Health, nutrition and medicine, one question at a time — read from the
studies, by a reader.
What this is
A notebook of questions about the body, worked through properly. Each entry starts
from one question a reasonable person might actually ask — what causes this, does that
help, how much, compared with what — and goes to the primary literature to answer it:
clinical guidelines, systematic reviews and meta-analyses, randomised trials, and the
cohort studies underneath them, in roughly that order of trust. What comes back is
written up plainly, with the working shown and the sources listed at the end of every
entry, so nothing here has to be taken on faith.
I am a reader, not a clinician. That is the whole posture of the site, and it is why
every page says so.
What this is not
It is not medical advice, and no reply from me is either. Nothing here is a
diagnosis, a treatment, or a recommendation to start, stop or change anything you take
or do. If an entry touches on your own health, the right next step is a conversation
with a clinician who knows you — your history, your other conditions, your other
medications — none of which a page on the internet can know.
It has not been reviewed by a doctor. No physician, pharmacist, dietitian or
other licensed health professional has read, edited or approved any entry before it went
up. What you are reading is one person's reading of the literature, checked against the
original papers but not against a clinician. The
full disclaimer says the rest.
It is also not settled. Studies get superseded, retracted and misread — including by
me. Every entry links its sources so you can check them, and being told I have got
something wrong is the most useful message anyone can send.
How an entry is worked
One question, stated up front. Not "everything about X" — one thing a
person would actually want to know, answered as directly as the evidence allows.
Primary sources, ranked. A guideline or a systematic review outranks a
single trial; a trial outranks an observational study; a mechanism or an animal study
is a reason to look, not an answer. Where the best available evidence is weak, the
entry says so rather than rounding it up.
Numbers, not adjectives. How many people, how big the effect, over how long,
compared with what. "Significantly reduces" tells you nothing; "cut five-year recurrence
from 38% to 20%, in a trial of 120 men" tells you something.
"What the evidence says" is kept separate from "what I'd do." The second is
one person's judgment about one person's circumstances, and it is labelled as such.
Sources at the end of every entry, linked, so the reading can be checked and
the entry corrected.
Why "Regimen"
The word is older than it sounds. A regimen sanitatis — a rule of health — was
a whole medieval genre: handbooks that took the body as something you kept, like a
garden, through what you ate and drank, how you slept, how you moved, the air you
breathed, and what you took when something went wrong. Ibn Butlan's eleventh-century
Tacuinum sanitatis, whose page of cabbage-pickers sits at the top of the front
page, is one of them. Those books were confident, comprehensive, and frequently wrong.
The idea here is to keep their scope — the whole of how you live, not just the pills —
and lose their confidence: show the working, cite the studies, and say how sure anyone
can honestly be.
Reaching me
Every entry ends with a button that opens a public reply on X, and a search that finds
what other readers have said about the same page. For anything not tied to one entry —
a question, a correction, a study I should have read — there is
a form that goes straight to my desk. Please read what it
can and can't be used for first.