Mental resilience or fragility?

Last Thursday was the end of all C19 restrictions in the UK, time to celebrate and feel some joy as the weight of oppression is lifted. And the beginning of war in Europe with Russia (or specifically Putin) attacking Ukraine. Pretty depressing all around, frankly. If we then throw in the soaring gas prices about to slaughter the budgets of everyone, I am concerned about…

Vitamin D and statin associated myopathy

Last week we talked about how statins can affect the body’s ability to make the crucial form of vitamin K2, MK4. As we discussed, the most common side-effect of statins is severe muscle pain and soreness, aka myopathy. The mechanism of statins is that they inhibit an enzyme called HMG CoA reductase, which is part of the mevalonate pathway. At the end of that is cholesterol…

C19 & vitamin D: Groundhog day?

Well, here we are over two years into a worldwide viral pandemic, but when it comes to the prevention of death/severe C19 using safe, cheap and effective treatments, it sure feels like groundhog day. Yet another study on vitamin D confirms that pre-existing levels are pretty good at predicting who gets really ill and is at risk of dying and who gets it mildly. Given…

The simple solution to prevent fractures

I am currently eyeballs deep in research on bone health and fracture prevention. As ever when you think you know something, when you read deeper, things are never quite as clean cut as you thought and the general narrative on the subject isn’t really representative of the research. Frankly, once you start really deep-diving into a subject, you realise we are drowning in research, that…

welcome to 2022 (& reality)

Welcome to 2022. Let us keep faith that common sense, logic and integrity will prevail over this year in terms of C19. Is Omicron a gift from Mother nature/God/Allah/Ganesh/the universe? It may well be. Whether or not this will change policy in some parts of the world remains to be seen. It does sometimes feel like the media narrative and government policies are starting to…

2021 review of best new stuff plus what is happening in 2022

Well, it wasn’t an easy year, but sometimes the most challenging things become the most valuable things in life. If you had asked me if had asked me in my 20’s would being diagnosed with two auto-immune diseases be a “good” or “bad” thing, well the simplistic naive me would have said bad. But this is all a relative judgement. It gave me insights I would never have understood…