When I was in the US last year for the tour of my film The Connection, people kept talking about the microbiome. It seemed to be a buzzword. In fact, Fortune Magazine declared 2015 "The Year of the Microbiome." But before I started sculling kombucha, popping probiotics and fixating on a ‘microbiome diet’, I wanted to find out for myself what it is, what the research actually shows and what this could mean for our health.   If you’re new to the craze, the human microbiome is the term being used to describe a bacterial world that subsists on humans... Read full article »

When my doctor first told me that he thought I had Lupus, he couldn’t offer me a cure or a cause. By way of explanation for why my immune system had turned on my normal healthy tissue, he said that the disease was probably genetic. The implication was that I got dealt an unlucky hand and there wasn’t anything more I could do.   I’ve spoken to many other people who have been told the same thing when they were given a chronic illness diagnosis. In fact genetic inheritability is often quoted in statistics to explain disease. For instance if... Read full article »

Dear Skeptic,   On my recent holiday in the US, I met a father of three young kids who has a chronic illness which conventional medicine says is likely to slowly progress until he is disabled. He has Multiple Sclerosis. I asked him if he was familiar with the work of Professor George Jelinek who has developed a program showing that it is possible to recover from MS. What astonished me was that he had heard of the program, but that he dismissed it as if it was quackery.   If you haven’t seen my film, The Connection you may... Read full article »

A few weeks ago something happened that knocked me for six. For the non-Aussie person reading this blog it’s the best expression I can find to describe an event triggering feelings of sudden unexpected grief that brought everything to a stop. It’s a phrase that refers to the game of cricket where the ball is hit out of the park without touching the ground.   I had sleepless nights and anxious days. I reached for comfort foods and returned to old habits. What followed shortly after was a familiar and somewhat scary physical response. I felt flat, exhausted and foggy... Read full article »

You may be familiar with research showing that highly trained Tibetan monks are able to control their body temperature by using the power of their mind, even to the point they are able to dry wet blankets with their body heat. This was first recorded by Dr. Herbert Benson, one of the world’s leading scientists in mind body medicine who I interviewed for my film The Connection.  In the 1980s Dr. Benson showed that meditating monks could increase the temperature of their fingers and toes by as much as 8.3 °C and other researchers have since found similar results.  ... Read full article »

Dr. Craig Duncan was not supposed to have a heart attack. The 43-year-old leading sports scientist was as fit as the elite Australian athletes he trained. He ran every day. He was vegetarian. He had no sign of heart disease - not high blood pressure or high cholesterol. In fact he’d recently had an ECG to check his heart and got the all clear from doctors.   But Craig is lucky to be alive after suffering a Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection. There were only 150 cases of the rare condition recorded and the majority had been autopsies.   I interviewed... Read full article »