The Food Phoenix

31/12/2025

Do you have any New Year’s resolutions?

I usually don’t because I just decide throughout the year to get stuff done when I need to.

But this year, I have my unfinished programme to complete and start supporting clients with. It’s called Ancient Body, Modern World.

What about you?

What is on your to-do list for the start of 2026?

When you tell people that you’re going to do something, you’re more likely to accomplish it. And more likely again if you have accountability buddies.

Hoping that this year, you achieve what you want and need.

29/12/2025

All in all you’re just another…

26/12/2025

Huh. Watercolours are hard!

24/12/2025

The darkest night has passed.

I'm writing this just after the solstice, and I know this season might feel complicated for you now. Maybe even hollow. Because Christmas is wrapped up in spirituality, and spirituality got tangled with the systems that betrayed you.

The profession you trusted. The guidelines you followed. The beliefs you built your life around.
When those collapse, what's left isn't just doubt. It's grief.

I know this because I lived it. I went from being a Cambridge-educated consultant paediatrician to someone who could no longer practise, after the slow realisation that much of what I had been taught was fundamentally untrue.

And when you step outside that structure, you're not just disagreed with. You're othered. The labels appear: science-denier, quack, dangerous.

Maybe you've worn those labels too.

But here's what I want you to know.

Your worth was never conditional on staying inside that system. You matter when you're tired. When you're ill. When you're resting. When you're uncertain. When you're rebuilding.

You matter because you exist.
The longest night is behind us now. Soon you'll notice the days lengthening. Light returns, even when we can't see it yet. And with light comes the possibility of healing. Not the kind that erases what happened, but the kind that lets you be tender with yourself.

My dad passed away a year ago. He loved Christmas carols. All year round. I miss him. I went to the Carols from King's once, while I was in Cambridge. I still watch it every year on TV. Some rituals survive, even when the institutions that held them don't.

I hope you can be with people you cherish and who cherish you this Christmas. And that you can hold a place in your heart for those who can't be with you this season.

Maybe that's what following the star has always meant. Not certainty. Not answers. Just the willingness to move toward something true, even in the dark.

Wishing you warmth, healing, and rest.

23/12/2025

21/12/2025

Nine years ago this November, I had an existential crisis that would've made Sartre proud:
If I were a character in a fairy story, I wasn't the knight in shining armor. I wasn't even the princess.

I was the gingerbread house.

And Big Pharma was the witch.

I was a consultant paediatrician. My patients were literal children, like Hansel and Gretel. And I'd spent my career unknowingly being the bait in a trap I didn't understand.

Burnout got me first. Then the moral injury: realising I'd been lied to throughout medical training. Then oxalate toxicity (never mentioned in med school, funny that).

The gadolinium contrast from a routine MRI in November 2016 was the final "F you" from the universe.

Within weeks, I felt like death warmed up with a slice of new onset diabetes. My liver function tests went slightly up. Blood pressure spiked.

My doctor, bless them, said they knew I thought the contrast made me sick, but they'd consulted their radiologist. You know, that doctor holed up in a dark room all day reading scans, studiously avoiding both patients and other specialists. Apparently they'd "never heard of problems with gadolinium in people with normal renal function."

Oh, and the magical threshold: you can't retain it unless you've had 4 contrasts.

Because obviously contrast agents can count. They're very smart that way.

(Let's also gloss over the fact that this logic is like saying you can't get pregnant from a one-night stand because the person isn't still inside you. The damage (or in this case, the baby) happened. Retention is irrelevant to consequences. But I digress.)

The tests that would've shown my mitochondria were completely banjaxed? Never ordered.

What saved me was understanding the mechanism beneath the medical gaslighting. And now I help clients interpret the evidence their doctors ignore.

I distilled nine years of clinical work, personal hell, and dark humor into 6.5 minutes.

This video is for you if:
❌ Your labs are "mostly normal" but you feel like death�❌ You've been labeled "functional neurological disorder" or "health anxiety"�❌ You've been told "it's probably stress" by doctors who've never seen you�❌ You KNOW something is catastrophically wrong but everyone keeps missing it

https://youtu.be/rN5P-iuI2No?si=cspxp73h0CMlUx_D

If this resonates, share it. Tag someone drowning in medical dismissal. And if you're ready to understand YOUR specific cascade, I have limited comprehensive health assessment slots. Link in comments.

You weren't imagining it. And the contrast agents can't actually count.

Your symptoms aren't random. They're not separate problems. And they're not your body betraying you.They're emergency rescue operations. Your body fighting t...

20/12/2025

Tomorrow is the winter solstice. Here's what your body knows that modern medicine doesn't:

For thousands of years, your ancestors' biology adapted to dramatic seasonal shifts. Shorter days meant:

*Less food available (natural fasting)
*Lower activity levels (conservation mode)
*Earlier sleep (melatonin production skyrockets)
*Reduced social demands

Your mitochondria, circadian rhythm, and stress response all evolved expecting this annual reset.

Modern life? Expects the same productivity in December as July. Same sleep schedule. Same social obligations. Same screen time. Same artificial light.

If you're struggling right now, with energy, mood, or motivation, you're not broken. You're an ancient body trying to function in a world that ignores biology.

The solstice is a reminder: sometimes the most healing thing you can do is stop fighting your design. Rest isn't failure. Darkness isn't depression. Slowness isn't laziness.

Your body is asking for what it's always needed. Maybe it's time to listen.

19/12/2025

Are you worrying about superflu?

Bless you.

HART did this post on it (and I’m loving the title).

The Sound Is Quite Atrocious, the Data Are Not

17/12/2025

Who your doctor thinks they are vs the reality

16/12/2025

Today makes a nice change from many of the previous days. At least there’s verifiable proof that the sun actually rose.

15/12/2025

Drug companies create avatars of doctors because that’s who has the prescribing authority and, by extension, the purchasing power.

They know all the buttons to press to get doctors to adopt the world view presented to them and they know where to go to influence doctors. Because they know doctors better than they know themselves.

So, drug companies do research that’ focuses on presenting avatars of patients to them.

Unlike the ICA that drug companies create of doctors, these patient avatars are often not accurate depictions of them. There are enough elements of the truth for them to be believable. But in essence, they’re straw men designed to sell products.

Patient experiences that deviate from the avatars are easily discounted, labelled as psychiatric or psychological and the patient experience subtly and imperceptibly undermined. Real patient feedback that steps outside the carefully crafted patient straw-man is interpreted as “health anxiety.”

Doctors’ focus is directed nimbly toward studies that rely on outcomes that don’t matter much to patients but are convincingly portrayed as being pivotal to patient wellbeing and outcomes. Surrogate markers and diagnoses dependent upon the patient straw-man.

Meanwhile, the things that patients genuinely care about, like their all-cause mortality, risk of admission to hospital, functional level, quality of life, happiness, ability to participate in society the way they want to, career progression and ability to work that isn’t impacted by fatigue, memory and cognitive issues and brain fog… Drug companies use misdirection in some of the finest examples of smoke and mirrors that you’ll come across to discredit these patient-centred outcomes and avoid addressing them while simultaneously claiming that their own “research” supersedes these. That numbers and images are the be-all and end-all. And that to question these numbers is heresy.

Drug companies use the power of authority and social proof to enforce internalisation of the patient straw-man until it becomes a doctor’s ideal patient avatar. The doctor’s apparent“true north” set by a broken compass.

If patients don’t automatically fit the straw-man, doctors will prescribe drugs that will alter their metabolism to force them to change enough until they do. Drugs that impair metabolism and create a cascade of side effects resulting in new symptoms and abnormal lab results that need more drugs to manage them. And if that doesn’t work, surgeons will take their scalpels and shave off enough to make them fit.

Drug companies jealously curate the walled garden that is nothing more than a cult based on unassailable faith in an industry that truth cannot reason with.

The goal of most modern medical and dietary research is not to improve health outcomes.

It’s not to further scientific proof. Make the unseen seen.

Instead, medical research is about marketing and profit.

It’s about power, status, and influence.

It’s a greed-based system that leaves ruined lives its wake , stepping over the bones of patients while cementing universal compliance and unquestioning belief.

Those who question will be asked to provide the evidence for anything they claim. Of course, the evidence will only be accepted if it comes from randomised controlled trials. Trials that cost millions to run. Trials that only drug companies and government funding can afford. Trials that neither the drug companies nor government want to see the light of day. See the problem?

Insisting on being presented with brand new evidence that runs contrary to drug companies for hypotheses that are already supported by many other lines of evidence that already exist isn’t usually about wanting to discover something new. It’s usually a defensive strategy pulled out when you can’t think of a good counter argument. And it’s certainly not scientific or sensible. Theoretical physicists focus on generating hypotheses. Experimental physicists design and perform the experiments to prove them. Good (and bad) ideas are patented because in real life, industry will take innovative concepts that aren’t protected and use them to make a mint.

Observations should be taken seriously. Hypotheses that fit with them should be proven. Anyone with the funding and interest in that field should want to do the research on it. The responsibility for doing and funding all the experimental proof isn’t up to the person who has the hypothesis. Even if they have the funding, it still doesn’t mean that they have the skill set necessary to plan and perform the experiments as well as others. If what we’re genuinely interested in is scientific truth, then we won’t create impossible hurdles to reach it.

And yet because money, power, status, legal repercussions, and egos are at stake, those who question the scientific dogma will often be called science deniers, ridiculed and ostracised.

The truth gets buried.

Science advances one funeral at a time.

13/12/2025

Been working on my programme, Ancient Body. Modern World.

Some of the concepts are hard to explain, particularly when it comes to my ATTRACT Theory of chronic illness, so I've been making some infographics. Not all of them are making the grade. In fact, a lot aren't. Here's one.