30th March 2026 Newsletter Monday How did we evolve without this? Hello Reader, I have to talk about what I keep seeing. Not a single headline this week. Just a pattern that keeps repeating until you can’t unsee it. There’s a term for it: audience capture. It’s what happens when someone builds trust by being clear, sensible and evidence-based… and then slowly starts shaping their message around what that audience wants to hear — or what will sell. And it’s not just influencers. I’m seeing it...
13 days ago • 3 min read
23rd March 2026 Newsletter Monday Winner Hello Reader, There’s an article trending this morning that I couldn’t resist clicking on. I suppose that’s exactly why it’s trending 😆 How long should you be able to stand on one leg for your age. I’ve no doubt many of you would struggle to resist that either. It’s so simple. So measurable. And we’re all quietly comparing ourselves to where we should be, even when we wish we wouldn’t. But it reminded me of a real-life test I did a few days ago. A...
20 days ago • 3 min read
16th March 2026 Newsletter Monday A rare sight - an empty bed There were two stories competing for my attention this week. At first they felt unrelated. The more I thought about them, the more they seemed to describe the same problem from two different angles. The first was the moral outrage that has erupted over the prospect of NHS England paying around £330 million to a US tech company for software designed to improve hospital efficiency. The anger seems to have focused largely on the...
27 days ago • 3 min read
9th March 2026 Newsletter Monday Chicken anyone? Hello Reader, This week England’s Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty, said something that will probably irritate both sides of the obesity debate. He said that relying on weight-loss injections to solve obesity would represent a societal failure. That comment will annoy people for different reasons. Some will hear it as criticism of GLP-1 drugs. It isn’t. These medications are life-changing for some individuals. I work with people who use them...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
2nd March 2026 Newsletter Monday Hello Reader, Last week I was driving along listening to the news announce that GPs will now have to guarantee same-day appointments for “urgent” cases in 90% of instances. I admit to shouting at the radio: “Define urgent!” My daughter asked me to calm down. Then I opened the BBC comments later and discovered half the country was shouting the same thing. So let’s talk about it calmly. Because on the surface, this sounds entirely reasonable. If something is...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
23rd Feb 2026 Newsletter Monday Hello Reader, This article on the BBC caught my attention this morning. Not because it was outrageous, but because of the language. “Anti-inflammatory foods.” That phrase usually lives quite happily on Instagram next to green powders and discount codes. When the BBC starts using it, you know it has crossed into mainstream thinking. And to my medical brain, that term has always felt… weighty. If we are going to call something anti-inflammatory, I want noticeable...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
16th Feb 2026 Newsletter Monday Grey matter needs challenge Hello Reader, I read a really interesting article in New Scientist yesterday about a dementia study. Most of these stories blur into one another, but this one stood out immediately because it followed people for 20 years. That’s rare. As usual, I read it with one question in mind: what can we reasonably learn from this that might change how we live? One of the frustrations with dementia research is time. Alzheimer’s disease (just one...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
9th Feb 2026 Newsletter Monday Waiting for guidelines to update Hello Reader, Buried among the cancer headlines this week was a genuinely positive piece of research. The sort you’d miss if you blinked. It didn’t come with a scary percentage, a lifestyle villain, or a call to panic, which is probably why it slipped under the radar. A study was published which focused on a specific group of women: those whose periods stop because of low energy availability. That might be due to intense...
2 months ago • 2 min read
2nd Feb 2026 Newsletter Monday How much is enough though? Hello Reader, **“Men need to exercise twice as long as women”? Let’s calm down.** You may have seen the headline because it's not going away and it came up again in BBC Science magazine this month, 3 months after it was in The Guardian. “Men need to exercise twice as long as women to get the same heart benefits.” Which sounds dramatic. Slightly alarming. And, as usual, not quite how science works. So let’s slow it down and look at what...
2 months ago • 3 min read