Whenever someone who doesn’t know me quizzes me about what I do, I often find myself talking to a person’s raised eyebrows. As I explain that I’m a journalist who researches the connection between our mind, body and health, I usually find that I’m met with skepticism at best and cynicism at worst. Since releasing my film about the subject, I’ve met countless others working in this space who experience the same frustration. In a world full of quackery, it can be hard to cut through with real science. Over the years I’ve developed a few ‘go-to’ examples of the... Read full article »

This morning I was nothing short of dumbfounded when I jumped on a set of scales and discovered I have gained weight. Inspired by the research I’ve been doing lately into the brain-health-exercise connection, I’ve been stepping up my usual workout routine a notch. I had assumed that a nice bi-product of my brain-boosting exertions would be a touch of weight loss. To my horror my efforts had the opposite effect. I was almost half a kilogram (roughly one pound) heavier than the previous week. Ouch. It prompted me to do a little digging into the latest research on exercise... Read full article »

In a military field hospital during World War II a young doctor named Henry Beecher found himself in a desperate situation. He had run out of morphine and needed to perform surgery on a badly wounded soldier. Without hesitation one of the nurses filled a syringe with saline solution and gave the soldier a shot, just as if she were injecting him with morphine. The soldier calmed down and Beecher went ahead with the operation without anesthesia. The experience convinced him of the power of placebo and when he returned to the US after the war, he began to study... Read full article »

My soon to be 86-year-old grandmother was in particularly high spirits when I saw her last weekend. She was in no pain after experiencing weeks of enduring nerve agony in her left leg. Being pain free meant that she didn’t need to take her prescription morphine, which she explained tastes awful. In passing, Mardie (the nickname her 14 grandchildren and four great grandchildren have given her) mentioned that she’d needed to eat jellybeans just to wash the hideous taste out of her mouth. Then, with a twinkle in her eye and a conspiratorial tone, she revealed that one-day she had... Read full article »

I have just returned from a glorious holiday spent with my in-law family. Nineteen Harveys aged 2 to 72 came together for a weekend of games, walks, shared meals and spontaneous congregations in the ‘cake corner’ of the hotel coffee shop. We were there for my mother-in-law, Alice’s 70th birthday, a major milestone for a woman who is at the heart of the Harveys and one we wanted to come together to celebrate.   Before the gathering we had secretly gone through decades of photographs that represent Alice’s life and compiled them into a book that we had published as... Read full article »

It’s been one year since my film The Connection was released, a project that has taken my heart and soul to bring to the world, and a project that has changed my life forever. As regular readers of this blog will know, I decided to make The Connection after I discovered the wealth of scientific evidence showing there was far more I could be doing for my chronic illness than my doctors were aware of and I wanted to share this information with others. Given that I was recently reading a research paper about the health benefits of reflection, I... Read full article »