senescence
Biology of Aging and Longevity
Aging is simultaneously the most universal human experience and one of the least understood biological processes. Every human being ages, yet the fundamental mechanisms driving the progressive decline in physiological function, the increasing vulnerability to disease, and the ultimate limit on...
Caregiving and Caregiver Health
The act of caring for an aging, ill, or disabled family member is one of the most demanding and least recognized forms of labor in modern society. An estimated 53 million Americans serve as unpaid family caregivers — a workforce whose economic value exceeds $470 billion annually, surpassing...
Melatonin: Far More Than a Sleep Molecule
Melatonin has been reduced in the popular imagination to a sleep supplement — a molecule you buy at the drugstore when jet lag disrupts your schedule. This trivialization obscures what may be the most multifunctional molecule in human biology.
Homo Luminous: The Next Evolution of Humanity and the Shamanic Science of Transformation
For millennia, secret societies of Native American medicine men and women carefully guarded their wisdom teachings. These shamans, known as Earthkeepers, existed in many nations and were called by different names.
One Spirit Medicine, Grow a New Body, and the Neuroscience of Shamanic Transformation
Alberto Villoldo's trajectory from directing the Biological Self-Regulation Laboratory at San Francisco State University to training with Q'ero shamans in the Peruvian Andes is not a story of abandoning science for mysticism. It is a story of following the data wherever it leads, even when it...
Exercise and Epigenetics: How Movement Rewrites Your Genetic Expression
The Human Genome Project was completed in 2003 at a cost of three billion dollars, mapping all 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes in human DNA. The implicit promise was that decoding the genome would unlock the secrets of disease, aging, and human biology.
Therapeutic Fasting and Time-Restricted Eating: The Medicine of Not Eating
In a world obsessed with what to eat, the question of when to eat — and when not to eat — may be equally transformative. Therapeutic fasting and time-restricted eating (TRE) represent some of the most ancient and most scientifically validated health interventions, bridging the gap between...
Astragalus — Astragalus membranaceus
Common names: Astragalus, Milk vetch, Yellow leader Latin name: Astragalus membranaceus (Fisch.) Bunge (syn. Astragalus propinquus) TCM name: Huang Qi (黄芪) — "Yellow Leader" (referring to the yellow color of the root and its leading role among Qi tonics)
Skin Aging & Beauty From Within: The Functional Approach
Your skin is a 22-square-foot organ that replaces itself every 28 days. It is your interface with the world — simultaneously a barrier, a sensor, a thermostat, an endocrine organ, and a window into systemic health.
Fasting Protocols: From Time-Restricted Eating to Extended Fasts
All fasting is not equal. A 12-hour overnight fast and a 5-day water fast activate fundamentally different metabolic pathways at different magnitudes.
The 12 Hallmarks of Aging: A Functional Medicine Map
For most of medical history, aging was treated like weather — something that just happens to you. You get old, things break down, you manage the wreckage.
Senolytics, NAD+, and the New Science of Longevity
Inside your body right now, there are cells that have stopped dividing but refuse to die. They sit in your tissues — fat, skin, joints, lungs, blood vessels — secreting a toxic cocktail of inflammatory molecules, tissue-degrading enzymes, and growth factors that corrupt their neighbors.
Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT): Pressure as Medicine
Henry's Law: the amount of gas dissolved in a liquid is directly proportional to the pressure of that gas above the liquid. Breathe 100% oxygen at sea level, and your plasma carries a modest amount of dissolved O2 — most oxygen rides hemoglobin.
Antioxidants & Phytonutrients: Beyond the Basics
Picture a campfire. Fire produces heat and light — useful, necessary, life-sustaining.
How Stress Makes You Sick: The Mind-Body Connection
Your stress response is 200 million years old. It was engineered for one scenario: something is trying to kill you right now.
Longevity Mindset: How Consciousness Practices Are the Most Evidence-Based Anti-Aging Interventions
In 1979, Ellen Langer, a social psychologist at Harvard, conducted one of the most extraordinary experiments in the history of aging research. She recruited eight men in their late seventies and brought them to a converted monastery in New Hampshire that had been retrofitted to replicate 1959 —...
NAD+ and Sirtuins: The Cellular Energy Currency of Longevity and Consciousness
Imagine your body as a massive data center — trillions of processors running simultaneously, each requiring a constant power supply. Now imagine that the power grid feeding this data center loses approximately 50% of its capacity between ages 40 and 60.
Senolytics: Clearing the Zombie Cells That Cloud Consciousness
Inside your body, right now, there are cells that have stopped dividing but refuse to die. They sit in your tissues — in your fat, your skin, your joints, your brain — like squatters who will not leave.
Telomeres and Telomerase: The Biological Clock's Countdown Timer
Every analogy has its limits, but this one has earned its place in biology: telomeres are the plastic aglets on the ends of your chromosomal shoelaces. Remove them, and the lace frays.
Sleep and Hormonal Health: The Neuroendocrine Dimension of Rest
Sleep and the endocrine system exist in a relationship of profound mutual dependency. The hypothalamus — the brain region that orchestrates both sleep-wake regulation and hormonal control — serves as the anatomical nexus of this relationship, ensuring that hormone secretion is precisely timed to...