Tom's Blog on Life and Livingness
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo, founder of the Institute of Nutritional Endocrinology, has 30+ years of clinical experience and sees imbalanced blood sugar and disordered insulin regulation as the underlying cause of so many people’s problems. Her bottom line is that to get fuel into your mitochondria, good insulin and blood sugar control is a non-negotiable.
Stress, lack of good sleep, inadequate movement, toxin exposure, poor diet lead to insulin resistance.
A massive Swedish study followed 30,000 women for over 20 years and found that those who actively sought sun exposure had dramatically lower death rates from cancer, heart disease, and all causes.
The shocking part? Sun avoiders had roughly double the overall mortality.
Even heavy smokers who got plenty of sun had similar death rates to non-smokers who avoided it.
Sunlight appears to extend life through vitamin D, nitric oxide, and immune support – yet we’re still told to hide from it. Are you getting enough sun?
Mice given aluminum hydroxide at Bexsero-equivalent mg/kg doses exhibited motor neuron death, brain inflammation, neuronal aluminum accumulation, and neurodegenerative changes.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jonfleetwood/p/menb-vaccine-aluminum-doses-overlap
Vaccinated Koreans suffered a dose-dependent rise in the common cold, infections, pneumonia, and tuberculosis — up to +559%. BILL GATES spent over $100 MILLION on mRNA.
A paper has just been published examining COVID-19 vaccination and sudden death in younger individuals. It has been widely shared because it appears reassuring. The conclusion: no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines increase the risk of sudden cardiac death in healthy young adults.
At face value, that sounds like the end of the discussion. For me, it is the beginning. When a study gives a clean answer to a complex biological problem, it is worth going back into the data to see what has been simplified.
When I looked at the baseline characteristics, one detail immediately stood out. Individuals who had a recent COVID-19 infection within 90 days were more than twice as likely to be in the group that died compared to those who survived.
This is not a subtle difference. This is a strong signal. And yet, it is not the headline.
Instead, it is adjusted for, controlled, and moved into the background so that the primary question — whether vaccination alone is associated with sudden death — can be answered. But that approach assumes something I do not believe reflects reality.
Abdel-Qadir, Husam, et al. “Association between COVID-19 vaccination and sudden death in apparently healthy younger individuals: A population-based case-control study.” PLoS medicine 23.3 (2026): e1004924.
The study treats vaccination and infection as separate variables. Statistically, that is standard. Biologically, it is incomplete.
We are no longer dealing with a population that has experienced a single exposure. We are dealing with individuals who have been immune primed through vaccination or prior infection, and then repeatedly exposed to the virus. The relevant question is not whether vaccination or infection independently increases risk. It is what happens when they occur in sequence.
This is what I have been describing for some time as a “COVID storm.” A subgroup of individuals who have experienced immune priming followed by further infection. In that context, the immune response may not behave in a predictable or balanced way. It may become dysregulated. In the heart, this could manifest as inflammation, altered metabolic function, or electrical instability — and in some individuals, that may translate into clinically significant events.
There is another signal in the study that reinforces this concern. Individuals who received only one dose of vaccination appear less “protected” than those who received multiple doses. That is not a straightforward biological gradient. It is a divergence. And divergence usually means the groups are not the same.
Some individuals continue with further doses. Others stop. In clinical medicine, when someone stops after an initial exposure, it is rarely random. It often reflects intolerance, early symptoms, or a different underlying physiology.
What I would have wanted to see in this study is simple. Of the individuals who had a recent infection and then died, what proportion were vaccinated? How many doses had they received? What was the time interval between their last exposure and infection?
That is where the answer is likely to be found. If there is a higher-risk subgroup, it will not sit neatly in “vaccinated” or “unvaccinated.” It will sit in the interaction between exposure and response over time.
We are seeing rising patterns across multiple cardiovascular conditions since 2020 — arrhythmias, heart failure, thrombotic disease, inflammatory cardiac conditions. This is not confined to one diagnosis.
To dismiss these patterns without fully interrogating the underlying mechanisms is not good enough. This is not about ideology. It is not about being pro or anti any intervention. It is about understanding risk properly.
I often think about how long it took for the link between smoking and disease to be fully accepted. There were studies that created doubt, arguments about confounding, calls for more data. For decades, uncertainty was enough to delay clarity.
That does not mean the conclusions today are wrong. But it does mean we should be cautious about assuming we already have the full picture.
The conclusion of this study may well be correct in its narrow framing. Vaccination alone may not increase the risk of sudden cardiac death in healthy young individuals. But that is not the full question.
The more important question is this: what is the risk in individuals who are immune primed and then experience a recent infection?
Until that is answered, we are simplifying a complex biological system into variables that are easier to analyse — but not necessarily accurate to reality.
This has never been about proving that one factor is responsible. It has always been about recognising that we may be dealing with a new pattern of disease — one that emerges not from a single exposure, but from the interaction of exposures over time.
If we continue to analyse these events in isolation, we will miss it. And if we miss it, we cannot manage it.
That is the risk we should be paying attention to.
https://open.substack.com/pub/philipmcmillan/p/the-covid-vax-signal-they-didnt-follow
She tested an ancient herbal remedy on herself first—then it saved millions of lives and earned her the Nobel Prize.
China, 1930s. A girl named Tu Youyou grows up during turbulent times—war, occupation, social upheaval. As a teenager, she contracts tuberculosis and has to suspend her studies. Lying in bed recovering, watching life continue without her, she makes a decision about her future.
If she survives this, she will dedicate her life to healing. She will make sure others don’t have to suffer as she has.
Tu Youyou keeps that promise.
She studies pharmacology, eventually becoming a researcher at the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Beijing. She’s methodical, detail-oriented, and deeply curious about both ancient remedies and modern science.
Then comes 1967.
The Vietnam War is raging. Chinese soldiers serving there are dying—not just from combat, but from malaria. The mosquito-borne disease is killing troops faster than bullets. It’s decimating military operations across Southeast Asia.
And the parasite is getting smarter. It’s developing resistance to chloroquine and other modern antimalarial drugs that once worked reliably. Soldiers are dying, and medicine is failing them.
The Chinese government launches Project 523—a secret military research program to find new malaria treatments. They turn to an unconventional approach: mining ancient Chinese medical texts for forgotten remedies.
Tu Youyou, then 39 years old, is appointed to lead the project.
Her team begins the painstaking work of reviewing over 2,000 traditional Chinese medicine recipes from ancient manuscripts. They’re looking for anything that mentions treating fever, chills, or symptoms that might indicate malaria.
One herb keeps appearing in texts spanning nearly two millennia: qinghao, sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua). Ancient healers had used it to treat intermittent fevers.
Tu Youyou begins experimenting with extraction methods. She tries boiling the herb, the traditional preparation method for many Chinese medicines.
It doesn’t work. The extracts show no antimalarial activity.
She tries again. And again. Dozens of attempts using different solvents, temperatures, and techniques. Nothing works consistently. The active compound remains elusive.
Then she finds something crucial in an ancient text.
Ge Hong’s “A Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies” (4th century CE) mentions preparing qinghao by soaking it in cold water and wringing out the juice. Not boiling. Cold extraction.
Tu Youyou realizes the problem: heat was destroying the active compound.
She adjusts her method, using low-temperature ether extraction instead of boiling. This time, it works. The extract shows powerful antimalarial activity in laboratory tests, killing the malaria parasite efficiently.
But laboratory success means nothing if the treatment isn’t safe for humans.
Tu Youyou needs to test it on people. But she refuses to risk patients’ lives before knowing the treatment is safe. Clinical trials require evidence of safety first.
So she does what any dedicated scientist facing ethical constraints would do.
She tests it on herself.
Tu Youyou takes the experimental artemisinin extract, monitoring herself for adverse reactions. When she experiences no serious side effects, her research team volunteers to try it as well.
Only after confirming through self-experimentation that the compound wouldn’t cause immediate harm do they proceed to formal clinical trials.
The results are extraordinary.
Artemisinin doesn’t just slow malaria down or suppress symptoms. It destroys the malaria parasite in ways scientists had never observed before. It works against drug-resistant strains. It acts quickly. And it’s remarkably effective even in severe cases.
Over the following decades, artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) become the gold standard for treating malaria worldwide. The World Health Organization recommends them as first-line treatment.
The impact is staggering. In regions of Africa and Southeast Asia where children once died routinely from malaria, mortality rates plummet. Millions of lives—particularly children under five—are saved.
Tu Youyou’s discovery doesn’t just treat a disease. It transforms global public health.
In 2015, at age 84, Tu Youyou receives the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. She becomes the first Chinese woman ever to win a Nobel Prize in science, and the first citizen of mainland China to win a Nobel in any scientific category.
The Nobel Committee’s citation is clear: “for her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against Malaria.”
When Tu Youyou gives her Nobel lecture, she’s characteristically modest. She emphasizes the collaborative nature of the research, the contribution of her team, and the wisdom embedded in traditional Chinese medicine that made the discovery possible.
But make no mistake: her brilliance, persistence, and courage were essential.
She bridged ancient wisdom and modern science. She persisted through countless failures. She risked her own health to ensure patient safety. And she turned a 1,600-year-old herbal remedy into a 21st-century lifesaving drug.
Today, artemisinin-based treatments have saved an estimated millions of lives. The exact number is difficult to calculate, but studies estimate ACTs have prevented hundreds of millions of malaria cases and millions of deaths since their widespread adoption.
Think about that scale. One woman’s discovery, rooted in ancient texts and validated through modern science, has fundamentally altered the trajectory of one of humanity’s oldest and deadliest diseases.
Malaria has killed more humans throughout history than perhaps any other disease. It shaped the rise and fall of civilizations, influenced military campaigns, and devastated populations for millennia.
And a Chinese pharmacologist, mining forgotten medical manuscripts and combining ancient preparation methods with modern extraction techniques, found a way to fight back.
Tu Youyou’s story is about more than scientific achievement. It’s about respecting traditional knowledge while subjecting it to rigorous modern testing. It’s about persistence in the face of repeated failure. It’s about ethical courage—testing experimental treatments on yourself before asking others to take the risk.
And it’s about remembering what it feels like to be sick and helpless, then dedicating your entire life to making sure others don’t have to endure the same fate.
The girl who nearly died from tuberculosis grew up to save millions from malaria.
All because she kept a promise she made to herself in a hospital bed decades earlier.
Nina Teicholz tells Joe Rogan that the government ran huge studies proving saturated fats and cholesterol aren’t linked to heart disease, but then hid the findings.
Jack Seale, The Guardian:
“Get up, after a restless sleep. Shower, using products that contain plastic and are in plastic containers. Fix your hair and deodorise your body using sprays smoothed by plastics, before putting on clothes woven from synthetic (plastic) fibres, picking up your plastic phone and heading out, sipping water from a plastic bottle. Chew plastic gum. Buy a snack wrapped in plastic and receive a receipt printed on plastic-covered paper. Come home, take food out of its plastic packaging, cook it with plastic utensils, then store the leftovers in plastic tubs and clean up with detergents that contain plastics and come in plastic bottles. Clean your teeth with a plastic toothbrush and plastic-infused toothpaste. Go to bed.
The list of ways in which humanity is committing species suicide may be long and growing, but The Plastic Detox is here to suggest that room should be found for the overwhelmingly widespread use of petrochemical-derived plastics.
That’s the main concern of this documentary’s protagonist, epidemiologist Shanna Swan, whose 2021 book Count Down claimed that chemicals in plastic are a factor in falling sperm counts. Swan, a vibrantly bustling grandmother of six and great-grandmother of a precious one, hooks us in with an experiment flavoured by reality TV. Visiting Florida, California, and Idaho, she finds six couples who are struggling to conceive, and challenges them to live for three months with their exposure to plastics dramatically reduced.”
After all this doom, Swan’s final visits to the six couples reward us with happy tears: her admittedly small-sample experiment has produced startling results, including some that go beyond being pregnant or not.
This source article is filled with medical terminology related to the immune system and for most of us would need to be studied in conjunction with a medical dictionary in order to understand it.
A lay person summary of it (thanks to Grok) is that:
https://open.substack.com/pub/rwmalonemd/p/igg4-class-switching-immune-tolerance