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Concussion: Why the Advice Changed from Rest to Movement
Dark-room rest until symptoms clear is out of date. The 2023 international consensus recommends relative rest for 24-48 hours, then progressive activity. Here's the current protocol. Read more...
The Teenage Brain and Sleep: Why They Can't Just Go to Bed Earlier
Adolescent body clocks genuinely shift later. It isn't laziness, it isn't only phones, and telling a fifteen-year-old to go to bed at ten doesn't work for a biological reason. Read more...
Post-Exertional Malaise: The Symptom That Changed the Advice
In long COVID and ME/CFS, pushing through can make things worse for days. NICE removed graded exercise therapy in 2021. Here's what post-exertional malaise is and why it changes everything. Read more...
What Changed in the 2025 Restless Legs Guidelines
The AASM moved dopamine agonists off first-line treatment for restless legs. If you're on one and your symptoms are creeping earlier in the day, that's a conversation to have. Read more...
Medication-Overuse Headache: When Painkillers Become the Problem
If you have headaches 15+ days a month and take acute headache medication regularly, the medication may be causing them. The criteria, and why the way out is counter-intuitive. Read more...
St John's Wort and Epilepsy Medication: The Interaction on Our Own Label
St John's Wort lowers the blood level of several anticonvulsants, with a risk of breakthrough seizures. It's in one of our products. Here's the mechanism and what to do. Read more...
Epilepsy: diet works, antioxidants don't, and a disclosure we have to make
Every post in this series so far has ended with some version of "we sell nothing for this." Epilepsy is different. We sell two things that appear in the epilepsy literature, and neither of them appears well. One is ineffective. The other is an interaction risk. So this page does two jobs: it explains the condition, and it tells you plainly what that evidence means for our own products. We are not doctors, and nothing here is treatment advice. This is the second post in our series on the neurological... Read more...
Parkinson's disease: good symptom control, nothing that slows it
Parkinson's disease is the one condition in this whole territory where the treatment genuinely works. Levodopa is probably the most effective symptomatic drug in neurology. People go from barely able to rise out of a chair to walking across a room. And there is nothing — not one licensed drug, not one supplement, not one intervention of any kind — shown to slow the disease down. Those two facts get run together constantly, in both directions. "There's no treatment" is wrong and discouraging. "There's a treatment" gets heard as "it's... Read more...
Young-onset dementia: why the hard part comes after the diagnosis
The five posts before this one are about recognising a disease. This one is about what happens once it has been recognised in somebody who is fifty-four, has a mortgage, a job, and children still at home. That is the distinguishing feature of young-onset dementia, and it is not a medical one. The pathology is the same set of diseases covered in this series. What differs is that almost every service built to help was designed for someone thirty years older. This completes our series on the dementia diagnoses, after... Read more...
Frontotemporal Dementia — When It Isn't Memory First, and Gets Called Psychiatric
Frontotemporal dementia fails differently from the other dementias. The ones before it in this series get missed because they look like ageing. This one gets missed because it looks like a psychiatric illness — and because it arrives in people in their fifties, an age at which almost nobody is looking for dementia. This is the fifth post in our series on the dementia diagnoses, after mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer's disease, vascular dementia and Lewy body dementia. It also contains the single strongest piece of evidence in our whole library... Read more...
Lewy Body Dementia — Why It Gets Missed, and Why Antipsychotics Are Dangerous In It
If someone you know has Lewy body dementia, or might have it, the single most important thing on this page is that antipsychotic drugs can cause severe and occasionally fatal reactions in this condition. That is not a general caution about side effects. It is specific to this diagnosis, it is well recognised, and the people most exposed to it are the ones who have not been diagnosed yet. This is the fourth post in our series on the dementia diagnoses, after mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia.... Read more...
Vascular Dementia — The One Most Tied to Risk Factors You Can Change
Vascular dementia is the third post in our series explaining the dementia diagnoses, after mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease. It is the subtype where our fourteen posts on dementia risk stop being abstract, because its risk factors are the cardiovascular ones. It is also where we have to report something that sits awkwardly alongside those posts: the randomised evidence that treating those risk factors prevents dementia is weaker than the risk-factor framing implies. Both of those things are in here. We are not doctors, and nothing here is treatment... Read more...
Alzheimer's Disease — What Actually Happens, and What the New Drugs Actually Do
Alzheimer's disease is the second post in our series explaining the dementia diagnoses, after mild cognitive impairment. It is also the one where the most has changed in the last three years, in two directions at once: the diagnosis got dramatically easier, and the first drugs that genuinely alter the underlying disease arrived — delivering a benefit that most of the people who measured it describe as being at or below the threshold a patient would notice. Both halves of that are true, and the gap between them is where... Read more...
Mild Cognitive Impairment — What It Is, and Why It Isn't Early Dementia
We have fourteen posts on this blog about lowering your risk of dementia, and until now not one explaining what the diagnoses actually are. That is a strange gap for a brain health company, and this is the first of six posts fixing it. Mild cognitive impairment is the right place to start, because it is the most consequential diagnosis almost nobody understands — and because the single most important thing about it is the thing least often said out loud: MCI is not early dementia, and between a fifth... Read more...
Hormonal Contraception and Mood — What the Evidence Actually Shows
More people take hormonal contraception than take any drug in the four medication classes we have already written about, and the question of what it does to mood has been argued over for sixty years. The honest answer turns out to be more interesting than either "it's all in your head" or "the pill causes depression" — because the observational evidence and the trial evidence point at two different conclusions, and both are right about different things. We are not doctors or prescribers. Nothing here is a reason to stop... Read more...
What Antipsychotics Actually Do — And Why One Is Prescribed as a Sleeping Tablet
Antipsychotics are the hardest medication class to write about honestly, because the gap between what they are licensed for and what they are actually prescribed for is enormous — and because the sharpest end of that gap is a sleeping tablet. That last part is our business, so it gets its own section. This is a mechanism-and-evidence explainer. We are not doctors or prescribers, nothing here is a reason to change a prescription, and antipsychotic discontinuation in particular is not something to attempt without the clinician who prescribed it. What... Read more...
What ADHD Stimulants Actually Do — Efficacy, Dose, Blood Pressure and Misuse
Stimulants are the most effective treatment in psychiatry by effect size, and the most argued about. This article is what they actually do, what the best current evidence says about how well they work, what they do to blood pressure, and how addictive they really are — plus the one finding that a company selling focus supplements should be most uncomfortable about, which is ours. Nothing here is dosing advice. We are not doctors or prescribers, the dose figures below are descriptions of what a published dose-response analysis found across... Read more...
What Benzodiazepines Actually Do — And Why Stopping Is the Risky Part
If you are currently taking a benzodiazepine, do not stop or reduce it based on anything in this article. Abrupt discontinuation is the one genuinely dangerous thing you can do with this class of drug, and the published cases of withdrawal delirium below are what that looks like. Any change belongs to you and your prescriber, together, on a plan. Benzodiazepines are among the most effective drugs ever made for acute anxiety and acute insomnia, and among the most difficult to stop. Both halves of that are true at once,... Read more...
What SSRIs Actually Do — And What the Evidence Says About Stopping Them
If you are in crisis, stop reading and get help now. Samaritans, free from any phone in Ireland and the UK: 116 123, 24 hours, every day. At immediate risk: A&E, or 999 or 112. Thoughts of ending your life are a medical emergency and they are treatable — tell someone tonight, not eventually. If you take an SSRI, or you've been offered one, you have probably been told some version of "it corrects a chemical imbalance." That sentence is doing a lot of work it can't support. What an... Read more...
Sleep Formula vs Melatonin Gummies: What You Can Actually Verify
A tub of melatonin gummies costs about the same as a bottle of Sleep Formula, tastes considerably better, and is on the shelf of every pharmacy. So it is a fair question to ask what you actually get for choosing a capsule instead — and the answer is narrower than a supplement company would like it to be. This isn't the absorption argument. Whether a gummy is absorbed differently from a capsule is a separate question, and we've answered it separately in does format matter for absorption: once either one... Read more...
Sleep Formula vs Over-the-Counter Sleep Aids: An Honest Comparison
You are standing in a pharmacy at nine in the evening. On one shelf is a packet of antihistamine sleeping tablets — diphenhydramine or doxylamine, sold under names like Nytol, ZzzQuil and Unisom. On another is a bottle of Sleep Formula. You want to know which one works. The honest answer is not the one we would prefer to give. For a single bad night, the antihistamine has better evidence for sedation than our product does. What it also has is tolerance that arrives within days, a documented next-morning hangover,... Read more...
Is Melatonin Habit-Forming, and Does It Stop Working?
This is one of the most common questions people ask before buying a melatonin product. We sell two and have never answered it — so here it is, including the parts arguing against ours. It arrives as one question when it is really four: will I become physically dependent, will my sleep worsen if I stop, will it stop working, and will I end up unable to sleep without a pill. Three are better supported than the fourth. Start with what melatonin is Melatonin is a hormone your pineal gland... Read more...
Physical Inactivity and Dementia Risk: The Strongest Recommendation on the List
Physical inactivity is the last of the Lancet Commission's fourteen modifiable dementia risk factors to get its own post here, and the one where we have least to gain from writing it. That is why it needed writing. This is not a comparison of exercise against supplements — that lives in our honest comparison of exercise against anything you could buy from us. This post covers what that one does not: how the evidence is graded, what the trials found, where the dose-response curve is steepest, and why the strongest... Read more...
Untreated Vision Loss and Dementia Risk: What the Evidence Actually Shows
Two of the fourteen modifiable risk factors on the Lancet Commission's list were added in the 2024 update: raised LDL cholesterol in midlife, and untreated vision loss in later life. Vision is the one almost nobody has heard of, and where the action is cheapest and least interesting. An eye test. The word doing the work is "untreated" The factor is not vision loss. It is vision loss that nobody corrected. That is the whole reason it sits on a list of modifiable risks. Refractive error, cataract and much diabetic... Read more...
Air Pollution and Dementia Risk: What the PM2.5 Evidence Actually Shows
Most of the fourteen modifiable dementia risk factors the Lancet Commission names are things a person can act on or a clinician can treat — blood pressure, hearing, alcohol, activity, smoking. Air pollution is the one that mostly is not. What you breathe is set by the road outside your window, the heating your neighbours burn, and what your national regulator decided was tolerable. WHO puts it plainly: "most sources of outdoor air pollution are well beyond the control of individuals." It is the awkward item on a list usually... Read more...
Smoking and the Brain: What Quitting Gives Back, and How Long It Takes
You already know smoking is bad for you. The questions worth answering are narrower: what does quitting give back, on what timescale, and is there an age at which it stops being worth doing? Plus vaping, where the honest answer is one almost nobody gives. Smoking is one of the fourteen modifiable risk factors named by the Lancet Commission on dementia prevention — we've covered what its headline 45% figure does and doesn't mean. This piece is about the recovery curve. What is established, and what is inferred The vascular... Read more...
Raised LDL Cholesterol and Dementia Risk: Why Midlife Is the Word That Matters
Of the fourteen modifiable dementia risk factors the Lancet Commission names, raised LDL cholesterol is the odd one out: most adults over forty have already had it measured. The number is sitting in a GP record. Almost nobody has been told it has anything to do with their brain. We have covered the vascular cluster before: blood pressure, the ten factors behind stroke risk, what the Commission's 45% figure does and doesn't mean. This one is narrower and easier to get backwards: the timing. The evidence points at LDL measured... Read more...
Midlife Weight and Brain Health: Why the Timing Changes the Answer
How insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes damage the brain across decades, and why the trials that lowered blood glucose did not improve cognition, is covered in full separately and not re-tread here. Why you feel flat at three in the afternoon is a different article again. This one is about obesity, one of the fourteen risk factors named by the Lancet Commission, and about a single word: when. Get the timing wrong and this literature appears to say the exact opposite of what it says — which is how... Read more...
Tinnitus: What Actually Helps
We sell nothing for tinnitus and would not. That is exactly why it is worth writing about properly: there is nothing at the end of this article to buy, which makes it easier to report the evidence as it stands. It stands in an awkward place. The best-supported treatment does not make the sound quieter, the most-sold supplement has been tested repeatedly with an unfavourable conclusion, and the most useful thing here is a list of situations needing urgent assessment. What tinnitus is, and is not Tinnitus is the perception... Read more...
The Everyday Medicines That Fog Your Thinking
Two of our articles name medication as a cause of cognitive fog and move on. What actually causes brain fog lists it among several causes; the blood-test piece calls it something bloods will not catch. This is the follow-up neither gave it. Read this first. Nothing below is a reason to stop a prescribed medicine or reduce a dose. Several drugs named here are dangerous to stop abruptly — benzodiazepines in particular, where sudden withdrawal can cause seizures — and others treat conditions that return without them. The action is... Read more...
Cognitive Reserve: What Education and a Complex Life Actually Buy You
Cognitive reserve is the idea that two people can carry the same disease burden in their brains and only one will look ill. It is one of the better-supported ideas in dementia research and one of the most misused — sold as a promise that a demanding job or a language app buys protection. What the evidence supports is narrower, and includes a finding nobody enjoys repeating. Where the idea came from A 1988 post-mortem study in Annals of Neurology examined 137 nursing-facility residents, average age 85.5, whose mental and... Read more...
Depression: What Actually Works, in Order
If you are in crisis, stop reading and get help now. Samaritans, free from any phone in Ireland and the UK: 116 123, 24 hours, every day. At immediate risk: A&E, or 999 or 112. Thoughts of ending your life are a medical emergency and they are treatable — tell someone tonight, not eventually. Depression carries a risk of suicide. That is the most important fact here, and it is also routinely misquoted. The 15% lifetime figure still repeated in textbooks came from a 1970 analysis of severely ill inpatients.... Read more...
Blood Pressure and the Brain
We have cited the Lancet Commission's list of modifiable dementia risk factors repeatedly without ever writing about the item on it that is easiest to find and easiest to treat. This fixes that. High blood pressure is on that list. It produces no symptoms, it is measured in ninety seconds, and it is one of the few entries where there are randomised trials rather than only observational associations. Those trials are also more equivocal than the headlines were, and the honest version of this story includes a primary endpoint that... Read more...
Insulin Resistance, Type 2 Diabetes and Cognition
First, what this article is not about. If you are here because you feel foggy and flat at three in the afternoon, that is a different subject and we have written it up separately: the post-lunch dip in healthy people, which is largely circadian rather than dietary, and where the measured outcome in most trials is glucose rather than cognition. This article is about the other end of the same axis — sustained insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes, and what they do to the brain over decades. Type 2... Read more...
Loneliness, Social Isolation and Cognitive Decline
Social isolation is one of the fourteen modifiable risk factors on the Lancet Commission's list. We have cited that list repeatedly — in what the 45% figure actually means, in the factor-by-factor breakdown, and in the piece on hearing loss — without ever writing the post on isolation itself. This is that post. It is a harder subject than hearing: the exposure is harder to define, the studies disagree with each other, and the biggest objection to the whole literature is one the literature cannot answer. Two different things, routinely... Read more...
Autistic Burnout: Why It Isn't Depression, and What Actually Helps
An autistic adult who has been coping for years hits a wall. The exhaustion does not lift with a weekend. Skills that were reliable stop working — driving a familiar route, cooking, answering the phone, holding a conversation they could have held easily a month ago. Noise and light that were merely annoying become intolerable. They go to a doctor, and they come out with a diagnosis of depression and a prescription for an antidepressant. Sometimes that is right. Often it is the wrong description of what is happening, and... Read more...
Dyslexia and Dyspraxia in Adults: What Helps, and One Thing That Doesn't
Two specific learning differences that are common, frequently undiagnosed in adults, and surrounded by more myth than almost anything else in this area. The most useful thing to establish first: dyslexia is a language processing difference, not a visual one. Almost every popular misconception — and one entire commercial product category — follows from getting that wrong. What dyslexia actually is Dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty affecting accurate and fluent word reading and spelling. The core difficulty is with phonological processing — hearing, holding and manipulating the individual sounds... Read more...
Tics and Tourette's: Behavioural Therapy Comes Before Medication
Two things about tics are almost universally misunderstood, and both change how you'd respond to them. Tics are not involuntary in the way a reflex is, and they are not voluntary either. And the first-line treatment is a behavioural therapy, not a drug — which is the opposite of what most people assume about a neurological movement disorder. What a tic actually is A tic is a sudden, rapid, repetitive movement or vocalisation. Motor tics run from simple — blinking, head jerks, shoulder shrugs, facial movements — to complex sequences.... Read more...
Addiction: The Treatments That Work, and Why Willpower Isn't One of Them
If you're in crisis right now, this page is the wrong place. In Ireland and the UK, Samaritans is 116 123 — free, 24 hours. If you're at immediate risk, go to A&E or call 999 or 112. If you are physically dependent on alcohol, read the safety warning below before you stop drinking. The single most useful fact about addiction treatment is that effective treatments exist, they are medications as well as therapies, and most people who would benefit are never offered them. The second most useful fact is... Read more...
Inflammation and the Brain: A Real Mechanism and a Marketing Frame
"Chronic inflammation" has become the all-purpose explanation in wellness — for fatigue, low mood, brain fog, ageing, weight and almost everything else. That is a marketing frame. Underneath it there is a real and genuinely interesting mechanism, with real trial evidence attached. The two are worth separating, because the science supports something much narrower and much more specific than the aisle does. The mechanism, which is real The brain has its own immune cells, microglia, and it is not immunologically sealed off from the rest of the body the way... Read more...
Men's Brain Health: Start With Sleep, Not Testosterone
If you're struggling right now, this page is the wrong place. In Ireland and the UK, Samaritans is 116 123 — free, 24 hours, and you don't have to be in crisis to call. If you're at immediate risk, go to A&E or call 999 or 112. One statistic defines this subject, so it goes first. In England in 2024, the suicide rate was 17.1 per 100,000 for men and 5.6 for women — around three-quarters of all suicides were male, with the highest rate in men aged 50 to... Read more...
PTSD: What the Guidelines Recommend, and the One Thing That Made It Worse
If you're in crisis right now, this page is the wrong place. In Ireland and the UK, Samaritans is 116 123 — free, 24 hours. If you're at immediate risk, go to A&E or call 999 or 112. Two things about PTSD are worth knowing before anything else, and both cut against the intuition. Most people who experience a traumatic event do not develop PTSD. Distress afterwards is close to universal; the disorder is not. Natural recovery over weeks is the normal course. And the intervention that was for years... Read more...
Chronic Pain: Why a Major Guideline Says Don't Start Painkillers
There is a recommendation in the chronic pain guidelines that sounds, on first reading, like a mistake. For one specific category of chronic pain, NICE's guideline advises clinicians not to start paracetamol, non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, opioids or benzodiazepines. Not "use sparingly." Do not initiate. That is not indifference, and it is not a claim that the pain isn't real. It follows from something genuinely important about how some chronic pain works — and understanding it changes what's worth trying. First: which kind of chronic pain The recommendation applies to chronic primary... Read more...
Numb or Burning Feet: The Causes Worth Finding, Including One That's a Supplement
Numbness, tingling, burning or pins and needles in the feet — often worse at night, often creeping upwards over months — is peripheral neuropathy. It is common, it becomes more common with age, and the single most useful thing to know is that several of its causes are found with cheap blood tests and are treatable once found. One of those causes is a supplement. We sell two products that contain the nutrient in question, so that section is about us as much as anyone, and it's not buried at... Read more...
Sleepwalking, Night Terrors and Acting Out Dreams: What's Benign and What Isn't
Parasomnias are the things that happen during sleep that shouldn't: walking, talking, screaming, eating, thrashing, acting out a dream. Most are harmless and most people who have them never need a clinic. But they split into two families with completely different implications, and the single most useful piece of information is when in the night the episode happens. Get that right and you know which conversation you're having. The split: deep-sleep events versus dream-sleep events Sleep isn't uniform — it cycles between non-REM stages and REM through the night, and... Read more...
Narcolepsy: Why the Average Diagnosis Takes Nearly a Decade
Narcolepsy is uncommon, frequently misread, and one of the slowest diagnoses in medicine. A European study of 580 people with narcolepsy type 1 across 12 countries put the mean delay from symptom onset to diagnosis at 9.7 years, with a median of 5.3 years and an interquartile range running from 1.7 to 13.2. The longest case in that cohort was 29.4 years. The part that should bother anyone reading this: the authors found that the delay has not shortened over recent decades, despite everything learned about the condition in that... Read more...
The Gut-Brain Axis: What's Real and What's Being Sold
The gut and brain genuinely communicate. That does not mean a general probiotic improves mood. Here's where the evidence is solid and where the marketing runs ahead of it. Read more...
Thyroid and the Brain: The Test That Explains a Lot of Brain Fog
An underactive thyroid produces slowed thinking, poor memory, fatigue and low mood — a near-perfect match for brain fog. It's common, treatable, and found with one blood test. Read more...
OCD Is Not About Being Tidy
OCD is a distressing condition built on intrusive thoughts and the compulsions used to neutralise them. It has a specific evidence-based treatment, and it is not a personality quirk. Read more...
Stroke: The Four Signs, and the Ten Things That Cause Nine in Ten
Stroke is the leading cause of neurological disability worldwide and largely preventable. The four signs that mean call an ambulance, and the ten risk factors behind 90% of cases. Read more...