What Health Under Control Is
Health Under Control is where I do the thinking work behind my practice at Unblocked Health.
This is not a protocol library and not a lifestyle blog. It is a place where I rebuild how I reason about health in a world that is constantly selling the next fix.
Most readers fall into one of two groups:
A practitioner or coach who can feel that standard “root cause” and optimization culture is stuck.
A contemplative person who have done the courses, the therapy, changed your diet, bought the wearables, and still don’t feel clear.
If that’s you, you’re in the right place. You’re with us.
The Environment You’re Really In
You are not choosing your way through a neutral landscape of health information.
You are inside a health attention economy:
Search, feeds, and “top” recommendations lean toward what is safe, popular, and profitable.
Influencers, apps, and pharma all compete to keep you engaged and buying.
Even AI answers are shaped by these same pressures.
It feels like endless choice, but the range of real options narrows. You rotate through doctors, protocols, supplements, and programs while your actual sense of what is happening gets thinner.
This Substack exists to name that environment and give you tools to stay oriented to yourself.
Why Your Doctor Is NOT Failing You
Modern medicine is excellent at specific things:
Ruling out danger
Stabilizing acute crises
Managing known diseases
Using drugs and procedures to keep you alive
That is already a full mandate.
Over time we started quietly asking physicians to do something else:
Investigate every subtle fatigue, mood, or gut shift
Advise us on food, breath, sleep, movement, stress
Act as long-term guides and health investigators
That is not what medical training is for. It’s not what appointment lengths or billing codes support. It’s no surprise that patients feel dismissed and doctors feel attacked and burned out.
It wasn’t there job, and they never asked for it.
The point of this work is not to blame medicine for failing at a job it was never designed to do. The point is to name the gap between acute care and the noisy world of health content and products.
That gap is where this project sits.
The Missing Seat
There is a role that almost no system has defined clearly:
Not a mini-doctor
Not an influencer with a favorite protocol
Not a motivational “accountability coach”
The missing seat is a guide who:
Stays strictly within non-medical scope.
Has time to look at food, breath, sleep, pacing, and meaning together
Works under clear principles that keep your judgment central
The framework here has two parts:
Five Stages of Health – how people actually get pulled through the modern health environment, from chasing symptom relief, to chasing protocols, to finally seeing that the chase itself has become interference.
Seven Principles – the rules of engagement for any work I do with clients, and a checklist you can use to evaluate anyone who wants to help you.
Together, they define the kind of help that does not add to the confusion:
Explanations you can understand and trust
Experiments you can try yourself
Tools used temporarily to rebuild your own sense of cause and effect
A relationship that aims to make the practitioner optional, not central
The same principles apply to how I use AI, the unavoidable tool. Large language models are not here to hand you “the answer.” Used well, they are thinking partners that help you see patterns, stress-test ideas, and become less dependent on external authority over time.
How to Use This Site
The content here is organized in three layers:
Framework – the core orientation pieces: 5 stages + 7 principles
Applied Philosophy – taking the same principles into specific domains like nutrition and emotional processing
Practice – concrete application through examples, multimedia, and case-style work
If you are new, a simple path is:
The foundational principles are then laid out in: Health from First Principles.
It explains why another course or protocol often becomes part of the problem and lays out the three-layer structure of this work.Read Five Stages of Health: From Managing Illness to Allowing Health.
Use it to locate yourself and your clients in the current health attention economy.Read Thriving in a Health Attention Economy: Health from First Principles.
This is the principles essay. It spells out the seven filters that govern how I work and how you can evaluate any practitioner, program, or tool.Then move into the nutrition series, Why Nutritional Science Can’t Tell You What to Eat (and its follow-ups) or Emotional Physics: The Hidden Setting Running Your Life.
These show what “first principles” actually looks like in one domain: constraints first, explanations you can check, and translation all the way down to the plate.
Across everything, the question running in the background is simple:
“Does this way of working make me more dependent, or more able to think clearly for myself?”
If a method or relationship fails that test, it does not belong here.
Who I Am and Where the Work Lives
I started as a personal trainer, moved into psychiatric behavioral work, then spent twenty-five years in technology leadership. In the middle of that, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease and eventually reversed it.
Traditional medicine wanted to manage symptoms. Alternative health made promises I couldn’t trust. Both missed something essential: a clear, testable way to understand what was really happening inside my own body.
Health Under Control is where I write and build the frameworks that came out of that search.
Unblocked Health is where those frameworks are used in private coaching and labwork with individuals who want to apply this in real time.
If you read along here, you should feel two things over time:
Your tolerance for vague explanations dropping
Your confidence in your own ability to reason about health quietly rising
That is the point.
