Of course there were exceptions and that shortfall didn’t apply to the Okinawans, Ikarians, Hunzas or other isolated groups. But nobody counted them and their ways, until starting around maybe the 80s. Interest in natural longevity gradually expanded over the years to become the “blue zones” concept, popularized by Daniel Buettner, a National Geographic Explorer and Fellow, and Emmy-Award winning journalist. A blue zone is a territory with an extraordinary high concentration of healthy old people, notably centenarians.

A healthy Ikarian (Blue Zones) Diet

Note that I said healthy: a large population of doddery dotards would mean nothing. Just some trick of the light perhaps! But if they live far longer than most AND keep their health faculties in good working order, that’s the start of a path to discovery, surely?

Up until the twenty first century the perception of aging was that it was inevitable. We had no control over it. Attitude of mind was irrelevant. Sooner or later you began to crumble and descend into a miserable dotage of frailty, cognitive impairment, aches and pains and severe limitation of movement.

Some years ago I wrote a piece titled Do You Want To Be An Old Crock Or A Classic Car? The difference between a rust-bucket old banger that has to be sent to the crushers and a decades-older beautiful smooth-running classic car is simple and obvious: the classic car has been properly looked after. We should treat our bodies in the same way and take care of them; otherwise you will become an old crock. The conclusion is still valid and the piece continues to change reader’s perceptions.

A lot of people I talked to at the time had a blunt-force thinking attitude of “I don’t care. I don’t want to grow old and suffer. I’d rather die.” This was very unfortunate because, like it or not, people were starting to live longer and longer, but not necessarily healthily. By the time you reach 80-some and are suffering from stooped posture, aches and pains, limitation of movement, difficulty remembering, incontinence and other indignities of old age, it’s too late to have a change of heart. You have ruined your prospects of a zestful old age and must pay the price.

[Of course it’s never too late to make wise and health-giving changes and derive at least some benefit]

The point is that people get what they expect to get. If you are sold into the story that old age is an infirmity, you can expect a fairly unpleasant ride through your dotage.

And don’t listen to dismissive doctors. Most of them go on with the same old line, “Aging is inevitable. There’s nothing you can do about it. You just have to put up with it.” It’s errant nonsense. Any doctor who utters those words is criminally bad, or just plain ignorant. You want to work with a doctor who offers detailed advice about diet and nutrition, staying active, keeping inflammation at an absolute minimum and, above all, setting the right positive mental attitude. “You are what you eat” is an old, old trope in medicine but there is also a twin phrase, equally valid: you are what you think you are!

Now we Boomers (and the up-and-coming Gen-X, Millennials and Gen-Z) are well served by a positive and fun-loving approach to life. It’s been my slogan for decades that we Boomers want to go on partying till our last day on earth. That brings up an important health definition: it is to distinguish between lifespan and so-called “healthspan.” Lifespan is how long we remain alive; healthspan means how many of those years are healthy, enjoyable and trouble-free.

Ideally we want the two measures to be very close. Get rid of the idea of your “final years”, meaning the difficult troubled times as you struggle to cope. If you wake up one morning, healthy and zestful, have a great day and then go to sleep, never to wake up, that’s a great ways for it all to end, you’ll agree.

That’s the benchmark to aim for. It’s the exit I preach!

Brain Health

Now, let’s separate out the issue of brain health and talk about that. We are not a brain, there is abundant evidence for that statement but it is completely ignored by the establishment. There are individuals walking around with next to no brain (less than 1%) and yet no-one can tell there is anything amiss; memory is excellent. One case known to me went to college, got a degree and began to practice accountancy.

But our brain is still important. It’s the main biological organ for connectivity with the outside world. So we should rightly look after it and be concerned for its effective functioning. Not surprisingly, brain health is now the number one concern for elders, ahead of cardiovascular health and cancer prevention (AARP 2025 Health Priorities Survey).

Yet decades of obsession with low-fat diets has done much damage. It’s a misguided obsession with the supposed harms of saturated fat, built on false science perpetrated by Ancel Keys in the 1970s (he was being paid by the sugar industry to distract attention from the damage cause by high sugar intake). He simply faked or distorted his findings by omitting countries with a high fat intake and good health and omitting countries with a low fat intake that were overall unhealthy.

Here are 2 graphs, the first that Ancel Keys published (which looks convincing) and the second is with all the countries he studied included, which shows virtually no connection between heart disease and fat intake:

It took nearly fifty years for the facts to emerge and there are still die-hards who won’t give up their pet hypothesis that fats are bad for us. Unfortunately, our brains are around 60% fat. So for decades we have been starving our brains and the result is an epidemic of dementias. Moreover heart disease, which was supposed to be being solved by Ancel Keys’ research, has continued to rise, relentlessly. So he was well wide of the truth – but that was his aim.

The story of cholesterol runs along similar tracks. Cholesterol has been demonized to the extent that people fear it as deadly and take complex drugs, with dangerous side effects, to combat it. The aim is to get your cholesterol levels as low as is possible. Yet our brains hold 20% of the total cholesterol in your body! Fighting against cholesterol is to deprive and damage your brain!

Science gets very muddled when big business dollars get into the mix and distort the truth. Ain’t that so!

To your health,

She always looked so vibrant and healthy, though I did read reports recently of her having to cancel or pull back on public performances, due to health issues.

When the C word was finally used, it became more understandable. Poor old Dolly had such faith in the medical profession (to the point of donating $1million to Moderna’s Fauci scam). But I doubt the doctors did her any good, for all her wealth.

Anyway, I don’t want to discuss Dolly’s health beyond that. Not relevant or none of our business!

But the issue was raised (by her) that the years of looking after her beloved husband Carl Thomas Dean, as a caregiver, took its toll. She admitted to rather letting her own health decline, though neglect, while looking after him. That’s something we can’t afford to do, at any age.

It made me think a good deal on one of my walks. It could be a maxim, that we MUST look after ourselves, well into old age, so we do not become a burden on our spouse or relatives. It’s not fair to take the view “I don’t care about preserving health.” It’s just passing the buck and means someone else will get all the dirty work that you are laying up.

And it doesn’t work to just say, “I’ll go into hospital or a home.” Unless you are VERY rich, that will soon burn through all your capital. Besides, your family may not want that for you and will sacrifice themselves to keep you outside the system and in their loving care.

No, it really comes down to a DUTY, that we must take care of ourselves as fully as possible, for as long as possible.

In a lively video titled “I ain’t dead yet!”, Dolly explained: “Back when my husband Carl was sick, that was a long time, and then he passed, I didn’t take care of myself, so I let a lot of things go that I should have been taking care of.”

Parton’s husband, Carl Dean, died in March 2025. While the couple never disclosed what disease he had, Parton shared that he was “ill for quite a while.”  We don’t know how she didn’t take care of herself, but her few words speak volumes given that she had been taking such extensive care of her husband.

When you care for someone else, it is all too easy to neglect to care for yourself.

63 Million in The USA Alone

There are 63 million caregivers in the USA, a nearly 50% increase since 2015.

Demographics: One in every four adults is a caregiver. Of these, 94% care for adults, and one in three is under age 50. Caregivers are increasingly diverse across race, income, and generation. 29% are sandwich generation caregivers, supporting both children and adults. 

Intensity and Complexity: Over 40% of caregivers now provide high-intensity care. Many perform complex medical tasks like administering injections or managing equipment, yet only 22% receive training. 

Health and Financial Strain: One in five caregivers report poor health; a quarter are taking on debt due to caregiving. Half report negative financial impact due to caregiving, and one in five cannot afford basic needs like food. 

Workplace Impact: Seven in ten family caregivers are employed, but many face disruptions and lack access to supportive benefits.

In fact only 11 million of the 63 million caregivers receive any compensation, through Medicaid, VA, or other state programs. These caregivers are more likely to be younger, lower-income, and from diverse backgrounds. 

Caregiving Comes With A Serious Health Risk

Some 23% of caregivers report that they find it difficult to pay attention to their own health while caring for another, according to a report from the National Alliance for Caregiving and the AARP. 

Carers often neglect routine health visits and screening, which might detect problems before they get started proper. Also, when people are spending much of their days dealing with hospitals or at doctor’s offices with those they care for, they just don’t want to spend any precious free time in a medical setting for themselves.

Moreover, when a caregiver takes their care partner to a doctor’s appointment, hospital or treatment, they are rarely asked how they, the caregiver, are doing, or if they need support.

There is a huge emotional toll, including anxiety, guilt and depression. On top of that there is a limitation of capacity to socialize or do things like attend shows, or literary meetings and gatherings.

Even those who do long-distance caregiving can experience burnout and self-neglect. The average family caregiver spends 27 hours a week on care and many put in 40 hours or more. There is an intensity that comes with caring for someone with a serious illness, which doesn’t leave much room for self-care.

Close to two-thirds of caregivers report emotional stress, and 45% report physical strain. There is the additional burden of loneliness, experienced by nearly a quarter of all caregivers who may be missing opportunities to socialize and connect outside their homes, away from the family members and friends they care for.

Love Becomes Captivity

One of the cruellest aspects of family caregiving is that love can quietly turn into captivity. The caregiver begins by helping someone they love, and months or years later discovers that almost every hour, decision and emotion revolves around somebody else’s needs.

Here’s are some strategies which will act as ways of giving the caregiver at least some of their life back.

1. Stop believing that love requires unlimited availability

This may be the most important one. A caregiver can love someone profoundly without being available every minute of every day. Yet guilt creates the feeling that going shopping, meeting a friend, taking an afternoon off—or simply closing the bedroom door and reading a book—is somehow abandonment.

It isn’t.

The caregiver needs protected periods in which they are off duty. Not “off duty unless something happens.” Properly off duty. Someone else takes responsibility, the phone can be ignored, and for two or three hours they become themselves again.

That psychological separation can be enormously restorative.

2. Build a team—even a tiny one

Caregiving becomes particularly destructive when one person becomes the indispensable person. Everything comes through them: medication, meals, appointments, washing, transport, emotional reassurance, emergencies.

Instead of vaguely telling relatives, “I could use some help,” give people ownership of specific jobs.

One person does Tuesday shopping. Someone else takes the patient to appointments. A neighbor sits with them Thursday afternoon. Another relative makes three freezer meals. Somebody else handles insurance paperwork.

People are often surprisingly willing to help but remarkably bad at inventing ways of doing so.

The caregiver should become the coordinator of care, not necessarily the provider of every piece of care.

3. Create one sacred piece of the day

Even where respite care is impossible, reclaim something small that belongs absolutely to the caregiver.

Perhaps 7:00–7:30 every morning is coffee in the garden. Perhaps there is an evening walk. An hour of painting. Music through headphones. Meditation. Gardening. A long bath. Twenty minutes sitting in sunlight doing absolutely nothing useful.

The activity matters less than the principle:

“This piece of my life still belongs to me.”

That is sovereignty in miniature—and sometimes miniature sovereignty is where recovery begins.

4. Put pleasure on the schedule

Caregivers become terribly efficient. Meals, medications, laundry, doctors, cleaning, appointments, prescriptions. Life turns into one enormous checklist.

Pleasure gets postponed until “things settle down.”

They may never settle down.

So pleasure has to become an appointment too. Lunch with a friend next Wednesday. A movie Saturday afternoon. A massage. A concert next month. Sunday breakfast somewhere beautiful.

There is something psychologically powerful about having a pleasurable event ahead of you. A caregiver needs things on the calendar that are not connected with illness.

5. Refuse unnecessary perfection

This is a huge thief of caregiver energy.

The house doesn’t have to be immaculate. Every meal doesn’t have to be freshly cooked. Every visitor doesn’t need entertaining. Every minor discomfort doesn’t require immediate intervention. And sometimes frozen lasagna is not evidence of moral collapse.

Ask repeatedly:

“Does this actually need doing?”

Then:

“Does it need doing by me?”

Those two questions can liberate hours.

Caregiving should operate on the principle of “good enough”, not domestic sainthood!

6. Protect the relationship from becoming purely clinical

This is especially important when caring for a spouse.

Gradually the relationship can become nurse and patient rather than husband and wife, partners, lovers, siblings or friends. Every conversation becomes: Did you take your tablets? Have you eaten? How is the pain? When did you last go to the bathroom?

Illness takes over the relationship.

Deliberately create moments in which illness is banned from the conversation. Watch an old comedy together. Look through photographs. Gossip outrageously. Play cards. Listen to music from when you were young. Talk about people you both knew.

Try occasionally to meet person to person rather than caregiver to patient.

Both people need that.

7. Maintain a life outside the illness

Caregiving shrinks one’s world. Friends disappear—not necessarily through indifference, but because invitations repeatedly get declined. Hobbies disappear. Travel disappears. Eventually the caregiver can lose contact with the person they were before the illness arrived.

Fight that contraction deliberately.

Keep friendships alive. Keep one hobby going. Keep learning something. Go somewhere new occasionally. Maintain conversations with people who don’t begin by asking, “How is he?” or “How is she?”

And when somebody asks the caregiver how they are, they should be allowed to answer truthfully.

The patient has an illness. The caregiver does not have to become part of the illness.

8. Give yourself permission to enjoy being alive

This may be the deepest one.

Caregivers sometimes experience a peculiar guilt when they enjoy themselves. How can I be laughing when she is suffering? How can I go out to dinner when he cannot? How can I possibly take a holiday?

But, honestly, the suffering of one person is not reduced by requiring another person to suffer alongside them.

In fact, quite the reverse. A caregiver who sleeps, laughs, socializes, exercises, sees daylight, experiences affection and occasionally has a thoroughly wonderful time comes back with more emotional resources to give.

Joy is not a betrayal of the person you care for. Joy is part of what keeps you capable of caring.

That might actually be the central thought of this piece. We speak endlessly about care for the patient, but perhaps we need to enlarge the concept. The caregiver is part of the care system too. If that person becomes exhausted, anxious, resentful, isolated and joyless, the entire system begins to fail.

The goal therefore isn’t merely to help caregivers “cope.”

It’s to make sure that, while looking after somebody else’s life, they don’t accidentally surrender their own.

God bless you, Dolly! You were a blazing light!

To Your Good Health,

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

Data Source:

AARP and National Alliance for Caregiving. Caregiving in the US 2025. Washington, DC: AARP. July 24, 2025. https://doi.org/10.26419/ppi.00373.001

The idea originates with the founder of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann (1745  – 1853, who after decades of clinical observation became troubled by a recurring phenomenon: patients improved beautifully under carefully selected remedies, only to relapse months or years later, often into entirely different forms of illness. It seemed as if some deeper layer beneath the visible symptoms remained untouched.

This led Hahnemann into one of the boldest conceptual leaps in medical history. He proposed that beneath chronic disease lay fundamental constitutional taints or inherited energetic dysregulations—miasms—which shaped how disease expressed itself.

I think of these as disease “shadows” that color the patient’s life, bringing darkness from the past, carrying it forward through families and generations.

In his great work, The Chronic Diseases (1828), Hahnemann proposed three primary miasms: psora, sycosis, and syphilis. Later generations of homeopaths added others, particularly the tuberculosis (I agree there) and cancerinic (carcinominum) patterns. I’m not quite so sure about that one.

Candida and sugar miasm I have also heard suggested, which borders on silly!

Psora was regarded by Hahnemann as the primordial disturbance, the mother of chronic disease. Not simply “itch” in the literal dermatological sense, though he traced it historically through suppressed skin eruptions, psora represented insufficiency, striving, hypersensitivity, insecurity, lack, and chronic vulnerability. The psoric individual often feels incomplete, anxious about survival, fearful of failure, or driven by perpetual striving. Physically, psora manifests through functional disturbances more than destructive pathology: allergies, itching conditions, digestive irregularities, fatigue, nervousness, hypersensitivity, and fluctuating symptoms.

Many great homeopaths came to view psora almost philosophically—as humanity’s estrangement from natural harmony.

The great American homeopath James Tyler Kent described psora as “the beginning of all sickness,” linking it not merely to skin conditions but to disturbed vitality itself.

Then comes sycosis, classically associated with suppression and excess. Historically linked to gonorrheal infection and its suppression, the sycotic miasm is characterised by overgrowth, concealment, accumulation, and rigidity. Warts, cysts, fibroids, polyps, thickened tissues, oedema, obesity, rheumatism, and secretiveness all fit within the sycotic sphere.

Sycosis miasm is often conflated with medorrhinum, a remedy derived from gonorrhea.

Psychologically, sycosis often expresses itself through hidden shame, guardedness, fixed ideas, compulsions, or the sense of carrying a secret burden. The sycotic patient may compensate excessively—becoming flamboyant, exaggerated, overbuilt, or defensive.

One of the great insights of miasmatic thinking is that symptoms are symbolic as well as physical. The body speaks in metaphor. The sycotic organism “covers,” “thickens,” “stores,” and “conceals.”

The syphilitic miasm is different again. Here we enter the realm of destruction, degeneration, breakdown, nihilism, and collapse. Associated historically with syphilis, but extending far beyond the infection itself, the syphilitic current expresses as ulceration, deformity, tissue destruction, violence, congenital malformation, suicidal despair, psychosis, and self-annihilation.

Where psora struggles and sycosis defends, syphilis destroys.

In emotional terms, syphilitic states may manifest as hopelessness, obsession with death, profound self-loathing, or destructive impulses turned inward or outward. Physically one sees degeneration: aneurysms, ulceration, bone destruction, severe neurological pathology, and congenital defects.

Yet homeopaths never viewed these as merely “bad” categories. They are patterns of imbalance, yes—but also maps of human struggle.

Later practitioners elaborated these themes enormously. J. H. Allen expanded the miasmatic concept in The Chronic Miasms, exploring inherited tendencies across generations. John Henry Clarke linked miasms with constitutional prescribing and chronic susceptibility.

Then came the tubercular miasm, perhaps one of the most poetically tragic of all. Tuberculosis haunted the nineteenth century like a ghostly fire. Homeopaths perceived in tubercular patients a profound restlessness: longing for change, dissatisfaction with confinement, romantic idealism, burning vitality alternating with exhaustion.

The tubercular type wants freedom above all.

There is intensity, creativity, travel hunger, sensitivity to beauty, rapid burnout, and continual dissatisfaction with limitation. Physically this pattern may include recurrent respiratory infections, allergies, fine-boned physiques, night sweats, fluctuating energy, and rapid metabolism.

It is almost the miasm of the wandering soul.

Then there is the possible cancerinic miasm, articulated most fully in the twentieth century. This pattern often develops in individuals exposed to extreme pressure, domination, perfectionism, emotional suppression, or impossible expectations. Cancerinic constitutions frequently appear conscientious, refined, overly responsible, dutiful, self-controlled, and eager to please.

The keynote is control.

Everything must be held together. Chaos is intolerable. Emotion is restrained. The individual may live under immense internal pressure for years before collapse occurs.

Physically, cancerinic patterns are linked not only with malignancy but with chronic fatigue, insomnia, hormonal disorders, autoimmune tendencies, eating disorders, and nervous exhaustion.

Some modern homeopaths have proposed additional miasms linked with newer disease states—malarial, ringworm, leprosy, AIDS-related patterns, and more. Rajan Sankaran notably developed an expanded miasmatic framework integrating mental and behavioural themes with remedy states. His work helped bring miasmatic understanding into a more contemporary psychological language.

What makes miasmatic theory so enduring is that it attempts to explain why people react differently to the same circumstances. Why does one individual develop eczema while another develops arthritis? Why does grief destroy one person physically yet deepen another spiritually? Why do certain family lines repeat the same illnesses, fears, addictions, or emotional dramas generation after generation?

Miasms propose that beneath the visible disease lies a terrain of susceptibility.

In this sense, the theory parallels ancient ideas from many cultures. Ayurveda speaks of constitutional imbalance through doshas. Traditional Chinese medicine describes inherited weakness through organ systems and jing essence. Even modern epigenetics, though operating in entirely different language, acknowledges that trauma, stress, toxins, and environment may influence inherited biological expression across generations; an effect we call epigenetics.

Homeopathy approaches this terrain symbolically, energetically, and constitutionally.

Importantly, miasms are not viewed as fixed mandates. They are tendencies. Patterns. Like weather systems within consciousness and biology. A skilled constitutional prescription seeks not merely to palliate symptoms but to untangle these deep inherited knots.

Clinically, many experienced homeopaths report that true cure often involves layers of miasmatic unfolding. A patient may move from destructive pathology toward superficial skin eruptions; from despair toward anxiety; from rigidity toward emotional fluidity. Old symptoms may briefly reappear in reverse order before resolving. Hahnemann himself considered this movement outward—from deeper organs toward the skin and periphery—as a sign of genuine healing.

Miasmatic analysis also transformed remedy understanding. Remedies themselves came to be associated with dominant miasmatic tendencies. For example:

Psoric remedies: Sulphur, Psorinum, Lycopodium
Sycotic remedies: Thuja, Medorrhinum, Natrum sulphuricum
Syphilitic remedies: Mercurius, Syphilinum, Aurum metallicum
Tubercular remedies: Tuberculinum, Phosphorus, Calcarea phos.

Yet great practitioners of homeopathy caution against simplistic categorization. Human beings are rarely pure expressions of one miasm. Most people contain blended currents, shifting throughout life according to stress, trauma, relationships, nutrition, environment, and spiritual development.

Generalizations are always a bit dangerous but it can be suggested in outline that someone with 4 or 5 full-on miasms will likely die by the age of twenty. With just 3, he or she will pass in their thirties or forties. With just 2, he or she should make it to the 50s and 60s and with just one miasm, good chance of breaking the eighty years barrier!

Generalizations are tricky but the essential notion was that the greater the miasmatic complexity or layering within an individual, the shorter and more burdened the lifespan was likely to be. In other words, the organism could only compensate for so many deep chronic taints before vitality collapsed.

Older homeopaths often spoke of “mixed miasms” with a kind of grave respect. A person carrying strong psoric instability combined with destructive syphilitic tendencies, sycotic overgrowth, tubercular dissipation, and later perhaps cancerinic suppression, was thought to possess a profoundly conflicted vital force.

Interestingly, some contemporary longevity science ends up circling similar territory from another direction. Multiple overlapping systems in chronic dysregulation—immune, mitochondrial, inflammatory, neurological—do indeed correlate with earlier morbidity and mortality. The old homeopaths expressed this symbolically through miasms rather than biomarkers.

There was also a deeper philosophical idea underneath it all: that vitality is finite unless renewed. The more fragmented the vital force becomes, the harder it is for the organism to maintain coherent order.

Seen this way, miasms become more than medical categories. They become lenses through which to understand culture, psychology, and collective evolution.

Sources and classic texts worth revisiting:

George Vithoulkas. The Science of Homeopathy. New York: Grove Press; 1980.
Ortega PS. Notes on the Miasms. Mexico City: Homeopathic Medical Publishing.

And there is a great section on miasms in my own masterpiece Medicine Beyond.

Truly, miasms are one of those strange crossroads where medicine, mythology, inheritance, psychology, and spiritual pattern-recognition all sit around the same fire drinking strong coffee and arguing about destiny!

Go learn more…

To your good health,

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Alternative Doctor

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

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

Influenza-like illness (ILI), on the other hand, refers to a syndrome characterized by symptoms similar to those of influenza, such as fever, cough, and sore throat, but which may be caused by other pathogens. 

In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that since 2010, influenza has resulted in millions of illnesses, hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations, and tens of thousands of deaths each year. 

Be alert: these are “estimates”  as it says, not based on facts or figures. It’s a game. If you are going to publish guesses, you can paint any scary scenario you like. Alert individuals would also note that flu statistics were suddenly not being collected or published in 2020 – 2022. They wanted to artificially boost the COVID deaths and so reported all flu as SARS-CoV-2 and suddenly there was “no flu”!

According to orthodox doctors, vaccination remains the primary preventive measure against influenza; however, they admit that challenges persist regarding its effectiveness and public acceptance.?

That’s because, contrary to all their propaganda, vaccination is very little use. Some years its “effectiveness” (questionable) is as low as 40%.

Couple the false claims with the fact they totally ignore natural preventatives, which can be formidable and even try to demonize them. Vaccination is NOT the only viable preventative. More of that later.

Background

Influenza viruses are a family, categorized into types A, B, C, and D, with types A and B responsible for the seasonal epidemics observed annually. Type A viruses are further divided into subtypes based on two proteins on their surface: hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N). So, for example, H5N1, which is bird flu.

The big problem with flu viruses is that they mutate constantly. What is prevalent at the start of the winter season may be gone by Christmas and a new strain emerges. So immunity cannot last very long.

And that’s the problem for flu vaccines: by the time they come to the market they are out of date and worthless. Only a steady symphony of false boasts (marketing lies) and credulous doctor enthusiasm keeps the myth going from year to year.

“Must get your shot this year,” is the constant chime. “Get your FREE flu shot here,” say the placards outside the pharmacy.

No doctor worth his degree would ever say “Don’t bother with the flu vaccine this year; it’s the wrong formulation.” It might be true but he or she would face heavy censure.

So annual vaccination remains the primary strategy for preventing influenza and its complications. To protect Big Pharma profits they always claim that even when the vaccine and circulating viruses are not closely matched, vaccination can still reduce the severity of illness and prevent hospitalizations and deaths.

But there is another failing: since flu vaccines are designed to protect against specific influenza viruses, they do not prevent illnesses caused by other pathogens that present with similar symptoms. This limitation means that even vaccinated individuals can experience ILI due to non-influenza viruses.

Historical events have also influenced public perception of flu vaccines. The 1976 swine flu vaccination campaign in the United States, for example, was associated with an increased incidence of Guillain-Barré Syndrome (a kind of paralysis), leading to heightened public concern about vaccine safety. However, the official line is that subsequent studies (read: hasty damage limitation) have shown that the risk of GBS following flu vaccination is very low, and the benefits of vaccination in preventing influenza complications outweigh this risk.

So Where Does This Leave Us?

According to my old pal from the UK, Dr. Damien Downing, a major review appeared in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases¹, in October (principal author Prof. Michael Osterholm, a respected researcher into infectious diseases). The paper, which found only 31 studies worthy of inclusion out of a massive 5,700 screened, concluded that there was only good evidence for moderate flu vaccine efficacy in healthy adults, and no real evidence of protection in those over 65 years, or for that matter in children. Of course it is the elderly, and particularly the frail elderly, that doctors are more concerned about – and in whom 90% of flu cases occur – and there was no evidence that flu vaccine prevents flu infection in this group.

Put another way, after nearly 6,000 studies of all sorts, there is no good evidence that flu vaccine prevents flu in its main target population.

The pooled effect in those healthy adults, aged 18 to 65, is reported as 57%, which means the vaccine roughly halves your chances of getting flu. 

BUT: what is well known about placebo effects can account for most of that 57% effect. If you know you’ve had a shot for the flu you think you’re invincible. But since the chance of getting flu in that age group was less than 3% to begin with, that’s really only about a 1.5 percent reduction. 

Then of course, this all happens at a price. Whatever you may have heard, there is no such thing as a medication without the risk of side-effects. In vaccines that risk can also come from the adjuvants. A vaccine is a small dose of an organism plus adjuvants – chemicals that are irritants to the immune system and trigger it to react to the organism part. Without adjuvants vaccines generally won’t work. Popular adjuvants include the antibiotic gentamicin (too much of which can make you deaf), aluminum compounds (which probably contribute to Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases)², and the mercury antiseptic, thiomersal/thimerosal (long known to be toxic and recently suspected in autism) – after all, they have to be toxic to work as adjuvants. Fluarix, one of the main brands of flu vaccine in the USA and UK, is stated by the manufacturers to contain both gentamicin and thimerosal.

We also used to think that flu vaccine prevented deaths from flu to a significant extent, even if it didn’t prevent overt infection – until we realized there was a major artifact at work. This is known as the healthy vaccine recipient effect, and the clue is in the name; a frail elderly person is much less likely to get down to their GP to have the vaccine than is a fit elderly person, who by the way is more likely to eat and live well, take vitamins and so on, and so has better resistance to viruses anyway.

What Osterholm and colleagues concluded, citing a couple of Californian studies, is that flu vaccine reduced all-cause mortality in those over 65 by a mere 4.6%. Is that worth the risk of adverse effects? That’s the choice you have to make but now you can make it knowing these facts.

Tamiflu

What about Tamiflu (oseltamivir), is that any good? It’s always being touted “officially”. They claim it reduces the duration of flu symptoms by 1 to 1½ days but it can give you other unpleasant symptoms, such as nausea and vomiting, and serious brain-fog (“I couldn’t think past a comma”), even according to the official website.³ 

But the reality is worse: basically, the whole planet is starting to become resistant to it.⁴  Why? Well Tamiflu is excreted largely unchanged in the urine of patients, and is barely affected by sewage treatment. So the active drug enters the waterways, as was shown during a flu outbreak in Japan, where ducks, the natural reservoir for the virus, can pick it up. And when this happens, the virus can probably (which means that so far it has happened in a lab experiment) develop resistance to Tamiflu.

So Tamiflu, which governments hand out so readily is rapidly becoming obsolete, because of resistance. This is just the same situation as overuse of antibiotics leading to seriously resistant hospital bugs like MRSA. But that took decades. Tamiflu has gone from, well maybe (I’d never take it), to it’s no longer any use in lightning fast time.

Save your money

As Dr. Damien, retorts: “It shows that we live on a small planet – and there’s nowhere left to hide our waste.”⁵ 

What’s Better?

Well frankly, anything that’s natural, overwhelmingly safe and yet effective is to be referred to synthetic, patented drugs with side effects of any kind.

Good ways to beat flu (and ILI) include:

Vitamin D. Take 20,000 IU to 50,000 IU, just for 3-4 days. It’s very cheap and harmless at such low intake. Add to that:

Vitamin C. Top up with about 20 – 25 grams but with a caution. You need to sip it constantly during the day. So much all at once would results in stomach pains and diarrhea and would not benefit blood levels.

Hydrogen peroxide. Get a nebulizer, 3% food grade hydrogen peroxide, and breathe in the mist, 3 to 5 times daily. If you can’t afford a nebulizer, then dilute the hydrogen peroxide to 1% (2 parts water to 1 part of the store-bought strength) and GARGLE (don’t swallow!) It’s almost as good, in fact 100% effective at preventing COVID in a busy hospital situation.⁶ 

Antibiotics are worthless against flu and viruses. But if the coughing and sneezing persists to the point where you have yellow-greenish sputum or snot, then might be a time to ask for antibiotics. That’s because colored mucus or slime like that means that opportunistic bacteria have invaded.

Final Tips.

I say this most winters: DO NOT BLOW YOUR NOSE. Increased pressure in the nasal passages caused when you blow your nose will send infected snot sideways into your sinuses and the resulting sinusitis could take days (even weeks) to clear.

Instead SNIFF. That pulls the muck backwards and you can swallow it (for convenience) or spit it out (better for you).

Recovery

A final tip from the masters of holistic science (which includes me) is that sneezing and cough are DETOX mechanisms, to expel unwanted pathogens. So if you seem to be recovering and then, suddenly, your nose starts streaming or sneezing ramps up and gets nasty, just remember that is a good thing! It’s the excretion phase! Wipe your nose a lot; just don’t blow it.

The ultimate principle, for those who are curious, is that healing takes place from the inside out!

Stay well (it’s simpler)!
Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Alternative Doctor

References:

1. PMID: 22032844, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=22032844
2. PMID: 21568886, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=21568886
3. http://www.tamiflu.com/hcp/influenza-treatment.aspx
4. http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:453789
5. Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, January 14, 2012. Flu Vaccine: No Good Evidence, Damien Downing, M.D.
6. Amoah GB, Quakyi IA, Sagoe KW, et al. (2021) Re: Oral antiseptics against coronavirus: in-vitro and clinical evidence. J Hosp Infect. 118:108-109. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34487774

A few radicals and big names in the public space believe there is. Russell Blaylock comes to mind; Joe Mercola; Ryan Cole and William Makis. What exactly is meant by “turbo-cancers”? That’s quite a large part of the problem. There is no real definition and so no consensus. It’s more the sort of label that gets started by so-called influencers on the internet. They have no medical training and use such catchy terms to make a point, not a fact.

But generally what is meant by turbo is fast-growing cancers that are unusually aggressive and which tend, for some reason, to strike younger people.

This possibility is generally compounded by the suspicion/belief that a sudden rise in extra-deadly cancers has been caused by the mRNA vaccines developed for COVID. It’s plausible, certainly. mRNA vaccines have been a worldwide experiment in manipulating human genetic material, without any foreknowledge whatever of likely consequences (and seemingly no concern whatever, in the rush for profits, about possible unpleasant or deadly consequences).

Turbo cancer is now definitely a term linked with COVID vaccines. And sources are lumping the two together as one causing the other. You may have read widespread speculation that recent cancers in the British Royal family (viz. King Charles and Catherine, Princess of Wales) were brought on by their COVID vaccination.

Of course, once again, it’s plausible. But not proven.

Putting the pieces of the puzzle together has proved very difficult, since Big Pharma has been gaslighting us all, lying and obscuring poor outcomes. “There’s no link,” they scream, defensively. “Turbo cancer” is not real. “COVID-19 vaccines don’t cause cancer.”¹

How can they possibly know? It will take many years, possibly a decade or more, to establish causality. Even the layman knows that.

Any denial at this stage is just flim-flam from Pharma toadies. 

Dr. Paul Marik of high-dose-vitamin-C-saves-lives fame thinks there is definitely an issue. I quote:

“The incidence of cancers has increased exponentially worldwide since the universal COVID-19 vaccination program began at the end of 2020. These cancers tend to present at an advanced stage, progress rapidly, and occur in younger patients. Additionally, some patients previously in remission have been reported to develop uncontrolled cancer relapses shortly after receiving a COVID-19 vaccination (usually a booster). The temporal association between these cancers and COVID-19 vaccination is undeniable. These observations have given rise to the term “turbo-cancers.” 

“In addition, we propose that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein directly interferes with the fundamental pathways causing carcinogenesis, namely metabolic reprogramming, cancer stem cell propagation, apoptosis resistance, metastatic potential, and altered immune surveillance.”²

Trouble is, a person of scientific bent like myself, wants to see charts and I had a great deal of trouble finding the evidence of this recent “exponential” rise. I spent an hour combing the net and had ChatGPT looking too, for actual charts showing the supposed increase.

Rather what becomes obvious is that cancer incidence was beginning to soar long before the COVID vaccine was rolled out. For instance, a JAMA article published in 2023 but looking at the period 2010 – 2019 was already referring to the incidence rates of early-onset cancers (cancers under 50) increasing “substantially” over the study period. Gastrointestinal cancers had the fastest-growing incidence rates among all early-onset cancers.³

The best chart I could find was for the period up to 2018, where it is clear that the rise in cancers affecting the young was well under way by 2020.

But it’s nowhere near “exponential (steep). According to a publication by the American Cancer Society, the incidence rate among non-Alaskan younger people has increased by about 1% per year since the mid-2000s.⁴

What’s Really Going On

I think there is another explanation of the recent changes in cancer incidence and mortality. It’s due to the COVID “pandemic” but not necessarily anything to do with the mRNA vaccine.

At the height of pandemic hysteria in 2020 – 2021, almost all hospitals and health facilities ground to a halt. Cases were not being seen routinely, no screenings, far fewer treatments, no follow ups, just pandemonium on the wards, caused by the gross mismanagement of the situation.

People were afraid to go to hospital and did not come forward for diagnosis or treatment of a wide variety of conditions, including cancer.

As a result, cancer that should have been diagnosed during the pandemic would now be diagnosed later, and likely at a more advanced stage. This backlog could be expected to lead to an overall higher mortality rate from cancer since more advanced cancers are also harder to treat. They would seem extra-aggressive.

There is a rapidly growing corpus of data that gives weight to this point of view:

National Cancer Institute / U.S. data — delayed diagnoses in 2020

A 2024 U.S. study found that during 2020 the number of new cancer diagnoses dropped sharply — presumably as I said because people skipped or couldn’t access screening and diagnostic care.

The study notes that early-stage diagnoses (the easier ones to catch early) were especially reduced, resulting in fewer “early-catch” cancers.5

Because early detection is tightly linked to better outcomes, this underdiagnosis could lead to a later surge of more advanced cancers and worse prognoses.6

Thing is, this wasn’t just happening in the US or UK. It was a global phenomenon. A 2022 review covering 33 publications found that worldwide cancer-screening rates dropped sharply during COVID — across cancers, across all demographics. Cancer screening was suspended for at least 30 days in 13 countries (in some cases a lot more than 30 days). Many screening types were suspended or postponed, sometimes for months.7

This caused a backlog of “missed” screenings and diagnostics that — once services resumed — would surface as a wave of later-stage diagnoses.

And that seems to have been exactly what happened. I’m no apologist for the COVID mRNA experiment, as you know. But we need to keep our feet firmly on the ground. Numerous authors/influencers are reporting “turbo cancers” but I can find little evidence, at this stage, for such a concept. Instead, I find evidence for a couple years of strangled cancer screening and treatments, leading to missed diagnoses and lost treatments opportunities, in turn leading to a later outburst of more advanced (ie. more aggressive) cancers once everyone got back to normal work.

We won’t know the truth for a little time yet. Meantime I reaffirm the need to search for real causes. Crappy diets, toxic burdens, psychological stresses and the burgeoning tendency to use dangerous drugs as a “solution” to all of nature’s ills are where my money lies. These are the important current dangers. Let’s not get distracted by the Plandemic. That’s over and we are now back in the real world!

Stay healthy, enjoy the rewards of good health.

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

References:

1. https://scienceupfirst.com/covid-19/turbo-cancer-is-not-real-covid-19-vaccines-dont-cause-cancer/
2. Paul Marik and Justus Hope. COVID-19 mRNA-Induced “Turbo Cancers”. J Indep Med. 2025. Vol. 1(3):185-194. DOI: 10.71189/JIM/2025/V01N03A02
3. JAMA Netw Open. Published Online: August 16, 2023. 2023;6;(8):e2328171. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.28171
4. https://www.cancer.org/content/dam/cancer-org/research/cancer-facts-and-statistics/annual-cancer-facts-and-figures/2024/2024-cancer-facts-and-figures-acs.pdf
5. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaoncology/fullarticle/2815435
6. https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/press-releases/2024/covid-pandemic-impact-on-new-cancer-diagnoses
7. Impact of COVID-19 on cancer screening: a global perspective. Curr Opin Support Palliat Care. 2022 Sep 1;16(3):102-109. doi: 10.1097/SPC.0000000000000602. Epub 2022 Jul 18. PMID: 35862881; PMCID: PMC9451605.

We’ve all said it: “Let’s sleep on it.” Often when something troubling feels overwhelming today, it seems more manageable after a good night’s sleep. Why? Because sleep — especially REM-sleep (dream-sleep) — is healing. It helps process psychological stress, integrate difficult experiences into our mental framework, and reduce the sharp edges of what otherwise would feel unbearable.

Walker’s point: it isn’t time alone that heals all wounds. It’s time in sleep, and especially dream cycles (REM), that provide emotional convalescence. Research supports this: sleeping on things allows emotional memory processing and diminishes the raw intensity of trauma.

Beyond mental healing, the scope of sleep’s importance spans every major physiological system — neurological, lymphatic, immune, hormonal, cardiovascular, metabolic. Chronic sleep deprivation appears to be associated with myriad poor health outcomes including poorer cognitive function, impaired immunological responses (such as reduced efficacy of vaccines) and an increased risk of diabetes and obesity, to name but a few. 

Indeed lack of adequate quality sleep can kill! It has been shown experimentally in rats that total sleep deprivation is rapidly fatal in a comparable time frame to total food starvation, on average 15 days. 

Absence of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep was similarly fatal in about 15 days whilst selective suppression of non-REM sleep was also fatal but in a longer time frame (around 45 days).¹ 

So this is important” take notice!

Immune system vulnerability

Your immune system strongly depends on healthy sleep. In one experiment, healthy subjects restricted to four hours of sleep for one night experienced a 70 % drop in key cancer-fighting immune cells (natural killer cells). This shows just how quickly sleep deprivation can meaningfully impair immune defense. ² 

Hormonal ageing and male health

Sleep restriction also profoundly affects hormonal systems. In a study on healthy males restricted to just four or five hours of sleep per night for a week, testosterone levels dropped to the equivalent of a man ten years older. In other words: chronic short sleep pushes physiological ageing forward.³ 

Summary: Sleep as system-wide reset

Sleep isn’t something you get after life’s work is done; sleep is the foundation layer of life’s work. Without it: immune fragility, hormonal inversion, cardiovascular stress, impaired cognition, emotional dysregulation — all climb quickly. The data support Walker’s statement that sleep is not optional. ⁴ 

Get your sleep, for sure, and then fit in life and duties around that, without disturbing your sleep routine.

Here are evidence-based, medically-grounded tips to improve sleep quality — particularly useful for those of you with demanding schedules, irregular nights, or intermittent insomnia.

1. Prioritize regularity

Go to bed and wake up at the same time every day(yes, weekends too). Consistency anchors your brain’s 24-hour clock (the circadian pacemaker) and strengthens sleep quality. ⁵ 

Instead of just setting your wake-up alarm, consider a “time-for-bed alarm”. That’s your cue to wind down behaviorally, reducing the “lying awake wondering if I’ll sleep” trap.

2. Create darkness in the last hour

Light at night suppresses melatonin release — melatonin signals the body that it’s night and time for sleep. So: in the final hour before you plan to sleep:

• Dim the lights by about half.

• Turn off screens (computers, tablets, phones). Blue-light plus cognitive/emotional arousal from scrolling kills sleep quality. Consider blackout curtains or reducing ambient light from devices/chargers.⁶ 

3. Keep your bedroom cool

Your body temperature needs to drop by about 1 °C (or 2–3 °F) for optimal sleep onset and maintenance. That is why you may have trouble falling asleep in a “stuffy” room. A room that’s too cold is better than one that’s too hot. Aim for ~18 °C (?65 °F). Layering (hot water bottle, socks) is fine — just the ambient room should be cool.

4. Don’t linger in bed awake

If you’re in bed for more than ~25–30 minutes and you’re still awake, get up. Lie-waiting teaches your brain that “bed = being awake”, which undermines sleep associations. Instead: get out of bed, go to another room, do something quiet and relaxing (not screen-heavy), and return when sleepy.

This may feel counter-intuitive, especially when you’re exhausted, but it resets the bed-sleep connection.

5. Moderation of caffeine & alcohol

• Caffeine: Blocks adenosine, the chemical that builds “sleep pressure” while awake. Caffeine late in the day undermines sleep onset and depth. 

• Alcohol: While it may sedate you initially, it suppresses REM sleep and causes frequent awakenings. That compromises the essential emotional-processing phase of sleep.⁶ 

After a bad night: don’t over-compensate

If you had a terrible night, resist the impulse to: wake up later, nap longer, or go to bed earlier. These all disrupt your schedule and can lead into a cycle of poor sleep. Instead: get up at your usual time, avoid long naps, wake gently, go about your day. Your brain will rebuild healthy sleep momentum.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

In today’s hyper-connected, 24/7 culture, sleep is undervalued. We mistakenly treat it as “lost productive time,” when in fact it is the time our brain and body use to restore, repair, and integrate. According to Walker, “[Sleep] is the single most effective thing that we can do each and every day to reset our brain and body health.” ⁷ 

Ignoring sleep is not just sub-optimal; data show it increases risk for serious disease: obesity, diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular events, impaired immunity, accelerated aging, cognitive decline. 

There is compelling epidemiological data around daylight saving time changes. When we lose one hour of sleep in the spring, there is a ~24 % relative increase in heart attacks the next day. Conversely, when we gain an hour in the fall, heart attack rates drop by about 21 %. These shifts underscore how finely tuned our cardiovascular system is to sleep adequacy.

Other correlations: road traffic accidents spike, suicide rates shift, even judge sentencing shows variation with less sleep. The less you sleep, the worse the decision-making, the poorer the self-regulation.

One study even saw a drop in quality foods chosen by participants who were sleep deprived. Subjects had a significantly greater desire for high-calorie, weight-gain-promoting foods.⁸ 

Sleep needs to be addressed with the same urgency as diet, exercise, medication. Often times sleep is the hidden variable.

Final Summary & Patient Message

Sleep is not optional. It’s a non-negotiable component of health. Treat it as your life-support system.

For patients: frame sleep as the foundation of your prescription: fix the sleep schedule, advance the dark-cool environment, reduce screen/blue-light exposure before bed, moderate caffeine and alcohol, and rescue the behavioral association between bed and sleep.

Summary Of Healthy Sleep Habits

Bedtime Routine

Set regular hours. Go to bed and wake up at the same time daily (weekends included).

Use a “to-bed alarm.” Set a reminder 30–60 min before target bedtime.

No screens 1 hour before bed. Dim all lights by half.

Keep bedroom dark, cool, and quiet. Ideal room temp ? 65 °F (18 °C).

During the Night

If you can’t fall asleep after ~25 min:  Leave bed, go to another dimly lit room, do something calm (reading, breathing, quiet music).

Return to bed only when genuinely sleepy.

Avoid heavy meals, alcohol, and caffeine within 3 hours of bedtime.

Daytime Habits

Get morning light exposure (10–20 min) to anchor circadian rhythm.

Exercise regularly, but finish intense workouts ? 3 hours before bed.

Caffeine cut-off: No caffeine after 2 p.m. (earlier for sensitive patients).

Skip long naps. If necessary, keep naps < 30 minutes before 3 p.m.

If You Had a Bad Night

Do nothing extreme…

? Don’t sleep in late, to try and catch up.

? Don’t nap long hours, to try and catch up.

? Don’t go to bed early, to try and catch up.

? Don’t overload on caffeine, to stay awake!

Just resume your regular schedule; your sleep drive will self-correct the next night.

When to Seek Further Evaluation

Persistent insomnia > 3 months.

Loud snoring, choking, or witnessed apneas (stopping breathing).

Excessive daytime sleepiness.

Restless legs, parasomnias, so-called narcolepsy (falling asleep without choice during the day) or shift-work insomnia.

Ask your doctor a referral for sleep study (polysomnography) or CBT-I (cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia).

Finally, One Last Resource!

This one is massive. Falling asleep means dropping from beta-frequency brainwaves to alpha (12 Hz), to theta (4 -6 Hz) and then delta (0.5 – 4 Hz), which is deep sleep. So what if you could hum to the brain and persuade it to drop gently from beta, to alpha, theta and then into delta. You would fall asleep (couldn’t help yourself, actually)!

Well, it can be done. I am associated with a device which can deliver these soporific brain frequencies. It’s called the Kasina and it wraps 4 different sleep aids into one pleasant “mind walk.” I have had patients say they could not stay awake till the end!

The 4 modalities are:

1. Binaural beats

2. Photic driving (flashing lights)

3. Slow relaxing music, integrated with the sounds

4. A calm, relaxing voice giving you instructions to travel in your mind in creative ways.

Go here to learn more.

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

SOURCES:

1. Brain, Volume 141, Issue 6, June 2018, Pages 1884–1886, https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awy115
2. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/01/27/what-an-insomniac-knows
3. https://time.com/7160802/sleep-longevity-live-longer-health/
4. Br J Gen Pract. 2018 Apr;68(669):193. doi: 10.3399/bjgp18X695609
5. https://news.berkeley.edu/2017/10/17/whywesleep/
6. https://www.masterclass.com/articles/matthew-walker-on-improving-sleep-quality
7. https://www.cogneurosociety.org/going-deep-sleep-matthew-walker/
8. Nat Commun. 2013;4:2259. doi: 10.1038/ncomms3259