Good job. No arguing. Doctors like me were not surprised at the finding, given that the patients studied were asked to take a mixture of equine estrogens (extracted from horse urine) and synthetic progestins (fake progesterone). Pharma shills and underperforming doctors have always argued that these fake hormones are exactly the same as Mother Nature’s version!

But it is not so. 

The women taking the active drug combination were being hurt. On May 31, 2002, after a mean of 5.2 years of follow-up, the data and safety monitoring board recommended stopping the trial of estrogen plus progestin vs placebo because the test statistic for invasive breast cancer exceeded the stopping boundary for this adverse effect and the global index statistic made it clear that the risks exceeded any potential benefits.

In more precise wording, the researchers stated: The risk-benefit profile found in this trial is not consistent with the requirements for a viable intervention for primary prevention of chronic diseases, and the results indicate that this regimen should not be initiated or continued for primary prevention of CHD (coronary heart disease).

In other words even the trial was dangerous and too many women were being hurt by the hormone combo, so any further investigation was stopped. The findings were quite clear and you can read them here, published in JAMA:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/195120

It’s all very obvious and straightforward. The FDA issued warnings, Big Pharma howled with protest that the game was rigged (obviously) and, in due course, the dangers of these drugs were added to black box warnings in the package insert.

I remember watching with relief as prescribing of these drugs fell and fell and fell, BECAUSE WOMEN REFUSED TO TAKE THE MEDICATIONS. They were rightly frightened of blood clots, breast cancer and other complications, which had been deliberately played down.

Prescriptions dropped from 22.4 million prior to publication of the study, to 15 million at the beginning of 2003 (32% decline) and eventually down to 12.7 million by the end of 2003 (nearly halved).

This decline was particularly dramatic for Prempro (combination conjugated equine estrogen + medroxyprogesterone acetate, exactly as used in the trial), which fell by 80% by the end of 2003.

This HRT reduction persisted over the long term, changing clinical practice and lowering hormone therapy prevalence among menopausal women.

And you know what? There was a sharp drop in deaths due to breast cancers in women the following year!

[https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsr070105]

Hooray!

So you can imagine my surprise when the FDA walked back on all this. The FDA in late February approved label changes for six hormone replacement therapies (HRTs) that remove boxed warnings for cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, and probable dementia.

One way or another, you’ve got to admit the FDA are stupid or crooked: either they were wrong to say there was a problem and there wasn’t, or there is a problem and they are wrong to say there isn’t!

[Never mind the science, which shows conclusively there IS a problem]

Notwithstanding, following what they claim was a comprehensive literature review (they always say that and it’s meaningless), the agency initiated the process for the labelling change in November 2025.

The FDA has received criticism for how it approached the change. Over the last year, the agency has convened fewer advisory committee meetings while holding a handful of what critics call “look-alike” panels. In this case, rather than convene a typical advisory committee of thoroughly vetted experts, Commissioner Marty Makary, MD, MPH, handpicked a panel of experts who largely already agreed on removing the boxed warnings. 

These panels have been criticized a being improper, unbalanced and possibly even illegal.

“The public needs to understand that these are not true advisory committees like the FDA has held in the past,” C. Joseph Ross Daval, JD, and Aaron Kesselheim, MD, JD, MPH, both of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, told MedPage Today in an email. “True advisory committees make recommendations the FDA doesn’t know in advance. Sometimes FDA overrules them, which can be controversial. The system isn’t perfect, but on balance it works pretty well. It promotes transparency and accountability. These expert panels offer none of that.”

It appears that expert panels may be failing to meet requirements of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), such as opening meetings to the public, publishing relevant documents, and announcing meetings in advance, Daval and Kesselheim noted. FACA also contains language aimed at ensuring that committee membership is fairly balanced and that advice “will not be inappropriately influenced by the appointing authority or by any special interest, but will instead be the result of the advisory committee’s independent judgment.”

[https://www.medpagetoday.com/washington-watch/fdageneral/119868]

What’s even more disturbing is that 29 drug companies have (so far) submitted proposed changes to HRT safety labelling at the FDA’s request!

I mean, what’s going on? Didn’t we all believe Makery was sympathetic to the MAHA cause? Now we should worry has he been “hacked” by Big Pharma. It’s an old story: the commissioner passes all sorts of bad judgements or even patently criminal approvals and then goes to a highly paid sinecure with one of the drug companies.

The move to ease the restrictions is apparently backed by the Menopause Society (TMS), which said the boxed warning “may have been a deterrent to the use of the low-dose vaginal estrogen, which is a safe and effective therapy for a condition that affects most menopausal women.”

But this is not about low dose vaginal estrogen; the concern is doctors going back to ladling out powerful and dangerous synthetic HRT. Out of 41 million eligible women ages 46 to 65, only an estimated 2 million received an HRT prescription in 2020, according to the FDA. Big Pharma obviously wants its profits back. They don’t waste money on research; they spend it on bribes to get what they want.

So the FDA produced a wimpy excuse: 

“Today’s action will allow women, working with their healthcare professionals, to make better-informed decisions about their treatment plan for menopause symptoms.” Which is a bald manipulative lie; women are now less well-informed, by deliberate intention. 

Oh yes, the warnings will still appear in the drug’s labeling, but lower down in the prescribing information where they probably won’t be seen!

What’s Better?

Bioidentical hormones, of course. That means hormones which are EXACTLY what your body secretes, nothing tricky, no added side chains, and NOT patented. There are lots of people swimming in the market and trying to sell you “bioidenticals”!

But a better idea, in my view, is my own “HRT” – herbal remedy from Thailand! (joke)

It’s called Pueraria mirifica. Mirifica means miracle, and it is! On Vivien’s suggestion I labelled ours as “PurificaTM” (very clever Viv) and you can check it out here.

To your good sense and good health,Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Alternative Doctor

True to its ridiculous history of attacking anything they didn’t think of first, medical orthodoxy has always viciously impugned any suggestion that electrical healing has validity and it’s been labeled charlatanism for the best part of a century. Now they are having to eat humble pie and admit that claims, all along, had some validity albeit in a rather hit and miss fashion until the advent of modern scientific trials.

We’re now learning to speak the electrical language of the body – and using it to develop treatments for diseases from arthritis to diabetes and possibly even cancer.

It’s no surprise to me, of course, nor should it be to anyone who knows of Robert O. Becker’s classic book The Body Electric. He first wrote vividly about experiments with salamanders, in which correctly applied electrical currents could stimulate the remarkable regrowth of whole limbs.¹ 

I predicted in the first edition of Virtual Medicine that this is the direction healing would be going and introduced the revolutionary Russian SCENAR device, which swept the world as a result. We’ll see more about that device in a subsequent chapter.

Cell migration and multiplication plays a key role in development and healing. Most research in this area, true to form, has been on chemical factors, totally ignoring the energy element (bioelectromagnetism). Now several studies have shown that applying electric fields can affect cell migration and division as well. 

Cells and tissues essentially function as chemical batteries, with positively charged potassium ions and negatively charged chloride ions flowing across membranes. This creates electric field patterns all over the body. When tissue is wounded this disrupts the battery, effectively short-circuiting it. 

Take, for example, a Scottish study, at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, looking into repair of the cornea (in the eye).

In a healthy eye, cells pump positively charged ions into the cornea and push negatively charged ions out, creating an electrical potential of 40 millivolts. But in damaged areas this voltage disappears, setting up an electric field between the damaged area and the surrounding corneal tissue. By enhancing or diminishing this electric field, scientists found they could speed up or slow down the rate of healing.² 

The conclusion: the electric field is the primary driver of the healing process. As one of the researchers stated, it’s a big step forward to realize that fields play an important part in healing. They are just so far behind the pioneers in this! ³ 

Nowhere is the old adage more true than in this domain of bioelectromagnetic fields and healing, that discovery goes through four stages; 

1. It’s quackery and nonsense 

2. There might be something in it 

3. There might be something in it but where’s the proof? 

4. We knew that all along!

A Little History

Electrotherapy has a long history. William Gilbert, the Cambridge mathematician who later read medicine and became Queen Elizabeth’s court physician in 1600, experimented with static electricity.

In 1757 John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, wrote in his diary of prescribing treatment with a specially made electrostatic machine for people “ill of various disorders: some of whom found an immediate, some a gradual cure”.

In 1882 James Wimshurst invented the machine bearing his eponymous name. 

By the end of the 19th century, the work of Faraday and many others had produced a host of convenient ways of generating electricity of various kinds: electrostatic, direct current and low-frequency and high-frequency alternating currents. Each had its advocates and to each was ascribed marvelous healing powers for every conceivable medical situation.

Magnetos proved more convenient to use than the Wimshurst and other electrostatic machines, which tended to be temperamental and intolerant of dust. Catalogues of the General Electric Company in the late 19th century had a number of such devices. Its 1893 catalogue illustrates nine magnetos, ranging from one 20 centimetres long, boxed in pine, to the Phoenix, boxed in mahogany with a dial “to measure strength”. Assorted electrodes “for foot, tooth, and ear, with plated handles” were available for the device.

Crank the handle and it generates a low-voltage alternating current. Instructions inside the lid claim that, when wound at the speed “most agreeable to the patient”, this magneto will treat no fewer than 50 ailments, from weak eyes to spinal and nervous diseases, debility, fits, paralysis and gout.

Another type of device was the induction coil, originally developed to detonate explosive charges. By 1888, GEC was offering induction coil apparatus for medical use, complete with bichromate battery, in a wooden case. By 1890 their range had grown to 10 models, with many variants, and electrodes engineered to treat particular parts of the body, from eye muscles to the spine. 

Early in the 20th century so-called “hydroelectric baths” became fashionable. A wooden or porcelain bath was fitted with plate electrodes. Sometimes medicines were added to the bathwater in the belief that the patient would thereby receive whole-body treatment through the skin, cataphoresis as it was called. Knowing what I know now, all these devices make sense and although they were not subject to modern-style scientific trials, there is little question they had benefit to some, at least equivalent to today’s pharmaceutical drugs.

I was pleasantly surprise in my research to find that the famous Mayfair chemists John Bell and Croydon, just around the corner from my former Harley Street clinic, at one time carried a range of electrotherapy devices. They even had their own workshop, making induction coil machines tailored to what the doctor wanted for his patients in terms of output, portability and price, and the electrodes necessary to deliver the current where it was needed.

Historically, as far back as 1890, the American Electro-Therapeutic Association conducted annual conferences on the therapeutic use of electricity and electrical devices by physicians on ailing patients.

The effect of an electrical current on the body depends on its intensity. At 25 milliamps, the current, if it lasts for about 20 seconds, can stop the heart beating, so they are not inherently safe (the electric chair operates on this principle). But below 10 milliamps, whether direct current from a battery or an alternating current at ordinary mains frequencies (50 to 60 hertz), the current can create a rather pleasing tingle.

Writing in New Scientist, David Fishlock, an avid collector of these early devices, tells us that in the 1920s, a version of the Tesla apparatus (see below), known as Roger’s Vitalator, began to make its appearance in barbers’ shops as a way of treating minor ailments, including bald patches and dandruff. The barber would fit one of a number of glass tubes into an ebonite holder and switch on, whereupon sparks sizzled from the tube to scratch and tickle the pate. The maker recommended it for 127 conditions, including sexual debility, impotence and breast development. That’s barbers for you!⁴ 

Fishlock asks the question: do black boxes emitting electricity or rays have a serious place in medicine? There is no doubt that the early inventions attracted the “snake-oil merchants”. As early as 1882, Silvanus Thompson, a fellow of the Royal Society and president of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, warned of the “gross impositions of the quacks and rogues who deal in the so-called magnetic appliances and disgrace alike the science of electricity and medicine while knowing nothing of either”. 

We shouldn’t worry. Don’t forget Lord Kelvin (1824-1907), the greatest scientist of his day, declared that x-rays were a hoax!

To learn about one of the most remarkable modern electronic healing devices available in the modern world (the Avazzia) go here.

[We’ll try and get the old purchase link, with its special discount, in case you want to purchase one]

And for amazing psychological transformations, again due to modern electronic wizardry, go here.

To your good health (and superior wisdom!),Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Alternative Doctor

References

1. Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric, Morrow, New York, 1985, pp. 994-102
2. Nature, vol 442, p 457
3. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI:10.1073/ pnas202235299)
4. New Scientist, 1957, 24 December 1994, p.58

The correct position, of course, is “We are going to do a study to find out the truth about….” Then at least there is a chance for the facts to emerge!

Sometimes, in reverse, the bias is that “We are going to prove that the cause isn’t (whatever)…” or “We are going to establish once and for that there is no connection between [X] and [Y].”

So all of that careful stuff exists within my mind and it was there, in the back of my head, when I read of an interesting study looking at causes of food allergies. This, you may remember, is my long suit, my wheelhouse! I was not called the world’s “Number One Allergy Detective” for no reason (Sunday Mail 1991).

The headline that caught my eye was “US, Australia Lead the World on Kids’ Food Allergy Rates.” The research was certainly interesting.

In a nutshell (no pun intended):

• The global incidence of food allergy among children by age 6 at 4.7%.

• Risk factors included early antibiotic use, Black race, early allergic conditions, parental migration before birth, delayed solid food introduction, and family history.

• Findings supported the concept that food allergy development is multifactorial, the researchers said.

Some 4.7% of children have at least one food allergy by age 6 years, according to a meta-analysis that spelled out an extensive list of credible risk factors. I disagree with that fundamentally but you need to bear in mind they are ONLY thinking of antibody-antigen mechanisms, completely ignoring what Arthur Coca described as “non-reaginic familiar food allergy”.

Arthur F. Coca (1875 – 1959), a top allergist-immunologist of his day, founder of The Journal of Immunology and was its editor from 1916 to 1948—so no lightweight—was well aware that food allergies sometimes run in families (without necessarily meaning it’s a genetic thing). But that very often there was no obvious chemical mechanism or pathway, like the antigen-antibody response.

The former is easily explained by the fact that meals tend to be identical in families, just by nature of habit: Moms, Grandmoms, Sisters and Aunties all tend to cook and eat the same way! It’s frequent exposure to foodstuffs that tends to build up this kind of food allergy or intolerance, so this is a very plausible mechanism for transfer. Hence “familial”.

Non-reaginic is a bit more technical but Coca was recognizing something I encountered daily: that without even recognizing WHY or HOW, it was demonstrable that certain foods would seriously upset an individual. There may be no obvious chemical mechanism; no reagents.

The rift grew to a gulf and now orthodox allergists deny there is any such phenomenon, a stupid view which leaves the poor patient without any effective help. He or she eats beef twice a week, gets migraines often and is told “It can’t be beef, you’re not allergic to beef.” It soon follows that the patient is therefore mistaken or making it up, then he or she must have a mental problem, a delusion that food gives him or her the migraines and then, next thing you know, “It’s all in your mind. I’m sending you to see a psychiatrist.”

[This is exactly what happened to me with a bitter public enemy of mine, who was an immunologist; he “tested” a patient for beef sensitivity by giving her a capsule of beef, double blind and when she didn’t react told her it was all nonsense. She needed psychiatric help. AND he tried unsuccessfully to get my license revoked or “struck off” as we say in Britain, because I subsequently helped her find out what was really wrong.]

Anyway, here goes with the recent published study, if you are still interested!

It was a meta-analysis which means they grouped a whole bunch of studies together

Across the 16 studies that confirmed allergy by direct food challenge, U.S. and Australian children appeared to face elevated risk, with incidence at 6.7% and 10.2%, respectively, Derek K. Chu, MD, PhD, of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and colleagues. 

Risk factors associated with at least a doubling in risk or 5 percentage point greater risk included:

Early life antibiotic use, Black race, early onset of allergic conditions like atopic dermatitis or wheezing, elevated skin transdermal water loss, parental migration before birth, delayed introduction of solid foods, and family history of food allergy or related allergies.

Arthur Coca had picked up on the transdermal water loss, calling attention to a condition called hyperhydrosis, which means sweating excessively. The treatment of the day was to open the neck and sever the sympathetic nerve plexus, which is to wreck the autonomic nervous system. How unbelievably crude.

The value of the study is that it advances the concept that the development of food allergy is multifactorial rather than solely driven by eczema or timing of allergen introduction.

The “strongest and most certain factors” precipitating food allergies included prior allergic conditions:

• Eczema within the first year of life 

• Allergic rhinitis 

• Wheeze 

• Severity of atopic dermatitis 

• Increased skin transepidermal water loss 

• Filaggrin gene sequence variations. Filaggrin is a skin protein and loss of competence is the cause of many allergic skins conditions, such as eczema.

Also important were oral allergen exposures. Delayed solid food introduction, such as peanut after age 12 months, was associated with more than double the odds of food allergy in childhood and a 6.8 percentage point risk difference.

Infant antibiotic use in the first month of life also strongly predicted food allergy development. In fact antibiotics anywhere in the first year or during gestation also predicted 32-39% higher relative risk.

Social and genetic risk factors did have an impact but relatively minor:

• Male sex

• Firstborn

• Family history of food allergy

• Parental migration (immigrant status)

• Black African descent

While cesarean delivery had a modest association with food allergy onset by age 6, associations weren’t significant for low birth weight, post-term birth, maternal diet, and stress during pregnancy.

And just to finish, Coca argued that hidden food allergies are the cause of almost every disease and disorder including heart attacks, asthma, constipation, diabetes, epilepsy, hypertension, indigestion, migraine and many others. Of course he was derided by colleagues but I know he was correct.

He also gave us the word atopy (atopic).

AND WHAT WAS THE MISSING QUESTION THEY DIDN’T ASK? Oh yes, I forgot that. Well, they did not look to see if vaccination is a trigger for developing food allergies, which it is. Or whether eating junk processed foods leads to food allergies, which it does!

They could have had the answer by asking me direct and saved a lot of money! Or Ted Randolph, Herbert Rinkel, Michael Zeller, William Rea, Jean Monro, Albert Rowe and a host of other pioneer doctors from the 50s, 60s and 70s.

To your good health,

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby

The Official Alternative Doctor

SOURCE DOCUMENT: 

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2844828

The study was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology/American College of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology Joint Task Force on Allergy Practice Parameters.

Note that Dr. Chu disclosed no relevant relationships with industry. Co-authors disclosed a wide range of conflicts of interest. How wide?

“Daydreaming” is such a dismissive little word, isn’t it? Sounds like the mind wandered off, tripped over a cloud, and came back with glitter on its face and nothing useful to report. But that’s only the verdict of a culture obsessed with bang-clunk surfaces. What if the so-called daydream isn’t a malfunction of attention… but a shift of location?

Because something very strange happens when you imagine.

Your body stays in the chair, sure. But your physiology changes. Your heart can speed up, slow down, tighten with fear, melt with love — all in response to something that is supposedly “not here.” The nervous system does not roll its eyes and say, “Relax, this is fictional.” It responds as if events are occurring. That alone should make us pause. The organism behaves as though experience is real. Maybe because, in some layer of reality, it is.

We act as though reality is a single stage set — one room, one timeline, one physical scene. But consciousness does not behave like it’s confined to a room. The moment you imagine, awareness relocates. You are no longer primarily identified with the chair, the walls, the clock. You are in the conversation, the landscape, the memory, the future scenario, the other person’s face. Your sense of “where I am” moves. And wherever awareness goes, experience unfolds.

Suppose you nod off in a comfortable chair and get the feeling your are drifting off, out of the window, across the lot and out into the forest. You can almost smell the pines! But then, it’s all imagination, isn’t it? But what if it isn’t? What if you really have gone “out of body” and doing a walkabout in spirit? 

Night dreams get more respect because the body is offline. Eyes closed, muscles still — fine, we’ll call that “another world.” But in the daytime, because the eyes are open, we assume the inner scene is fake. That’s an arbitrary rule. The only difference is bandwidth allocation. At night, almost all perceptual input comes from the inner field. By day, we run a split-screen: physical sensory data on one side, imaginal reality on the other.

But imaginal does not mean unreal. It means accessed through a different interface.

When you rehearse a conversation in your head, you’re not just pushing symbols around. You feel the tension. You sense the other person’s reactions. You try different responses and watch different outcomes ripple. That’s not nothing. It’s exploration. A kind of subtle travel. You’re navigating probability, relationship dynamics, emotional landscapes that exist as real patterns — just not made of wood, brick and plastic.

People say, “It’s all in your head,” as if the head were a trash bin of illusions. But the head is not a container of fantasies. It’s more like a receiver–transmitter, tuning into layers of experience that are not limited to the visible room. When you daydream, you may be touching memory, future potential, symbolic realms, shared emotional fields, or aspects of other minds. The inner world is not sealed off from the rest of existence; it’s another doorway into it.

And here’s the kicker: daydreams change outer life.

Ideas born in “just imagination” become buildings, books, relationships, revolutions. The so-called unreal scene shapes decisions, emotions, behaviors, and therefore the physical world. If something consistently reorganizes reality, calling it unreal is a stretch. It’s more like a subtle layer that precedes the dense one — a blueprint level.

So is daydreaming really dreaming?

Maybe both night dreams and daydreams are forms of travel through the same vast interior cosmos — only with different lighting conditions. In one, the outer world fades and the inner becomes the main stage. In the other, the inner slips between the cracks of the outer, like a second dimension woven through the first.

In Kreisonnetics we have a concept of the Three Universes. In brief there is the physical universe, your own universe and the others’ universe. We suppose the physical universe is the “real” one. We are taught that. But actually it’s an illusion, a completely delusory universe, held together by little more than tacky-tape and everyone’s agreement: it’s that way because we all think it is (we’ve been told that). That’s advanced physics!

But the only universe which is ACTUAL for each of us is our own private universe. It is unique to us and all true, to the degree we uphold it. Our own personal universe is actually sovereign, though we are taught we must subsume it to the common agreement (so-called reality)!

People dismiss internal truth because it can’t be measured with a ruler. But neither can love, meaning, intention, or identity — and these run the show. The imaginal realm may be one of the primary theaters of creation, where possibilities are touched before they harden into events.

You probably know the story that Albert Einstein came up with the basis for his remarkable theory or relativity by imagining himself riding on the end of a beam of light. It happened only in his universe. Yet we all now kowtow to his view of things and it is structural in the agreed universe (I balk at calling it the real universe, since cracks in his model are already appearing).

The inscription on the stand reads: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited whereas imagination embraces the entire world” (1929)

So think about this: next time the mind drifts, maybe it’s not drifting at all. Maybe awareness just slipped out the side door of the room and went somewhere else for a while, another dimension, another but equally real place!

“Of course it couldn’t have,” someone says. “It’s only pretend.”

Only.

That word has ruined more understanding than ignorance ever did.

Because pause for a second. Something did just happen. A situation formed. A person appeared. An action unfolded. Emotional tones attached themselves to it — curiosity, fear, desire, amusement, whatever came with the image. Your body may have shifted slightly. Your breathing may have changed. Muscles may have tightened or relaxed.

All from something that is supposedly “not happening.”

But what if the mistake is assuming that “happening” only applies to things made of furniture and skin?

The dismissal of daydreams happens because we’ve equated physical with real, and imaginal with fake. But the imaginal realm behaves less like fiction and more like a subtle layer of reality we dip into constantly. And I’ve already explained that what is “real” (physical) is just a quantum illusion; when you touch a table, there is almost nothing there!

So when someone says, “It’s just imagination,” they are really saying, “It’s not happening in the narrow band of dense physical matter we’re currently focused on.” That’s a much smaller claim than they think.

To your good health,Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

This piece was started 60 years ago! I was at med school in a tutorial class with the professor of psychiatry. He had us suppose a man was lying in bed and found himself drifting out the window, and down a drain outside. He began talking about the man’s “delusion” and when I said “Maybe it wasn’t a delusion but he really was drifting off,” the mediocrity of the professor’s response so disappointed me, I walked out of the class and never went back!

Have you noticed when people start banging on about some theme or quality it’s because they are abusing it? It’s like that is their attention-awareness but not necessarily because it’s their torch or standard but they are pushing the issue, to try and compensate.

I’d worry that an old folks home calling itself “dignity” retirement or similar would be the LAST place the old ones would be treated with dignity. Instead they would be feeding patients unsustainable food; cutting their freedom to zero, to make them easily manageable; and pumping them with drugs to keep them quiet and docile. The corporation is pushing the word to try and compensate, as I say.

Well, so it is with these people. A recent article in the medical press made it clear. A number of lawsuits have been filed against California’s Dignity Health for allegedly not notifying families of patient deaths. But worse: that its contracted storage facility failed to maintain appropriate temperatures, leaving unembalmed bodies to decompose for months or even years.

The latest lawsuit focuses on a man called Charles Wesley Harvey, who died June 2, 2022 at Dignity’s Mercy San Juan Medical Center, a 384-bed hospital in Sacramento. Harvey was transported to Mortuary Support Services of Northern California (MSSNC) and “sat decomposing in improper storage for years,” the lawsuit said, “like dozens of others before him and potentially hundreds after him.”

His family was not informed of his death until Nov. 28, 2025, the lawsuit said. OVER 3 YEARS LATER!

The suit, which refers to more than a dozen patients, also alleges that MSSNC stored the remains at temperatures over 45°F, the legal state-required threshold for a morgue.

Rachel Fiset, the attorney representing families in the class action suit, told MedPage Today she has seen pictures of bodies as they were stored, and that “none of these bodies were embalmed. You can’t believe it.”

Fiset said she doesn’t understand why MSSNC kept the bodies so long. Allegedly, Dignity was only paying for their storage for 60 days at $15 a day, she said.

“I have no idea what the incentive was for keeping all these bodies,” in one case for 3.5 years, Fiset said. “Something is going on, and I don’t know what it is yet.”

Lost In Physical Purgatory

It all made me think of Robin Cook’s exciting thriller Coma (made into a movie of that name), in which bodies of deliberately created brain-dead patients were being stored secretly in a deep facility, in order to harvest their organs for huge profits.

Some of the patients in the complaint are identified only with their first name and first letter of their last name. The complaint alleges that the hospital where they died failed to file death certificates within 8 days of the patient’s death as required by state regulations.

It also specified that the hospital failed to complete “the medical and health section data and the time of death … attested to by the physician and surgeon last in attendance” within 15 hours. The hospital entities in custody of the human remains are required to “prepare the certificate and register it with the local registrar, which also was not done.”

Dignity and MSSNC also failed to obtain an appropriate storage permit for any of the bodies named in the complaint, which is also required by state regulation.

“As a result, Mr. Harvey’s body as well as the body of every individual in the Decedent Group was lost in physical purgatory…” A bit melodramatic but listen, “They were no longer a patient of Dignity, and without the registration of a death certificate, they could not be found in any database of deceased at the county or state level.”

Yikes! 

Dignity operates six hospitals in the Sacramento area, and it is not clear in which hospitals, other than Mercy San Juan, the other patients named in the lawsuit died.

The lawsuit charges Dignity and its parent company Common Spirit Health with breach of contract, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligence, and negligent hiring and supervision, and demands a jury trial.

MSSNC (owner Michael Robert Lofton) did not reply to a request for comment. Dignity Health’s spokesman William Hodges said in an email with the usual fudging that its “goal is to provide the best care and support possible for patients and their families. Unfortunately, we are unable to comment on pending litigation.”

Even more startlingly State officials have filed disciplinary actions against Mercy San Juan three times already, in 2022, 2023 and 2024, for mishandling deceased patients’ bodies. This latest lawsuit alleges that Dignity failed to implement many of the corrections required.

In other words these are a couple of vile corporations, cynically ignoring complaints, disciplinary action or any sense of care or concern for patients and families. I hope this all goes on record and when the executives die, their bodies are left out on a hillside to rot, denied burial.

Previously, the families of three patients sued the hospital system in separate complaints. The family of Jessie Marie Peterson, 31, said they were told Jessie left Mercy San Juan against medical advice when in fact she had died, and was sent to storage “on Shelf Number Red 22 A and forgotten.” 

The mother of a Michael Gray claims in different lawsuit that she was never contacted about her son’s death on July 10, 2021, from an accidental overdose at Mercy San Juan, “despite having his cell phone, wallet, and identification with his current home address.” Gray’s body also was sent to the storage facility “where it was neither autopsied nor preserved.” 

This case was settled for an undisclosed amount. Bet you it would come out of the shareholder’s portion of profits, not the top executives’ ill-gotten gains.

A third lawsuit filed in April 2025 alleges that another Dignity Hospital, Mercy General in Sacramento, “did not take any action to notify” the family of Tonya Walker, who died Nov. 2, 2023, and did not issue a death certificate that would have triggered official notices to the police and government authorities.

“Walker’s body sat decomposing in improper storage for 7 months while Ms. Walker’s family scoured Sacramento’s darkest recesses hoping to find her,” according to the lawsuit.

Rachel Fiset, the attorney representing families, said her case includes findings “so egregious, with appalling violation after violation, with so much damage to these families. Whatever your belief in the afterlife is, this certainly is not part of it. This is not the way you envision going.”

Well said, Rachel.

Too bad most ghost stories are apocryphal. It would be lovely to think of these rascals been haunted and driven out of house and home by enraged phantoms, screaming for dignity in their nightmares.

Ooops. Am I being too harsh? Nah, just put it down to my quirky sense of humor!

To your health,Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

SOURCE REFERENCE:

Dignity Health Mismanaged Patient Remains, Lawsuit Claims

— After years, one body was “unrecognizable” due to alleged high temperatures

By Cheryl Clark, Contributing Writer, MedPage Today, January 30, 2026

What RFK jr. actually said was it was “a possibility”. He told USA Today that his spasmodic dysphonia “could be” due to taking flu shots. That’s cautious. That’s responsible. He stated in an interview that he took annual flu shots until the mid-1990s, then stopped in 2005 “when I began looking at the side effects.”

“I was preparing litigation against some of the flu shots several years ago and one of the entries that was listed on a lot of them was spasmodic dysphonia, which is an injury I have to my voice. That’s why my voice is so screwed up.” “

Do I know it was caused by the annual flu shot? I have no idea.”

When pressed by the interviewer, who asked if he suspected it was caused by the vaccine, he said it’s “a possibility.”

“It’s a potential culprit that I cannot rule out, but I can’t prove it,” he said. “I’d like to know. We should have that data but we don’t.”

MedPage Today flunkeys round on him again with a supposed analysis of the package inserts for the most popular flu vaccines showed that “none of them listed spasmodic dysphonia — or laryngeal dystonia, an alternative name for the condition — as a side effect.” 

Of course what they omit is that the warning WAS on the package inserts. It’s been removed.

Only one flu shot, FluLaval, listed “dysphonia” as a potential respiratory symptom, but this shot was approved in 2006, after Kennedy said he stopped taking flu shots. Of course this is tricky wording to make RFK look stupid or mistaken. But to me they shoot themselves in the foot. If this type of vaccine is shown to definitely cause spasmodic dysphonia, then it makes it very likely that the one RFK was subjected to would also cause the condition.

They’ve just covered it up, as they do.

That great conman Paul Offit, MD, of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who co-invented a rotavirus vaccine, takes a different line. He said package inserts typically mention any side effect that came up in a clinical trial, even if it was later shown not to be tied to the vaccine.

“Package inserts … are written by lawyers at companies in collaboration with lawyers at the FDA, and they fall under the general rubric of ‘failure to warn,'” Offit said. “They want to make sure that anything that was reported in the vaccinated group gets reported as a possible cause, even if it occurs at the same level in the placebo group.”

I doubt most honest or scientifically-minded doctors would declare the package inserts as bogus or misleading!

And guess what? When Offit’s own rotavirus vaccine RotaTeq® was in trial there were nine seizures in the vaccine group and two in the placebo group, “which was statistically significant.” Very significant. That should have stopped the product right there… but it didn’t of course. Too much money invested in development.

But once that vaccine was rolled out and given to millions of people,” claims Offit, “…You saw the incidence was the same in both groups.” Wonderful isn’t it, how cleverly drug manufacturers cause problem to simply disappear.

There are in fact many side-effects of RotaTeq®, most of them mild, like tummy upsets. But there are some very serious life-threatening problems, notably intussusception. This is a bowel obstruction where one part of the intestine literally “telescopes” (slides inside) into another. It’s not common but there is an increased risk after rotavirus vaccines, concentrated mostly in the first week (or up to ~21 days) after the first dose.

Also serious are sudden episodic severe abdominal pain/crying, vomiting, blood in stool (“currant jelly” stool), marked lethargy. If those show up after vaccination, clinicians generally want the baby assessed urgently. It rapidly becomes fatal.

More controversially Kawasaki disease was reported after RotaTeq® in post-marketing experience (so it appears in manufacturer safety language and labeling summaries).

Kawasaki disease (KD) is a rare, acute illness causing vasculitis (inflammation of blood vessels), primarily affecting children under 5. It is the leading cause of acquired heart disease in children in developed countries, characterized by persistent high fever (?5 days), rash, red eyes, swollen hands/feet, and strawberry tongue.

When researchers have looked systematically, reviews generally find low incidence and no convincing association, while also noting the need for large datasets. As I said, Big Pharma has this convenient way of making problems disappear and become “unproven” (by their own standards of course).

And there is another not-to-be-discussed problem, which is that live vaccines (RotaTeq® is live) will inevitably shed pathogens on the population and cause a lot of collateral sickness. Of course they consider that part of the price to pay, an entitlement of theirs, to make the population “safe”. The trouble is, children who are immune-compromized, through no fault of their  own, are thrown under the bus.

I’m not saying all this so much as to attack Offit (a man I revile) but to show the hypocrisy and double-science they use to try and discredit anyone who stands in the way of their obscene profits. Every statement of Kennedy’s is opposed, taken apart and supposedly discredited, because they want him out of the way. Otherwise he’s going to derail the gravy train and we’ll end up with healthy people again!

Do I need to remind you how bad things are? The USA in 2024 spent $5.3 trillion on health care, which works out to $15,474 per person, and is 18.0% of GDP.  Yet we are currently tabled at about 46th (males), 47th (females) in terms of overall health (the global health index). Indeed, various healthy life expectancy (HALE) analyses show the U.S. has declined sharply in global standing, with some research suggesting it has fallen into the 60s or lower for healthy life years compared with world peers.

In fact when it comes to “years lived with disability”, THERE ARE ONLY SIX COUNTRIES BEHIND US IN THE WORLD TABLE (204 countries).

Put another way, every dollar spent on the US Big Pharma healthcare system means more death and damage to the population. We are BUYING death and disability!

Go Bobby, go!

To your good health,

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

References:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024, December 20). Rotavirus Vaccine Safety. CDC. 

U.S. Food and Drug Administration. (2022). Package Insert — RotaTeq (Rotavirus Vaccine, Live, Oral, Pentavalent). FDA. 

Vesikari, T., Matson, D. O., Dennehy, P., Van Damme, P., Santosham, M., Rodriguez, Z., … Heaton, P. M. (2006). Safety and efficacy of a pentavalent human–bovine (WC3) reassortant rotavirus vaccine. The New England Journal of Medicine, 354(1), 23–33. 

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2007). Postmarketing monitoring of intussusception after RotaTeq vaccination—United States, February 1, 2006–February 15, 2007. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. 

World Health Organization, Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety. (n.d.). Rotavirus vaccines and intussusception. WHO. 

Patel, N. C., Hertel, P. M., Estes, M. K., De la Morena, M., Petru, A. M., Noroski, L. M., … Chinen, J. (2010). Vaccine-acquired rotavirus in infants with severe combined immunodeficiency. The New England Journal of Medicine, 362(4), 314–319. 

Mellone, N. G., & Carvalho, A. P. (2019). Kawasaki disease and the use of the rotavirus vaccine in children: A systematic review. Revista Paulista de Pediatria. 

https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/newsroom/videos/us-falling-global-health-rankings

And the competition is very fierce, there are literally millions of new books flooding onto Amazon (causing printing and shipping delays and all kinds of problems).

This is not the NY Times best-seller list I would point out, but it does have authenticity. Maybe you already know that you have to BUY your way to a slot on the NYT list! And it costs a lot of money ($250,000+, I’ve heard).

What’s more NGNW has garnered a lot of very positive reviews (4.9 of 5 stars!) It’s well worth going there to read some of the comments. You’ll understand right away that this is going to be a very HEALING book. Healing is my thing!

https://www.amazon.com/New-God-World-Visions-Scriptures/dp/1733478574/ref=sr_1_1

Many people have been waiting all their lives, in doubt and turmoil, for someone to give them permission to say “Get lost” to the old Biblical God, with his meddling, picking favorites, infanticide, genocide, threats, revenge and punishments. 

So where did this “New God” come from? Well, folks, think about it for just a minute: it has ALWAYS been there! I’m not attacking “God”, just pointing out the flaws in historical descriptions by misleading priest-devils and gatekeepers of the past, who want to protect their own powers by making God demanding, scary and threatening. I’m talking about a New God, who is more kindly and benign and, let’s be honest, more rational and understandable. 

For example, the New God has no gender. Trust me: there is no invisible misogynistic man up in the sky! And all attempts to re-market the Old God as a woman (Goddess) are doomed. Any supposed God which doesn’t have both masculine and feminine aspects is worthless. Male and female are balances and contrasts, like the Chinese Yin and Yang. You can no more have one without the other than you can have a one-sided coin!

Anyway, you may want to get yourself a copy, even if just to rage against it! You can do so here:

https://www.amazon.com/New-God-World-Visions-Scriptures/dp/1733478574/ref=sr_1_1

I have made a hardback version available because it’s truly a book to cherish and you will be reading and re-reading it a lot (maybe every Sunday morning, haha!)

10 key things readers will take away from New God New World

1. God is not a person, authority, judge, or external being—but a living metaphor for intelligence, creativity, and love itself.
Readers come away understanding that the old anthropomorphic God was never meant to be literal, and that clinging to that literalism has caused extraordinary damage.

2. Belief systems shape reality far more than most people realize.
The book makes clear that the God-image a culture holds directly influences its politics, medicine, sexuality, education, and capacity for compassion.

3. The old God model is not just outdated—it is actively harmful.
Readers realize, often for the first time, how fear-based theology produces obedience, guilt, violence, and intellectual stagnation rather than wisdom or love.

4. God does not require belief—only participation.
This is a relief to many readers: the divine is not something to “believe in” but something to live as—through curiosity, creativity, empathy, and presence.

5. Spiritual intelligence evolves just like biological intelligence.
The book reframes spirituality as an evolving system, not a frozen revelation, making room for science, art, mysticism, and reason to coexist.

6. Love is not a moral command—it is a natural state of alignment.
Readers leave with a sense that love is not something imposed from above, but what naturally arises when fear-based myths dissolve.

7. Religion can be outgrown without losing reverence or meaning.
One of the book’s quiet triumphs is showing readers they don’t have to choose between atheism and dogma; there is a third, far richer path.

8. Human beings are not broken, fallen, or sinful by nature.
The book dismantles the “original sin” narrative and replaces it with a vision of humanity as exploratory, creative, and fundamentally intact.

9. God-language should serve life, not control it.
Readers gain permission to update spiritual language so that it reflects modern understanding rather than ancient fear.

10. A new world requires a new God metaphor—or no future at all.
By the end, readers feel the urgency: outdated myths are not neutral. If we want a viable future, our deepest stories must evolve.

Many people might fear that abandoning the Old God means abandoning morality. How does this book address that fear? It starts from the premise that we are not broken but whole, good not evil, not treacherous but honest, not stupid but, yes, uniformed at times. People do what they think is right and bad things are mostly done in error, believing that a poor choice will somehow eventually lead to a good place.

There is one answer to all this; a simple answer; and it is this: always act from LOVE. Not imposters like greed, desire, want, or need… but LOVE. Real love will guide you.

Finally, and most important of all, this book answers the age-old quandary: How can a supposedly loving God, with infinite powers, allow tragedy and destruction to befall good people. We even have the term “an act of God” for something sudden, terrible, unpredictable and devastatingly destructive! I mean, c’mon!

This is Better

This is not a religion.

No rules to memorize.
No beliefs to defend.
No God demanding loyalty in exchange for love.

New God New World is a way of seeing where the Divine is not separate from life, intelligence, nature, or you.

Here, God is not frozen in ancient language.
God is alive—responsive, evolving, and intimately woven into reality itself.

You don’t need to convert.
You don’t need to repent.
You don’t need permission.

You only need honesty.

If the old stories never quite fitted, there’s nothing wrong with you.

It means you were built for what comes next.

To use our computer terminology:

God has been updated.

Bug fixes include: fear-based obedience, eternal punishment loops, and the belief that you are small, broken, or unworthy.

New features now gone live: direct knowing, embodied love, curiosity, creativity, and a radical trust in consciousness itself.

This software update doesn’t install through belief.
It installs through awareness.

Blessings to all.

To your good health,

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

PS That link again: https://www.amazon.com/New-God-World-Visions-Scriptures/dp/1733478574/ref=sr_1_1

Measuring Biological Aging

There is no single dial on the body that reads “You are 47.3 years old, biologically speaking.” Instead, we triangulate. We infer. We listen to multiple systems at once and look for points of convergence.

That said, we can now go far beyond the guesswork of old.

The first thing to understand is that biological age is not one thing. It is a composite signal emerging from many interacting systems. Any attempt to measure it with a single marker is guaranteed to be incomplete. Accuracy comes not from perfection, but from overlap—when different measures, drawn from different layers of biology, begin to tell the same story.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man re-imagined!

One of the most powerful approaches currently in use is epigenetic aging. This is based on DNA methylation patterns—chemical tags that sit on DNA and regulate which genes are turned on or off. These patterns change predictably with biological aging, but crucially, they change faster or slower depending on lifestyle, stress, illness, trauma, and environment.

Epigenetic clocks—such as those developed by Steve Horvath and others—compare an individual’s methylation profile to large population datasets to estimate biological age. When someone’s epigenetic age is higher than their calendar age, it correlates strongly with increased disease risk, frailty, and mortality. When it is lower, it correlates with resilience and longevity.

What makes epigenetic clocks compelling is not that they measure time, but that they measure cellular memory. They capture the imprint of lived experience on gene regulation. This is why they respond to interventions—diet, exercise, stress reduction, sleep, even psychosocial changes. The clock can slow. Sometimes it ticks backward.

Another major axis of measurement involves inflammatory burden. Chronic, low-grade inflammation—often called inflammaging—is one of the strongest drivers of biological aging. Markers such as C-reactive protein, interleukin-6, tumor necrosis factor-alpha, fibrinogen, and white blood cell ratios reveal whether the immune system is in a state of calm vigilance or chronic activation.

An immune system stuck in alert mode ages tissues faster. It degrades collagen, damages blood vessels, disrupts insulin signaling, and interferes with repair. Elevated inflammatory markers often predict biological age more accurately than calendar age ever could. 

The importance of the immune system is such that over 35 years ago, I wrote: “We live just as long as our immune systems will allow us”.

That came from the observation of AIDS victims, whose immune systems collapsed. They aged frighteningly fast, often dying within months but suddenly looking decades older.

Then there is metabolic age, which quietly governs how efficiently the body turns fuel into life. Measures like fasting insulin, insulin sensitivity (HOMA-IR), triglyceride-to-HDL ratios, HbA1c, lactate thresholds, and resting metabolic flexibility give insight into how “old” the metabolic machinery is behaving.

Cardiovascular measures also serve as remarkably accurate proxies for biological age. Arterial stiffness, pulse wave velocity, blood pressure variability, endothelial function, and heart rate variability reflect the condition of both blood vessels and the autonomic nervous system. A heart that recovers quickly, varies its rhythm fluidly, and responds gracefully to demand is biologically younger than one that plods, stiffens, and overreacts.

Heart rate variability, in particular, is fascinating because it bridges physiology and perception. It reflects vagal tone, emotional regulation, and nervous system flexibility. High variability correlates with youthfulness, resilience, and longevity. Low variability correlates with accelerated aging, chronic stress, and disease risk. The heart, it turns out, is an excellent historian.

There is also functional age, which medicine is slowly rediscovering after decades of obsession with lab values alone. Grip strength, gait speed, balance, reaction time, VO? max, recovery from exertion—these are not cosmetic metrics. They integrate muscle strength, nerve tone, cardiovascular vitality, and metabolic health into real-world performance.

How fast do you get tired? How fast do you recover? How confidently does your body move through space? These questions often predict mortality better than sophisticated imaging.

At the cellular level, markers of repair capacity matter enormously. Telomere length was once hyped as the aging marker, and while it is no longer considered enough on its own, it still tells an important part of the story. Telomeres shorten as cells divide, but their rate of shortening varies dramatically based on stress, inflammation, oxidative load, and lifestyle. Short telomeres are not destiny, but they do signal accumulated strain.

Equally important—but less commonly measured—are markers of mitochondrial health. ATP production efficiency, oxidative stress levels, mitochondrial DNA integrity, and metabolic byproducts reveal how energetically “young” cells are. Aging, at its core, is often an energy problem before it is a structural one.

Cognitive and neurological measures also belong in any serious assessment of biological age. Processing speed, working memory, sensory acuity, sleep architecture, and circadian rhythm robustness all decline with biological aging—but not inevitably with time. Brains, like bodies, age fastest under chronic threat and slowest under curiosity, safety, and engagement.

Here is the key point that often gets missed: no single test gives you biological age. Accuracy emerges from accumulated pattern recognition across systems. When epigenetics, inflammation, metabolism, cardiovascular function, and performance all point in the same direction, you are no longer guessing. You are listening to the body in stereo.

And there is an even deeper layer—one medicine is only beginning to acknowledge. Biological age is inseparable from nervous system state. A body that feels perpetually unsafe (high active stress) ages faster, regardless of diet or supplements. A body allowed to regularly enter deep parasympathetic repair modes slows aging across every measurable domain.

This is why two people with identical lab panels can age differently over time. One heals. One doesn’t. The difference is not compliance—it is coherence.

So how do we accurately measure biological age?

We triangulate it like a constellation. We track trends over time rather than relying on single numbers. We investigate whether the organism is becoming more resilient or more brittle, more adaptable or more reactive, more coherent or more fragmented.

Back to our first metaphor, let’s say calendar age tells you how many laps around the sun you’ve completed. Biological age tells you how intact the vehicle is—and whether it’s learning how to repair itself while still moving!

Identifying reliable biomarkers of aging is a current major goal in geroscience. Things have moved very fast in the last 2 decades!

Testing Biological Age

The most widely validated and scientifically accepted biological age tests are epigenetic clocks. These look at chemical tags on your DNA — especially DNA methylation — that change in very predictable ways as your body ages.

Unlike genetic sequences (which are fixed in your DNA), methylation patterns shift depending on life history: lifestyle, stress, diet, pollution, inflammation, and even social experiences leave detectable scars on your epigenome. By reading these patterns across hundreds to thousands of sites in the genome, algorithms can estimate your “biological age” relative to a population average.

The famous Horvath clock, developed by Dr. Steve Horvath, analyzes over 350 CpG sites (regions of DNA where methyl groups attach) and has a median error of only a few years compared to chronological age — remarkably precise for a biological process.  

Commercial tests like TruDiagnostic’s TruAge and myDNAge are based on this kind of analysis — you send a blood or saliva sample, and they return an estimate of your biological age along with personalized insights. 

Researchers have also developed variations like PhenoAge, GrimAge, and the DunedinPACE clock — each tuned to different aspects of aging (disease risk, mortality prediction, aging pace, etc.). 

Telomere Length Tests. Telomeres are protective caps at the ends of chromosomes that shorten with each cell division. Early aging research popularized telomere length as a proxy for biological age. Today, we know telomere tests are noisy and less predictive than epigenetic clocks — telomeres can vary widely between individuals and even fluctuate with temporary stressors — but they still supply useful context when interpreted alongside other biomarkers. 

Companies such as Life Length specialize in telomere diagnostic services, often combining telomere length with telomerase activity (the enzyme that rebuilds telomeres) for a richer picture. 

Blood-Based Biomarker Age and Machine Learning Models. Some commercial and research programs don’t rely solely on DNA at all. Instead, they analyze panels of blood biomarkers and use machine learning (AI) to derive an age estimate based on how your physiology compares to large datasets.

These can include patterns across:

• Inflammatory markers like C-reactive protein

• Metabolic markers like glucose and triglycerides

• Hormones, cytokines, and more

Such tests — sometimes called proteomic or deep aging clocks — can use hundreds of circulating proteins and cell counts to estimate biological age and even predict disease risk before symptoms appear. 

Composite Age Scores with Frailty and Functional Metrics

Some approaches combine clinical measurements (like blood pressure, glucose regulation, body composition) with functional performance (strength, gait speed, cognitive tests) into composite indices that estimate biological age.

This is less molecular but very practical for assessing overall physiological reserve and real-world function. 

Emerging and Multimodal Tests

Cutting-edge methods blend multiple data layers — epigenetics + proteomics + metabolomics + phenotypic signs — often refined by with AI models to give an age estimation beyond what any single marker can offer. 

None of these tests claim to measure a literal “number of years lived,” because that wouldn’t be biological. Instead, they measure patterns that correlate with:

• Cellular maintenance capacity

• Immune function

• Metabolic resilience

• Inflammatory burden

• Epigenetic change rates

• Disease susceptibility trajectories

In short, they measure how your body is functioning relative to its chronological peers, which is far more meaningful for health outcomes than the number of candles on your birthday cake.

Accuracy and Real World Use

Epigenetic clocks currently represent the most scientifically robust measure of biological age available — but it’s not perfect. Different clocks can give slightly different ages, and results are influenced by which tissues are sampled (blood vs saliva, etc.), the model used, and technical variability in lab processes (no two lab give identical results). 

Many experts caution that these tests are predictive tools, not definitive statements of destiny. But compared to traditional age markers like telomeres, they are far more predictive of disease risk and mortality patterns. 

Poetically speaking, what all these tests do is read the echo of your life in your biology. They read the impact left by nutrition, trauma, adaptation, stress management, repair capacity, and systemic resilience. They capture your physiological biography rather than your chronological biography.

All of them, in their own way, try to answer one question: Is your biology older, younger, or on track — and what does that mean for your future health?

To Your Good Health,Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

Calendar age is the number stamped on your passport and defined by how many times the earth has gone round the sun since you were born. It’s what we normally mean when we refer to a person’s age.

But in terms of health, and especially longevity, we need to look at things slightly differently. Here we are concerned with how vibrant your organs and tissues are and how long they will last, starting from NOW! We call this “biological age.”

Say a person is sixty years old (calendar age) but has lived a healthy life, done all the right things and not “burned the candle at both ends”. Such a person’s body might be in roughly the same biological shape as the average fifty year-old. That would mean he or she has a biological “age” of fifty and is 10 years in credit for a long and healthy life. This individual might expect to live well past 80, maybe even 90 – 95 or more.

But another kind of sixty year-old individual who smokes, eats badly and doesn’t take nearly enough exercize might be in similar condition to someone healthy but 20 years older. Chances are her or she will die younger than the first individual, maybe a lot younger. Maybe very soon, in fact!

See it’s easy, really. 

Your calendar age is exact: you have a certificate, given when you were born, that tells us exactly how “old” you are. But how old you body “feels” and what sort of dynamic shape it’s in—actually more important—is not nearly so easy to establish.

It depends on what is happening within: are your organs doing the job as well a they should? Is some of you deteriorating, while other parts are not? See, that is important because if you are healthy in every way EXCEPT your heart is stressed, swollen and beating irregularly at times, then you might die quite soon, while MOST of the rest of you is in good shape.

Maybe everything is OK in the heart and blood vessels department but you start to lose your mental skills and grow a bit dotty over the years. That happens, but clearly the person is defined by the onset of dementia, not by heart health! He or she will be “old” before their time.

[It’s a tricky example because dementia is unlikely without considerable deterioration of the circulatory system, even if it’s undetected for a time. The blood brings nutrients and carries away toxins, so any under-performance of the circulatory system (properly called the cardio-vascular system) will have widespread aging consequences, but you get the idea].

Biological aging is intimate, cellular, and deeply personal. It unfolds not by birthdays but by biochemical conversations happening in your tissues, your mitochondria, your epigenome, your immune system, and—if we’re being honest—your nervous system’s relationship with meaning, stress, safety, and love.

To confuse the two is one of modern culture’s great conceptual errors.

Calendar age measures time elapsed since birth. That’s it. It does not care whether you slept, loved, healed, raged, starved, meditated, or laughed yourself senseless. It ticks forward with the same indifference whether you are flourishing or unraveling. Two people born on the same day share a calendar age but may inhabit bodies that differ by decades in functional capacity, resilience, inflammation, cognitive clarity, and regenerative potential.

Biological age, by contrast, asks a far more interesting question: How old is your body behaving?

It is an emergent property, not a single number. It arises from the cumulative state of cellular repair, metabolic flexibility, immune competence, hormonal signaling, mitochondrial efficiency, epigenetic regulation, and nervous system tone. It is shaped not just by genetics, but by environment, nutrition, trauma, beliefs, relationships, purpose, sleep, movement, toxins, and the stories the body has been forced to tell itself in order to survive.

Calendar age is destiny only if you believe in clocks more than cells.

At the biological level, aging is damage accumulating faster than repair. When repair keeps pace, aging slows, stalls, or even partially reverses. Yes, that is possible.

When damage overwhelms repair, biological aging accelerates—sometimes dramatically. This is why a person can “age” ten biological years in five calendar years under chronic stress, illness, or grief, and why another can appear to grow younger across a decade of conscious living.

See, cells do not own calendars. They respond to signals.

One of the most profound discoveries in modern biology is that aging is plastic. Not infinitely so, perhaps—but far more malleable than once believed. Telomeres shorten, yes, but their rate of shortening varies wildly. DNA accumulates mutations, but repair pathways can be upregulated or suppressed. Proteins misfold (which is bad), but chaperone systems can be strengthened. Mitochondria decline, but they also biogenically rebound under the right conditions. Epigenetic markers drift, but they can be re-patterned.

Biological age is not fixed at birth. It is negotiated daily.

Calendar age moves in a straight line. Biological age zigzags, stalls, accelerates, decelerates, and occasionally moonwalks backward when conditions allow. At 50 calendar years, one person may have the inflammatory profile, muscle mass, insulin sensitivity, and cognitive speed of a 35-year-old, while another carries the metabolic and immune burden of 70.

This divergence is not cosmetic. It predicts disease risk, recovery capacity, and mortality far more accurately than birthdate ever could.

What we call “aging” in everyday language is usually not aging at all—it is accumulated dysregulation. Systems falling out of coherence. Communication breakdowns between cells. Chronic low-grade inflammation smoldering like an unattended fire. Hormonal rhythms flattening. Repair cycles shortening. Autophagy (removal of dead cells and debris) slowing. Sleep architecture fragmenting. The nervous system remaining stuck in vigilance long after the danger has passed.

None of this is required by time itself.

Calendar age has no memory. Biological age remembers everything.

It remembers famine and abundance. It remembers safety and terror. It remembers loneliness, overwork, grief, unresolved shock. It remembers whether the organism felt supported or hunted by life. It remembers whether the body was treated as an ally or a machine to be driven until parts failed.

This is why two seventy-year-olds can walk into a room and feel like different species.

One carries stiffness, brittleness, and caution in every movement. The other carries fluidity, curiosity, and strength. One’s immune system is reactive and exhausted; the other’s is responsive and calm. One’s cells whisper inflammation; the other’s murmur repair. Calendar age cannot explain this. Biology can.

Modern medicine historically conflated age with inevitability. Decline was treated as natural rather than conditional. Wrinkles, sarcopenia, cognitive slowing, insulin resistance, osteopenia, immune senescence—these were framed as the unavoidable tax of time. “You’re growing old, what do you expect?”

But what we are now discovering is that many of these phenomena correlate far more strongly with biological age than with calendar age. Rather than the phenomenon of clocks ticking down, the real emphasis is systems wearing out under load.

There is also a crucial distinction between appearance and biology. Some people look young but are biologically old—propped up cosmetically while inflammation, metabolic dysfunction, and immune exhaustion quietly advance. Others look weathered but function with remarkable resilience. The grizzly old goat type of countenance. Skin is a visible organ, but it is not the whole story. Biological age lives in blood markers, tissue elasticity, mitochondrial output, cognitive flexibility, and recovery speed.

The Search For Markers Of Aging

The emerging science of aging biomarkers—epigenetic clocks, glycation levels, inflammatory indices, immune cell ratios—exists precisely because calendar age is such a blunt instrument. These tools attempt to quantify biological age, not because time matters less, but because time alone explains so little.

And here is where things get quietly radical.

If biological age is responsive to signals, then perception matters. Meaning matters. Belief matters. A nervous system that perceives life as hostile and difficult ages faster than one that perceives life as joyous and workable. A body trapped in perpetual defense spends its resources on survival, not regeneration. Over time, that trade-off becomes visible as “aging.”

The immune system, endocrine system, and nervous system are in constant conversation. Fear ages. Safety heals. Purpose stabilizes. Joy lubricates repair. Loneliness corrodes at a cellular level. Chronic resentment is not just an emotion; it is a hormonal climate.

Put another way, calendar age does not care whether your life makes sense or not. Biological age very much does care!

Perhaps the most important implication of this distinction is ethical. When society treats calendar age as the primary metric of vitality, it enforces decline narratives prematurely. People are told they are “too old” to heal, adapt, learn, love, desire, or change. Biology does not agree. Cells are opportunistic. Give them the right signals and they respond—often astonishingly late into life.

We are not aging because we are getting older. We are aging because our systems are losing coherence.

Today that coherence can be restored to degrees once thought impossible.

This is not talking about immortality. It means flexibility. It means that aging is not a straight slide into the pit (entropy), but a dynamic negotiation between damage and repair, stress and recovery, meaning and exhaustion.

In the end, the difference between the two is the difference between counting years and telling a story. Calendar age is like a tax, a tally. Biological age is a narrative story written in cells—edited daily, revised constantly, responsive to how you live, what you eat, how you breathe, how you move, how you love, and whether your nervous system believes it is allowed to rest.

To Your Good Health,Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

Champagne is produced only in the region east of Paris and is made from a mixture of grapes: chardonnay (85%), Pinot noir (10%) and Pinot meuniere (5%) but there are variations, such as blanc de blanc (white grapes only) or blanc de noir (only red grapes). A lot of people substitute Italian prosecco or Spanish cava, largely because they are cheaper but it’s not the same. Champagne has very special properties, as we will see.

I’ve reported a number of times for my readers that in 1985 (OMG, 40 years ago!) I was interviewed on British television about the health benefits of Champagne (Viv and I are quite wanton and we glug lots of the stuff). 

I lost the VHS tape years ago but did a later YouTube video short, which you can see here:

Champagne (real French Champagne) contains some very powerful anti-oxidants, notably tyrosol, which is reckoned to be about 10 times more powerful than the anti-oxidant power of blueberries!

It may even have anticancer properties. It’s not widely known but Johanna Budwig, in her marvelous anti-cancer diet protocol, recommends 2 glasses a day! 

But is there science? Yes, particularly about heart health and your arteries. We all know, or suppose, that red wine is good for the heart, which may be due to its content of flavonoids and polyphenols which can improve endothelial viability, increase endothelium-dependent flow-mediated dilatation and inhibition of endothelin-1, a peptide which constricts blood vessels.

As of 2010, there was nothing on champagne (just me!) Then in 2010 a study looked specifically into the effect of 2 glasses of champagne on endothelial health (endothelium: the lining inside your arteries which protects you from dangerous clots). What they found was very interesting.

In order to assess whether acute (downing it quick) but moderate Champagne wine consumption is capable of modulating vascular function, researchers performed a randomized, placebo-controlled, cross-over intervention trial, comparing the consumption of Champagne wine to an alcohol, carbohydrate and fruit-derived acid drink.

15 healthy subjects were chosen. Individuals with diabetes mellitus, any form of liver or gastrointestinal disorder, high blood pressure (>150/90 mm/Hg), anemia, gall bladder problems, present illness, or those taking dietary supplements, consuming caffeine or aspirin, vigorous exercise (more than three times × 20 min per week), or alcohol consumption more than 120 g (women) and 168 g (men) per week were excluded from the study, along with pregnant or lactating females.

Even with those restrictions I bet they didn’t have any difficulty recruiting plenty of volunteers! The lucky participants got to drink half a bottle (375 mls.) of Champagne or the adjusted equivalent alcohol drink, minus the beneficial polyphenols. The Champagne wine used in the study contained no vitamin C (the champagne was not identified).

The ensuing investigation included blood, doppler (blood flow) and urine measurements for the complex metabolites of polyphenols (hippuric acid, protocatechuic acid, isoferulic acid, homovanillic acid, homovanillyl alcohol and 3,4-dihydroxyphenylacetic acid, if you are interested). They also tested for the presence of MMP (matrix metalloproteinase, a measure of tissue metabolism but unhealthy when raised significantly).

In brief, they found evidence of blood vessel dilatation in both the Champagne group and the controls, but the Champagne increase was more widespread and lasted longer (8 hours). MMP was significantly reduced by Champagne. There were more metabolites of the polyphenols, showing they had been active and the reason for the benefits.

The lead researcher summed up the results with a cheery quote: Based on the results, “a couple of glasses” of champagne a day benefits the walls of blood vessels. That was in line with what Johanna Budwig (1908 – 2003) taught us, decades ago.¹

According to Walter Willett, M.D., Chairman of Nutrition at Harvard University’s School of Public Health, much attention has been given to studies concluding that daily moderate consumption of alcohol of any type (including beer, white or red wine, or whiskey) over the age of 50 will reduce cardiovascular risk.

What is not commonly known, according to Willett, is that the beneficial effects of alcohol are only realized if there are sufficient levels of folate or folic acid in the diet. Folic acid is a synthetic form of folate which is a B vitamin found naturally in fruits and vegetables.²

Champagne Wasn’t Always French You Know!

Oh dear no! It was invented in England, of all places! That phoney story of the monk Dom Perignon “inventing” champagne is nonsense. He was on the search for robust glass bottles that wouldn’t keep exploding as they matured. He finally succeeded and that was his ONLY contribution to Champagne research.

But England? It happens to be true, though most Frenchmen would die, rather than admit it (to this day Brits are the biggest consumers of Champagne). But head of the house of Taittinger, Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger, concedes the English were first. 

English scientist Christopher Merret documented how adding sugar to wine caused a second fermentation in 1662, predating Dom Pérignon in 1697. England’s superior coal-fired glass bottles, which could withstand the pressure, were crucial, allowing for the safe production and popular consumption of sparkling wine decades before French Champagne houses perfected their bottles.

I read it first in a very funny book BTW: “One Thousand Years of Annoying The French” by Stephen Clarke. It’s a vainglorious romp into the love-hate relationship which the Brits and the Frogs have always had. You know, Crecy, Agincourt, Waterloo! But Champagne first? It’s unreal. In fact justification of another war, in some French bars I’ve been in!

And before you ask: The Battle of Hastings (1066) was NOT a French victory. William the Conqueror was a Norman and HATED the French (many Normans still do and would rather be British I was told)! Haha!

Raise your glasses then, Your Majesty, My lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, “The New Year.” May it find you happy, healthy and prosperous, living without fear or anxiety!

Prof.

References:

1. Vauzour D, Houseman EJ, George TW, et al. Moderate Champagne consumption promotes an acute improvement in acute endothelial-independent vascular function in healthy human volunteers. British Journal of Nutrition. 2010;103(8):1168-1178. doi:10.1017/S0007114509992959
2. https://greenmedinfo.com/blog/bubbly-champagne-boosts-heart-health