It’s apple o’clock and this week I found myself wondering… is all exercise the same?

🍎 The Bite

“More pills then, is it doc?”

A 58yr old man sighs as he plods into the chair opposite me, still in his supermarket uniform from the night before.

This is the 4th time I’ve seen John since diagnosing him with high blood pressure and prediabetes. Before that he’d barely ever come to the doctors. And each time since, I’ve either increased or added a pill.

I feel a little pang of guilt because it’s like he knows the routine now.

And he’s not wrong. That is exactly what I’m thinking.

The numbers in front of me are hard to ignore. Blood pressure, BMI, HbA1c, cholesterol, alcohol units, diet... everything seems to be less than ideal.

I decide to take a different approach. The same one I’ve tried twice before, without much luck.

“What about exercise? Maybe if we cou-”

“Exercise!” He points at his overalls, then his watch. “I did 12,000 steps yesterday.”

After he leaves (with another pill) I plan to check my own watch later that day…

5,884 steps.

Not even half of John’s total.

So why am I the one telling him to do more?

🍏 The Core

I came across a study recently that made me think about John.

It looked at 74 studies and more than 4 million people, asking a simple question:

Is physical activity at work the same as physical activity in your leisure time?

The answer seemed to be... maybe not…

People who were active in their free time had a lower risk of dementia. Walking for pleasure. Gardening. Swimming. Sport. Dancing. The usual things we think of as exercise.

But activity done as part of someone’s job didn’t seem to have the same benefit. In fact, it was linked with a higher risk.

That doesn’t mean being on your feet at work is bad for you. This type of research can’t prove that. And it certainly doesn’t mean John’s 12,000 steps are pointless.

But it does make you wonder whether a step is always just a step.

At work, those steps might come with a tight schedule, a demanding manager, sore feet and an aching back. They might be repetitive. They might happen at 10pm, when you’d rather be at home.

You don’t finish a shift feeling healthy and energised. You finish it exhausted.

Movement you choose can feel very different. A walk with a friend. A swim. A bike ride. A bit of gardening. It might be fewer steps, but it can come with fresh air, enjoyment, conversation and a chance to switch your brain off.

So maybe John isn’t missing movement.

Maybe he needs to find some movement that belongs to him.

🍏 The Seed

Here’s a thought...

When it comes to exercise, maybe the benefit isn’t just what it does to our bodies. Maybe it’s also how it makes us feel.

A round of golf with a friend might leave you tired... but it might also get you outside, give you a laugh, give you a reason to do it again next week.

A long shift on your feet can give you more steps on your watch than the golf session ever could. But perhaps the repetitive nature of it, checking the clock to see how long is left, then arriving home completely drained... that’s the difference.

It’s almost like movement you choose can give something back, whereas compulsory movement can take something away.

But me telling you to do more exercise when you’re already exhausted doesn’t really help. And the truth is, I don’t have the answer for John.

Maybe just raising the question is a start though...

What kind of movement restores you... rather than drains you?

From my orchard to yours,

Dr Quinn 🍏

It’s apple o’clock and this week I found myself… stressed by traffic.

🍎 The Bite

One hand on the steering wheel, the other around a coffee. It’s a Tuesday morning and I’m heading out to a practice a little further from town.

I’d left in good time. Plenty of it. An audiobook is playing and, for a few minutes, the drive feels almost pleasant.

I glance at the sat nav.

Arriving 5 minutes early.

That’s odd, I’d expected at least 10.

No problem. I move into the fast lane and claw back a minute. Then the traffic ahead begins to bunch. Brake lights. More brake lights. I audibly groan. It’s one of those strange phantom motorway slowdowns where everybody eases off, nobody knows why, and eventually everything just… starts moving again.

But now the sat nav says I’m only 2 minutes early.

As I come into town, every set of lights seems to turn red just before I reach it. ‘Is this a joke?’ I hear myself saying out loud. I sit a little further forward in my seat. The audiobook is still playing, but I haven’t heard a word of it for a while.

I turn into the car park at exactly the right time.

And yet, as I switch off the engine, I let out a breath and notice that my shoulders are up, my hands are tight and my brow is furrowed.

Somewhere during a perfectly ordinary 45 minute drive, my body had decided this was an emergency.

🍏 The Core

It made me wonder, is it just me?

To feel that tense, that rushed, because of a few minutes of slow moving traffic?

It turns out, you probably do too!

In one study, researchers stopped 310 drivers at petrol stations and compared those who had just been driving through heavy congestion with those on clearer roads. The drivers caught in traffic had higher blood pressure readings and the longer they had spent in it, the higher those readings tended to be.

It’s not that traffic is dangerous. Or that one frustrating journey gives you permanent high blood pressure.

It’s that your body doesn’t really distinguish between a threat you can fight and one you can’t do anything about.

When we feel under pressure, our body releases adrenaline. The heart beats harder. Blood pressure rises. Muscles are tensed. If the feeling carries on, cortisol helps keep us alert and fuelled.

Brilliant if you need to run from danger.

Not so helpful when the danger is a red light, a queue of cars and a sat nav moving your arrival time back by 3 minutes.

And it isn’t just one study: Researchers following more than 26,000 workers in England found that longer commutes were linked with greater strain, poorer mental health and less satisfaction with the time people had outside work.

That doesn’t mean a long commute is a bad decision. People take them for all sorts of good reasons.

But it is a reminder that the body keeps score of more than the big things.

Sometimes it is quietly responding to the small things too.

🍏 The Seed

That morning, the thing that surprised me wasn’t that traffic had stressed me.

It was that I hadn’t really noticed the changes happening in my body.

And I wonder how often does that happen?

The rush to get the children out of the door. The unread email. The slow supermarket queue. The phone that keeps buzzing during dinner. The alarming news article. None of them are disasters. But they can keep adding little signals of urgency to a body that was never designed to live in a permanent state of “hurry up”.

We can’t remove all of them. Nor should we try to turn life into some perfectly calm, frictionless existence.

But perhaps we can start by noticing.

What’s making your shoulders creep up? What’s making you speak a little faster? What are you still carrying after the moment itself has passed?

And importantly… is it really worth that level of stress?

Sometimes the first useful thing you can do for stress is simply recognise that it is there.

Try to have a wonderful stress free week… if you can!

From my orchard to yours,

Dr Quinn

It’s apple o’clock and this week I wondered… is there an age when a pill stops being worth taking?

🍎 The Bite

Click. Click. Click.

That’s how easy it is for me to prescribe pill after pill after pill.

Most are important. Some are lifesaving. But when those clicks accumulate over many years, part of me occasionally wonders…

Are they all still needed?

A few minutes later, an 80yr old man is sitting in front of me.

He looks at me almost pleadingly.

“Doctor, do I really have to take all these tablets?”

I look down the list.

Ramipril. “That’s controlling your blood pressure.”

Metformin. “That’s for your diabetes.”

Omeprazole. “That’s keeping your reflux at bay.”

Atorvastatin. “That lowers your cholesterol and helps prevent a heart attack.”

I think I’ve answered his question.

He knows I haven’t.

“But the statin, Doctor. I’m 80 years old! What good is it really doing me now?”

I open my mouth to answer and realise…

I’m not sure…

🍏 The Core

A new study has tried to answer his exact question.

Researchers recruited 1,180 people aged 75 or older who had been taking statins for years.

Half continued taking them.

Half stopped.

Within 3 months, the cholesterol levels of those who stopped had risen by around 50%.

But the researchers didn’t leave it there. They quietly watched what happened over the next 3 years.

You might expect more problems among those whose cholesterol had risen?

Or perhaps they felt better after taking one fewer tablet?

Neither was true.

After 3 years, 7.2% of those who stopped had died, compared with 7.9% of those who continued.

And there was no improvement in quality of life from stopping them either.

There was basically no difference at all between the two groups.

The study wasn’t perfect. It was too small to prove that stopping statins is completely safe, and we don’t know what might have happened over another 5 or 10 years.

But it does challenge the idea that there must be one correct answer for every older person.

Which leaves me back in the consultation room with that 80yr old man.

What do I tell him?

Do I stop his statin?

Or continue it?

🌱 The Seed

Perhaps the best way I can answer that question is to show you 2 real people.

Recently, I continued a statin in an 87yr old man.

He was remarkably well. The tablet wasn’t troubling him, and he was happy to continue it.

Around the same time, an 83yr old man and I decided to stop the hormonal treatment that had kept his metastatic prostate cancer remarkably well controlled for years.

The treatment was working.

But its side effects had become intolerable and taking away his quality of life.

Two older men.

Two important medications.

Two completely opposite directions.

And BOTH decisions were right for the person sitting in front of me.

There is no moment when you say:

“You’re 80 now. Time to stop these medicines.”

But neither should tablets continue forever simply because nobody has stopped to reconsider them.

Guidelines can tell us what a medicine usually does. They cannot tell us what matters most to YOU.

Sometimes the right decision is to stop.

Sometimes it’s to continue.

The important thing is that it remains a decision.

So, I’d love to know this week:

‘Have you ever had a frank discussion about stopping some medications?’

Oh, and perhaps it goes without saying, but please don’t stop any medications without talking it through your doctor first!

Have a wonderful week, everyone.

From my Orchard to yours,

Dr Quinn 🍏

It’s apple o’clock and this week I found myself thinking about... the problem with blood pressure cuffs

🍏 The Bite

A man in his 50s comes into my surgery. Nice bloke. A little nervous, perhaps, but we’re chatting through the problem he booked the appointment for and everything seems perfectly fine.

As things are wrapping up, I reach for the blood pressure machine.

“Before you go, let’s quickly check your blood pressure.”

He looks at the cuff.

Then leans back in his chair. Jaw clenched.

“I can’t do that.”

I pause. “What do you mean?”

“I know what’s going to happen. The moment that thing starts squeezing my arm, my blood pressure goes through the roof. I’m not putting it on. Not here. Not at home. Nowhere.”

I try to reassure him, but he has clearly made up his mind.

And now we have a problem.

High blood pressure usually causes no symptoms. Without measuring it, neither of us knows whether his is dangerously high.

But if the sight of the cuff makes him so anxious that his reading shoots up...

Even if I could measure it would I be measuring his blood pressure... or measuring his fear?

Later, I search the reliable, usual places: NHS guidance, NICE, the American Heart Association…

I’m looking for an answer to a simple question:

How do you measure someone’s blood pressure when they cannot tolerate a cuff?

I find advice about taking readings at home. Advice about sitting quietly. Advice about 24 hour monitors.

All of it involves a cuff.

There is no alternative.

Surely, after more than 100 years, somebody must have found another way?

🍎 The Core

Eventually, I found something.

A technology that claims it can measure your blood pressure using nothing but your phone’s camera.

No cuff. No watch. No gadget attached to your body.

Just a phone placed in front of you for 30 seconds.

I’ll be honest, I chuckled and rolled my eyes.

Another wellness app promising the world.

But then I saw it was regulated as a genuine medical device, so I looked a little deeper.

Every time your heart beats, a tiny wave of blood travels through the vessels in your face.

As they fill with blood, the colour of your skin changes very slightly.

Not enough for you or me to see.

But enough for a modern phone camera to detect.

The software compares those tiny changes with patterns from thousands of previous blood pressure readings, then calculates what your blood pressure is most likely to be.

That is the important word:

Likely.

It is not squeezing an artery and directly measuring the pressure, as a cuff does.

It’s looking at the clues blood pressure leaves behind and making a very clever estimate.

So I decided to test it.

I sat quietly for 5 minutes, then checked my blood pressure 3 ways: using the traditional method, my usual home monitor and finally, the phone.

When I put the readings side by side, they were remarkably close.

Close enough that I checked them again.

It’s not perfect; poor lighting, movement, tremor, poor circulation and an irregular heartbeat can all make the estimate less reliable.

That’s why, for now, a validated upper-arm blood pressure monitor remains the one I would use for important medical decisions.

So please don’t throw your cuff away.

But for the man sitting in front of me that day, this is the first thing I have found that genuinely feels like an answer.

Not a replacement for the cuff.

An alternative for the people the cuff cannot reach.

If you’re interested in looking it up, the technology is called Lifelight. It has been tested in thousands of people and is regulated as a Class IIa medical device. I have no connection with the company whatsoever; I simply found the technology fascinating.

🌱 The Seed

The thing that stayed with me this week wasn’t really the phone.

It was the blood pressure cuff.

Because the cuff is a brilliant piece of technology.

It’s inexpensive. It’s accurate. It’s helped doctors detect high blood pressure and prevent countless strokes, heart attacks and kidney problems.

But for the man sitting in front of me that day… it was useless.

Not because it didn’t work. But because he couldn’t use it.

And I think that is something we sometimes forget when we talk about progress.

The best solution on paper is not always the best solution for the person in front of you.

A pill only works if someone can take it.

A hearing aid only helps if someone will wear it.

Health advice only changes a life if it fits into that person’s actual life.

And a blood pressure monitor is only useful if somebody can bring themselves to put it on their arm.

Perhaps that is the real promise of technology.

Not more gadgets.

Not more numbers.

Not turning every healthy person into a patient.

But finding another way in when the usual way is closed.

Have you ever found a health tool, piece of advice or treatment that worked brilliantly for other people, but simply didn’t work for you?

Hit reply and let me know. I read every one.

Have a wonderful week.

From my Orchard to yours,

Dr Quinn 🍏

It’s apple o’clock and this week I found myself... correcting a prostate

🍎 The Bite

“It’s my prostate, doc.”

A 70yr old man sits down opposite me and launches straight in.

For the next 5 minutes I barely say a word.

He tells me everything. His toilet habits. The tablets he’s tried. Tamsulosin. Finasteride. The natural remedies that haven’t worked. What he’s read about enlarged prostates. His thoughts on PSA tests.

Eventually he reaches the end of his story with a sigh.

“I’d like a referral for an operation, please. What do you think?”

He gets his breath back and looks at me expectantly.

It’s the first opportunity I’ve had to speak.

I smile and say,

“But this isn’t your prostate.”

🍎 The Core

I see this all the time. Patients AND Clinicians are guilty of it.

People blaming a prostate for the sins of the bladder.

This man, like many men and women I see, actually had an overactive bladder.

Here’s the simplest way I think about it.

An enlarged prostate is a plumbing problem.

An overactive bladder is a timing problem.

With a prostate problem, you’re trying to pee through a narrowed pipe. The flow is weaker, it takes longer to empty, and there’s often a trickle and a dribble at the end. Imagine trying to wee through a straw.

An overactive bladder is different.

Everything’s fine... until suddenly your bladder starts shouting,

“We’re going. NOW!”

That’s what doctors call urgency.

Or, in slightly less medical language...

If you gotta go… you GOTTA go.

When someone describes that feeling to me, I start thinking about the bladder rather than just the prostate.

The good news is that it’s often very treatable. Sometimes it’s simple things like cutting back on caffeine, avoiding bladder irritants, drinking sensibly and retraining the bladder. Sometimes medication is needed too.

If you’d like a deeper explanation, Have a look at this video I made…

🌱 The Seed

They say that to assume, you make an ASS out U and ME.

It’s a bit cheesy... but I think there’s something in it.

I’ve made assumptions before. I’ve been absolutely convinced I was right... only to discover I wasn’t. It’s happened in medicine, and it’s happened in life.

Those moments are never comfortable.

But they’ve taught me something important.

It’s surprisingly easy to convince ourselves we’re right.

The difficult part isn’t being wrong. It’s having the humility to admit it and the curiosity to change your mind.

These days, whenever I feel certain about something, I try to hold myself back… avoid tunnel vision… keep an open mind

“What else could explain this?”

It doesn’t always change my mind.

But it stops me from closing it too early.

So I’m curious...

What’s something you’ve been absolutely convinced about... only to discover you were completely wrong?

I love hearing from you guys so feel free to get in touch. Have a wonderful week.

From my Orchard to yours,

Dr Quinn 🍏

It’s apple o’clock and this week I found myself... terrified of a spot

🍎 The Bite

‘Last patient’ I reassure myself. It had been one of those days where general practice reminds you how much humans carry.

A woman black and blue after years of abuse.

A patient whose emotions had completely overwhelmed her, angry that I couldn’t fix what was impossible to fix.

A man I’d known for five years finally losing his battle with pancreatic cancer.

And a little old lady who says my beard is lovely (it’s not all doom and gloom!).

‘Wendy Bloggs?’

A smiling woman in her forties follows me back to my clinic room, 10 year old son in tow, his head stuck in a computer game, thumbs on autopilot

‘How can I help?’

‘It’s just a quick one doctor, this mole.. I hate it. It’s been there for years and it keeps catching on my clothes. Do you think you could remove it for me’

I look at her leg and see a mole. Harmless. Easy. Half of me starts thinking of arriving home to 2 kids attacking me with hugs whilst the other half is about to start the usual minor surgery explanation when I see it.

There on her other leg

A different spot.

Oh no...

I look at them both... completely unaware... And then... I turn her life upside down with a sentence: ‘I’m more worried about this one...’

🍎 The Core

The thing that stayed with me about this appointment was that the concerning spot wasn’t the reason she came to see me.

She hadn’t noticed it.

And that’s one of the tricky things about a melanoma.

We are used to dangerous things announcing themselves.

We expect pain.

We expect bleeding.

We expect something sudden.

But melanoma is often quiet.

Subtle.

Easy to miss.

And because it can change slowly over time, our brains are very good at ignoring it. If something looks the same every day, we stop seeing it.

That’s why one of the simplest rules we use when looking at moles is the ABCDE rule (but remember melanomas don’t have to tick all these boxes!).

A is for Asymmetry.
B is for Border.
C is for Colour.
D is for Diameter.
E is for Evolution.

But if I could only give you one letter to remember, it would be E.

Evolution.

Change.

A mole or mark on your skin that is changing in any way is worth getting checked.

It’s usually nothing serious and in fact most things I see in clinic are completely harmless.

But spending a couple of minutes checking your skin, and getting something unusual looked at, could make a huge difference. I made a detailed video on this a while back, give it a look if you haven’t already…

🌱 The Seed

One of the things you learn early in medicine is that a consultation is rarely just about the thing written on the appointment request. There’s usually more underneath the surface.

Patients come in with a sore knee. Halfway through the conversation, you discover they haven’t slept properly for six months.

They come in asking about headaches. Then, after a few more questions, you find out they’re stressed, lost their job and their relationship is strained..

They book an appointment because of one thing. But then there’s something else underneath. Sometimes the booking reason is a means to open the door to a second issue but very often, the patient doesn’t even know there’s a second issue at all!

Doctors call this the ‘hidden agenda’ and a good doctor should be able to find it, even is you haven’t connected the dots yet yourself.

We are all very good at focusing on the obvious problem.

The thing that is annoying us today.

The thing that is easiest to point at.

But sometimes it’s worth asking ourselves:

“What’s actually underneath this?”

Is the argument really about the dishes left in the sink? Or is it about feeling unappreciated?

Is the tiredness really just getting older? Or has life lost meaning?

Is that small change in your body something you’ve simply adapted to noticing less?

This week’s lesson from me is twofold.

Pay attention to the things that have changed slowly enough for you to stop noticing them.

That applies to your life.

And it applies to your skin.

Take a few minutes this week to check your moles. Look for anything new or changing. And if something doesn’t look right, get it checked.

And feel free to click reply because I’m curious… what’s something you initially thought was one thing, but later realised was actually something else entirely?

Have a wonderful rest of the week.

From my Orchard to yours,

Dr Quinn 🍏

It’s apple o’clock and this week I found myself thinking about... a sundried tomato.

🍎 The Bite

It’s 30C (86F) degrees in my kitchen and I’m hungry. The last thing I’m doing is turning the oven on.

Then my shrivelled, dehydrated brain has a moment of genius...

Barbecue.

A couple of hours later I’m outside. The sun’s shining down on me. A cold beer is sweating in my hand while chicken, burgers and sausages hiss away on the grill.

I look down.

Not a single fruit or vegetable.

It feels like the perfect summer afternoon...

A few hours later I’ve got the meat sweats, the mother of all sunburns and what I swear already feels like tomorrow morning’s headache after just 2 beers.

And if you were a fly on the wall right then, looking down at that shrivelled sundried tomato of a man, you’d probably ask:

“How can someone who spends all week giving health advice end up like this?”

🍎 The Core

When I recovered I started thinking about why I had done it.

The strange thing was...

I knew better.

I knew the sun wasn’t doing my Irish skin any favours.

I knew the beer would dehydrate me further

I knew it was too much meat.

But in that moment, none of those thoughts were particularly loud.

Because health decisions are rarely made when we’re sitting calmly thinking about the future.

They’re made when we’re tired after work.

They’re made when we’re stressed and hungry

They’re made when friends are round and the sun is shining.

We often assume people make unhealthy choices because they don’t know enough, they lack the knowledge... they like the education.

But after years of talking to patients, I’m not convinced that’s true. Most people already know the basics.

The smoker knows smoking isn’t good for them.

The person who never exercises knows they should probably move more.

The person eating poorly usually knows they could improve their diet.

The problem isn’t knowing what to do... it’s doing it when real life gets in the way.

Our brains are hard wired to concentrate on the here and now and that doesn’t make us weak. It makes us human.

So relying on willpower isn’t enough. It’s about creating habits and routines that make the better choice easier when we’re tired, busy or distracted. I’ll come back to this in future newsletters I’m sure.

🌱 The Seed

The thing that stayed with me this week wasn’t actually the burger.

Or the beer.

Or even the sunburn.

It was how much pressure we put on ourselves to be perfect and the guilt we feel when we fail.

Health advice can sometimes make it feel like one bad decision ruins everything. But it doesn’t.

One barbecue doesn’t make you unhealthy.

One burger doesn’t undo months of good choices.

One missed workout doesn’t erase your progress.

Your health isn’t decided by one moment. It’s the accumulation of thousands.

The walk you take when nobody is watching.

The cigarette you don’t smoke.

The appointment you don’t ignore.

It’s ok to get things wrong occasionally. The danger is when the occasional becomes the everyday.

I know I make bad decisions now and again and I know I’m far from perfect. But perfect is impossible and so long as we try to get more things right than wrong... maybe it’s ok to end up as a sundried Irish tomato now and again.

My question for you this week

What’s something you know is good for your health, but still struggle to do consistently?

And as always I love to hear your advice and feedback on how I can improve both with the newsletter and the YouTube channel

Hit reply and let me know. I read every one.

Have a wonderful week.

From my Orchard to yours,

Dr Quinn 🍏

It’s apple o’clock and this week I found myself thinking... about the air.

🍏 The Bite

Walking through town this week, the strangest memory appeared out of nowhere.

I was about eight years old, standing in a pub with my dad. (Perfectly normal in the 1990s.)

Oasis was playing.

The carpet was sticky.

There was a coin resting on the pool table to claim “next game.”

But the thing I remember most wasn’t the music or the smell of stale beer.

It was the cigarette smoke.

Not just seeing it. Feeling it.

The room was filled with a grey haze you could almost reach out and touch. You certainly breathed it. You tasted it. At the time, none of us questioned it because it was simply... normal.

Then I snapped back to reality and almost walked straight into a lady in her seventies walking her Jack Russell (who was probably in his 70s too). She gave me the sort of look only an experienced dog walker can perfect, took a drag on her cigarette, and carried on.

The rest of my walk home I looked at the smokers… or the lack of them.

There wasn’t a cloud of cigarette smoke in sight.

Instead, there were sweet fruity clouds drifting from shiny metal tubes. Watermelon. Bubblegum. Blue raspberry. Every few minutes another young person exhaled what looked like a tiny steam train.

And suddenly I found myself wondering...

Have we cleaned the air? Or have we simply changed what we’re breathing?

🍎 The Core

When I got home, I did what every curious GP does.

I started reading.

Three things stood out.

Firstly, vaping is almost certainly less harmful than smoking. That’s why doctors often recommend it to smokers who are trying to quit. Cigarette smoke contains thousands of chemicals created by burning tobacco. Vapes don’t burn tobacco, so they expose people to far fewer of those toxins.

But here’s the important bit.

Less harmful doesn’t mean harmless.

Vape aerosols can still contain nicotine, ultrafine particles that reach deep into the lungs, heavy metals from the heating coil and other chemicals formed when the liquid is heated. We simply haven’t had long enough to know what breathing those in for 30 or 40 years might do.

The second thing I wondered about was everyone else.

What about passive vaping?

The reassuring news is that breathing in someone else’s vape appears to be much less risky than passive smoking because the levels of harmful chemicals released into the air are much lower.

But “much less risky” isn’t the same as “risk-free.”

If I had the choice, I’d still rather my children breathed fresh air than someone else’s bubblegum-flavoured vapour.

And finally, it made me think about the air we breathe every day.

Traffic fumes.

Wood burners.

Smoke.

Dust.

We spend so much time thinking about what we put into our stomachs, yet rarely stop to think about what we’re putting into our lungs.

I came away with one very simple rule:

If what you’re breathing isn’t clean air (or medicine prescribed to help your lungs) it’s probably something worth having less of, not more.

🌱 The Seed

The thing that’s stayed with me this week isn’t really vaping.

It’s how quickly “normal” changes.

Thirty years ago, a room full of cigarette smoke barely raised an eyebrow.

Today we’d struggle to believe it was ever accepted.

It makes me wonder what we’re surrounded by today that feels perfectly ordinary but, in another thirty years, people will look back on with complete disbelief.

One of the most useful habits I’ve learnt as a doctor is to occasionally ask myself:

“Have I accepted this because the evidence is good... or simply because it’s become familiar?”

One of my favourite parts of writing these emails is reading your replies, so I’m genuinely curious.

What do you think people will look back on in 30 years and wonder, “How did we ever think that was normal?”

Hit reply and let me know. I read every one.

Have a wonderful week.

From my Orchard to yours,

Dr Quinn 🍏

Subscribe now

It’s a big day! 🍎

You’re now part of the Three Apples Crew. That means you’ll be getting bite-sized health insights and practical tips straight from me, your friendly neighbourhood GP, Dr Quinn. I know your time is precious so I won’t waste it - each week I’ll keep it short and sweet, with just 3 apples of info to make you smile, scratch your head and hopefully not roll your eyes!

We’re family now and I intend this to be a 2 way street - I’ll listen to your thoughts, concerns and ideas and together we’ll make an unmissibale weekly email update

Welcome aboard, I can’t wait to get started!

.