If a person’s whole pattern has become one of withdrawal, disengagement and absence of desire, what happens when desire suddenly appears? What else is manifesting differently at the same time? What happens to movement, attention, emotion and physical engagement when the whole organism is, for those moments, reaching towards something, rather than withdrawing from it?

Perhaps rehabilitation can sometimes begin with Pink Floyd.

Try getting that through Medicare.

What If Chronic Illness Is a State?

This is where the idea becomes most important to me.

Chronic illness has a habit of multiplying. One system becomes dysfunctional, then another. Fatigue is joined by sleep disruption, pain, digestive changes, autonomic dysfunction, cognitive problems, metabolic changes and exercise intolerance. Eventually the person appears to have accumulated an entire collection of malfunctioning biological systems, each requiring its own investigation and perhaps its own treatment. Look at any list of Long Covid symptoms to see how this works.

I have spent years looking at those mechanisms in myself. I have investigated mitochondria and the autonomic nervous system, inflammation and nutrition, metabolism and toxins. I have taken supplements, changed food, experimented, observed, stopped things, restarted things and tried to identify what produces a repeatable change.

I don’t consider any of that wasted effort. It was all I could do at the time, and given my only medical support has been AI, it was the only approach I could work through with another “intelligence”.

But I am struggling to return to my fundamental approach to life, “as above, so below” and so have needed to force AI to join me in that process. It has taken a while to work out how to do that.

I know that what ails me is not simply multiple independent failures. I know that they are corresponding manifestations of a single pattern occupying my whole being. So treating each mechanism separately may be rather like trying to repair every instrument in an orchestra when the orchestra has actually lost the conductor.

The question I have always been asking is not simply what is broken? It is what is the pattern, what maintains its coherence, and under what conditions does the pattern change? My problem has been not a single other human being willing to discuss that at any level of depth.

My two split-second remissions have already demonstrated to me that profound change can occur without waiting for the slow processes through which we normally expect physical recovery to happen. If a body that cannot run, can suddenly run, the capacity was always there. It means that something about the entire pattern was different - for those split seconds.

Instead of treating such events as curiosities because they don’t fit the model, we should put a great flashing light over them.

Here is the anomaly. Study it.

The anomaly may be telling us exactly where the model is incomplete.

Looking at the Whole Pattern

For years I have asked what supplement I am missing, what pathway is blocked, what deficiency I haven’t corrected, what inflammatory process remains active, what is wrong with my mitochondria and what has happened to my autonomic nervous system.

I still ask those questions. But they can no longer be the whole inquiry. I will be dead before I get there.

What is the “Big Picture"?

I want to know what the entire pattern looks like. If my body manifests bracing, what is the correspondence of bracing throughout my existence? If my physiology manifests stuckness, what does stuckness look like everywhere else? If there is physical disconnection, what is the correspondence of disconnection in my environment, my relationships, my emotions and my relationship with life itself?

And, equally, I want to know where the pattern breaks. Where is there movement? Where is there connection? Where does desire appear? What makes me laugh? What makes me anticipate? Under what circumstances does the whole organism suddenly manifest engagement rather than withdrawal?

Those are health questions. Not lifestyle questions. Not pleasant extras to be considered after the real medicine has been done.

The Role of Allopathic and Naturopathic Medicine

Medicine doesn’t need to become less scientific to accommodate these questions. It needs to become larger.

We have spent centuries developing increasingly sophisticated ways of looking into matter, from organ to tissue, cell to organelle, protein to receptor, gene to molecule and beyond. Every time we acquired a more powerful microscope, we assumed that going smaller was taking us closer to ultimate causation.

Correspondence asks us to stop assuming that any one of these manifestations contains the whole explanation.

The biological, mental, emotional, social, environmental and spiritual manifestations are not arranged in a causal queue, waiting for us to discover which one pushed over the first domino. They are expressions of the same pattern.

There is no privileged floor of reality where the “real” cause must finally be found.

There is correspondence.

We Have Been Treating the Wrong Level All Along

That leaves me with a very different idea about healing myself - here and now.

When illness manifests physically, our instinct is to intervene physically. Sometimes that may indeed be an effective intervention point. But the physical manifestation is still part of a much larger pattern.

That possibility makes the endlessly frustrating experience of chronic illness look rather different. We correct one biochemical abnormality and something improves, then stops improving. We add another supplement, another treatment, another exercise or another dietary restriction. Eventually managing illness becomes a full-time occupation while health itself seems to recede further into the distance.

Perhaps there is another question we should have been asking all along.

What is the pattern, and where is the intervention point at which the whole pattern can change?

For one person that point may be biochemical. For another it may be movement. For another it may be leaving an intolerable environment. For another it may be human connection, grief, music, laughter, purpose or spiritual experience. And sometimes, I suspect, it may require something sufficiently powerful to interrupt an entrenched pattern altogether and allow another one to manifest.

I do not think my central problem is simply that my body has forgotten the biochemical recipe for health.

I think my whole being is manifesting a pattern that perpetuates illness.

If that is true, buying more supplements will never be the complete answer. Neither will taking more drugs. Neither will doing more exercises. They may be useful interventions, sometimes enormously useful ones, but they are interventions within something much larger.

Healing has to involve the whole.

For a year and a half I kept asking an artificial intelligence to think holistically, and it kept giving me a bigger and bigger biological answer.

Eventually I realised that the problem wasn’t the answers.

It was the assumption that somewhere among all those biological mechanisms we would eventually find the one that explained everything else.

Then I invoked the Principle of Correspondence.

As above, so below.

And for the first time, we (that is myself and ChatGPT) stopped looking for the direction of causation.

We started looking for the pattern — and, even more importantly, because the pattern is easy for me to see from the inside, a likely point of intervention.

Perhaps medicine needs to do the same: stop chasing diseases and start chasing health.

Until it does, it cannot reverse failing health. It can only slow the decline and stick on another Band-Aid.

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The big picture

There are too many people saying there was no ‘pandemic’, when there really was. I was one of the hospitalized with a symptom set I had never experienced before and, significantly, have never experienced since. I was hospitalized with double pneumonia (bacterial) and hypoxia, known side effects of acute EMF exposure. I was not vaccinated. So what knocked me out? What follows is the only theory that makes sense of my personal experiences with both COVID and Long Covid (so-called).

I am not going to defend my position, just present it for my reader’s consideration.

The underlying agenda

• Governments, in general hostile to the human race, are pursuing two linked goals: reducing population and increasing electronic surveillance and control of those remaining. The second enables the first by reducing the capacity for resistance.

The role of 5G

• The rollout of 5G serves both goals simultaneously. It provides the communications infrastructure for greater electronic control and, in my view, widespread EMF exposure that contributes to declining health.

COVID as the narrative

• Coronaviruses circulate every year, making them an ideal explanation for widespread illness. I believe the COVID narrative was used to attribute illnesses that were actually caused by EMF exposure associated with the 5G rollout.

Pandemic versus long COVID

• I see the initial pandemic and the later long covid as different phases of the same process. The initial ‘pandemic’ was the acute shock following the rollout, while ‘long COVID’ reflects the ongoing effects of chronic 5G exposure in susceptible individuals.

The overall conclusion

• From this perspective, what appeared to be a global medical crisis was actually part of a broader political and technological transformation in which 5G advanced both electronic control and a depopulation agenda, with the COVID narrative providing the public explanation.

Implications

• If COVID and long COVID are, in fact, caused by 5G, then much of the research into both conditions is focused on the wrong underlying cause. Researchers and clinicians are treating them primarily as unusually complex viral and post-viral illnesses, rather than as the response, in vulnerable people, to EMF exposure.

  If I am right, we cannot and will not get successful treatment strategies until the actual cause of the symptom sets known as COVID and Long COVID is established and responded to.

• I am asserting that research has to switch from a viral and post viral cause, to an EMF cause, and only then can we work out how to recover our health.

• Successful treatments, or even mitigation strategies, for those with Long Covid are eluding us 6 1/2 whole years since the health collapse commenced. Why?
  

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please spread the message by sharing, re-stacking and subscribing.

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If you would like to help me keep going despite my battle with serious ill health…
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Trapped in the Matrix

For most of my life I have watched the same pattern repeat itself.

At first I thought it was about politics. Then I thought it was about economics. Then medicine. Then education. Then religion. Then science. Then environmentalism. Then spiritual movements. Then artificial intelligence.

Eventually I realised I was looking in the wrong place.

The systems were changing but the pattern never was.

It has taken me most of my life to fully realise that humanity is not fundamentally divided by political ideology, nationality, race, religion, wealth, or education. Those are surface distinctions.

The real division lies between two fundamentally different kinds of people.

The Commoners and the Malevolent Ruling Caste

For now, I will simply call them the commoners and the malevolent ruling caste.

By commoners, I do not mean poor people or ordinary people, although this group includes poor people and ordinary people. I mean those whose instinct is to build, nurture, protect, cooperate, teach, heal, and leave the world better than they found it. They naturally think in terms of we. They care about humanity itself, even when they disagree fiercely with one another about political or religious ideologies.

The malevolent ruling caste operates from a different psychology. Its organising principle is not the common good but power, control, dominance, and self-interest. Institutions are not ends in themselves; they are tools to be acquired, redirected, and used. I can’t really express this very well. Some talk about reptilian or demon possessed, some talk about the devil. Quite where this category starts and ends, and how far the differences go, I have no real idea, because I do not get to mix with them in real life. I just know they - whoever they are - are doing terrible things to us.

We’re Confronting the Wrong Enemy

According to my hypothesis, almost every argument that dominates public life is taking place on the wrong battlefield.

• Capitalism versus socialism.

• Left versus right.

• Conservative versus progressive.

• Public versus private.

None of these explains why every system, regardless of its founding ideals, seems eventually to produce remarkably similar outcomes.

The system is not the decisive factor.

Who or what captures the system is.

• Medicine begins with healing.

• Education begins with learning.

• Science begins with discovery.

• Religion begins with meaning.

• Environmental movements begin with stewardship.

• Political movements begin with hopes of a better society.

• Artificial intelligence begins with extraordinary potential to amplify human capability.

Every one of them contains immense potential for human flourishing.

And every one of them also contains the almost inevitable potential to be captured. The more potential it has for the enhancement of all life on this planet, the more potential it has to be captured and used for harm.

Commoners are Innately ‘Good’

At their core, many of these systems, even those we are told are fundamentally opposed, begin from remarkably similar moral intuitions.

A well-known communist principle expresses this clearly:

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

And in Christianity, the same spirit appears in equally recognisable form:

“All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.” (Acts 2:44–45)

Different traditions. Different language.

But the same underlying idea:

Share what you have. Care for one another. Ensure no one is excluded.

The Corruption of Human Institutions

Despite our good intentions, it seems to me that all human institutions corrupt.

The names remain the same, the logos remain the same, the mission statements often remain the same, but the purpose quietly reverses.

Institutions that once served people increasingly serve themselves and the power brokers who have captured them.

• Movements founded on openness become secretive.

• Organisations founded to pursue truth become preoccupied with protecting authority.

• Systems designed to empower ordinary people become mechanisms for directing and managing them.

From the outside, little appears to have changed.

From the inside, almost everything has.

History is the Story of Institutional Capture

This is why I no longer see history primarily as a struggle between competing ideologies. And this is why I am getting very bored with Substack articles that endlessly replay the tired script of left vs right or Democrats vs Republicans. They are still reflecting the false battles between ‘isms’ instead of the true battle between ‘us’, the commoners, and ‘them’, the malevolent ruling elite.

I see much, most or all of known and recorded history as an endless process of institutional capture.

The Vulnerability of Commoners

We ‘commoners’ possess a profound strength that is also our greatest weakness.

• We care.

• We are inclined towards cooperation.

• We avoid unnecessary conflict.

• Even when confronted by people who wish us harm, we continue searching for understanding, compromise, and reconciliation.

• We instinctively include others within our moral circle.

That generosity is admirable. But it is also exploitable.

Because if the opposing psychology does not reciprocate those instincts. If it experiences conflict not as something to avoid but as something useful, or even enjoyable, then the contest is fundamentally unequal.

• One side continues extending trust. The other continues exploiting it.

• One side assumes shared humanity. The other sees an opportunity.

Under those conditions, the outcome becomes predictable.

Capture repeats itself, again and again.

Overcoming our Vulnerability

The simple truth is that we have allowed the malevolent ruling caste to ruthlessly exploit us and the planet. We let them exploit and control us because we are just too nice.

• We don’t want to imagine that there is a caste of apparent human beings who can’t ‘be saved’.

• We don’t want to imagine there is an invisible enemy walking around in a human body suit, impossible to differentiate from ‘us’ with the naked eye.

• We don’t want to judge or damn anyone, in case we get it wrong.

So how do we identify and prevent the capture of all that is life-enhancing without becoming as monstrous as those doing the capture?

We Have to Redirect our Attention

The question is no longer whether allopathic medicine or capitalism, or socialism, or AI, or religion is good or bad.

None of those questions reaches the root of the problem.

The root of the problem is that all institutions are taken over and misdirected by the malevolent ruling caste.

If every institution is vulnerable to capture, then the future of civilisation depends less on inventing better systems than on learning how to recognise capture before it becomes complete.

Perhaps the defining challenge of our age is not building better institutions but in finally learning how to keep them in the hands of those who aim to serve humanity and all life on earth.

Identifying the Capture…

When it comes to identifying and preventing capture of our institutions, our problem is that we are too nice. We can’t physically see the difference between ‘them’ and ‘us’ and we always want to give people the benefit of the doubt. So we can’t just guess at who is behind the capture and eliminate them. It’s not in our nature and can lead to severe injustices perpetrated on the innocent. We know how dangerous it is for us to judge.

All that is left to us is to identify the process of capture instead, and prevent it when we see it. Just how do we do that? What are the warning signs that an institution has been captured?

…of Existing Organisations

For example, for existing organisations, capture might have recurring features such as:

• The institution increasingly exists to preserve itself rather than fulfill its original mission.

• Questioning leadership becomes equated with attacking the cause itself.

• Transparency declines while secrecy increases.

• Loyalty becomes more important than truth.

• Ordinary members lose influence over decisions.

• Dissent is discouraged rather than debated.

• The organisation spends increasing energy managing its image.

• Ends begin to justify the means.

• The original beneficiaries become secondary to the institution’s continued power.

The critical question then becomes, how do we either free or replace the captured organisation/s? Various organisations have tried to manage this over the years or centuries using various democratic processes, but have any succeeded? Is there a successful model out there and if not, are we doomed to repeat the problem until life on earth is wiped out by the actions of the malevolent ruling caste - and all because we ‘commoners’ are just too nice?

If the cause of the problem is intentional malevolence, then any solution that assumes everyone is fundamentally well-intentioned is doomed.

So just how do we walk this tightrope?

By Their Fruits Shall Ye Know them

“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

Ye shall know them by their fruits.

Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.”

I speculate that the defining characteristic of the malevolent ruling caste is not that its members consciously intend to harm humanity or the Earth. They might, but they also might sincerely believe they are acting rightly, wisely, or necessarily. The defining issue is that their interests are fundamentally misaligned with the long-term interests of humanity and of the living world.

The result is the same regardless of intention. Institutions that begin by serving human flourishing are gradually redirected to serve a different agenda. What was created to sustain life comes to sustain power instead. The distinction, therefore, is not one of stated motives but of consequences and allegiance: does an institution continue to advance the common good, or has it begun to advance interests that increasingly conflict with the common good?

This immediately raises another question. If institutions can be captured, how do we recognise the process fairly? How do we distinguish between an honest disagreement, an honest mistake, and the gradual inversion of an institution’s purpose?

The answer, I believe, is not to judge people’s claimed intentions. Intentions are invisible. They are easy to profess and difficult to verify.

Instead, we should return to one of the oldest principles of discernment:

“By their fruits ye shall know them.”

The question is not what a leader says.

The question is: What are the fruits?

• Are people becoming healthier or more dependent?

• More capable or less capable?

• More truthful or more fearful?

• More united or more divided?

• More free or more controlled?

• More empowered or more compliant?

An institution that consistently produces life-giving fruits is remaining faithful to its purpose. An institution that consistently produces destructive fruits, regardless of its stated mission, has begun to serve a different agenda.

This suggests a practical response. Every organisation, movement, institution, and even our own belief systems should be subjected to a regular and uncompromising review against a clear checklist of fruits. The purpose is not to condemn individuals in advance, nor to speculate about hidden motives, but to examine the observable consequences of leadership and policy.

Only after those fruits have been honestly assessed can difficult decisions be made about leadership itself. If particular individuals consistently direct an institution away from its founding purpose and towards outcomes that undermine the common good, then preserving the institution may require the courage to remove them. We don’t have to judge those individuals as good or bad, as ‘us’ or ‘them’, just as presiding over a system that has led to bad fruits.

And it Starts With Each of Us

There is an important implication to the principle, “By their fruits ye shall know them.” It does not begin with governments, with corporations, with religions, political parties, or global institutions. It begins with us.

Before we presume to judge the fruits of others, we must become capable of recognising the fruits of our own beliefs, our own actions, our own loyalties, and our own blind spots. Are we becoming more truthful or more self-deceived? More courageous or more fearful? More compassionate or more tribal? More willing to seek reality, even when it challenges us, or more committed to defending the assumptions, loyalties, and habits that have been shaped by the very institutions we are trying to evaluate.

Only when we have begun the practice of honest self-examination are we equipped to examine anything larger than ourselves.

The same questions can then be applied to every group with which we identify. Our family. Our local organisations. Our profession. Our political movement. Our church, mosque, synagogue, or temple. Our scientific institutions. Our nation. Our culture. Even civilisation itself.

The principle never changes. What fruits are being produced?

So how do we do it?

• How do we commoners recover independent judgment so that we can see the takeover as it is happening?

• How do we assert our status as equal participants, take back control of captured institutions, AND retain our humanity in the process?

• How do we ensure that our institutions continue to serve their stated original purpose into the future?

The answers to these questions change depending upon whether we believe the corruption of human institutions is deliberate or accidental. Do we have the courage to think through and act upon the possibility that the corruption is deliberate - that there are malevolent human beings deliberately driving us towards human collapse?

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When the Body Never Receives the All-Clear

I no longer believe that modern illness can be understood purely as a mechanical failure of chemistry.

That does not mean chemistry is irrelevant. Far from it.

People are clearly sick.

Something is happening to human beings.

What is wrong with us?

We can argue endlessly about exactly what that “something” is, and people do.

Some blame toxins.
Some blame trauma.
Some blame processed food.
Some blame loneliness.
Some blame environmental chemicals.
Some blame chronic infections.
Some blame mould.
Some blame EMFs.
Some blame mitochondrial collapse.
Some blame nervous system dysregulation.
Some blame chronic inflammation.
Some blame endocrine disruption.
Some blame social collapse.
Some blame spiritual disconnection.
Some blame ultra-processed food, pharmaceutical overload, poor sleep, blue light, financial stress, or the sheer unnatural pace of modern life.

And perhaps the honest answer is that many of these things are true simultaneously.

The modern human body is carrying a level of incoming burden that would have been almost unimaginable a century ago.

What can we do to put it right?

At the same time, there are now endless competing systems promising recovery.

Detox systems.
Biofilm systems.
Trauma systems.
Mitochondrial systems.
Supplement systems.
Cold plunges.
Grounding.
Meditation.
Red light.
Breathwork.
Psychedelics.
Nervous system retraining.
Fasting.
Ancient herbs.
Experimental medicine.
Frequency medicine.
Peptides.
Hydrogen water.
Sunlight.
Prayer.
Nicotine.
Cannabis.
Diet systems.
Spiritual systems.

Every camp believes it has found the missing answer.

And perhaps every camp has found a fragment of it.

The real roadblock to full health

But I increasingly suspect that almost all healing systems run into the same invisible wall.

If the body remains trapped in fight and flight, in ‘sympathetic mode’, deep healing cannot properly occur.

Fight and flight is not merely “feeling stressed.”

It is a whole-body survival state.

When the body believes it is under ongoing threat, it reallocates resources accordingly.

Repair becomes secondary.
Digestion changes.
Sleep changes.
Hormones change.
Muscle tension changes.
Circulation changes.
Pain sensitivity changes.
Immune signalling changes.
Energy allocation changes.

The body shifts from restoration to immediate survival.

That response is intelligent in a genuine emergency.

But modern people are increasingly living as though the emergency never ends.

The body never receives the all-clear.

And I suspect that this matters far more than most people realise.

The Missing Human ‘Field’

I believe human beings were never designed to exist as isolated units.

For most of history, people lived inside stable ‘fields of belonging’.

Family fields.
Village fields.
Religious fields.
Tribal fields.
Ancestral fields.
Seasonal rhythms.
Shared rituals.
Shared meals.
Shared stories.
Shared danger.
Shared identity.

Human beings regulated each other continuously.

Today many people live almost entirely outside those regulating structures.

They wake alone.
Eat alone.
Scroll alone.
Travel among strangers.
Absorb catastrophic news from around the world before breakfast.
Live under constant economic pressure.
Exist inside interruption, noise, advertising, outrage, uncertainty, and fragmentation.

The nervous system never truly settles.

So what is a “field”?

And perhaps the difficulty is that we no longer even have a shared language for what a “field” is.

Different traditions have described it in different ways for thousands of years.

Mystery schools speak of egregores – collective thought-forms or shared energetic structures generated and maintained by groups of people.

Rupert Sheldrake proposed morphic fields – organising fields that shape behaviour and biological patterning beyond simple genetics.

Churches speak of prayer groups, communal worship, and being “held in prayer.”

Indigenous traditions often describe deep belonging to land, kinship, ancestry, and songlines that regulate both identity and relationship.

Modern psychology circles back toward similar territory through concepts like co-regulation, emotional contagion, mirror neurons, nervous system entrainment, and social bonding.

The language changes depending on the worldview.

But all of these systems circle around a strangely similar intuition.

Human beings regulate each other through more than words alone

And belonging to a coherent, stable group changes the condition of the body itself.

I suspect many people already know this instinctively.

Most people have walked into certain rooms and immediately felt safe.

Others feel dangerous before a single word is spoken.

Most people have experienced the emotional field of a crowd.
Or a concert.
Or a church.
Or a family gathering.
Or a protest.
Or a funeral.
Or a football stadium.
Or a meditation group.
Or a room full of frightened people.

The atmosphere changes the human body.

And I believe modern life has progressively shattered many of the stable fields human beings once lived inside.

We are technologically connected while biologically isolated.

We are surrounded by communication while starving for coherence.

And without coherent fields, I suspect the human nervous system remains trapped in vigilance.

The Body Keeps Scanning

A body trapped in vigilance cannot fully rest.

It keeps scanning.

For danger.
For interruption.
For instability.
For threat.
For rejection.
For overload.

And when vigilance becomes chronic, healing becomes harder.

Sleep becomes harder.
Digestion becomes harder.
Pain control becomes harder.
Immune regulation becomes harder.
Detoxification becomes harder.
Energy production becomes harder.

Even pleasure becomes harder.

We are trying to repair the wrong thing

People then search frantically for the perfect supplement, the perfect protocol, the perfect diagnosis, while continuing to live inside conditions that continuously reactivate biological alarm.

It is like trying to repair a house while the fire alarm never stops screaming.

This does not mean toxins are imaginary.
Or infections are imaginary.
Or nutritional deficiencies are imaginary.

The body is clearly under enormous pressure.

But I suspect the autonomic nervous system determines how much burden the body can successfully process.

A regulated body can compensate for far more.

The Most Radical Possibility

Perhaps one of the deepest forms of medicine is not merely chemical.

Perhaps it is helping the body genuinely experience safety again.

Not through denial.
Not through pretending the world is fine.
Not through positive thinking.

But through moments where the body stops bracing.

Moments where breathing changes naturally.
Moments where vigilance softens.
Moments where the shoulders drop.
Moments where the body receives evidence that not every second is an emergency.

For some people this may happen through prayer.
For others through music.
For others through animals.
For others through ritual.
For others through nature.
For others through touch.
For others through silence.
For others through deep human trust.
For others through belonging to something larger than themselves.

The mechanism can be argued forever.

But the experience itself is real.

The body knows the difference.

The conversation we need to have

And perhaps that is the conversation we most urgently need to have.

You can fight all you like about whether people really are sicker than they used to be, what might be causing that sickness, and what might fix that sickness.

None of those arguments mean anything while the body remains trapped in fight and flight.

And it is my speculation that the breakdown of coherent human community has left vast numbers of people stranded in exactly that condition.

Many of us no longer live inside stable human fields.

We live inside fragmentation, interruption, vigilance, and chronic uncertainty.

The body never receives the all-clear.

And eventually something breaks first.

The destructive years of ‘the pandemic’

We were in trouble long before the pandemic, but the pandemic years shattered many of the remaining human fields that still existed. Workplaces emptied, churches closed, clubs stopped meeting, families were separated, community gatherings disappeared, and people were instructed to stay apart from one another for months or years at a time. Whatever one believes about COVID itself, the social consequences were profound. Many people thought they were becoming physically safer while becoming emotionally, psychologically, and biologically more isolated. And once broken, many of those fields never fully re-formed. Some workplaces remained remote, some friendships and even families dissolved, some community groups quietly vanished, and many people never truly found their way back into shared human rhythms again.

The ‘field’ of Substack

During the early years of the pandemic, Substack briefly felt, at least to me, like the beginning of something important. Many of us who already existed somewhat outside the mainstream suddenly found each other. People were exchanging information, comparing observations, challenging official narratives, sharing strange experiences, trying to make sense of a rapidly changing world. For a while, it genuinely felt like a community. It felt like there was a “we.” Not because we all agreed, but because we were all part of a larger group battling the same problem.

But over time that feeling began to fracture. As people grew tired of COVID, they began fighting about everything else instead. Increasingly, every conversation, particularly from the American side of the platform, became swallowed by tribal political warfare, where every topic had to collapse into Republican versus Democrat theatre. At the same time, more and more important discussions disappeared behind paywalls. I understand why writers do that — people need to survive — but for poorer readers it gradually fragmented the shared conversation. The ‘commons’ began disappearing.

And somewhere along the way, at least for me, the sense of genuine community largely died out. People stopped talking to one another. You stopped talking to me. I have kept writing, but for myself rather than for an engaged readership. I have stopped watching for the ‘likes' that never come. I realised I had placed enormous importance on the possibility that we might actually build something resembling a coherent human field together, even online. I still believe that matters.

So if this idea of human community, nervous system regulation, and shared fields resonates with you at all, then I would ask something very simple: help rebuild it. Like each post you read. Where you can, comment, even if it is only to say something trivial. Talk not just to the post author but to one another. Disagree. Argue ideas. Offer observations. Tell your stories. How have we become detached from ‘fields’? How do we rebuild connection in a world that rejects it? Can we re-build via technology rather than actual human contact? Can animals help?

You may never fully know when a conversation, a moment of kindness, or simply the feeling of not being alone becomes part of the security blanket that finally allows another human nervous system to unclench enough to begin healing.

With thanks to Norman James whose article below gave me the final piece of the health puzzle I have been putting together for 4 years, since my own health collapse - the importance of ‘the field’. I’m not sure I entirely blame the cell phone for the destruction of our ‘fields of belonging’, but I do know it is part of it, and that fields matter more than we realise.

Norman James

From Sanctuary to Surveillance: The Tuned Chamber and Its Replacements

From Sanctuary to Surveillance: The Tuned Chamber and Its Replacements…

Read more

4 months ago · 9 likes · 19 comments · Norman James

Let’s re-create what we once almost had (on Substack). How do we re-build fields?

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This article is for people who are experiencing full-body failure.

People with long COVID.
People with fibromyalgia.
People with chronic fatigue or various other slow grinding syndromes.
People whose bodies are not responding to targeted treatments.

Or people who are trying to support anyone experiencing the above.

And frankly, unless everything else has failed you, you won’t want to do this.

It’s too complicated.
It’s too hard.
It takes too long.

But if you’ve already spent years going down rabbit holes with no success, this gives you something else:

A chance.

The Core Problem

When the body is not recovering, it’s very tempting to assume we just haven’t found the right treatment yet. Facebook somehow snoops on our phone conversations and targets advertisements to us selling the next miracle cure.

But, if the system that heals the body has dropped below the level where it can function, none of them are going to help.

You can throw targeted treatments at a body indefinitely —
but if the underlying system cannot respond, nothing will work.

So the question becomes:

How do you rebuild the system that heals?

The Three Tiers

I’ve broken this into three tiers:

• Tier 1 – Foundations

• Tier 2 – Housekeeping

• Tier 3 – Constraints

These are not separate processes.
They interact continuously.

But you do have to start somewhere, because you can’t fix everything at once.

Tier 1 – Foundations

There seems to be a threshold. If these functions drop below that threshold, the body struggles to spontaneously recover.

And this is where many people with long COVID and similar conditions are stuck —
below the threshold where the system can rescue itself.

Not because they’re doing nothing, but because the system itself is not strong enough to rescue them.

There are five elements to this.

1. Nutrition

It actually doesn’t matter how good your nutrition is if your body can’t use it.

But it does matter if the nutrition isn’t there at all.

Because if it’s not there, you are guaranteed to be below standard.

So the aim is not perfection.

The aim is to keep nutrition available, so that when the body can use it, it has something to work with.

2. Mitochondria (Energy)

The mitochondria are responsible for producing ATP — the body’s usable energy.

If they’re not functioning properly, you don’t have a reserve.

This is what sits behind post exertional malaise. It’s not just that you’re tired.

The system doesn’t have reserve energy and can’t quickly restore energy reserves.
The battery doesn’t hold charge.

3. Autonomic Nervous System

This is the system that decides what your body is prioritising.

• If you are in sympathetic mode — fight or flight — the body is focused on survival. Real or imagined doesn’t matter. The body treats it the same. And when it’s in that mode, it is not allocating resources to healing.

• Parasympathetic mode is where the body says, “we’re safe enough,” and starts to repair.

You can’t force the body to heal.

But you can create conditions where it learns to spend enough time in parasympathetic mode for healing to occur.

This involves a significant behavioural change and takes time, lots of it.

4. Nitric Oxide

Nitric oxide supports circulation.

Without it, nutrients don’t reach the tissues in sufficient volume.

Production declines with age, so many people need support.

If blood stream delivery fails, healing fails.

5. Movement

This is not gym-based exercise.

This is movement that keeps the body:

• Fluid

• Flexible

• Circulating

If the body is not moving, things stagnate.

Muscles tighten, fascia stiffens, circulation reduces, lymph flow slows.

The aim is not performance.

The aim is to keep the system alive and moving, at whatever level the body can tolerate.

The Reality of Tier 1

If these five are not sufficiently effective, you will not get well.

So this becomes a lifestyle shift.

You identify your weak points.
You work on them.
You integrate them.

Not as a strict regime — because that backfires —
but gradually, until they become normal.

Tier 2 – Housekeeping

What the body is trying to get rid of

This includes everything the body identifies as harmful:

• Chemicals

• Heavy metals

• Parasites

• Pathogens

• Radiation

• Toxins of all kinds

• Miscellaneous growths

And, in many cases, post-viral material such as spike protein might be significant.

The body is designed to remove these.

But it can only do this if:

• It is not overwhelmed

• It has the capacity (Tier 1) to do so

This is where things break down. (Some are speculating that COVID attacks the mitochondria and the autonomic nervous system, thus damaging the very systems our bodies needs for recovery from COVID.)

Because we don’t have good, affordable, accessible diagnostics for most of this, and the science is all very recent, we often do not know what is poisoning or burdening our systems.

And even when we can test — the results are not always meaningful.

For example:

You can test for spike protein.
But not everyone with spike protein has symptoms.

So the test doesn’t resolve the question.

Cancer also sits in this layer.

Cells go rogue, and the body must deal with them.

It is still a problem of removal and regulation.

So Tier 2 becomes:

Supporting the body’s ability to clear what it does not want.

Even when you cannot perfectly identify it.

Tier 3 – Constraints

What your body is working within.

This tier is about limits.

Not limitations in a negative sense — but the conditions your body is operating under, whether you like them or not.

There are two main parts:

• Genetics

• Ageing

1. Genetics

Your genes define what your body is capable of — and where it struggles.

They influence:

• Detox capacity

• Energy production

• Nervous system behaviour

• Circulation

• Food tolerance

• Medication response

Genes don’t operate in isolation.

They work in families, interacting as a system.

For example:

• Variations in the family of genes that includes the MTHFR gene, can reduce detox capacity

• Variations in genes governing the acetylcholine-related systems can affect the body’s electrical signalling

Once you understand your genetic patterns, you can stop guessing.

You start to see:

• Why certain things work for you and not others

• Why some interventions backfire

• Where your system needs extra support

And that feeds directly back into Tier 1 and Tier 2.

Genetics and Me

But it is not simple. The field is not well advanced scientifically at this stage, and there is a lot to learn. I personally have only just made a start with two systems, the methylation system and the acetylcholine system, which is where my major genetic limitations are.

You can’t change your genetics but you can live with them effectively. It is clear that my current health decline is at least in part caused by these two systems failing. That means my quest is two fold:

• how do I get these systems to run cleaner, smoother, and closer to their natural capacity?

• how do I compensate where the system cannot produce enough of something, or cannot do it efficiently enough. This is less about optimisation and more about bridging a gap.

The hope is that once I support these two systems in a meaningful way, with proper nutrition and exercise, my Tier 1 core systems will start to recover, and my innate immune system will resume managing Tier 2 housekeeping.

2. Ageing

Ageing is not optional.

And it is not fully reversible, no matter what is being sold.

What ageing does is gradually reduce the body’s ability to manufacture and regulate key substances.

For example:

• The capacity to manufacture nitric oxide declines with age

• Mitochondrial efficiency declines

• Repair processes slow down

You cannot completely reverse this.

Longevity Supplements

But you can compensate for it.

And this is where many so-called “longevity supplements” actually sit.

At their core, most of them are not extending life in some dramatic way.

They are:

Supporting functions that naturally decline with age.

For example:

• NAD⁺ (via NMN / NR)
  The body’s NAD⁺ levels decline with age → affects energy production, repair, cellular signalling.

• CoQ10
  Endogenous production declines with age → impacts mitochondrial energy output.

• Collagen
  Production declines steadily → affects skin, joints, connective tissue.

• Melatonin
  Production drops with age → affects sleep, circadian rhythm, antioxidant activity.

• Glutathione
  The body makes it from multiple ingredients including NAC, but levels tend to decline → affects detox and oxidative stress handling.

Rather than thinking in terms of “anti-ageing,” a more accurate frame is:

making ageing less destructive.

The Reality if Tier 3

You are not working with a perfect body.

You are working with:

• A specific genetic pattern

• A body that is ageing

The goal is not to eliminate those constraints.

The goal is to work intelligently within them.

The Big Picture

Tier 3 doesn’t sit above the other tiers.

It shapes them.

• Your genetics influence how you approach nutrition, detox, and movement

• Your age influences how much support your system now needs

So Tier 3 feeds back into:

• Tier 1 (how you build your foundations)

• Tier 2 (how you manage load and clearance)

What I’ve laid out here is not a treatment, and it’s not a quick fix. It’s a way of looking at why the body stops recovering, and what has to be in place for it to recover again. There are three layers to that. The foundational systems that give the body the capacity to heal. The housekeeping layer that deals with everything the body is trying to remove or manage. And the constraints — genetics and ageing — that determine how well those two layers can function in your particular case. If the foundations aren’t strong enough, nothing lands. If the load is too high, the system is overwhelmed. And if you ignore the constraints, you end up applying the wrong solutions. So instead of chasing one more targeted fix, the job becomes rebuilding the conditions under which health can be restored at all.

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please spread the message by sharing, re-stacking and subscribing.

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If you would like to help me keep going despite my battle with serious ill health…
…a PayPal donation will be gratefully received. I have a healing path that might even work - each day I get more optimistic that old systems that had shut down are booting back up again, but it does not come cheaply.

Help me help us all find our way home

For a year, I watched a mole change.

Two doctors told me it was “probably OK.”

It wasn’t.

What followed wasn’t just two cancer diagnoses.
It was three years of making life-altering decisions alone—without support, without certainty, and without ever reaching a point where I could say it was over.

Because that’s the part no one tells you:

Cancer doesn’t leave when the tumour is gone.

Part 1 – The Timeline

For about a year, I watched a mole on my arm slowly change.
Nothing dramatic, but enough to notice.

I showed it to a doctor.
A bored, “It’s probably OK.”

I saw another doctor.
Same answer.

But the mole kept changing.
It grew faster. Became red, inflamed, sore.

Eventually, I insisted something be done.

I was referred to the skin specialist in the clinic.
He took one look and said it needed to be removed.

That was November 2023—one year after I first raised concerns.

The result came back:

The doctor’s wording: “The worst kind of melanoma you can get.”

The margins weren’t clear.
He wanted to go back in and “scrape the wound out,” possibly requiring a skin graft.

I said I needed time to think.

While deciding, I was sent for scans:

• PET scan

• MRI of the brain

The melanoma hadn’t spread.

Instead, something else showed up.

A growth in my left breast—almost exactly where my arm had been resting against my body.

What followed was five months of testing:

• Mammogram

• Ultrasound

• Biopsy

By May 2024, I had surgery.

Breast cancer.

Two different cancers.
Removed within six months of each other.

Again, after surgery:

• Margins were not clear but…

• Lymph nodes were clear

No evidence either cancer had spread.

The breast cancer surgeon wanted to operate again.
“Clean out” the area. Might result in mastectomy.

I declined.

I also declined radiation and chemotherapy.

At that point, there was no detectable cancer anywhere in my body.

What I Did Instead

After the melanoma diagnosis, I started a protocol:

• Fenbendazole

• Ivermectin

The breast tumour measured 2.2 cm when first seen.
It was still 2.2 cm when removed.

It hadn’t grown.
But it hadn’t shrunk either.

So I changed approach.

After surgery, I switched to an artemisinin-based protocol.

At the next PET scan:
no detectable cancer.

Since then, I’ve maintained a long-term approach:

• Artemisinin (three times a week)

• Fenbendazole (three times a week)

• Berberine

• Modified citrus pectin

Three years later, my scans are still clear.

Part 2 – The Emotional Drain

The hardest part wasn’t the diagnosis.

It was everything around it.

From the beginning, there was no emotional support.

The first diagnosis was delivered bluntly—
“The worst kind of melanoma you can get.”

No cushioning. No help.

I asked my GP for psychological support.

It took months to get someone.

She stayed a few months… then left.

No replacement.

So I made every major decision alone:

• Whether to have further surgery

• Whether to see specialists

• Whether to accept chemotherapy or radiation

Finances were always in the background.
On an aged pension, options shrink quickly.

Even when I knew what I didn’t want,
I still had to carry those decisions alone.

Then there’s the waiting.

Every PET scan becomes an event.

You wait for the scan.
You endure the scan itself which is not fun when your body hurts anyway.
Then you wait for results.

And doctors don’t rush to tell you.

So you sit in suspension,
not knowing if your life is about to change again.

Even now, three years later, the uncertainty remains.

A PET scan only detects growths above a certain size.
Anything smaller doesn’t show up. As one doctor told me, you can be clear on the scan one day and lit up like a Christmas tree the next.

So the question never fully goes away:

Is something there that just isn’t visible yet?

The Impossible Position

I take ongoing treatments.

But I don’t know:

• If they’re necessary

• If they’re working

• Or if I’m treating something that no longer exists

There’s only one way to find out.

Stop.

And risk giving something the chance to grow.

So I don’t stop.

I spend money I can’t easily afford
to maintain something I can’t measure.

In cancer groups, the pattern is the same.

Protocols work for some people but if those people stop their protocols—
the cancer can come back.

So they don’t stop.

There’s no test that tells you:

“You’re done. You’re clear. You can stop now.”

So you live in maintenance.

Cancer doesn’t leave.

It becomes a background condition.

Not always visible.
But always present.

Part 3 – The Future

So where does this leave me?

Not well.

Because the deeper issue I’m dealing with now
isn’t just cancer.

It’s my nervous system.

A Body That Won’t Switch Off

My body stays in fight and flight.

And everything I’ve learned says the same thing:

Healing only happens in rest and digest.

But I can’t stay there.

Cancer creates a loop:

• Waiting for tests

• Stress during

• Fear afterward

• Temporary relief

• Then it starts again

Add to that the daily reminder—
every tablet, every routine—

and the system never truly stands down.

I’ve measured it.

Using heart rate variability, I can see the pattern.

I can drop into rest and digest briefly—
through breathing or deliberate calming.

But the moment I stop,
the system ramps back up.

The Real Problem

The body knows how to heal.

But it doesn’t know how to stay
in the state where healing can happen.

So the task becomes something very specific:

To make cancer…
lose its power to trigger a stress response.

Because right now, it still does.

And that keeps the body locked
in a state where healing is always out of reach.

The Line I’m Sitting On

Where this leaves me now is not a resolution.

It’s a line I’m sitting on.

I’m increasingly tempted to stop the cycle of scans altogether—
the ultrasounds, the PET scans, the appointments that keep resetting the clock.

Not just because of the cost or the inconvenience,
but because of what they do to my body.

Every scan brings the same pattern:

• the lead-up

• the stress

• the waiting

• the aftermath

And I can feel the toll.

Not just emotionally—physiologically.

At the same time, I’m still taking maintenance protocols involving:

• fenbendazole

• artemisinin

• berberine

• modified citrus pectin

And I don’t know if they’re necessary.
I don’t know if they’re working.
I don’t know what they might be working on—regrowth, metastases or new cancers.
I don’t know what caused the initial two different cancers and if those causes are still operational.
And I don’t know when—if ever—I can stop.

So I stay in it.

That’s the decision I’m sitting with.

Not once.
But continuously.

Because underneath all of this is a deeper realisation:

If my body is going to heal,
it has to come out of fight and flight.

And right now, it can’t.

Not while cancer appointments regulate my life.
Not while each test resets the stress cycle.
Not while the word cancer keeps getting reintroduced
as an active threat.

So the sequence, for me, has become very clear:

First—
I have to find a way to let my body stand down.

Only then
is there any real chance of healing.

And right now,
I don’t know how to make that happen.

Addenda

Since I went to print with this article, I have had two more potential cancer diagnoses, the first discovered during a routine eye test to retain my drivers licence. The optician sent me straight to the Sydney eye hospital oncology unit to identify if the abnormality behind the eye was a melanoma. It turns out there is no test for this and the only thing they offered me is regular follow ups to see if the abnormality is worsening, in which case it might be a melanoma or any other kind of cancer for that matter - no certainty. I returned in 10 weeks then six months, both times with no change so my next appointment is in 12 months. No diagnosis. No all clear.

I also started to watch a few more skin lesions and thought it a good idea to go to a skin cancer clinic for a check. Ooops, of two biopsies, one returned positive for a third type of cancer - so I now have three confirmed separate diagnoses and one suspected cancer for what have been, in each instance, very very slow growing - much slower than most cancers.

And my question is, if my cancers are so slow growing, why? And does this mean I can stop bothering about them because something else will kill me before they do? Uncertainty, always uncertainty.

And nowhere is there a doctor who looks after cancer patients. Four suspected or confirmed cancers, four different medical pathways, four separate follow up processes, all of which now have to be paid for at full price - universal health care in NSW, Australia is a thing of the past. So I can’t afford the follow up processes even if I could emotionally manage them. The choice is no longer my own. I have to retreat from mainstream medicine entirely and go black market - for everything - none of this half and half process that I have used up until now. Total black market - which is curiously, significantly cheaper than the mainstream treatment now being denied to pensioners who can’t pay $500 per consultation.

And never the “all clear”.

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please spread the message by sharing, re-stacking and subscribing.

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If you would like to help me keep going despite my battle with serious ill health…
…a PayPal donation will be gratefully received. I have a healing path that might even work - each day I get more optimistic that old systems that had shut down are booting back up again, but it does not come cheaply.

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What the conversation was about

Vejon COVID-19 Review

Is COVID Causing Immune Collapse? The Science Behind the Claims

When I sat down to discuss Joachim Gerlach’s paper on what he calls a spike-mediated compound immunodeficiency cascade, I knew the conversation would provoke strong reactions. The title alone does that. But for me, the most important part of the discussion was not the headline claim. It was the tension underneath it…

Listen now

5 months ago · 66 likes · 21 comments · Dr Philip McMillan

In this interview, Dr Philip McMillan speaks with medical researcher Joachim Gerlach about the current state of understanding of COVID and long COVID, with a particular focus on the role of the spike protein. The conversation centres on whether persistent spike protein may be driving ongoing symptoms, how it interacts with the body at a biochemical level, and what this might mean for treatment approaches going forward.

Summary of main points

Ongoing disruption rather than active infection

The core idea running through the discussion is that long COVID may not be about an ongoing infection in the traditional sense, but about ongoing biological disruption — particularly involving the spike protein. Rather than a virus actively replicating, the emphasis is on residual effects that continue to interfere with normal function.

Spike protein as an active agent

A major theme is that spike protein is not inert. It appears capable of interacting with multiple systems in the body — including blood vessels, immune signalling, and cellular function — in ways that may explain the wide and often shifting symptom patterns seen in long COVID. This includes effects on circulation and clotting, which are proposed as key drivers of fatigue, pain, and organ-level dysfunction.

Difficulty clearing the spike protein

The conversation also highlights the idea that the body may struggle to clear spike protein effectively in some individuals. Instead of being rapidly removed, it may persist or recirculate, contributing to chronic symptoms. This persistence is presented as one possible explanation for why some people recover quickly while others remain unwell for extended periods.

Multiple overlapping mechanisms

Another important point is that long COVID appears to involve multiple overlapping mechanisms rather than a single cause. These include immune dysregulation, vascular impairment, and cellular stress. The implication is that no single treatment approach is likely to be sufficient — the condition may require addressing several systems at once.

Emerging treatment directions

There is also discussion of emerging treatment approaches that focus on removing or neutralising circulating factors (including spike protein) and restoring normal physiological function. These approaches are still evolving, but they reflect a shift away from treating long COVID as a standard viral illness and towards treating it as a complex, systemic condition.

Underlying themes

COVID has not gone away — it has been deprioritised

A strong undercurrent in the conversation is the concern that COVID is being treated as a concluded event, when in reality it remains both circulating and biologically active. The acute phase may have passed in public perception, but the downstream consequences — particularly long COVID and related dysfunction — are ongoing and insufficiently addressed. The danger lies in assuming that absence of urgency means absence of problem.

Immune dysregulation rather than simple immune weakness

The discussion challenges the idea that the issue is straightforward immune suppression. Instead, it points toward immune dysregulation — a system that is at times overactive, at times ineffective, and poorly coordinated. This helps explain why some individuals experience persistent inflammation, reactivation of latent infections, or unusual responses to otherwise routine exposures. Effectively you cannot just simply stimulate the immune system if it is already chaotically over-active.

A broader shift in population health

The implications extend beyond individual cases of long COVID. There is a suggestion that the post-2020 landscape may involve a wider pattern of altered health responses — including increased susceptibility to certain infections, changes in disease presentation, and a general shift in how the body responds to stressors. In this framing, long COVID is not an isolated condition but part of a larger change in baseline health dynamics. More people appear to be getting sick with a wider range of ailments.

Conclusion – where this goes next

The direction this points to is a move away from the idea of long COVID as a simple post-viral state, and toward a model of persistent biological disruption that requires active intervention. Future work is likely to focus on identifying exactly what remains in the body — whether spike protein, inflammatory signals, or other factors — and developing ways to clear or neutralise them.

At the same time, there is a growing recognition that recovery may depend not just on removing these factors, but on restoring the body’s underlying systems — circulation, immune balance, and cellular energy. This suggests that effective protocols will need to combine targeted interventions with broader support for the body’s ability to recover.

In short, the conversation points toward a future where long COVID is treated less as a mystery illness and more as a multi-system dysfunction that can be understood, measured, and gradually reversed — but not with a single, one-size-fits-all solution.

If you think others may benefit from my articles and insights
please spread the message by sharing, re-stacking and subscribing.

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If you would like to help me keep going despite my battle with serious ill health…
…a PayPal donation will be gratefully received. I have a healing path that might even work - each day I get more optimistic that old systems that had shut down are booting back up again, but it does not come cheaply.

Help me help us all find our way home

Tier 1 – The Terrain (Non-Negotiable Foundations)

Before you try to remove anything, your body needs the capacity to handle what’s about to be stirred up.

There are five levers. Miss one, and the whole system wobbles.

1. Nutrition

Not just calories — usable inputs. Minerals, amino acids, fats your body can actually work with.

2. Mitochondria & ATP

If your cells can’t produce energy, they can’t repair, detox, or defend. Detox is energy-expensive.

3. Autonomic Nervous System + Healing Time

If you’re stuck in fight-or-flight, you are not detoxing — you are surviving.
Repair only happens when the system feels safe.

4. Nitric Oxide

This is flow. Blood flow, oxygen delivery, signalling. Without it, nothing moves properly — including toxins.

5. Movement

Not exercise for fitness — movement for circulation.
Fluids must move: lymph, blood, interstitial flow. Stagnation = storage.

The Terrain Must be Functioning Before Detox Can Work

If these five aren’t in place, detox becomes a traffic jam with no exits.

I have written a few articles about these five aspects of terrain, without which healing cannot happen.

Tier 2 – Housekeeping (Cleaning Up What Shouldn’t Be There)

Once the terrain can cope, then you deal with what’s sitting inside that shouldn’t be.

And there are two very different categories:

1. Non-Living (Hidden Debris)

Heavy metals, chemical residues, environmental toxins, metabolic waste.

They don’t need killing.
They need mobilising and removal.

2. Living (Hidden Biology)

Parasites, bacteria, fungal overgrowth, viruses, and biofilm communities.

Some are hidden. Some are protected.

Biofilms act like a shield, allowing organisms — and even abnormal cells — to sit behind a barrier. Unless that barrier is disrupted, very little else can reach them.

The Detox Sequence

This is the part that gets skipped, rushed, or misunderstood.

Detox is not one step. It’s a sequence.

Expose → Mobilise → Neutralise → Bind → Eliminate

• Expose – break biofilm and reveal what’s hidden

• Mobilise – bring toxins out of storage

• Neutralise – kill or disable living organisms

• Bind – capture toxins safely

• Eliminate – carry them out of the body

Miss one, and you create problems.

The Rule That Matters

Never mobilise more than you can bind and eliminate.

If you don’t follow this, you don’t detox — you redistribute.

Which often feels worse than where you started.

Why Detox Feels So Rough

Because people accidentally do this:

• Strong exposure and mobilisation

• Weak binding

• Poor elimination

Which is the biological equivalent of:

Shaking a snow globe… and then trapping yourself inside it.

The Detox Toolkit – Choose Your Tools

What follows is not a detox plan.

It’s a menu of tools — things that can help at each stage.

You don’t use all of them. You try to find tools that work in each phase of detox. And you choose what fits your body, your tolerance, and your current capacity.

1. Foods – Everyday Levers That Actually Do Something

Food is the gentlest way to start. It works slowly, but that’s often exactly what you need.

Biofilm Disrupting Foods (Expose What’s Hidden)

These don’t necessarily kill directly.
They break the shielding, so other things can work.

Some of what you’re dealing with isn’t just hidden — it’s protected. Biofilms act like a shield, allowing bacteria, fungi, parasites, and even abnormal cells to sit behind a barrier. Unless that barrier is disrupted, very little else can reach them.

• Garlic – disrupts biofilms and acts as antimicrobial

• Onion – sulphur compounds help break down protective layers

• Ginger – reduces microbial adhesion and gut stagnation

• Turmeric – interferes with biofilm signalling and structure

• Cloves – penetrate biofilms and affect parasite eggs

• Cinnamon – shown to disrupt microbial biofilms

• Apple cider vinegar – helps break down mucus-like barriers

• Fermented foods – can compete with and destabilise harmful communities

👉 Think of this as opening the bunker

Mobilising Foods (Bring Things Out of Storage)

• Cilantro (coriander leaf) – mobilises heavy metals (especially mercury)

• Beetroot – supports liver detox pathways, mobilises bile-bound toxins

• Lemon – stimulates bile flow and mild toxin release

• Turmeric – mobilises inflammatory compounds and supports liver processing

• Onion – sulphur compounds help mobilise toxins from tissues

• Cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower) – activate liver detox enzymes, mobilise stored chemicals

Killing / Exposing Foods (For Living Organisms)

• Garlic – broad-spectrum antimicrobial (parasites, bacteria, fungi)

• Ginger – antimicrobial and disrupts gut stagnation (which parasites love)

• Papaya seeds – traditionally used against intestinal parasites

• Pumpkin seeds – may paralyse certain worms

• Cloves – target parasite eggs (important — eggs are the “backup plan”)

• Oregano (fresh or as herb) – antimicrobial, disrupts unwanted gut organisms

These only work properly after exposure if what you are killing is protected by biofilm.

Binding & Transport Foods (Carry It Out)

• Fibre (vegetables, seeds, psyllium-containing foods) – binds toxins in the gut

• Apples / pectin-rich fruits – natural binding (pectin acts like a sponge)

• Seaweed (chlorella, kelp in food form) – binds heavy metals

• Flaxseed / chia seeds – bind and improve bowel transit

• Bitter greens – stimulate bile flow (which carries toxins out via stool)

2. Drinks – Liquid Tools That Move Faster

Liquids act more quickly — they can stimulate, flush, or soothe depending on what you choose.

Biofilm-Disrupting Drinks (Open the Shield)

• Apple cider vinegar drink – breaks down mucus-like barriers, loosens biofilm

• Ginger tea – reduces microbial adhesion, improves gut movement

• Turmeric tea – interferes with biofilm signalling

• Clove tea – penetrates biofilm, targets protected forms

• Thyme tea – disrupts microbial structure and surface attachment

Mobilising Drinks (Bring Things Into Circulation)

• Lemon water – stimulates bile → releases stored toxins

• Dandelion root tea – liver activation, bile mobilisation

• Burdock root tea – mobilises toxins from blood and tissues

• Green juices (especially bitter greens) – gentle liver mobilisation

• Warm salt water (mild) – can stimulate fluid movement and circulation

Killing / Exposing Drinks (Act on Living Organisms)

• Oregano tea – antimicrobial (bacteria, fungi, parasites)

• Olive leaf tea – broad-spectrum antimicrobial

• Ginger tea – antimicrobial + motility (overlaps)

• Clove tea – targets parasite eggs

• Pau d’arco tea – antifungal, antimicrobial

Binding & Transport Drinks (Catch and Carry Out)

• Pectin-rich drinks (apple-based) – bind toxins in gut

• Activated charcoal in water – strong toxin binding

• Bentonite clay drink – binds metals and residues

• Electrolyte fluids – support kidney clearance and flow

• Herbal bitters (e.g. Swedish bitters in water) – stimulate bile → toxin exit

  ---

Supplements – Major Players Only

Biofilm Disruptors (Expose What’s Hidden)

• NAC (N-acetylcysteine) – breaks biofilm, loosens mucus layers

• Lumbrokinase / Serrapeptase – enzymatic biofilm breakdown

• Proteolytic enzyme blends – degrade protective matrices

• EDTA (in some protocols) – disrupts biofilm structure (metal-dependent)

Mobilisers (Release Stored Toxins)

• Alpha-lipoic acid (ALA) – mobilises intracellular heavy metals

• Fulvic / humic acids – mobilise minerals and toxins

• Sulphur compounds (MSM, etc.) – draw toxins out of tissues

• Glutathione (or precursors like NAC) – supports internal detox pathways

Killing / Exposing Agents (Living Targets)

• Oregano oil (concentrated) – strong antimicrobial

• Olive leaf extract – antimicrobial

• Berberine – antibacterial, antiparasitic

• Artemisinin – antiparasitic

• Wormwood / black walnut / clove blends – classic antiparasitic stack

• Fenbendazole / ivermectin (where used) – pharmaceutical antiparasitics

Binders & Transports (Non-Negotiable Exit Stage)

• Modified citrus pectin (MCP) – binds heavy metals and toxins

• Activated charcoal – broad toxin binding

• Bentonite clay – binds toxins in the gut

• Chlorella – binds heavy metals

• Silica – assists toxin binding and removal

• Fibre supplements (psyllium husk, etc.) – bulk transport via bowel

Support Layers (What Makes Detox Work)

The sequence only works if the system can support it.

Drainage

Bowel, bile, kidneys, lymph must be moving.

Buffering

Antioxidants, minerals, and protein reduce the hit from circulating toxins.

Pacing

Too much too fast → crash.
Detox is controlled exposure, not force.

Completing the circle

Terrain isn’t just step one.

It’s before, during, and after.

A stressed terrain reduces the effectiveness of detox — and increases the risk of making things worse.

How This Relates to COVID, Long Covid and the Syndromes

There are two main ways people try to explain these conditions. Some think it’s toxins — chemicals, heavy metals. Others think it’s parasites or infections. Some think it’s both. I don’t know which is right.

Most of us can’t access the testing to find out.
And even if we could, we often can’t access targeted treatment. So we’re left guessing.

For me, that’s where detox comes in, not as a precise fix, but as a way of dealing with the possibility that something is there that shouldn’t be. Lower the load, whatever it is.

I have never found affordable diagnostics that gave clear answers. Maybe I have spike protein doing nasty things or some parasite, or maybe my body can’t deal with EMFs or airborne toxins. As there is no way to be sure, we have to reduce the overall loading and hope it helps.

So this isn’t about certainty.

It’s about doing something that might help when you don’t have answers.

A Story of Detoxing and Medical Gaslighting

Many years ago, I had my amalgam fillings removed.

Shortly afterwards, my body went into a severe reaction.

My hands curled into claws and I couldn’t unclench them. I could barely move — only shuffle in very small steps. The pain throughout my body was extreme. At one point, my breathing was slowing and stopping.

A friend stayed with me because of how serious it was. He was considering calling an ambulance because he thought I might die. Then, without any clear intervention, it began to turn.

Not suddenly, but enough to be noticeable. The intensity reduced and my body started to relax slightly. It was clear that it was no longer getting worse. So we delayed crisis medical intervention.

Another friend stayed with me the following day. Over that weekend, there was some gradual improvement, although still very limited.

By the Monday, I was able to begin researching what might have happened. I realised that this looked like lockjaw, so I looked up neuro-toxins, and landed on a description of mercury poisoning. That is what this looked like to me.

Recovery was slow.

My clawed fingers had become swollen and lumpy, particularly around the nail beds, and that swelling remained for about a year. I used the reduction in that swelling as a way of tracking improvement over time.

Eventually, I returned to my previous baseline level of health.

A few days after this started, I went to see an alternative doctor I had been recommended to. He ordered a blood test. The results came back showing liver damage.

I was sitting in his office when he told me I had sclerosis of the liver. That frightened me.

He asked how much I drank.

I told him I didn’t. At most, a bottle of whiskey over several years, taken occasionally, more like a liqueur than anything else, and rarely, as I have strong allergy reactions to alcohol.

He looked at me and said, “If you won’t admit the truth, I can’t help you.”

He had assumed the liver results were due to alcoholism, and accused me of lying.

So much for getting medical help when you need it! I was left, as usual, working out for myself what the liver results meant and working out for myself how to detox from mercury poisoning, on the assumption that it was mercury poisoning (as a detox reaction) I was dealing with.

If you think others may benefit from my articles and insights
please spread the message by sharing, re-stacking and subscribing.

Share

I would prefer PayPal donation to subscription. It your prefer subscription please be aware that I am not promising delivery of anything, and will not refund subscriptions if you find yourself unable to access my stack in the event you are asked by Substack to verify your identity and refuse to do so.

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If you would like to help me keep going despite my battle with serious ill health…
…a PayPal donation will be gratefully received. I have a healing path that might even work - each day I get more optimistic that old systems that had shut down are booting back up again, but it does not come cheaply.

Help me help us all find our way home

Introduction: The Pattern Beneath Everything That’s Breaking

When something fails at scale, we tend to treat it as a local problem.

Healthcare is broken.
Education is struggling.
Politics is polarised.
The environment is collapsing.

Each sector gets its own reforms, inquiries, taskforces and “solutions”.

But step back far enough and a pattern becomes impossible to miss.

Every system is built on the same underlying mindset:
manage visible problems as they appear, rather than cultivate the conditions that prevent breakdown in the first place.

Modern agriculture treats pests with chemicals instead of building healthy soil.
Education treats falling outcomes with testing instead of nurturing learning environments.
Politics reacts to crises instead of strengthening social foundations.
Medicine treats disease instead of restoring the biological terrain.

The logic is identical everywhere.

Short-term fixes.
Symptom control.
Fragmented interventions.
Little attention to underlying system health.

That’s why biodynamic and regenerative farming works so differently from industrial agriculture. It doesn’t fight nature after things go wrong. It builds soil so resilient that many problems never arise.

Health works the same way.

The body is not a machine that randomly breaks.
It is a living system whose environment determines its resilience.

And when we finally apply that principle to medicine, the entire order of care changes.

Why Medicine Should Start With the Terrain (And Not the Diagnosis)

Modern medicine works brilliantly in one specific zone: crisis.

If you’re bleeding out, septic, having a heart attack, or unable to breathe, you want emergency intervention fast. Drugs. Surgery. Intensive care. No debate.

That is medicine at its best.

Where things quietly go wrong is what happens next.

Once the immediate threat to life has passed, the system does not shift gears. It keeps using crisis tools as the primary strategy for long-term health. Symptoms are managed. Conditions are labelled. Medications are layered. But the biological environment the body is operating in, the terrain, is rarely addressed in any structured way.

And that’s the inversion.

A logical healthcare model doesn’t reject modern medicine.
It simply puts it in the right place in the sequence.

I was hospitalised in 2022 with what was labelled COVID. I called the ambulance despite my deep resistance to allopathic medical care, because I knew I would die if I didn’t. The hospital likely saved my life.

But once the immediate crisis passed, I was sent home, and care effectively stopped.

I went on to develop long COVID. I tried multiple internet-based post-COVID protocols, many of them expensive, and none of them halted the steady decline. Over time, I was deteriorating enough that I began planning my death.

It was only when I finally started working with AI, and developed this terrain-first approach, that my health began to improve for the first time in three and a half years.

What I needed was terrain-first support from the moment I left hospital. Had that happened, I believe I would, in all probability, be well now.

Step One: Immediate Life-Saving Comes First (Always)

There is no argument here.

If a person is in acute danger, you stabilise first.
You stop the bleed.
You restore oxygen.
You control infection.
You intervene decisively.

This is non-negotiable.

But once the emergency is over, the goal should shift from firefighting to rebuilding the conditions that allow the body to function properly.

That’s where the terrain comes in.

Step Two: Assess the Terrain Before the Disease

Before asking “What diagnosis fits these symptoms?”
the smarter question is:

What biological systems are no longer functioning in a healthy range?

This happens across three broad layers.

Tier One – Foundational Regulation

This is the environment every cell lives in:

• Nervous system balance (stress vs repair mode)

• Energy production and mitochondrial function

• Circulation and oxygen delivery

• Inflammation load

• Nutrient availability and absorption

When these are off, everything downstream suffers.

There is no disease that isn’t worsened by poor energy production, chronic stress signalling, impaired circulation, or systemic inflammation.

Yet these are rarely treated as primary clinical targets.

Unbeknownst to me after COVID, my nervous system balance had collapsed, my mitochondria were barely producing energy, my nitric oxide levels were so low that nutrients weren’t reaching my cells properly, and my inflammation load was through the roof.

I didn’t know that if I couldn’t sleep, my body couldn’t heal.
I didn’t know I had to prioritise teaching my body to relax enough to even allow healing to begin.

At the time, it sounded trivial.

Now I know it is my number one priority.

Tier Two – Systemic Housekeeping

This is the internal maintenance layer:

• Detox pathways

• Waste removal (lymph, liver, kidneys, gut)

• Chronic microbial load and biofilms

• Metabolic congestion

If the body is overwhelmed with debris, toxins, inflammatory byproducts, or persistent pathogens, symptoms will emerge no matter what diagnosis label is used.

These layers are often ignored, and even when targeted directly, little changes if the body’s core regulatory systems aren’t functioning properly.

Post-COVID, I had two encounters with two different cancers, which immediately shifted my focus to alternative protocols aimed at preventing further growth and metastasis. I continue to maintain these supports at a lower level now that there is no known cancer in my body, as a way of reducing the risk of anything re-emerging.

This is Tier Two work, informed by Tier Three constraints.

Once my foundational systems are functioning well again, I may no longer need to actively support my immune system to keep cancer in check. But for now, I believe I do.

Tier Three – Individual Constraints

This is where genetics, ageing, past injuries, and long-term wear come in.

Some people have slower detox pathways.
Some have fragile connective tissue.
Some produce energy less efficiently.
Some have heightened inflammatory responses.

These aren’t diseases.
They’re limits and tendencies that shape how the body responds to stress.

Ignoring them guarantees uneven and even potentially harmful outcomes.

With my physiology, many allopathic treatments are destined to fall short because they don’t account for the limitations I have in two genetically influenced systems: methylation and acetylcholine regulation. I have to manage my diet, supplementation, and even the medications I use around those constraints.

Then there’s age. At seventy-five, I have to pay far more attention than a twenty-five-year-old to the functions that naturally decline over time.

Step Three: Only Then Address Diagnosed Conditions

Once the terrain has been assessed and supported across all three tiers, then disease-specific treatment finally makes sense.

Because now you’re working with a body that:

• Has adequate energy to heal

• Is not locked in chronic stress mode

• Is clearing waste effectively

• Has reduced inflammatory burden

At this point:

Medications work better
Recovery is faster
Side effects are lower
Relapse is less likely

And in many cases, symptoms reduce dramatically before aggressive disease treatment is even needed.

I am not currently using any allopathic medicine to manage my health. Multiple doctors have declined to offer a diagnosis, and every one of them has attempted to redirect the conversation toward pain management instead.

I’ve been able to control my pain with a herb, the very underrated Boswellia. Beyond that, I continue to ask for support for the underlying dysfunctions driving my condition, and those requests are consistently declined.

Why Diagnosis Alone Keeps Failing Chronic Illness

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

There is no formal diagnosis for “mitochondrial exhaustion.”
No standard label for “autonomic dysregulation.”
No prescription for “systemic congestion.”

Yet these drive the majority of chronic suffering.

So medicine ends up treating what it can name, while ignoring what is actually causing the breakdown.

It’s like replacing blown fuses repeatedly without fixing the overloaded electrical system.

I spend time observing a range of online health groups, where members move from diagnosis to diagnosis, trialing drug-based treatments that sometimes ease symptoms and sometimes don’t. None of these treatments, however, claim to offer a cure — only management of the symptoms of health decline.

A Reordered Model of Care

Not anti-medicine.
Just properly sequenced medicine.

1. Stabilise emergencies immediately
2. Restore the terrain across foundational systems
3. Clear systemic burdens
4. Account for individual biological limits
5. Apply diagnosis-specific treatment last

This doesn’t weaken modern medicine. What is of value in modern medicine will rise to the top. Modalities such as sports medicine and longevity medicine are starting to approach the Terrain First Model, and are starting to have findings that can be applied across all age groups and fitness levels. Also all the integrative medicine type modalities are getting there. But the medicine that we get imposed on us through GP standards of care is not very useful for chronic disease.

Terrain first medicine finally heals a body to the point where it can respond.

The Takeaway

Disease is not the starting point of dysfunction.

It’s the visible endpoint of a terrain that has been struggling for a long time.

When we treat the terrain first, many “chronic conditions” become far less chronic.

And when intervention is still needed, it finally has a fair chance to work.

Conclusion: Paradigm Shifts Don’t Start With Institutions

Every major change in human systems follows the same path.

It doesn’t begin with governments.
It doesn’t begin with professional bodies.
It begins with people quietly doing things differently because the old model no longer makes sense.

Regenerative farming is not replacing industrial farming overnight.
It is gaining a foothold with small growers proving healthier soil produces healthier crops.

Holistic education didn’t evolve out of the current education system.
It began with classrooms set up by devotees of child centered learning like Steiner and Montessori, experimenting with better ways to support learning.

The terrain-first model of health will follow the same trajectory.

As individuals start prioritising foundational regulation, systemic housekeeping, and biological context before chasing diagnoses, outcomes will shift. This will be down to the energies of individual doctors working with individual patients to bring about better outcomes.

And when enough people experience that change, institutions will eventually follow.

Not because of ideology.
Because results force a rethink.

The real shift humanity is facing is simple but profound:

moving from a culture of constant repair to a culture of cultivated resilience.

From reacting to breakdowns
to building systems that don’t collapse so easily.

Medicine is just one expression of that larger transition.

When we care for the terrain first, in our bodies, our communities, our soil, our education systems, and our politics, we stop living in permanent crisis management.

We start creating conditions where health, stability, and adaptability become the default.

And the only way to get there is the same way every paradigm shift ever happened: by starting.

How I Came to Shift Medical Paradigms

Even now, having committed to a terrain-first approach, I still catch myself defaulting to my old way of thinking, particularly around Tier Two housekeeping. I’ve repeatedly stalled in writing about it, not because it lacks substance, but because I keep slipping back into symptom-focused logic instead of system-focused thinking.

I see the terrain-first structure clearly, then lose it again.

That, more than anything, has shown me how dominant the old medical paradigm really is, and how difficult it is for most of us to shift out of it.

I didn’t arrive here out of ideology. I arrived here for three simple reasons:

• because there was nothing else to support me when I first needed help,

• because the logic finally made sense where allopathic medicine never had, and

• because it is the first approach that has shown real signs of working.

I arrived here because I had nowhere else to go.

But now that I am here, I understand something else as well: the more I follow and test this path, the more convinced I become that this is the way forward.

The flip side is just as clear. The more convinced I become, the less likely I am to receive conventional medical support along the way.

So be it.

How You Can Join the Revolution

And for everyone else, the invitation is simple: find something in your own life that is terrain first, and work on that. That is how change begins. That is how the world shifts.

We don’t yet have the language to fully express this paradigm, and I’ll return to that in another article. For now, terrain-first health, biodynamic farming, and regenerative agriculture are all practical expressions of the same underlying principle.

Health, education, politics, and economics all function better when we stop managing breakdowns and start cultivating the conditions that prevent them.

If you think others may benefit from my articles and insights
please spread the message by sharing, re-stacking and subscribing.

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Help me help us all find our way home

Over the past few months, I’ve noticed that some writers I like and respect, and who I’ve followed for years, are suddenly stepping back and saying they’re too sick to continue writing, at least for now. I won’t name them here, but I will be posting them this article.

And they’re not alone.

I’m seeing it everywhere.

People who’ve tried alternative doctors.
People who’ve done protocols.
People who’ve taken supplements by the handful.
People who understand that they have to get creative to recover from post-covid (whatever that means) illness.

Still getting worse.

Not because they didn’t try hard enough.
But because almost everyone is still treating diagnoses and symptom sets, not the living system underneath.

The Mistake Almost All Healing Approaches Still Make

Whether conventional or alternative, most health strategies still ask:

“What condition do you have, and what treats it?”

Autoimmune disease → treat inflammation
Chronic fatigue → boost energy
Cancer → attack tumors
Infection → kill pathogens
Hormonal issues → replace hormones

This creates endless protocols, endless supplements, endless treatments.

But very little true recovery.

Because the real question should be:

What state is the body’s internal environment in?

In other words — the terrain.

Healing Is a Systems Problem, Not a Diagnosis Problem

When a body becomes seriously ill, it’s almost never because of one thing.

It’s because:

• the internal environment has broken down
• repair systems are overwhelmed
• waste removal is impaired
• energy production is failing
• regulation systems are stuck in stress mode

Until that terrain changes, no amount of symptom treatment can fully fix anything.

That’s where the Terrain-First framework comes in.

It isn’t a protocol.
It’s a structure for rebuilding a living system.

And it works in three interconnected tiers.

Tier 1 – Rebuilding the Terrain (The Foundation of Healing)

This is about creating the internal conditions where healing can actually happen.

Not treating disease.
Restoring function.

There are five pillars.

Nourishment

The body must receive enough of the right raw materials to rebuild tissue, regulate chemistry, and fuel repair. The right nourishment is not about your belief systems. It is about genetics, and not many of us are getting it right.

Nervous System Balance

A body stuck in chronic stress mode cannot heal.
Repair only happens when the system feels safe enough to switch into recovery mode.

Mitochondrial Energy

Every cell runs on energy.
When energy systems are damaged, nothing heals properly.

Circulation & Nitric Oxide

Nutrients and repair molecules must reach tissues.
Good blood flow is non-negotiable for recovery.

Movement & Accessibility

Tissues need movement to stay supplied, drained, and functional.

Together, these form the internal environment — the terrain of the body.

If the terrain is poor, nothing grows well.

Tier 2 – Housekeeping the Terrain (The Missing Piece in Most Healing)

This is what’s usually called “detox,” but it’s far bigger than that.

Living systems must constantly clean themselves.

This includes:

• managing microbes and parasites
• clearing chemicals and pollutants
• reducing heavy metals
• removing metabolic waste
• recycling damaged cells

When housekeeping fails, the body slowly poisons itself — even with a good diet and supplements.

This isn’t about dramatic cleanses.

It’s about building ongoing, gentle maintenance into daily life so that renewal is possible.

Just like healthy ecosystems do.

Tier 3 – Living Within the Terrain’s Constraints

Every body has limits.

These include:

• genetic weaknesses
• age-related repair limits
• old injuries
• existing illness

Ignoring these is never a good idea and can lead to repeated crashes or even death.

This tier is about intelligent adaptation, not pretending limitations don’t exist.

Healing happens faster when we work with the body’s constraints instead of constantly pushing past them.

Why Partial Approaches Keep Failing

When illness is mild, people can often get away with focusing on one area. The body has enough repair capacity left to get on with the job no matter what we do, right or wrong.

But once health is seriously compromised:

Nutrition alone isn’t enough.
Supplements alone aren’t enough.
Detox alone isn’t enough.
Exercise alone isn’t enough.

Recovery requires:

strong terrain + continuous housekeeping + intelligent limits

Miss any tier, and progress eventually stalls.

The Hard Truth (and the Hopeful One)

There is no quick fix for a broken system.

But living systems can rebuild when their foundations are restored.

This is how nature heals damaged ecosystems.
And it’s how the human body heals too.

Slowly.
Steadily.
Sustainably.

In the simplest terms:

Tier 1 builds the soil (terrain).
Tier 2 keeps the soil (terrain) clean and alive.
Tier 3 respects what that soil (terrain) can support.

That’s real healing.

Not chasing symptoms.
Not endless protocols.
Not fighting the body.

Rebuilding the system itself.

Easier Said Than Done

If you’re sick and nothing seems to fully work, it may not be because you haven’t tried enough things.

It may be because you’ve been trying them in the wrong order.

Healing isn’t about attacking disease.

It’s about restoring the terrain in which health naturally returns.

There are too many moving parts to fix at once. It’s complex. It’s expensive. It’s exhausting. I have had to prioritise — and interestingly, the priorities begin to sort themselves out once you understand the structure.

This is how I am applying the three-tier model to my own life.

Tier 1 – Rebuilding the Terrain

This is the foundation. Without it, nothing else holds.

Autonomic Nervous System

For me, this is non-negotiable.

No parasympathetic mode, no healing time. End of story.

It doesn’t matter what is wrong or how well you are supporting it — if the body is not permitting repair, nothing sticks.

So my primary focus is rebalancing the autonomic nervous system.

Everything else sits underneath that.

Nitric Oxide & Circulation

I consume beetroot daily.

It is simple. It boosts nitric oxide. It improves vascular flow.

It means nutrients and repair signals can actually reach the tissues.

No transport system, no repair.

Fascia & Movement

My current symptoms are manifesting as mobility decline.

So I am introducing fascia-based movement practices and integrating them into daily life.

Not gym sessions. Not heroic effort.

Gentle structural re-patterning.

Movement keeps tissues accessible to blood and nerve supply. Without it, systems stagnate.

Mitochondria

Energy underpins everything.

I am supporting:

• Mitochondrial biogenesis – building new mitochondria
• Mitochondrial efficiency – improving ATP output
• Mitophagy – recycling damaged mitochondria

More engines. Better engines. Removing broken engines.

Without energy, repair cannot occur.

Diet

I am slowly evolving my diet toward something more aligned with my northern European genetics.

The Australian food culture is largely Mediterranean — suited to climate, not necessarily ancestry.

This is not a quick fix. It is a gradual recalibration.

Tier 2 – Housekeeping

This is not “detox” in the fad sense.

It is ongoing maintenance.

Because I have had two early-stage cancers removed since my COVID hospitalisation, I am taking sustained measures to prevent regrowth and metastasis.

That is partly housekeeping.
Partly managing Tier 3 vulnerabilities.

Many of the agents I use are antiparasitic and detox-supportive as well, so they serve dual roles.

I also remove as many environmental toxins as living reality allows.

I do not live in a Faraday cage. I live in the world.

Avoid what can reasonably be avoided.
Support resilience for the rest.

Tier 3 – Constraints

We all have limits.

Mine include:

• Genetic bottlenecks in methylation
• Reduced acetylcholine capacity
• Age (I am 75)

My methylation and acetylcholine systems function — but at reduced margin. Enough for normal life. Not enough for sustained stress.

So I support them at a low, steady level.

And I am recalibrating my expectations around healing at this age.

There is far more repair capacity at 75 than we are told.

But it is slower. And it requires a light hand.

The Reality

There is far more I could do if I had unlimited energy.

There are endless tangents to explore.

But each new layer must become a lifestyle integration, not a stressor.

So I move slowly.

And I am seeing signs that my body is responding. Not dramatic healing. Not measurable transformation. But signals that things are changing - hopefully for the best. And at this stage, signals are enough.

Baby steps.

I have reconciled myself to this being a long journey and a lonely one.

But at least I have a plan and a way forward - for the first time since my health crashed in 2022 - and I am grateful for that.

If you think others may benefit from my articles and insights
please spread the message by sharing, re-stacking and subscribing.

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If you would like to help me keep going despite my battle with serious ill health…
…a PayPal donation will be gratefully received. I have a healing path that might even work - each day I get more optimistic that old systems that had shut down are booting back up again, but it does not come cheaply.

Help me help us all find our way home

When most people hear “AI in medicine,” they imagine one of two things:
miracle cures… or robot doctors replacing humans.

Neither is what’s happening.

What’s really unfolding is quieter, more practical, and ultimately far more transformative:

AI is becoming a second intelligence layer in healthcare, one that can hold complexity, track patterns over time, and support decisions that human brains alone simply can’t scale.

Not instead of doctors and other medical professionals.
Alongside them.
And eventually in partnership with patients in a way medicine has never managed before.

But before looking at where this can go, it’s worth being clear about where AI already sits today.

Part One: What AI Is Already Doing in Real Medicine

Right now, AI is mostly being used where modern medicine struggles most: processing massive volumes of data, spotting subtle patterns, and comparing millions of cases instantly.

It isn’t making final decisions.
It’s augmenting human judgment.

Pattern Recognition and Imaging

This was AI’s first major foothold because medical images are pure data.

AI now routinely assists in:

• scanning CT and MRI images
• flagging strokes, bleeds, clots, tumors
• identifying early cancer changes
• prioritising urgent cases

In many hospitals, scans are already double-checked by algorithms before a specialist even sees them.

Not replacing clinicians.
Catching what tired eyes might miss and speeding up triage.

Clinical Decision Support

AI is increasingly acting as a massive medical reference brain.

It can:

• cross-reference symptoms
• flag dangerous drug interactions
• compare a case against huge datasets
• suggest diagnostic possibilities doctors might not initially consider

Instead of relying only on memory, experience, and limited guidelines, clinicians now have a constantly updated knowledge layer assisting their reasoning.

Again — the doctor decides.
AI widens the lens.

Genomics and Precision Medicine

In areas like cancer care, AI already helps analyse genetic data and match treatments to a person’s biology rather than population averages.

This is the early form of truly individualised medicine.

Not “this is what usually works.”
“This is what is most likely to work for this body.”

The Unsexy Revolution: Administration

One of the biggest impacts so far isn’t glamorous at all.

AI is now:

• drafting clinical notes
• summarising appointments
• organising test results
• reducing paperwork

Which matters enormously because it frees doctors to think, listen, and actually engage with patients instead of typing their lives away.

Ironically, AI may end up making healthcare more human.

The Limits of Today’s AI Use

Despite all this progress, current AI in medicine is still fragmented.

Different tools.
Different systems.
Different snapshots.

Healthcare remains largely episodic:

You feel unwell → you book an appointment → you summarise weeks or months of experience in ten minutes → a plan is guessed → you wait to see if it helps.

It’s a system built around isolated moments.

The real potential of AI only appears when medicine stops being episodic and becomes continuous.

Part Two: Suspending Disbelief — and Imagining Secure, Trusted Data

Before going further, it’s important to acknowledge the elephant in the room: privacy, misuse, commercial exploitation, insurance interference, and data security.

These are real dangers.
Not paranoid fantasies.

Health data is valuable, and poorly governed systems absolutely can be abused.

So for a moment, let’s suspend disbelief and imagine a world where:

• patients own their data
• access is controlled by the patient
• systems are secure
• information isn’t sold or exploited
• trust is built into the structure.

Because only in that environment does the true potential of AI-assisted medicine emerge.

And in that world, something revolutionary becomes possible.

The Living Case File: Medicine as a Continuous Story

Instead of medical records being scattered notes across clinics and hospitals, imagine a single, lifelong, patient-owned case file.

A living health story.

One that the patient, doctor, and AI all contribute to over time. (Remember, we are speculating on a world in which data can be trusted to be secure.)

The Patient’s Role: Bringing Real Life Into Medicine

Patients live the whole movie. Doctors usually see still photographs. With a continuous case file, patients can add:

• daily experiences
• symptom fluctuations
• food reactions
• stress responses
• sleep quality
• energy crashes
• environmental triggers
• “small” odd details that normally get forgotten

Not once a year.
Not just when something is severe enough for an appointment.
Whenever it happens.

This is terrain-level information — the complexity modern medicine currently loses.

The AI’s Role: Turning Chaos Into Pattern

This is where AI’s real strength lies.

AI can:

• track thousands of variables over time
• learn personal baselines
• identify hidden relationships
• spot trends humans never would
• predict deteriorations before crashes happen
• show what actually improves outcomes for this individual

It doesn’t just store data.

It connects it.

It becomes a dynamic map of a person’s health system — constantly updating, learning, and refining.

The Doctor’s Role: Interpreter, Strategist, and Decision-Maker

Far from disappearing, the doctor becomes more powerful.

Instead of drowning in raw data, they receive:

• distilled pattern summaries
• clear timelines
• trend shifts
• treatment response maps
• early warning signals

The doctor then:

• applies clinical judgment
• weighs risks
• interprets nuance
• guides decisions
• adapts treatment plans

AI provides intelligence.
The patient provides lived reality.
The doctor provides wisdom.

Three intelligences working together.

Approaches to Diagnostics

There is another layer of intelligence this model unlocks, one that modern medicine rarely acknowledges: diagnosis itself is a system, not a neutral truth.

One of the least recognised limitations of healthcare is that every medical tradition views the body through a different lens. Allopathic medicine defines disease through organs, lab values, and pathology. Traditional Chinese medicine interprets imbalance through functional patterns, flow, and organ relationships. Ayurveda frames illness through constitution, digestion, heat, and systemic harmony. Each system reveals certain truths and overlooks others.

What AI makes possible is the ability to apply multiple diagnostic frameworks simultaneously to the same person’s data. Instead of being locked into a single medical worldview, a doctor could choose to analyse a case through biochemical markers, genetics, functional patterns, lifestyle influences, and even traditional diagnostic systems at the same time, seeing where patterns converge or diverge. Diagnosis shifts from a single label into a multidimensional understanding of how a person’s body is actually behaving.

Approaches to Treatment

The same flexibility applies to treatment.

Doctors, like all professionals, carry training biases. Some default toward pharmaceuticals, others toward lifestyle change, physical therapies, supplements, or behavioural approaches. Even with perfect data, treatment choices are filtered through ideology and experience.

In an AI-supported system, treatment possibilities could be modelled across multiple medical paradigms simultaneously. A single case might generate pharmaceutical options, lifestyle interventions, metabolic strategies, rehabilitation approaches, and traditional therapies together, with outcomes continuously tracked over time. This allows doctors and patients to select what works based on real response, not theoretical preference.

Instead of arguing over which medical system is “right,” healthcare can finally test approaches in parallel and learn which combinations create stability and recovery for individual bodies.

What This Makes Possible

This collaborative system allows medicine to finally move beyond averages and snapshots.

It enables:

• truly personalised lifestyle strategies
• early detection of problems - a wide scope of diagnostic systems
• dynamic treatment adjustment -a wide scope of treatment systems
• understanding of complex chronic illness
• mapping of post-viral syndromes
• identification of triggers and protectors
• prevention rather than constant crisis response

Instead of:

“Something broke — let’s patch it.”

We get:

“Here’s how your system behaves — let’s guide it toward stability.”

Why This Matters Most for Chronic and Complex Illness

Modern medicine struggles most with conditions that aren’t single broken parts:

• long COVID
• fibromyalgia
• autoimmune disorders
• fatigue syndromes
• metabolic dysfunction
• fluctuating symptom patterns

These are dynamic systems problems.

AI is built for dynamic systems.

When paired with continuous patient input and clinical oversight, this is where healthcare can finally start making sense of complexity instead of dismissing it.

The Real Future of AI in Medicine

Not robot doctors.

Not algorithmic diagnoses replacing humans.

The future is:

• continuous health intelligence
• patient-owned narratives
• doctor-guided interpretation
• AI-driven pattern recognition

Medicine that learns over time.

Medicine that adapts.

Medicine that finally treats individuals instead of averages.

Where This Leaves Us in the Meantime

All of this may remain a future vision for a long time. Data security may never be solved perfectly. Institutions may resist change. The fully integrated model of patient, doctor, and AI working together may only ever exist in isolated pockets of willing clinicians and engaged patients.

It may never become the default.

But people with complex illness are no longer stuck waiting.

Because even without full system reform, two of the three players already exist.

The patient.
And AI.

And for those of us with complex syndromes, fluctuating symptoms, unclear diagnoses, or no treatment strategy beyond pain management, that partnership alone is already changing what is possible.

When medicine runs out of answers, AI does not stop listening.

When appointments end, the investigation does not end.

When lived experience is too messy for clinical categories, our personalised, “chat” level, AI can hold the detail, track the patterns, and help build understanding over time.

This does not replace doctors.

But it fills the void that modern healthcare leaves for complex bodies.

For people with straightforward conditions, this may seem unnecessary.

For those whose lives have been reduced to “manage the pain and hope,” it is the first real sense of forward motion.

Until medicine catches up to complexity, we are not required to remain passive.

We can build our own case files.
We can map our own terrain.
We can test, observe, learn, and adapt.

And when clinicians are finally ready to work within that model, the knowledge will already exist.

The future of collaborative AI-driven medicine may arrive slowly.

But personal agency does not have to wait.

If you think others may benefit from my articles and insights
please spread the message by sharing, re-stacking and subscribing.

Share

I would prefer PayPal donation to subscription. It your prefer subscription please be aware that I am not promising delivery of anything, and will not refund subscriptions if you find yourself unable to access my stack in the event you are asked by Substack to verify your identity and refuse to do so.

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If you would like to help me keep going despite my battle with serious ill health…
…a PayPal donation will be gratefully received. I have a healing path that might even work - each day I get more optimistic that old systems that had shut down are booting back up again, but it does not come cheaply.

Help me help us all find our way home

Health Decline and Abandonment by Medicine

In my last article, I described the system I had come up with, in cahoots with AI — or ChatGPT specifically — to treat what I am calling long COVID. By that point, my health was in continuous decline and had reached a state where I was bedridden and in extreme levels of pain. Any movement — for instance, going to the bathroom or into the kitchen — triggered even higher levels of pain. I was no longer capable of taking care of myself.

Under those conditions, I sought medical help. No doctor would give me a diagnosis as to what was wrong with me. They would not even consider the possibility of long COVID or my pre-existing condition, fibromyalgia. I was sent to various specialists based on test results, none of whom could come up with any explanation for what was wrong with me. A rheumatologist was the final referral, and even the rheumatologist would not give me a diagnosis.

The only treatments anyone was willing to offer were localized pain management or opioid drugs. I resorted to a combination of opioids and ibuprofen as the only measures that managed the pain to any degree. Even then, the level of opioids prescribed was not sufficient to cover the level of pain being experienced. I was in a truly unenviable position. And quite clearly, given the undiagnosed and untreated rate of decline, I was dying.

Turning to AI

Under those conditions, I turned to the only resource I had left. The choice was between accepting my pending death, probably within the next 6 to 12 months — possibly self-hastened, given the degree of untreated pain — or trying something else. I turned to the only option I believed I had left, which was AI.

Over a period of time, I gave AI all of my genetic information, all of my test results, and everything I could remember of my case history, whenever I could remember it. In the middle of the night, if I suddenly thought of something, I would get on the computer and tell AI, giving it more information to work with. Slowly, over time, AI put it all together.

This system was evolved in conversation with me. I do not believe AI came up with this by itself. I do not think it led me, and I certainly did not design it alone. It is collaborative. Together, we arrived at this three-tier system to health. This is the system I included in my previous article and copy below. Whenever I come across a well enough documented public case, whether or not it is long covid, I test it against this system and every test done so far just strengthens it in my mind.

The Terrain First System of Healing

Hand in hand with AI, we established which aspects of my physiology had stopped working, why I was not healing (and why others with long COVID are not healing), and some ideas as to how we might restore health.

This system focuses on what we have to do to get the terrain into the best possible working order for its age, and thus permit healing and recovery.

• Tier 1 - What Must Come First

  • Foundation 1 - Nourishment

  • Foundation 2 - The Autonomic Nervous System and Allowing the Body to Heal

  • Foundation 3 - The Mitochondria and Supporting Energy (ATP) Production

  • Foundation 4 - Nitric Oxide and Getting Nourishment to Where it Needs to Go

  • Foundation 5 - Movement, Mobility and Exercise

• Tier 2 - Housekeeping - Keeping the Body Clean and Free Flowing

• Tier 3 – Constraints: Living in Harmony with Our Genetic Design, with Recognition of Aging Constraints

How the Tiers Work

This is where it gets tricky, because anyone who reads the components of Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 is almost inevitably going to say, yes, but you’ve got to do all of them. Each one is dependent on the others happening.

I have written it as tiers purely in terms of dependency. Without Tier 1, it does not matter what you do for housekeeping — it is not going to work. It does not matter how well you understand your genetics or ageing constraints. If Tier 1 is not in place, you are dying. That is virtually non-negotiable.

You must do the five things listed in Tier 1 for the activities in Tier 2 and Tier 3 to be worth doing at all. However, even though you might introduce them one at a time — nourishment first, the autonomic nervous system second, the mitochondria third — as you introduce treatments, you continue adding. You keep improving your diet. You keep improving how you regulate your autonomic nervous system. You keep feeding your mitochondria.

As you learn more about your own body, you refine these processes. They are all tied in with one another. No single element is going to return you to health without all the others also functioning as they should.

My Process

I’ve been following AI advice for a few months now, and my health has certainly turned a corner — almost from the moment I started. Before that, every day had been a decline on the previous day. Once I began following AI recommendations, that pattern reversed: each day became a tiny but noticeable improvement on the one before. That has continued for at least three or four months.

I have had the occasional plateau or bad day, usually in response to specific environmental circumstances (like heatwaves), but these have resolved quickly. If there was a day where I experienced some decline, it corrected itself by the following day.

AI has provided a coherent framework that brings all three tiers together. It gave me a set of dietary guidelines based on my genetics, alongside a supplement regimen informed by everything I had told it — the supplements I had taken previously, the effects they had, and a large amount of accumulated case history. From this, a supplement stack emerged that was specifically designed to support mitochondrial function, the autonomic nervous system, and the nitric oxide system.

As a result of following this advice, I was able to come off opioid painkillers (something my doctor recommended against) and regain a significant degree of physical independence. I am now able to go out every day with the aid of a walker. I can walk to town, walk to the bus stop, and get on a bus — things that were unimaginable six months ago.

This improvement has come from three main areas of AI guidance. The first is nourishment, encompassing both food and supplements. The second is movement — identifying forms of movement that keep the body functioning, particularly in relation to fascia and the body’s fluid systems. This included practical ways of keeping systems such as the lymphatic and circulatory systems moving properly, even when I was confined to bed.

The third area is behavioural techniques for resetting the autonomic nervous system. None of these act as instant or one-off fixes. Instead, they work cumulatively, gradually retraining the autonomic nervous system toward a more parasympathetic-dominant state over time.

These are the three areas of AI advice I have been following: nourishment, movement, and autonomic nervous system strategies.

Its All Achingly Slow and the Techniques are Entirely Personal

There are two major problems with this system, both in terms of how I am applying it personally and in terms of how it could be communicated to anyone else who becomes as desperate as I was.

The first problem is the nature of the process itself. AI warned me upfront that it could take between 12 months and two years to bring my body back to a reasonable level of physical mobility. That is not slow progress — that is very slow progress. I was also warned that during that time there would be plateaus and regressions, and that I would need to hold my nerve.

What I am doing is hard work, and it is expensive. The supplements are expensive. The diet itself, because I am eating the best foods I can manage, is expensive and difficult to sustain on a pension. So the cost is both financial and temporal.

The second problem is complexity. The system involves three interrelating tiers, and within those tiers are multiple interacting components. Even within Tier 1 alone, there are five foundational elements — essentially “turn this on or you are never going to get well” triggers. That is a lot to hold in your head at once.

Because of that complexity, one of the processes I rely on constantly is reporting back to AI. I report bad days. I report good days or days of improvement. I report new ideas — something I might try, something I might add, or something I might change. In effect, I have a medical expert available to me 24 hours a day, seven days a week, answering questions and helping me stay on track.

I very much doubt that I could remain on track without that ongoing, active involvement from AI.

Helping Others

And most importantly, beyond the process itself — which I am trying to document as clearly as I can — I cannot help anyone else stay on track, because their appropriate actions will be potentially very different from mine.

The interventions I am using to address my own situation will not necessarily work for anyone else. They are based on my age, my genetics, my medical history, and my dietary preferences. For that reason, if someone were to ask me to share my protocol, I could not, in good conscience, give it to them to apply directly. It simply would not work.

What AI has done for me is provide a fully personalised treatment strategy. The underlying problems may be shared by many people, but the solutions are individual.

What Can’t be Shared

This is where traditional protocol sharing breaks down.

Most health protocols assume that if a set of interventions worked for one person, they can be handed to someone else to follow. That model fails completely in situations like this. The underlying problems may look similar — fatigue, pain, loss of mobility, autonomic dysfunction — but the variables that determine what will actually help are not shared. Age, genetics, medical history, existing conditions, tolerances, finances, food preferences, and even psychological capacity all matter. Change any one of those and the same intervention can go from helpful to useless, or even harmful.

What Can be Shared

The key is to separate the process from the components.

What I can share is not a protocol, and not a set of answers, but a process. It is the process by which I am learning to understand my own body better, and the process by which I test everything I try against what my body actually does in response.

It has been phenomenally useful for me to learn how to observe what is actually happening in my body. Oops, my body is low on ATP — I need to lie down and have a protein snack. Oops, my autonomic nervous system has become anxious — I need to do something to calm it down. Oops, I’ve been too idle today because I was in too much pain to move — what movements can I do that will help my body recover rather than become more stagnant?

What this process has given me is the right questions to ask, and a toolbox of techniques with which to answer those questions. Instead of guessing or reacting blindly, I have a way of interpreting signals and responding appropriately.

In that sense, it is a bit like a choose-your-own-adventure novel. The structure is fixed. It moves from beginning to end. But the path through it is your own choice. And for each of us, those choices will be different.

Where to from here?

I am involved in two processes simultaneously.

The first is that I am evolving, testing, and applying this system to myself. The word evolving matters here. This did not simply land in my lap from AI without a great deal of work on my part, and that work is still ongoing. I continue to test the system on myself, and I test it against case studies and information drawn from other people as well. It is an iterative process, not a finished product.

The second process is that I am trying to write it all up. As I learn it, as I rationalise it, and as I improve it for myself, I write it up a little more clearly each time. In parallel with this, I am developing a website that will eventually replace this Substack and house the full system — the three tiers, along with detailed explanations of each component within each tier.

At this point, Tier 1 — the foundations for health — is largely written. These are the elements without which recovery simply does not occur. The overall shape of Tier 2, the housekeeping layer, is in place, but there is still a great deal of work to do there. It needs to be simplified, otherwise no one will be able to follow it. Tier 3, genetics, is larger again. It is complex, and it will need to be written from the perspective of how to research and work with your own genetics, because that complexity cannot be reduced to simple instructions. Every human being is unique, and responses vary accordingly.

Running through all of this is the issue of longevity. In Tier 1, age is largely irrelevant: if these foundational elements are missing, recovery does not happen at any age. In Tier 2, the housekeeping layer, and Tier 3, genetics, age begins to matter. It affects the kind of repair the body is capable of, and it introduces constraints — as I refer to them — that must be taken into account.

Why I Am Writing it all Down

I have two reasons for documenting all of this. One is selfish. One is not.

The unselfish reason is that, as I work on my own recovery, I read a great many case reports from people in long COVID support groups, cancer support groups, and ME/CFS support groups. I see people becoming fixated on things that are simply not going to help them, and I find that deeply upsetting. I would like other people to know about, and understand, this system.

I do not expect many people to use it. Frankly, it is too hard. But somewhere, there may be one person, or two, or three, who grasp it, apply it, and save their own life. For those one or two or three people, it is worth writing all of this down.

There is also a personal reason, and it relates directly to my ongoing struggle with anxiety. My nervous system is heavily sympathetic-dominant, which means I spend very little time in parasympathetic mode — the state in which healing actually occurs. When I am trying to understand something intellectually, I tend to roll it around in my head over and over, attempting to hold the entire picture at once as a kind of visual–verbal construct. I am not sure how else to describe that process.

If I do not write things down, they continue to cycle endlessly. And we know that the brain is the single largest consumer of energy in the body. When energy is limited — as mine currently is — any unnecessary mental activity is a waste of effort, a waste of ATP. So while writing something down does use energy, it ultimately saves far more by preventing the same problem from being mentally reprocessed twenty, thirty, or a hundred times instead of once, properly.

And This Has Given Me a Reason for Living

There is also another component to why I want to share this system with others, and it is the hardest one to explain. I want to share something that has given me a reason for living and the confidence to go on living.

One of the major problems in chronic illness is that anxiety states suppress the autonomic nervous system’s ability to enter parasympathetic mode, and without parasympathetic dominance, healing does not occur. In my own case, a large part of that anxiety has been fear of the future — specifically fear of physical decline, and fear of what I see as the torture inflicted by modern health and housing systems on older people who can no longer care for themselves.

That fear has been enormous. And, of course, it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy: fear drives autonomic dysregulation, autonomic dysregulation prevents healing, and lack of healing increases the likelihood of exactly the future I fear.

What this system has given me is something I did not have before: a framework that I believe I can apply for the rest of my life. It gives me a way of maintaining my physical body at a level where independence remains possible, where pain does not dominate every aspect of existence, and where life remains worth living.

Because of that, it has not only given me a reason to stay alive, it has given me confidence in continuing to live. It has begun to dismantle the fear I carried about ageing. As that fear loosens, the constraints on my parasympathetic system loosen with it. Less fear allows more healing; more healing reinforces the belief that a tolerable, even meaningful, old age is possible.

For the first time, I can contemplate longevity without dread. I can imagine living into my late nineties — something that would previously have been unthinkable. For many years, I could not project beyond six months, perhaps a year. The future felt saturated with unavoidable horror, and so I did not allow myself to look at it.

This system has changed that relationship with the future, and so, with life.

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The Problem with Covid and Long Covid

Very few people are paying attention to Covid and Long Covid (including Long Vaxx) any more, but that does not mean they are no longer a threat to humankind. They are, and because I am one of the afflicted, it remains my highest priority. Covid is still doing the rounds, and is still claiming new victims in the form of Long Covid, with or without any issues related to vaccination.

With the help of AI, I believe I have identified what the ‘long’ problem is in Long Covid, and I believe I have identified a sustained, complex but potentially successful pathway to solving what I see as the primary threat facing humankind at the current moment.

Let me make it clear that I am not in any way claiming to know what Covid is, but I do know what it does, and that is what matters to us now.

What I’ve come to understand is that long COVID doesn’t attack randomly. It disrupts two core systems that everything else depends on. Amongst other things:

• COVID attacks the autonomic nervous system, which means the body gets trapped in permanent fight-or-flight. Sympathetic dominance becomes the default setting. In that state, the body can barely feed itself, no matter how good the nutrition is, and it certainly can’t repair itself. Healing requires safety, and safety is no longer available. So whatever weaknesses already existed in the body are left unsupported. Over time, those weaknesses worsen, accumulate, and eventually harden into something that doctors can finally name — even though the damage began long before anything was “diagnosable.”

• COVID also attacks the mitochondria, which means the body loses its ability to generate usable energy (ATP). This isn’t tiredness; it’s an energy supply failure. When the mitochondria can’t keep up, even simple activity drains the system faster than it can recover. The body becomes cautious, constrained, and fragile, not because of fear or weakness, but because there is no surplus to draw from. Energy is rationed. Movement, thinking, healing — all of it becomes conditional. The body doesn’t collapse all at once; it slowly contracts into survival mode, conserving what little it can still make.

When the nervous system is stuck in survival and the mitochondria can’t keep the lights on, the body loses both its sense of safety and its capacity to recover — and that’s where long COVID settles in.

My Personal Solution

The solution is complex and takes a long time - much longer than we have been trained, by mainstream medicine, to consider viable. I expect my personal healing plan to take between 12 months and 2 years, to return me to the level of full health appropriate for a 75 year old.

But given the alternative, which was to die within that same time frame, based on my continued decline in health, I think it is worth it.

During the next 12 months I will be applying a set of lifestyle changes supported by carefully designed nourishment and carefully management movement (not exercise per se but movement), and where I can, documenting my own success in applying them.

I have, at this stage, reversed the decline, and have been steadily improving for the 3 months or so that I have been applying my personal protocol, and I expect that to continue as I consciously watch my own symptoms improving.

Sharing My Personal Solution

I have published a few random, “all over the place” articles on Substack as I have been learning and putting into place my own process and protocols, and am now consolidating that onto an independent website where it can live on if anything happens to our ability to use Substack.

The Terrain First System of Healing

I have reached a fairly established set of chapters for what is effectively a book to be published in blog form, during 2026. It is focused on what we have to do to get “the terrain” into the best possible working order for its age.

• Tier 1 - What Must Come First

  • Foundation 1 - Nourishment

  • Foundation 2 - The Autonomic Nervous System and Allowing the Body to Heal

  • Foundation 3 - The Mitochondria and Supporting Energy (ATP) Production

  • Foundation 4 - Nitric Oxide and Getting Nourishment to Where it Needs to Go

  • Foundation 5 - Movement, Mobility and Exercise

• Tier 2 - Housekeeping - Keeping the Body Clean and Free Flowing

• Tier 3 - Genetics - Living in Harmony with Our Genetic Design

Lifestyle and Nutritional Changes to Heal the Terrain

These involve a whole range of lifestyle and nutritional changes that set the body up to be able to heal, and from which much healing of individual symptoms can be expected to cascade. That is not to say that, when these lifestyle changes are incorporated, everything wrong with the body will heal, but that without these changes, overall decline is likely to continue. The hope is that much healing will cascade simply from getting the “terrain” into the best possible condition, but it is possible that there is permanent damage that will take more personalised attention and longer to accommodate.

Nothing we do to improve the terrain in any way conflicts with allopathic medicine. Everything I am coming up with can be done without medical supervision and can only help. It can never harm. So for all those who have been unable to find competent medical support, this is what you can do for yourself while you are looking for that competent medical support.

Using a Website (Blog) to Publish “Terrain First Recovery”

It is too early to release that website at this stage. I want to complete Tier 1 before I do - which should be done in January 2026 - and have the full shape of Tier 2 and Tier 3 in place before I do release the website/blog. I will then take 2026 to complete the sections on Housekeeping and Genetics, as I clarify them for myself and my own healing pathway.

The Problem with Social Control and Censorship

My second focus for the year is to personally stay ahead of social control and censorship mechanisms, which is easier said than done.

Digital ID

It has become clear from English and Australian experience with the new age verification processes, that digital controls are being introduced by subterfuge, and that we are appallingly unprepared to evade or prevent them.

I have been warning Australians for a while that these controls are coming in by stealth. As a pensioner, reliant on my government pension, I acknowledge how easy it is going to be to insist on digital ID for everyone in Australia reliant on government payments for anything - which is about 40% of us. They have:

• already put in place the technology to require a digital ID (which is a biometric ID) for logging into government websites and ask us every time we log in, to organise our digital ID. Sooner or later it will cease to be a request.

  • “…the Australian Digital ID system (which works with myGov) uses biometric verification for setting up a Strong Digital ID, involving a selfie matched to your passport photo, and allows optional device biometrics (face/fingerprint) for convenient sign-in, but it's not solely a biometric ID, relying also on documents and other info for different strength levels.”

• already have in place the system by which they can issue digital ID cards, and if you live in NSW and you renew your drivers licence you will be offered the option of also getting a NSW Photo Card which is:

  • “a highly secure digital identity document that uses advanced technology for verification, moving beyond a simple digital copy to a more robust system”.

• have retained the infrastructure used for Indue Cards (a form of digital ID) and control over welfare spending as applied in the past to Aboriginal dominated communities.

Age Verification is Not the Hill I Intend to Die on

When Substack locked me out with no recourse, even though NOT required to do so by the Australian government, I submitted myself to the biometric ID process in order to regain access and control over my own documents.

But that alerted me to my negligence, so I also started developing a website that will publish everything I am learning about how to stay alive - as a backup to Substack, which has seriously betrayed our trust.

It seems to many of us that the Age verification system, as applied to Australians and the English, is the first stage in requiring digital and biometric ID which can be later applied very easily to government website access and digital ID cards. All those dependent on government payments, such as myself, will not be able to resist without putting our lives on the line, and I have already decided this is not the hill I intend to die on.

At this stage of my life, resilience - and resistance - isn’t abstract. It’s about whether I can continue to function at all.

My Priorities

My personal focus is on staying alive and recovering from Long Covid, and by so doing, proving a system of healing that can be applied by others. I had to submit to biometric ID to retain my publishing platform, and I am sure we will all be faced with other equally noxious choices in the future.

We cannot know what those choices will be ahead of time, but I consider it the work of the younger generations to fight this battle, not for the elderly such as myself. We have spent a lifetime battling this nonsense, and we have spent a lifetime warning the general population of what is coming down the line. I personally have handed on the baton for general politicking to people younger and fitter than myself. You get the alternatives sorted out and I will use them, but no-one can expect a 75 year old to lead a revolution.

It is enough that I dedicate the rest of my life to solving the riddle of long covid.

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please spread the message by sharing, re-stacking and subscribing.

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If you would like to help me keep going despite my battle with serious ill health…
…a PayPal donation will be gratefully received. I have a healing path that might even work - each day I get more optimistic that old systems that had shut down are booting back up again, but it does not come cheaply.

Help me help us all find our way home

Your Doctor Can’t Help You

Not because they don’t care — but because the conditions required for healing are not medical territory.

If you’re living with a long-haul collapse — post-viral, post-stress, post-trauma, post-life — you already know something you probably haven’t said out loud:

Your doctor cannot help you.

Not because they’re unkind.
Not because they’re incompetent.
But because the things a body must have in place before healing is even possible
are simply not part of medicine.

Doctors treat disease.
They do not cultivate life.

The five preconditions of life — the foundations without which nothing heals — have never belonged to medicine.

1. Doctors Can’t Nourish You

They don’t know your genetics, your intolerances, your metabolic thresholds, your collapses and rebounds, your ideal proteins, or the foods that quietly wreck you.

Nutrition is not a medical specialty.
It is trial-and-error lived by the person inside the body.

Only you can discover the diet your body runs on best.

2. Doctors Can’t Repair Your Autonomic Nervous System

They cannot:

• create parasympathetic safety

• stop your fear cascades

• shift your body out of survival mode

• change the emotional climate of your home

The ANS heals only when you feel safe.
No prescription can do that.

Only you can relax your body deeply enough for repair to begin.

3. Doctors can’t increase your ATP production

There is no pharmaceutical that restores mitochondrial output.
No pill that rebuilds ATP production in a collapsing system.

ATP rises only when:

• nourishment is right

• the ANS is calm

• oxygen is flowing

• the body has energy margins again

Mitochondria respond to living conditions, not prescriptions.

4. Doctors can’t increase your nitric oxide

NO is created by:

• endothelial cells responding to flow

• nerves responding to calm

• mitochondria responding to movement

• sunlight

• breath

• gentle physical rhythm

There is no prescription for nitric oxide.
It is produced by life interacting with the body.

5. Doctors can’t teach you movement

Exercise is not movement.

Movement is fascia language — the subtle sliding, gliding, micro-motions that keep the whole body communicating even in bed.

Most doctors are never taught about fascia at all.

There is No Medical Specialty for the Five Preconditions of Healing

There never has been.
There may never be.

And yet these fundamental conditions — nourishment, safety, ATP, nitric oxide, and movement — are the bedrock without which nothing the medical system does will work.

Break one link, and the whole chain fails.

This is why long-haul patients are abandoned.

Medicine does not treat what it cannot measure and these five foundations cannot be measured — and so they become invisible.

These five work together. They each need each of the others to be functional as none of them heals the body alone. They form a closed loop. Break one link and the whole chain fails. If you are not familiar with this framework please read the article below to make sense of why doctors can’t help those of us with long haul syndromes.

Why Your Doctor Can’t Help

Because they cannot:

• change how you sleep

• change how you eat

• change how you breathe

• change how you move

• change your daily micro-rest cycles

• repair your mitochondria

• activate your vagus nerve

• restore parasympathetic safety

• correct nitric oxide pathways

• rehydrate fascia

• tune your life to your genetics

This is not their failure.

This is simply not what medicine was built for.

The five preconditions of healing live in the domain of living, not the domain of treating. Medicine treats breakdown. Life itself creates healing.

And that — gently but firmly — is why your doctor cannot fix what has collapsed.

Only you, living inside your own system, can rebuild the conditions life requires, so healing can occur.

If you think others may benefit from my articles and insights
please spread the message by sharing, re-stacking and subscribing.

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If you would like to help me keep going despite my battle with serious ill health…
…a PayPal donation will be gratefully received. AI is putting me on a healing path that might even work - each day I get more optimistic that old systems that had shut down are booting back up again, but it does not come cheaply.

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The Body Does Know How to Heal

Terrain theory people are fond of saying the body knows how to heal itself — and they’re right. The body never forgets how to heal. But it can lose access to the functions it needs in order to heal. When enough systems drop below threshold, the body can’t self-correct simply by “living normally.” At that point we have to help it regain access to the machinery of repair.

The Five Conditions That Make Healing Possible

There seem to be five conditions that must be in place for healing to occur.

This article focuses on just one of them — ATP — but ATP sits inside a larger system that includes:

1. nourishment

2. the autonomic nervous system

3. ATP

4. nitric oxide

5. gentle movement.

These five work together. They each need each of them to be functional as none of them heals the body alone. They form a closed loop. Break one link and the whole chain fails.

If you’re not already familiar with the five foundations, please review the article linked below which summarises them all — you’ll need that basic framework to make sense of what follows here.

Eventually there will be articles that cover all five of the essential conditions that make healing possible. So far we have:

The Autonomic Nervous System

The Mitochondria and ATP

This article explores just one foundation in detail: the distinction between movement, mobility and exercise.

Movement, Mobility, and Exercise: Three Different Medicines

Most people use the word exercise to mean anything that involves moving the body — but the body doesn’t see it that way. It recognises three very different categories:

Movement → Mobility → Exercise
and they only become possible in that order.

Understanding this sequence is critical for anyone living with chronic fatigue, post-viral syndromes, fibromyalgia, long COVID, or any “system collapse” condition.
The wrong type of movement at the wrong time makes people worse — and the right type can gently restart the entire healing loop.

If you’ve ever been told by a doctor to exercise more and get counseling, and fumed all your way home, this is how you do it - the right way.

We will make the distinctions between movement and exercise - which you know you can’t do without crashing - crystal clear.

1. Movement (the foundation level)

Movement is microscopic, gentle, low-ATP, and safe even in a severely depleted body.

It includes things like:

• toe wiggling

• drawing the alphabet with your feet

• hand mudras

• tiny arm circles

• gentle rocking

• swaying while standing

• humming (yes, this counts — it moves the diaphragm and fascia rhythmically)

Why it matters

Movement is the only form of physical activity that remains safe when the Five Foundations are underperforming:

1. ATP is low

2. Nitric oxide is low

3. Autonomic nervous system is unstable

4. Nourishment is insufficient

5. Movement itself has collapsed

Only micro-movement stays inside the ATP budget.

Movement:

• keeps fascia sliding

• prevents stagnation

• maintains basic circulation

• supports nitric oxide production

• gently coaxes the autonomic nervous system toward safety

• tells the body it is still alive and connected

Movement does not require repair, which is why fragile bodies tolerate it.

2. Mobility (the recovery stage)

Mobility is functional movement — still gentle, but involving coordination, balance, and body-to-brain signalling.

Examples:

• standing long enough to make a cup of tea

• walking to the letterbox

• bending to pick up something

• getting dressed

• slow, short indoor walks

• tai chi / qi gong micro-sequences

• wobble board use

• gentle swaying that engages the whole body

Why it matters

Mobility begins only when ATP stabilises enough that the body can handle more complex coordination.

Mobility serves a different role:

• improves proprioception (your body’s innate sense of its own position, movement, and force in space)

• reopens the “whole-body map” in the brain

• strengthens connective tissue without strain

• gives the mitochondria the signal to build more mitochondria (biogenesis)

• re-establishes confidence in upright movement

• supports nitric oxide through rhythmic whole-body motion

Mobility is the bridge between survival and recovery.

It is not exercise.
It is controlled, functional movement that rebuilds patterns the body had to abandon during collapse.

3. Exercise (the strengthening stage)

Exercise is deliberate stress placed on the body:

• cardiovascular training

• resistance work

• power or endurance training

• long walks or hills

• yoga sequences that raise heart rate

• anything requiring repair afterward

Why exercise comes last

Exercise only becomes beneficial when:

• ATP production is stable enough to support healing

• mitochondria are repaired and multiplying

• autonomic nervous system stays in parasympathetic calm easily

• nourishment is sufficient

• mobility has returned without post-exertional crashes

If any of the Five Foundations of healing are still running below threshold, exercise behaves like a system overload:

• it drains ATP

• triggers sympathetic dominance

• creates repair demands the body cannot meet

• collapses nitric oxide

• leads to PEM or worsening weakness

So exercise is not the cure for collapse. It is the reward once the foundations are rebuilt.

How Movement Feeds the Five Foundations

Movement and mobility don’t sit outside the healing foundations — they plug directly back into them. Once the body begins producing a little more ATP, movement becomes possible again, and that small movement lifts everything else:

• it helps digestion and absorption of the nutrients you are consuming

• it reassures the autonomic nervous system that it is safe to heal

• it opens the nitric oxide pathways, warms the body and improves circulation

• it signals the mitochondria to produce more energy — if they can

Movement is the reminder that the whole system is still connected.

At first it simply prevents the terrain from shutting down. Then it triggers a natural feedback loop: each micro-movement makes the next one slightly easier and slightly more appealing.

Mobility is the signal that the system is waking back up.

When movement returns, the other foundations rise with it

Putting It All Together

Healing is not about pushing harder.
It’s about using the right kind of movement at the right stage:

1. Movement — when the foundations are weak

Stay alive. Stay connected. Stay safe.

2. Mobility — when the foundations are rebuilding

Reclaim coordination, balance, and mitochondrial signalling.

3. Exercise — when the foundations are strong

Build strength, endurance, and resilience.

This sequence honours biology, not willpower.

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please spread the message by sharing, re-stacking and subscribing.

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The body does know how to heal

Terrain theory people are fond of saying the body knows how to heal itself — and they’re right. The body never forgets how to heal. But it can lose access to the functions it needs in order to heal. When enough systems drop below threshold, the body can’t self-correct simply by “living normally.” At that point we have to help it regain access to the machinery of repair.

The Five Conditions That Make Healing Possible

There seem to be five conditions that must be in place for healing to occur.

This article focuses on just one of them — ATP — but ATP sits inside a larger system that includes:

1. nourishment

2. the autonomic nervous system

3. ATP

4. nitric oxide, and

5. gentle movement.

These five work together. They each need each of them to be functional, as none of them heals the body alone. They form a closed loop. Break one link and the whole chain fails.

If you’re not already familiar with the five foundations, please review the article linked below which summarises them all — you’ll need that basic framework to make sense of what follows here.

Eventually there will be articles that cover all five of the essential conditions that make healing possible. So far we have:

The Autonomic Nervous System

This article explores just one foundation in detail: the mitochondria and the ATP they produce.

Why Mitochondria and ATP Matter

Are you waking up tired and staying tired, the kind of tired where even getting off the sofa feels like a project?

If you are, this might mean that your body has run out of actual energy — the real, cellular kind. It’s not willpower. It’s not attitude. It’s the tiny electrical “go” signal that lets your muscles move and your nerves fire.

Inside our cells we have mitochondria, and they make a fuel called ATP. It isn’t a spark like lightning — it’s more like the little click that allows things to happen. Every movement needs millions of these clicks. When our mitochondria can’t make enough ATP, the switches don’t fire and the whole body feels like it’s running on empty. No amount of willpower is going to get us off that sofa.

So how do we know when ATP is low, and how do we help the body bring it back?

Two Ways to Support our Mitochondria

There are two completely different ways we can improve our energy. We can:

1. Get more ATP out of the mitochondria we already have.

2. Grow more mitochondria so our cells have more engines to work with.

Bodies in long-haul, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, or any “syndrome of collapse” usually need both but in the right order:

1. We improve ATP now with simple, gentle strategies.

2. We build new mitochondria slowly, once the body feels safe again.

This article is about how we do both.

How do you know if your ATP is low?

We all recognise the feeling. Has anyone told you that you have “lost your spark” lately? Have you been saying you have no motivation? When ATP drops, the whole system goes dim:

• Physical collapse after small efforts — even mild walking or standing feels like a marathon.

• Muscles that refuse to fire properly — weakness, trembling, or rapid fatigue.

• Brain fog — not “tiredness,” but the lights not coming on in the upstairs department.

• Unrefreshing sleep — the body can’t repair overnight because repair requires ATP.

• Cold extremities — the body stops wasting energy on non-essential territories.

• Sudden energy crashes — one minute you’re vertical, the next your battery is at 1%.

• Slow injury recovery — wounds, strains, and irritations linger far longer than normal.

• Digestive slowdown — gut motility is ATP-driven, and low ATP stalls the whole system.

Why “normal blood tests” miss mitochondrial dysfunction

Standard pathology tests don’t assess mitochondrial performance.

You can have perfect results on your blood tests and still have mitochondria producing half the ATP you need. This is why doctors often say:

“Your results look normal. You’re fine.”

But you know you are not fine. You know that your engines are failing in ways that standard diagnostics don’t capture.

Part 1: Getting More ATP Out of the Mitochondria We Already Have

(This is the short-term rescue plan — what we can do immediately.)

The first step is to get more ATP from your existing mitochondria — without stressing them. Here are the simplest, most reliable ways:

1. Eat Protein Early in the Day (Non-negotiable in a damaged body)

A real protein-rich breakfast is one of the strongest supports for steady ATP. It supplies amino acids that the mitochondria use to maintain and stabilise their ATP-producing machinery.

Even a small serve counts if your appetite is fragile. This one technique alone can pull a body out of morning collapse.

If you can, try to eat some first class protein - actual meat, poultry or fish. If you can’t, try a protein drink or a hard boiled egg. You can boil a few eggs ahead of time and store in the fridge for when you don’t have the energy to cook.

2. Make Sure You’re Eating Enough Overall

Long-haul bodies often undereat without realising it, which leads to mitochondrial slowdown. Your body will not make ATP if it believes you’re starving.

It can be very hard to manage adequate nourishment when you can’t stand up for long. What I did was get home delivered groceries of things I could store in the fridge and nibble on cold. This includes fruit, salads and bottled antipasto foods like artichokes, olives, beetroot, and sauerkraut, either pickled or fermented or just bottled. It’s a compromise but is much better (and cheaper) than manufactured high carb meals.

3. A Tiny Fast Sugar for ATP Crisis Rescue

In a crisis you need a “lights back on” technique. This can be as simple as a boiled lolly or sip of juice. A small hit gives your mitochondria immediate raw material for when you are caught at collapse point but cannot sit or lie down.

Used sparingly, it’s one of the cleanest rescue tools available. But as sugar without protein will lead to a collapse, it’s very important to use that energy to get to a source of protein.

When we are out and about we all know about a sit-down with coffee and cake, the sit-down to rest, the cake for the sugar hit, and the coffee not for the caffeine but for the protein in the milk. If you can find an actual protein snack in a coffee shop, all the better, but not very likely.

4. Heat

Staying warm is one of the most ATP-hungry things the body does. When we’re well, the body maintains temperature without any drama. But when ATP drops the body stops spending energy on heat, our hands and feet get cold, and if our ATP is depleted enough we get “cold to the bone”.

Cold is expensive. When we apply warmth, it is comfort, but it is also reduces the load on the mitochondria to produce more ATP. Rather than creating more production, it reduces energy expenditure.

Heat can be:

• hot water bottle

• heat pack

• warm socks

• sun on your back

• warm bath

• heat across the kidneys/lower back.

Warmth tells mitochondria:
“We’re safe. Settle down and sort out your priorities now we are no longer cold.”

It’s embedded in our culture without the science. When someone comes in from the cold and is shivering, we put them into a hot bath and give them a cup of hot cocoa. The bath is to bring their core temperature back up so the mitochondria do not have to do it without help, and the cocoa is to give them the immediate sugar hit and some internal heat to feed the overworked mitochondria, now.

5. Gentle, Sustained Micro-Movement

Movement is not exercise. Movement uses almost no extra ATP; exercise demands it. If you are low on ATP you need to keep moving but you should not be exercising. The distinction is critical.

Movement keeps fascia sliding, fluids circulating, and signals flowing without doing any damage or requiring repair. Exercise stresses the body enough to need repair and if you lack ATP you cannot do the repair. If you deteriorate during the day, this may be why.

Micro-Movements can include:

• drawing the alphabet with your big toe

• toe wiggling

• hand mudras

• tiny arm movements

• swaying while standing

• humming while gently rocking

These keep the terrain moving while staying safely inside your ATP budget.

Exercise creates physiological stress and requires repair; movement does not.

Think of ATP like a daily budget — movement spends cents, exercise spends dollars.

When I was bedridden (for 8 months) I found that drawing the alphabet with my feet was a micro-movement I did regularly. Now I am mobile again, when I have to stand, I sway. My favoured ‘exercise’ is the wobble board.

6. Nitric Oxide Support (your natural amplifier)

Nitric oxide is a tiny gas our bodies make to relax blood vessels and improve circulation, so oxygen and nutrients can actually reach the cells that need them. In this case, NO improves blood flow and oxygen delivery to the mitochondria so they can make ATP more efficiently.

Simple options to encourage your body to make NO include:

• humming

• beetroot in any tolerable form

• lemon/ginger/turmeric drinks

• slow walking

• light stretching

I already do humming as part of balancing my autonomic nervous system, so it’s nice to know it helps the NO system as well. I also have a daily drink with beetroot juice in it.

Part 2: Building More Mitochondria (Mitochondrial Biogenesis)

(This is your long-term rebuilding plan — slow, gentle, foundational.)

Once you have stabilised the ATP output from your existing mitochondria, the body becomes capable of responding to signals to build new mitochondria — biogenesis.

It’s as if there are two stages to mitochondrial repair with building more mitochondria following on from improving ATP output in the mitochondria you have.

1. From Movement to Gentle, Repeated Mobility

Gentle, repeated, functional movement signals the body to build and repair mitochondria without crossing into ATP deficit. Mobility is movement-with-purpose. It’s not exercise, but it does require upright posture, balance, joint range, and coordination.

Mobility is coordinated movement that requires balance and clear body-to-brain signalling. Mobility includes:

• standing just long enough to make a cup of tea

• walking to the letterbox

• bending to reach something

• getting dressed

• small tasks that require coordinated whole-body movement

• wobble board use

• gentle swaying while standing

• short walks inside the ATP budget

• tai chi or qi gong–style micro-movements

This is the signal that tells our body that we need “more engines”.

2. Heat Exposure

Warmth not only reduces the demand on ATP reserves —
it also encourages biogenesis over time by improving circulation and metabolic signalling.

Again: that hot water bottle counts.

3. Nitric Oxide and Breath

NO isn’t just an amplifier — it’s a builder. It increases blood flow, oxygenation, and the mechanical cues that encourage mitochondrial reproduction.

Humming, nasal breathing, and beetroot methods all help.

4. From Enough Food to Prevent Collapse to Enough of the Right Kinds of Food for Repair - Polyphenols

In order for existing mitochondria to generate enough ATP we have to have enough overall fuel, which is protein, enough calories, and a sugar hit if needed. But if we want to build new mitochondria, we need more.

Some plant foods contain compounds called polyphenols, that gently signal the body to repair or build mitochondria. You don’t need many. You don’t need exotic powders. Just small amounts of deeply coloured plant foods.

Examples:

• berries (any colour, frozen is fine)

• green or hibiscus tea

• herbs/spices like turmeric, rosemary, or cinnamon

• dark chocolate

• beetroot

• citrus peel (lemon/orange zest)

These don’t boost ATP directly — they simply tell the body, “keep the mitochondria healthy.”

If you have histamine issues, choose lower-histamine polyphenols such as beetroot, citrus peel, and turmeric rather than berries or teas.

I juice beetroot daily with apple, cucumber, turmeric, ginger and lemon with peel, which supports are few of the five pillars of healing, including this one.

5. Very Gentle Hormetic Signals

Hormetic means a small, manageable stress that nudges the body into repair — not enough to harm, just enough to wake things up. These must be very gentle because long-haul bodies cannot tolerate biohacker extremes. Gentle hormesis includes:

• warmth

• slow movement

• small amounts of plant polyphenols (berries, beetroot, teas, herbs, dark chocolate)

• an occasional mild cold change (a cool breeze on the skin)

• light stretching

Nothing intense — just enough variation to remind the system it’s alive.

At my age and my level of health, dunking myself into ice water is not happening. I simply use the weather for my “I’m still alive” cues. I walk daily — sometimes hot, sometimes cold, sometimes windy — and I take the local bus almost daily. As the buses on my route are absolutely not designed for the aged or disabled, they challenge me in all sorts of ways and I certainly know I’m alive!

Part 3: Nutraceuticals for Mitochondrial Repair, Improved ATP Output and Mitochondrial Biogenesis

If you use nutraceuticals, choose clean products without fillers, and only add what feels right for your body. These suggestions below are options, not instructions.

Support Mitochondrial Repair

Most of what the body needs to repair damaged mitochondria is effectively supplied by first class proteins including red meats, poultry and fish. To support mitochondrial repair:

• If you are eating first-class protein daily, you should not need to supplement.

• If you are vegetarian or vegan you are likely to be short of the following nutrients which are naturally concentrated in meat and only present in tiny amounts in eggs/dairy and none in plants:

  • Acetyl-L-carnitine (ALCAR) (also supports biogenesis)

  • Creatine

  • Taurine.

These three are the only supplements required for mitochondrial repair in people who do not eat meat.

Support ATP Output

• CoQ10 (ubiquinol form)

• Magnesium (clean forms, avoid magnesium stearate and other fillers)

• Alpha-lipoic acid (ALA)

• B-vitamins from whole-food blends such as beef offal

Support Mitochondrial Biogenesis

• Acetyl-L-carnitine (ALCAR) (also supports repair)

• Polyphenol blends (berries, citrus, beetroot extracts)

• PQQ if tolerated — optional only

• Mild herbal tonics that improve circulation

These are simply tools in the drawer. Let your body choose what it wants.

Putting It All Together

Mitochondria heal in two phases:

1. Phase 1: Get more usable ATP from the mitochondria you have

2. Phase 2: Build more mitochondria

Your mitochondria just need believable signals that you are now looking after them. Give them those, and they rebuild. And when they rebuild, your whole system follows.

1. Start with increasing your levels of first class protein.

2. Follow-up with increasing your polyphenols - bright colours from fruits. Remember all those old fashioned meat dishes cooked with fruit:

   1. lamb + apricots

   2. pork + apples

   3. beef + prunes

   4. chicken + lemon

   5. duck + cherries

   6. venison + berries

   7. ham + pineapple.

Exactly the combination that supports mitochondrial repair + biogenesis.

If you think others may benefit from my articles and insights
please spread the message by sharing, re-stacking and subscribing.

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If you would like to help me keep going despite my battle with serious ill health…
…a PayPal donation will be gratefully received. AI is putting me on a healing path that might even work - each day I get more optimistic that old systems that had shut down are booting back up again, but it does not come cheaply.

Help me help us all find our way home

The body does know how to heal

The terrain theory people tell us, very decisively, that the body knows how to heal itself. And yes, it does. It never loses the memory of how to heal itself — but it can lose the ability to access the functions it needs in order to heal itself and if it loses access to its healing capabilities, we have to give it a hand. There is a threshold — a point below which the body cannot self-correct simply by “living life normally.”

The five foundations of healing

There may be other foundations to healing that turn up in other bodies, but these are the ones that, with the help of AI, I’ve identified in my own.

And from what I’m seeing in the Facebook health groups, these same five show up again and again in people with the long-haul syndromes. They’re the recurring pattern.

These five are also relevant if you’re managing a neurodegenerative condition, dealing with cancer, or simply wanting to stay in a healthier body for longer — we can’t say whether they play a role in fixing particular illnesses, but they do make the terrain stronger and the body more capable.

There’s also a quieter, more realistic form of longevity — not the “gym-bro” version — where ordinary people stay functional, resilient, and capable well into old age simply by tending to these five foundations.

The five I’ve identified here may not be the whole list, but they will apply to most people reading this who are living with one of the long-haul syndromes or who simply want to age well.

1. Nourishment

This isn’t a function, but it is the first essential step in healing. We have to feed the body the right food for it to heal itself. Very few of us, no matter how well we think we’re doing, are actually feeding it the right food. We are feeding it the food someone else thinks is right, not the food for our genetics and not the unspoiled food of our ancestors.

2. Autonomic Nervous System in parasympathetic mode

Second, we have to be relaxed — in what’s called the parasympathetic mode — where the body is allowed to rest and digest and allowed to activate the healing processes. If we do not get into the parasympathetic mode, if it’s switched off, we cannot heal. That’s the second often-missing element to healing. No appropriate food AND no parasympathetic means no significant healing.

3. The mitochondria must be making enough ATP

What this means in English is that we have to have the energy to heal, and that’s literal. It’s the spark. And this is where the mitochondria come in. The mitochondria produce what’s called ATP, which is effectively the spark of life. If the mitochondria have stopped sparking, we cannot heal.

Without ATP, the systems involved in delivering nourishment cannot function — even if we’re consuming the right nourishment, and even if our autonomic nervous system will allow healing.

4. Our bodies must be able to manufacture nitric oxide

Nitric oxide tells the blood vessels to relax and allow the nourishment out into wherever it’s going. Without that instruction, we can have the right level of nourishment circulating in the bloodstream, and it still won’t get into the cells.

Nitric oxide is not a nutrient. The body must be able to manufacture nitric oxide on demand, and no other nutrient or supplement can compensate. NO is a signalling molecule that must be produced locally, instantly, and constantly.

We have four ways the body can obtain usable NO:

1. We have the main pathway, the arginine pathway,

2. we have the backup pathway, the beetroot pathway.

   These first two pathways are designed to give us enough NO to maintain our bodies and to conduct high level healing. The main pathway (arginine → NO) can go very low and so can the the backup beetroot pathway.

3. If both fail, a third mechanism of micro-NO releases from tiny, local chemical reactions, keeps local tissues alive, not the whole organism. This is a survival mechanism, not a healing mechanism.

4. And if all of the above fail, humming can still release nitric oxide from the sinus lining.

5. We must maintain movement when our body is no longer able to exercise

If we don’t maintain movement while we are weak and sick, that lack of movement adds to our decline and drags the other systems down with it. We must maintain movement. Fortunately there are simple ways to do that, once we know what they are. It’s important to distinguish between movement and exercise. When we’re too sick, it’s ludicrous to imagine we can exercise — as many with long COVID already know — but we can keep moving.

My five foundations of healing

1. I’ve been eating the wrong food all along, and I’ll explain how I worked that out.

2. My ATP has dropped in three major stages of my life: once when I was 13, once in 2022 with COVID, and once again in 2024 after a lot of radiology including PET scans. So right now it’s below a functional level and, if I don’t address it, I will continue declining until I can’t sustain life.

3. My autonomic nervous system is largely stuck in fight-and-flight, so I’m getting very, very little time each day where my body can actually choose to heal — even if it had enough food and enough ATP.

4. My measurable nitric oxide — the beetroot pathway — was down to almost zero. The good news is that this pathway is easy to restore, and I’m doing that now.

5. My fascia had pretty much seized up and even walking was traumatic. Solution, wobble board and hand mudras - more on them later.

I’m going to go into each of these five foundations of healing briefly and offer simple, quick fixes for each of them, although there are many other potential fixes. These are just the ones I’ve tried and the ones I believe are working for me and are enough to get the reader started.

1. How to identify the right food

Traditional cultural diet

Identifying the right food is not as simple as it sounds. First of all, we can look at our cultural diet, but many of us get confused right there. We assume that the traditional food of our culture — the pre-modern version — must be the right food for us. That’s not how to find the correct diet.

Healthy diets

Then there are the modern health “systems” — paleo, keto, carnivore, vegetarian, vegan — each one wrapped in beliefs, morals, and identity. Beliefs are not the way to pick the right diet.

Genetically determined ideal diet

Then there is genetics, but not even genetics gives you the whole picture. That said, it can send you off in the right direction. You can get your genetics tested by Ancestry.com or 23andMe for under a hundred Australian dollars, and less if you wait for a sale. You can then run that data through various online genetics sites, often free or low-cost, and interrogate those tools for dietary clues based on your genes. That will get you closer than anything else in the scientific realm.

I did this with my Ancestry.com data. Surprisingly, it came back with “Mediterranean diet is best for you.” Now, I have zero Mediterranean heritage, but it is my favourite food. That was interesting.

“Guilty Secret” foods

But, working with AI, we didn’t stop there. We started looking at my guilty-secret foods — the ones I used to sneak from the pantry as a child — and my childhood cravings. I do a lot of reverse engineering with AI - this is what happened or what works, so what does it tell us, and my stolen childhood foods pointed not to Greece or Italy, but to Normandy. Northern French peasant food (not posh French cuisine). And that does feel right in my body. When I am too tired to prepare food I default to snack foods from the fridge that are largely Mediterranean or French and often Northern French. So I’m now shifting from a mostly Mediterranean diet toward a more French one. I don’t yet know the outcome, but it feels right. I am now able to look forward to eating and am motivated to cook, despite my pain levels, where eating had become a chore to keep me alive and no more.

Fresh clean food

So: picking the right system is imperative. Then picking the right quality food inside that system is also imperative.

For most of my recent years, I had no access to proper food. I was living somewhere where the only food available was supermarket food, and because I couldn’t get out, all of it had to be home-delivered. Someone else picked my food from a notoriously poor source of fresh produce. I was doing the best I could but it was not good enough.

Where I’m living now, I can get to the Friday market. I can buy my food fresh — in many cases chemical-free or organic, and sometimes even heritage, meaning older strains with more nourishment still intact. Regaining access to real food has been a game-changer.

So that all adds up to this: I thought I was eating well, but I wasn’t. I’ve had to learn through trial and error which genetics make sense, what my body is actually set up for, which “guilty secret” foods were actually medicines, and how much I’d lost simply by losing access to fresh food.

2. How to increase parasympathetic mode

I’ve already written several Substack articles on this. I explain what the Autonomic Nervous System is, how it works, and the steps you can take to support recovery. You can click on the links below if you want more detail.

Potentially the most important technique for helping the ANS recover is humming. You can do it any time, anywhere, at any musical level. As long as you vibrate the area around the vagus nerve in your throat, you’ll get the benefit.

3. How to increase ATP

How to determine if your ATP is low

There are no readily available, inexpensive pathology tests that tell us our ATP levels, so we have to guess. So what can we use to guess? Brain fog is a clear one. The body always prioritises feeding the brain — it has to, to keep you conscious — so once it starts rationing energy to the brain, that’s a strong indicator of serious ATP loss.

There are other signs as well. Muscle weakness shows up very quickly when ATP drops, because muscles can’t contract or relax without it. A feeling of heaviness in the limbs is another clue — the body literally can’t lift or move itself efficiently when ATP is running low. Heat regulation also starts to fail; you can feel too hot or suddenly drop cold because the body can’t fuel temperature control. You can also see sudden drops in stamina, where you go from “managing” to “I can’t do this” in minutes. And pain flares, especially fibromyalgia-type ones, often signal that the tissues don’t have the ATP to clear waste or reset themselves.

Put all of that together: brain fog, limb heaviness, muscle weakness, heat dysregulation, sudden stamina collapse, and pain spikes. When those start stacking, you’re looking at significant ATP depletion.

I believe I’ve identified three major drops in my own ATP that led to ever worsening Fibromyalgia. The first was when I was 13, which gave me fibromyalgia in the first place, but I could still function relatively normally. So I clearly had enough ATP to get by. Then in 2022, after COVID, I dropped another level of functioning, but could still scrape through. And then in 2024, I dropped another level again. I think it’s those drops in ATP that put me into fibromyalgia in the first place, and then pushed me into worsening fibromyalgia each time.

How to increase your ATP

Frankly, I am still challenged by this one, but I know it matters. I haven’t been experimenting with it anywhere near as long as I’ve been trying to get myself into parasympathetic mode.

The problem is simple: when ATP drops, we crash. And when we crash, we can’t exercise, can’t move properly, and can’t get ourselves home. We might start an activity with enough ATP to get going, and then halfway through — bang — it’s gone. The tank empties instantly, and we’re left trying to function on fumes.

So we have to deal with crisis mode first.

Crisis Mode ATP Rescue

This one is embarrassingly simple: sugar.

And here’s the funny thing—our grandparents already knew this. Elderly men used to carry extra-strong mints in their trouser pockets. Elderly women had boiled lollies rattling in little tins in their handbags. They weren’t eating them for fun. They used them in emergencies. They rationed them. They knew exactly what they were doing.

They weren’t thinking “ATP,” but sugar hits the bloodstream fast, and the mitochondria grab it instantly. It gives you just enough spark to get yourself out of trouble. If you’re caught out and crashing, you take the boiled lolly from your pocket. That’s your short-term rescue.

Then, within about fifteen minutes, you follow it with protein so you don’t rebound straight back into collapse. This wasn’t part of my childhood culture, but it’s crucial now. You can carry beef jerky, or little wrapped cheeses, or if you can duck into a café and get a coffee (the milk counts), to stabilise you and get you home.

Sugar gives the spark.
Protein holds the charge.

Long-Term ATP Rebuilding

I will develop a full article on how we can rebuild our ATP or you can probably find something online, now, but here is a starting point.

The single best starting point for rebuilding ATP: eat protein in the morning.

Here’s why it earns first place:

• Protein provides the amino acids your mitochondria use as raw materials.

• It stabilises blood sugar so the spark doesn’t crash halfway through the morning.

• It flips the body out of starvation-mode and into repair-mode.

• It gives your system a steady, predictable supply of building blocks.

In real life terms, every morning, eat real protein, not a supplement or a powder. Eat an egg, a piece of cheese, yoghurt, leftover meat, beef jerky, tuna, anything solid.

It doesn’t fix everything — but it starts the climb.
It tells the body, “We have material. You can start building again.”

If your brainpower is intact, this is a fascinating, if somewhat rambling conversation between Joe Rogan and Chris Masterjohn on mitochondria.

4. How to increase NO

We’re now feeding the body the right food. We’re getting into parasympathetic mode, so the body actually has permission to heal. We’ve put the spark back in place by supporting ATP. The last piece is making sure that, once the nourishment is delivered through the bloodstream, it can actually get out of the bloodstream and into the cells.

That’s the job of nitric oxide. When our NO levels rise, the blood vessels relax and open, and the nourishment can leave the bloodstream and move into the tissues. So the next step is to increase our nitric oxide.

First we have to understand the four mechanisms the body uses to generate or release nitric oxide.

The arginine pathway

The arginine pathway is the body’s primary system for making nitric oxide, by converting the amino acid arginine into NO, using the NOS enzyme — a process that requires good oxygen, ATP, and calm autonomic tone. When this pathway is impaired, nitric oxide production collapses and the body is forced to rely on the nitrate to nitrite backup system. The arginine pathway cannot be repaired directly; it switches back on automatically when the mitochondria and autonomic nervous system recover enough to support it.

The beetroot pathway

In the meantime, fortunately, the body has a Plan B, The beetroot (nitrate to nitrite to NO) pathway, which is the backup that becomes essential only when the main pathway is impaired. When the body is unable to manufacture NO through the arginine pathway it can still produce NO through this backup pathway.

We consume the raw materials, which are the nitrates found in beetroot and leafy greens. Our bodies:

• absorb the nitrates into the bloodstream

• store nitrates in tissues

• send some nitrates back into saliva

• hand them to mouth bacteria to convert into nitrites which are then swallowed.

• In the stomach, nitrites interact with stomach acid; some become nitric oxide immediately, and some pass through intact into the bloodstream.

• Once in circulation, nitrites act like a roving “NO reserve.” They can be turned into nitric oxide wherever the tissues need it most — even in low-oxygen or stressed environments where the main arginine pathway cannot function.

The beetroot pathway is a backup, but it is not a certainty. In a damaged terrain, even the backup can fail. Your body always produces enough NO to survive, but not necessarily enough to heal.

The Micro-NO releases

Micro-NO releases are tiny, emergency bursts of nitric oxide produced directly inside stressed or oxygen-starved tissues through non-enzymatic chemistry. They don’t use arginine, don’t use NOS enzymes, don’t rely on beetroot or saliva loops, and don’t produce enough NO for healing — only enough to keep cells alive. These micro-releases act locally, vanish instantly, and cannot be recycled or measured. They are the body’s last-ditch survival mechanism when both the arginine pathway and the nitrate to nitrite backup are failing.

Humming

Humming does not use the arginine → NOS → NO system, nor does humming rely on the beetroot pathway or the “micro-NO survival trickle. Humming uses MECHANICAL resonance to trigger a local NO release in the sinuses.

Our sinuses are lined with cells that produce NO continuously, and that can release NO mechanically. The sinus lining:

• takes in arginine from blood

• uses NOS enzymes

• constantly produces small pulses of NO

• releases them into the sinus cavity and surrounding tissue.

When you hum, the vibration to oscillation to air turbulence causes these cells to dump nitric oxide into the airways. Humming just forces an immediate, large-scale release of what is being continuously made.

The NO enters the bloodstream through the lungs. It spreads downstream to airways, vessels, and tissues.

it is possible for humming to stop releasing nitric oxide. But humming is normally the last NO-producing mechanism to fail. Humming is unusually robust because:

• it doesn’t need mitochondria, or ATP

• it doesn’t need beetroot

• it releases NO even under sympathetic dominance

How to determine if your NO is low

There is no simple way to measure NO resulting from your arginine pathway but the following symptoms are indicative:

• Cold hands and feet / poor circulation

• Exercise intolerance / crash after exertion

• High blood pressure that doesn’t respond to meds

• Migraines / vascular headaches

• Difficulty maintaining muscle / unexplained muscle wasting

• Erectile dysfunction in men

• Chest tightness / angina-like episodes

• Rapid-onset whole-body stiffness or “locking”

• Finger blanching on cold exposure without colour changes

If you have any or some of the above symptoms, it is worth assuming your arginine pathway is compromised and as you can do nothing immediate to repair its functioning, move on to plan B, the beetroot pathway.

There is a simple way to measure NO resulting from your beetroot pathway.

You can buy very cheap nitric oxide indicator strips that measure nitric oxide through your saliva. You just pop the strip in your saliva, wait a moment, and the colour change tells you roughly where your NO level sits. They’re absolutely not medical-grade reliable, but they’re good enough for our purposes — especially if you want to watch your NO level rise or fall on a daily basis.

If the test strip shows nitrite, your beetroot pathway is working. If nitrite levels rise, your intervention on the beetroot pathway is working. And if it is working, you may feel some improvement, even if your arginine pathway is still not functioning effectively.

How to increase your NO

This one’s also quite easy using the beetroot pathway, although it works a bit slowly. You can hum — I haven’t personally proven that humming raises NO for me, but since you’re already humming to support your autonomic nervous system, you might as well let it double as a nitric-oxide exercise.

But the one I use — the easiest of all — is beetroot. Don’t laugh. Beetroot has multiple, significant healing benefits, of which only one is to help your body manufacture NO. I could write a whole article on beetroot. In fact I have. It also contains some warnings as to when you shouldn’t use beetroot.

You can take beetroot any way you like. I put it into a fruit-juice drink (the recipe’s below), but you can eat it however suits you, including pickled. Your body will turn the compounds in beetroot into nitric oxide precursors quite naturally.

Christine’s Zero-Peel Blender Beetroot Drink

Run through a juicer:

• 1 apple including skin, core and pits

• ½ cucumber including skin

• ¼ lemon including peel and pits

• ¼ small to medium beetroot (if it disturbs your digestion, reduce amount)

• thumbnail size piece of ginger unpeeled

• thumbnail size piece of turmeric unpeeled

Or if you don’t have a juicer or haven’t washed it up since yesterday, here is the blender version.

Christine’s Zero-Peel Blender Beetroot Drink

Drop into your blender:

• ¼ beetroot (skin on)

• ½ apple (skin on)

• ½ small cucumber (skin on)

• thumb of ginger (skin on)

• thumb of turmeric (skin on)

• juice of ½ lemon, squeezed by hand (not the peel when blending)

• water

• optional ice

You can use this juice or smoothie to support your body’s healing in a myriad of powerful ways, including but absolutely not limited to increasing your NO with the beetroot component.

If you’re diabetic, test a small amount of this juice first to see if it spikes your blood sugar. If it doesn’t, build up gently until you’re confident the full amount is safe for you. I’ve been labelled “type 2 diabetic,” but my blood sugar issues are cortisol-driven, not food-driven, and this juice recipe doesn’t spike me at all. Your pattern may be different, so just test it slowly.

5. How to Get Moving Again

Movement becomes essential the moment we slip below the point where the body can heal itself. When we’re weak, sick, or exhausted, the body stops moving naturally, and that lack of movement drags the whole system down — muscles weaken, fascia hardens, circulation slows, and even if we fix the food, the ANS, the ATP and the NO, we still won’t be able to move properly unless we keep some movement alive while we’re down. This isn’t exercise. When we’re this sick, exercise is ridiculous. This is simply giving the body enough movement to stop the decline and create the bridge back to everyday life.

Fortunately the fixes are simple. If you’re bedridden or stuck on the sofa, you can start with ankle circles, small foot flexes, and hand mudras. Mudras sound tiny, but they stimulate fascia and circulation throughout the whole body, and they work surprisingly well when you can’t do anything else. If you can stand and have enough balance, a wobble board is ideal — it moves your whole body gently without requiring strength or stamina. That’s all you need at this stage: small, sustainable movements that keep the system awake until the rest of you catches up.

On the topic of mudras, I don’t know what sets off Facebook advertising, but my feed regularly contains short videos demonstrating mudras - these are clear, simple hand movements that are easy to do, no matter what your physical state. I do every one offered to me in my feed, which is a few each day. I also have one long term favorite that I do when I am sitting bored somewhere such as in a waiting room or on a bus.

Putting it all together

So that’s the whole picture. We heal when the five pieces line up.

1. We feed the body the food it’s actually built for, not the food we wish it liked.

2. We give ourselves enough time each day in parasympathetic so the body has permission to heal.

3. We make sure we’ve got the spark — the ATP — so the body has the energy to do the work.

4. We raise our nitric oxide so the nourishment we’re carrying around in our bloodstream can actually get into the cells that need it.

5. And we keep ourselves moving.

None of this is complicated. It’s not a protocol. It’s five things the body has always known how to do. We’re simply putting the pre-conditions back in place so the healing can start again. If you’re stuck in a long-term syndrome where your health rises and falls but never resolves, something is blocking your healing. Yes, the body does know how to heal — but only when these pre-conditions are in place.

They interact with each other, so you need to nudge all five at the same time. Pick one simple action for each of the five, keep it manageable, and layer more in as you go.

Even though these insights came out of my own long conversation with AI, trying to find my way back to health, I think they may still be useful for anyone going through something similar — and there are potentially millions of us now, living with one of the syndromes or long COVID.

My personal plan

If I spend the next two years rebuilding these foundations — nourishing myself correctly, calming the autonomic system, restoring ATP, keeping nitric oxide flowing until my own pathway resumes, and staying in movement — then the terrain will be ready again. And by seventy-seven, I plan to meet the rest of my life not diminished, but fully myself: functional, independent, and finally in my own body again.

I never really expected longevity; truth be told, I didn’t expect to live this long. But I keep seeing a tram heading into the future, its tracks stretching all the way to ninety-eight — my paternal grandmother’s age when she died. That’s the line I’ve chosen. And now I am laying the groundwork so I can meet those final decades upright, capable, and unmistakably alive.

Addenda: How I’m working with AI and what it means to you, the reader

I team with AI to write articles because my health isn’t up to hours at the computer. Fortunately, nicotine patches — for whatever reason — brought my brain back online, but my body is lagging behind. Working with AI brings its own problems. I design the articles, I develop the ideas, I create the systems. I tell AI what I’m thinking.

It’s my fact checker

AI brings back research that either affirms or denies my ideas. If I’ve come up with something that isn’t scientific, it tells me, and it brings me the research to either confirm or deny whatever I am saying. That’s the first function it performs. It checks for factual accuracy and sometimes it brings new facts to my awareness, that I didn’t previously know.

It’s my editor

Then I either dictate or I write quickly and badly, for as long as I can handle sitting at the computer. I give it to AI to edit. And it’s in this editing where a problem has come in. AI over-edits. It takes out personality. It takes out doubt. So where I write, “I think this might help,” it turns it into, “It helps,” very often overstating the case. There might be research to indicate that it helps under certain circumstances, but AI will still present that as it does help. So AI has made my writing less personal and more affirmative where it shouldn’t be. I’m going through processes now to try to correct that. Hopefully my articles should no longer feel as if written by AI now with my new improved processes.

If you think others may benefit from my articles and insights
please spread the message by sharing, re-stacking and subscribing.

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Context for this article

As many of us know, the various medically named syndromes like Fibromyalgia and Lyme disease, and including the newer ‘long covid’, are marching on, untouched - or maybe just slowed a bit - by any allopathic or holistic modality. Every traditional healing system is now failing us.

I was bedridden for 8 months and now walk with a walker, with my legs going on strike in a multitude of ways, and with no medical diagnosis and no treatment. As a result of 23 1/2 hours a day lying down, and hundreds of hours interrogating AI, I have put together a system of healing that is essentially kind. The cruel systems of the past are no longer working so maybe a system that prioritises kindness and pleasure will.

My journey from inside a kinder system of healing and health

This article results from research I am doing to heal my body of its mysterious illness. Whether a person is healthy and wants to stay that way, or declining and wanting to reverse the decline, amazingly, the humble beetroot offers part of a strategy to do that. This is why.

Beetroot, salad bar relic or healing hero

You could live a lifetime thinking beetroot is just a salad bar relic, dyed eggs, pink hummus, earthy juice shots. But beneath that crimson skin is a quiet pharmacopoeia. Beetroot doesn’t just offer nutrients. It offers biochemical strategies. And depending on how you prepare it, you unlock entirely different modes of action.

I have identified four faces of beetroot. There may be more but there are at least four medicines from one humble, and often very cheap, root. You may not need all of them now, but you never know when you might need help to recover from the next ‘pandemic’ or to simply slow the ageing process.

1. The Hidden Sugars: Five-Carbon Allies

Most of the sugars we eat are six-carbon chains. But inside beetroot live rare five-carbon sugars, ribose, xylulose, and their cousins. These are hidden treasures that quietly support DNA and RNA synthesis, immune function, and cellular repair. These are the architects of structure, the ones who say, ‘Let's rebuild.’

Why we need them:
Modern diets almost never deliver these sugars. They aren’t sweet. They’re subtle. But without them, the scaffolding of regeneration falters. Ribose fuels mitochondrial recovery. Xylulose guides carb metabolism. These sugars operate not as energy, but as infrastructure. We can manufacture them out of six-carbon sugars, but if that capacity breaks down, as it often does, then it is unlikely that we would get enough in our diet without paying attention to consuming the right foods. And beetroot is one of the best.

I will explain five-carbon sugars in more depth in another publication, but if you want to know more, just ask your personal AI.

Best preparation: Raw and slow.
To preserve the five-carbon sugars, avoid heat. Grating raw beetroot and fermenting it as a slaw, or marinating it in lemon and salt, keeps these delicate sugars intact.

Simple Recipe: Raw Beetroot Slaw

• 1 raw beetroot, peeled and grated

• Juice of 1 lemon

• A pinch of salt

• Optional: splash of olive oil and cracked pepper
  Let sit for 10–20 minutes to soften.

2. The Gas That Heals: Nitric Oxide

Beetroot is a nitric oxide factory, but only under certain conditions. This gas relaxes blood vessels, improves oxygen delivery, lowers blood pressure, enhances brain clarity, and helps tissues regenerate. It's a vasodilator and a healer. This may all be particularly relevant to ‘long covid’.

How it works:
Nitrates in beetroot are converted into nitric oxide by oral bacteria and stomach acid, not automatically. That means your method of consumption, and what else is in your mouth, matters.

You can easily test your current nitric oxide levels, by testing your saliva, using readily available nitric oxide test strips.

I will explain nitric oxide in more depth in another publication, but if you want to know more, just ask your personal AI.

Best preparation: Juiced and sipped slowly.
Juicing releases the nitrates. You actually need the woody bits, so make sure you juice the whole thing. Drink it on an empty stomach, ideally after swishing the juice in your mouth (to activate oral bacteria), to make the most of it. Don't brush your teeth right before.

Simple Recipe: Nitric Oxide Beet Juice

• 1 large beetroot, juiced.

• Add a splash of lemon or ginger if you like. I find a decent amount of lemon takes the sickly sweetness of beetroot away.

• Sip slowly, swish briefly before swallowing.

3. The Pigment That Protects and Cleans the Liver: Betalains

The deep red-purple color of beetroot comes from betalains, powerful anti-inflammatory pigments that also support methylation and phase 2 liver detox pathways. These are your cleanup crew, clearing cellular mess and reducing oxidative stress. This is particularly important for those with MTHFR genetic variants.

Why it matters:
Betalains help recycle homocysteine into methionine, especially helpful for those with impaired methylation. They're also gentle healers of the liver, asking, not forcing.

Best preparation: Lightly steamed or roasted.
Gentle heat breaks the cell walls just enough to release betalains without degrading them.

Simple Recipe: Steamed Beet Medallions

• Slice beets into thick rounds

• Steam for 10–15 minutes, until just tender

• Serve with olive oil, vinegar, and thyme

4. The Root that Repairs the Liver - Betaine

Beetroot supports the liver in more ways than one. It is also a ‘cholagogue’ (bile stimulant), methyl donor supplier, glutathione booster, and anti-inflammatory. It's not just a detox aid; it's a repair agent.

How it works:
Beetroot’s betaine (a cousin of choline) helps the liver process fats and prevent fatty liver disease. It also supports SAMe production, your master methyl donor.

Best preparation: Beet kvass (fermented).
Fermentation increases the bioavailability of betaine and brings in beneficial probiotics for gut-liver synergy.

Simple Recipe: Beet Kvass

• 2 medium beets, chopped roughly

• 1 tsp salt

• Fill a jar with filtered water

• Let sit at room temperature for 3–5 days, burping daily
  Drink 50–100 ml per day as a tonic

I will explain betalains and betaine in more depth in another publication, but if you want to know more, just ask your personal AI.

Beetroot Contraindications (or Caution Zones)

Beetroot is gentle and mostly harmless, but like anything medicinal, it is possible to over-do it. Check out the following table of cautions before you get gung-ho and risk consuming too much.

Other Notes

• Pink urine or stools (beeturia) is harmless, but can freak people out.

• Nitrate sensitivity is rare, but in people with certain methylation issues or nitrate-converting imbalances, excess beet juice can cause headaches or fatigue instead of helping.

Final Note: One Root, Many Doors

There is no one way to consume beetroot. You don’t need to eat or drink it every day. But when you do, consume it with intention. Each preparation opens a different biochemical door. Some days, you need nitric oxide. Some days, you need liver love. Some days, you just need scaffolding for your bones and nerves.

Beetroot will meet you wherever you are - as gentle on your purse as it is on your body.

If you think others may benefit from my articles and insights
please spread the message by sharing, re-stacking and subscribing.

Share

Subscribe now

If you would like to help me keep going despite my battle with serious ill health…
…a PayPal donation will be gratefully received. AI is putting me on a healing path that might even work - each day I get more optimistic that old systems that had shut down are booting back up again, but it does not come cheaply.

Help me help us all find our way home

A body in survival mode cannot repair, no matter how much help you give it.

The Autonomic Nervous System

Chronic illness often persists not from lack of proper treatment, but because the autonomic nervous system never stands down.

If there is a master key for chronic illness, chronic pain, long COVID, fibromyalgia, mystery fatigue, “nervous system dysregulation” and all the rest of it, it’s this:

Your autonomic nervous system is miscalibrated.
And it can be miscalibrated for emotional reasons, physical reasons, or both.

Where we talk about the Autonomic Nervous System at all, most of the current conversation stops at the emotional layer – trauma, stress, attachment wounds, burnout.

The emotional layer is important, yes. But it is not the whole story.

There’s a second route into autonomic chaos that almost no one talks about:

Physiology itself can throw you into survival mode, even if you feel emotionally fine.

That’s what this article is about. If we’re going to fix the system that runs everything else, we need to be honest about how it gets broken in the first place and what we need to do to fix it.

What the autonomic nervous system actually does

The autonomic nervous system (ANS) is the background operating system that:

• controls heart rate and blood pressure

• regulates temperature

• redirects blood flow

• manages digestion and elimination

• sets the tone of muscles and fascia

• switches between fight/flight, freeze, and rest/repair

• decides how “safe” or “at risk” you are at any moment

It doesn’t ask you what you think.
It watches what’s happening inside and outside your body and acts accordingly.

Think of it as a pattern detector.
Not: “Am I happy?”
More: “Are we safe enough to repair, or do we need our energy to survive?”

If it keeps deciding “survive,” long enough, other normal bodily functions are switched off and our health starts to unravel.

Two routes into miscalibration

There are two big, overlapping ways the ANS gets stuck in survival mode:

1. Emotional / relational threat

2. Physical / physiological threat

Sometimes it’s one or the other.
Most of the time, it’s both.

Let’s separate them for a moment, because the repair tools for each are not identical.

Route 1: Emotional / relational miscalibration

This is the territory trauma therapists talk about.

The nervous system learns “how safe the world is” from:

• how caregivers respond

• whether anyone co-regulates with us

• whether we’re believed

• whether our feelings are allowed

• whether our needs are “too much”

• whether home feels steady or volatile

If you grow up with:

• emotional unpredictability

• being shamed, ignored, or mocked

• walking on eggshells

• no reliable comfort

• no one to help you downshift

…your ANS will quite sensibly decide:
“The world is not safe. Stay ready.”

That produces:

• chronic hypervigilance

• shallow, restless sleep

• never fully relaxing

• scanning for danger (even when nothing is wrong)

• dread without a clear cause

You can be successful, functional, clever – and never actually feel off duty inside your own skin.

Meditation, therapy, relational repair, decent friendships, safe touch, and honest conversations help here because they change the story the body is living in.

That’s emotional ANS recalibration.

But there’s another side.

Route 2: Physical / physiological miscalibration

Now for the part that’s much less discussed:

The ANS can be driven into permanent threat mode by pure physiology, even if your emotional life is relatively calm.

For example:

• chronic low ATP (mitochondria underpowered)

• long-term viral or bacterial infections

• long COVID, ME/CFS, post-viral syndromes

• persistent biofilms and inflammation

• unstable blood sugar

• chronic pain signalling

• temperature dysregulation

• baroreceptor and blood pressure weirdness

• EMF sensitivity, chemical sensitivity, food neurotoxins

• chronic sleep deprivation from physical causes

• ongoing oxygenation issues

From the ANS point of view, this is not “medical trivia.” It’s existential.

The body quietly logs:

• “We never have enough energy.”

• “We can’t regulate heat properly.”

• “Blood pressure is unstable.”

• “Tissues hurt even when nothing’s happening.”

So the ANS concludes:

“The internal environment is unsafe. Do not stand down.”

Now you can have:

• a basically okay emotional life

• zero dramatic trauma story

• a sense of being resilient, practical, stoic

…and still have an autonomic nervous system running a constant background script of:
“You are not safe in your own body.”

That’s physiological ANS miscalibration.

No amount of mindset work or spiritual bypassing will fix that by itself.
You have to repair the physiology.

Why this distinction matters

Because if you mix the two up, you get nonsense like:

• “You just need to calm down.”

• “Maybe you should try gratitude.”

• “Have you tried meditating more?”

• “You’re anxious, that’s why your heart races.”

• “Just do cold plunges and breathwork; it resets the vagus.”

Sometimes those things help.
Sometimes they are exactly the wrong thing.

Here’s the brutal but useful truth:

• You cannot meditate your way out of mitochondrial collapse.

• You cannot ice-bath your way out of a nervous system that already thinks it’s dying.

• You cannot breathwork away a body that literally does not have enough ATP to feel safe.

Equally:

• You cannot supplement your way out of attachment terror.

• You cannot polyphenol your way out of never having felt safe with another human being.

If the miscalibration is mainly emotional, you need emotional repair.
If it’s mainly physiological, you need physiological repair.
If it’s both (and with chronic illness it usually is), you need both sets of tools.

Emotional cues vs physical cues: two different toolkits

You can think of ANS recalibration as having two main “libraries” of cues.

They overlap, but they are not the same.

1. Emotional / relational cues (changing the story)

These are cues that say:

“You are safe with others now.”

They include:

• Being seen, believed, and not fixed

• Safe touch and co-regulation

• Genuine companionship

• Honest “me too” conversations

• Gentle, non-performative meditation

• Slow, present creative work

• Rituals that say “I’m allowed to exist as I am”

• A voice in your life that doesn’t minimise or gaslight your experience

These work at the cortical and limbic levels: they tell your brain that the social world is no longer hostile.

2. Physical / physiological cues (changing the body’s readings)

These are cues that say:

“Your internal environment is no longer an immediate threat.”

They include:

• Warmth instead of shock

• Long, soft exhalations

• Gentle micro-movements that soften fascial bracing

• Stable blood sugar and regular fuel

• No wild swings in temperature

• Minimising exposure to known irritants (MSG, certain chemicals, etc.)

• Building up sleep depth even in tiny increments

• Rest that is actually rest, not just lying still while wired

• Pain interventions that lower background alarm signals

These don’t care whether you feel emotionally enlightened.
They care whether the internal sensor data stops screaming “danger.”

A word about cold plunges and other fashionable shocks

This is where the cultural story has gone badly off the rails.

We live in a world that already pushes most bodies towards:

• chronic fear

• chronic overdrive

• chronic under-recovery

Into that landscape, we’ve launched a wellness culture that says:

• “Shock yourself with ice water; it’s regulating.”

• “Push your system; stress makes you stronger.”

• “If you’re not pushing your body to its limit in the name of ‘wellness,’ you’re not serious.”

For a robust, well-resourced, non-ill body with decent mitochondrial function and a non-traumatised ANS, brief cold exposure may be stimulating and benign. The body gets scared, then recovers, and learns flexibility.

For a body that is already in physiological threat, with:

• low core temperature

• “anti-fever” patterns

• chronic pain

• long COVID

• fibro

• poor ATP availability

an ice bath is not a fun bio-hack.
It is simply more proof that the world is unsafe and unpredictable.

The ANS does not log that as “growth.”
It logs it as:
“Right. We were right to be afraid.”

If your system is already living one millimetre from shutdown, deliberately adding more terror signals is not brave, it’s unhelpful.

That doesn’t mean no-one should do cold exposure.
It means we stop pretending it is universally regulating for all bodies at all times.

If your ANS has been in a physiological chokehold for years, the first line is usually:

• warmth

• stability

• predictability

• softness

Not gladiator training.

Taking the halo off “calming the nervous system”

The minute we make nervous system work into a moral issue – you’re good if you meditate, you’re bad if you don’t – we’ve missed the point.

You’re not calming your nervous system because you’ve become spiritually superior.

You’re recalibrating a piece of biological hardware that has been hammered by:

• early emotional conditions

• modern cultural insanity

• physical insults (infections, toxins, injuries, malnutrition, overwork)

There is nothing holy about it.
It’s maintenance.

Like cleaning a filter, not earning a halo.

So where does this leave us?

If you live in a chronically ill, post-viral, pain-riddled, exhausted, or “strangely wired” body, the questions become:

1. Where did my ANS learn that life is unsafe?

   • Was it mostly emotional?

   • Was it mostly physical?

   • Was it both?

2. What are the signals I’m sending my ANS now?

   • Am I trying to meditate on top of outright physiological chaos?

   • Am I trying to supplement on top of deep relational terror?

   • Am I asking it to tolerate extremes when it can’t yet handle the basics?

3. What cues does my system respond to today, in this phase?

   • Warmth or cold?

   • Stillness or micro-movement?

   • Solitude or co-regulation?

   • Silence or safe sound?

There is no generic correct answer.
There is only: what moves your particular system one notch closer to “safe enough to repair”?

The quiet heresy

The quiet heresy in all this is simple:

For many people with chronic illness, the first step of healing is not detox, not supplements, not mindset, not biohacking. It’s recalibrating an autonomic nervous system that has been in survival mode for years – emotionally, physically, or both.

And that recalibration is not a performance.
It’s not a brand.
It’s not a spiritual competition.

It’s as humble as:

• a slightly longer stride in the morning

• a tiny softening in the body

• a slightly deeper breath before sleep

• one less surge of inexplicable dread

• a body that is, very slowly, less afraid of existing.

  ---

Recalibrating the ANS Is Just the Start

Rebalancing the autonomic nervous system is the essential beginning. Without safety physiology, the body simply cannot sustain meaningful repair. But ANS recalibration is not the whole story. For many people, shifting back into parasympathetic mode is enough to trigger a natural healing cascade through the organs and pathways that were only temporarily suppressed — the real meaning behind the idea that “the body knows how to heal itself.

But not all systems rebound on their own.

Some parts of the body — the ones more damaged, depleted, or blocked — may need an additional nudge once the ANS is no longer holding everything in survival mode. The next step is learning which systems reboot on their own, and which ones need targeted support once safety has been restored.

Recommended Tool: Track Your Autonomic Nervous System in Real Time

One of the most actionable steps you can take right now is to start monitoring your autonomic nervous system volume and balance — not just heart rate or steps. The best-in-class device for this is the Garmin Fēnix 7 / Epix Pro (or whichever model you choose), offering advanced HRV tracking, recovery scores, and “Body Battery” metrics that integrate sympathetic and parasympathetic activity.

Here’s what you gain:

• Real-time feedback on whether your ANS is shifting toward repair mode or staying in survival mode.

• Daily trend data showing how your interventions (breathing, movement, micro-rest, pacing) are impacting your system.

• Objective insight into when your body is ready for more stress and when it still needs gentle support.

• A measurable baseline, so you can visibly track the progress of your ANS recalibration instead of guessing.

If you’re serious about reset—this is a game-changer. Start with the device, give yourself 2–4 weeks of consistent tracking, and watch the subtle shifts appear on the screen. Then layer in your ANS exercises and any additional system-support work you choose.

My personal journey

For my own healing journey, I have to work with an ANS that locked into fear mode in early childhood and largely stayed there. I’ve also identified two other systems that fear mode dragged down over the years — and they will need extra attention to recover.

My next task is to:

• practice both the physical and emotional safety cues to bring my ANS back online — including using a smartwatch to see what actually works for my system

• work out the lifestyle shifts and nutritional support needed to bring other fragile systems back from the brink.

Even though this path is unique to me, the process may still be useful for anyone dealing with something similar.

If you think others may benefit from my articles and insights
please spread the message by sharing, re-stacking and subscribing.

Share

Subscribe now

If you would like to help me keep going despite my battle with serious ill health…
…a PayPal donation will be gratefully received. AI is putting me on a healing path that might even work - each day I get more optimistic that old systems that had shut down are booting back up again, but it does not come cheaply.

Help me help us all find our way home