I’ve been trying to coax myself into taking my final biological injection of the year for most of the day. It’s a very painful shot. The feeling of it is somewhere between stinging and hot sauce being pushed into your subcutaneous fat. It’s spicy
I was filled with optimism that this new variant called Bimzelx might be the one that finally brought down my biomarkers. And it did indeed show promising results. My CRP and SED rates have never been better.
Alas, the cost is quite high. I’ve got no immune system response to speak of when it comes to my skin and soft tissues. I’ve had four major skin infections requiring surgicalintervention and many minor skin infections.
My pain is better so long as I can avoid picking up an infection. I’ve been on antibiotics most of the year. Alas I’ve only had maybe 2-3 weeks without an infection brewing or being beaten into a retreat.
So today may be my last spicy shot. I’ve gone it a full year of adjustment. I don’t relish the prospect of adjusting back to my previous medication as it takes a full year to fully dose on and off these things. But maybe I’ll be lucky and on my final shot in the year I’ll see a change for the better
I had a really excellent massage recently. The body worker really got under some of the tension points in my body and the compensatory patterns I was hoping for them to work through. I felt like the flow of my energy was reset.
This type of relational work between two people, one with body issues and another one who knows an efficient path for soothing them, need each other. I need relief and they need a payment that reflects their expertise.
Typically this has been labor paid in some increment of time. I paid for an hour long massage but I’d be willing to pay for more hours and the knowledge and capacity to execute that work on myself or through another body worker or tool.
I’ve got a Theragun, a Tiger Tail, lacrosse balls and foam rollers and I try to work through knots and pains. But I know way less than your average massage therapist or Alexander Technique practitioner so these tools are in the hands of a poor craftsman.
I would love for there to exist some type of Open Source Bodywork Database. I’m thinking work flows, anatomy training from video to textbook and routines input by every type of knowledge tradition and patient.
There are humorously already types of open source startups that work on body based API calls. One is called buttplug.io so you get the idea.
I’d love to see workers get paid to contribute their video, audio, and tactile experiences to an open world and ideally be paid a percentage each time it’s used.
Imagine being about to boot up this massage with an automated massage options. Or open share the repo with a therapist with less experience looking to learn. You pay the therapist trainee and for the routine and everyone benefits.
It’s a bit of a fantasy now but I’m sure we are closer than anyone realizes to being able to train these movements into automated systems. Imagine celebrity osteopaths with programs built into something you can use.
I would prefer this be an open source program for human body knowledge so that we learn mechanically the many physical routines and options that exist to make our bodies function better thanks to aligned incentives for everyone to participate. Dare to dream right?
I have had way too many minor (and major) health problems emerge over the course of 2025. Adding in personal life tragedies (the death of my father) and I had a challenging year.
So I trying to keep the last few weeks of the year crisis free. I have already pulled myself out of the day to day to try for a slow wind down of the year. No holiday parties or appearances for me. I am gone.
As I slow down and put distance between myself and the world, I maybe stupidly see it as an opportunity to nudge myself on little health promoting efforts.
After the year I’ve had, I so desperately want to see improvements. Even if simply not collapsing into another infection cycle is a win.
I’ve been trying to consistently work on body basics like muscular compensation patterns and getting more steps each day, but I’m so terrified that even a minor miscalculation in exertion will upset my proverbial apple cart.
I went for a walk on a high mold count day and reached for prednisone. I’ve been teetering on the wrong side of recovery for so long I don’t think I can recall a genuinely good day. My sleep is similarly impacted. I want to have a long night of deep sleep and dream cycles but the best I can manage is just a long night.
Tis the season of “unwrapped” data round ups as technology companies owe remind us that they have very capable data teams without unnecessarily freaking out users.
The marketers get all the glory, as everyone figures it’s a few MySQL queries gussied up with a creative hook but I always wonder what happened to the great data and behavioral science fad of the early teens. We’ve moved beyond IFTT and Zapier into natural language vibe coding. It’s a time of incredible change in understanding the data we’ve lived inside for years.
I got my fifth year of Whoop end of year marketing when I woke up today. Which was a little annoying as I wanted to see my sleep from last night but who wants to rush through the end of year review right? Finding it again can be tricky.
I keep wondering what more can we get from the hardware that knows us best. I’ve given half a decade to Whoop and mostly what I’ve learned is Covid really took 20 points of my heart rate variability.
I’ve been frustrated of Whoop’s progress in the integration of a chat AI as it seemed like any commercial LLM could analyze screen shots of the Whoop as well as their own chat did with the data it already. But tenure counts for a lot and it’s still the tool we have all relied on for half a decade now. Or at least 2% of us have worn it everyday for that long.
Clearly the data l could be used in many more way more than the management team ever seems to enable their data teams to do regularly. And I’d like to get more out of my Whoop. So being reminded of the length of use makes me wish they would deliver on that future before another year goes by.
For someone with clear skin on my face (not even a humble brag), I spend what feels like irresponsible amount of time and energy on my skin health. The rest of my dermis is not as tractable as my face. I’ve been fighting eczema my whole life.
This year has been a particularly challenging, as my the IL-17 immune suppressant Bimzelx, I take for my ankylosing spondylitis and psoriatic arthritis (it’s eczema on the inside), has left me almost catastrophically prone to skin infections.
I’ve had maybe 3 weeks without a disaster (and I traveled) though have still needed doxycycline so I’m optimistic.
I am hoping I can rack up a few more weeks or maybe even multiple months without needing to slice an abscess, manage a deep tissue infection, or get a subcutaneous skin infection.
I do have a new weapon in my battle to keep my skin healthy. I recently acquired a new deep infrared cosmetics mask from Beauty Pie that they are calling “medical grade” but mostly means it has one longer wavelength than their previous mask offering.
Medical-grade LED mask proven to improve the overall skin complexion
Using 1070nm – the deepest penetrating wavelength used in at-home LED devices to date – to reduce under-eye bags and puffiness, and smooth texture and tone
Helps the skin look fresh & hydrated. Using 830nm – supports the skin’s natural restorative and healing function – to boost circulation, improve blood flow, and increase oxygen
Skin looks plump & glowing. Using 630nm – enhances the production of collagen and reduces redness – to leave skin radiant and hydrated
I don’t know if it will do much but the longer wavelength is an improvement on their past mask which required something closer to 4 months of continuous use to see results and I was simply never off of antibiotics that interact negatively with red light long enough to get any results. Theoretically I should see results in a few weeks with the longer wavelengths.
I can’t recommend it yet as I just got it and I’ve only used it twice but I used it on my face, my neck, my left butt cheek where I had the infection from inserting testosterone pellets (long story if you missed that one) and on my scalp to see if I can stimulate some growth on my scalp as I shed a lot of hair this year from the stress.
That’s about 40 minutes of mask time so no joke but also pretty amusing. I hope I can use it enough between antibiotics rounds for a win as infrared is meant to do a world of good for pain and inflammation in addition to cosmetics so I’ll use the heck out of it while I can.
The days becoming shorter has hurt my attempts at getting out in the sun for a walk every day. This matters to me as I’d like to get regular readings of my V02 maximum and my heart rate. I rushed out without sunscreen to get in a mile.
I hit an important milestone in my current biohacking regimen this week. I made it to my 40th session of hyperbaric oxygen chamber therapy or HBOT. I began on September 13th and did session 40 on November 20. I only traveled once during this period (a five day trip) so I could have fit it all in within a two month period but I was consistently doing two hours a day.
I intend to get bloodwork for comparisons next week, but in some ways this was a terribly experiment period. I had a small procedure to insert testosterone and estradiol into my left buttock which turned into a saga when I got a skin infection. Not the procedure’s fault and I’m glad I did it as my numbers are already better.
Fortunately HBOT is renowned for healing soft tissue infections so if I was going to suffer for having compromised immune health across my skin biome, then at least I had the state of the art treatment available.
We didn’t purchase the HBOT for its skin benefits. In fact, I didn’t even know I’d be have skin immunity issues. They began with my new IL-17 inhibitor which I started in January We’d acquired the HBOT around the same time but I had no idea how challenging Bimzelx would be. It could have gone worse.
We had originally acquired the HBOT as several of our friends and acquaintances had succeeded in managing impressive inflammation rate reductions as well as progress with a slew of autoimmune issues from long COVID to mold toxicity. The kind of troubles we only test in fancy labs with extreme athletes or the enterprising technology brother.
My wound has mostly healed save a small lump, my V02 max has improved despite virtually no exercise (hard to do much cardiovascular exercise with an infection in your posterior chain) and I have overall found the balance of improvement in my energy and pain to be significant.
Thanks for noticing Whoop
If I could just get a month without a health crisis where I have enough energy to workout consistently I just might make some progress. So if I disappear for a bit that will be what I’m doing. Once I’ve got bloodwork I will share obviously.
One of my long standing theories, and a personal coinages, is the Thursday Styles Problem. It’s a theory of knowing directionally what is coming, but never being quite sure of when.
The New York Times publishes its “styles” section on Thursdays and Sundays. If you work in media, public relations or culture, you are aware of the general trends that will emerge on Thursday ahead of time. If you know “what everyone knows everyone knows” ahead of time, there is a lot of money to be made.
Predicting the trends sounds easy when I put it this way, but the timing of it requires quite a bit of foresight, and considerable planning.
The trend piece is researched and reported over months. It requires the editor to be familiar enough with the trend to approve the writer taking time & resources. That means other upstream media has to have covered the topic in the niche which requires its own planning and coverage.
And while hype cycles have shortened, culture still takes time. And really important cultural trends may even require years to be relevant enough to be Thursday Styles worthy.
And can you afford to wait for the cycle to run? Breaking news happens and a piece gets pushed. A hotter trend might push the piece for weeks or months. If your business can’t survive the long game of becoming a Thursday Styles trend, being first hardly matters. Being right doesn’t matter as much as being right on time.
There is an art to this. Publicists play long games. They seed articles with a long arc in mind. Prediction markets place bets on the likelihood of something occurring, but with many actors you can’t really control when and how a thing happens.
So naturally when something I am doing happens within a month or so of me doing a thing, I tend to feel smug. When Albania was on the front page of the styles section while Alex and I were vacationing there, I gloated. I’d been hip to the forgotten European country for years.
Today I got a push notification about women taking testosterone. It had the full ugly animations of a thirty minute reporting on a full blown phenomenon.
We’re started me with 10mg of estradiol (range 6-25mg with 8-10mg being most common), and 75mg of testosterone (range 50-150mg with the most common being 75-100). Day 1754
I have been very open about my dosing, my own bloodwork, and what went into why I chose to do it. Which, I’m glad, as the New York Times sure isn’t telling. Being very honest and open about details seems important as I have the privilege to experiment and I want others to benefit from that.
Because of minor complications, I’ve been attempting to be entirely transparent with those as well. The treatment itself is not dangerous and is tolerated very well, but I have had unusually high incidences of skin infections due to the IL-17 inhibitor I take for my chronic inflammatory condition, which led to a longer recovery than I’d have preferred.
Now that this is a full blown trend I promise to report back as I heal and as my blood work begins to show results. Until then, if you want to know what other trends I think will hit big and want to get ahead of the pack, remember I am just a message away. And I keep a shopping blog as well so you can buy what I buy before it shows up with a rave in the New York Times.
I’m at home with a freaky red light mask that could absolutely pass for a horror movie prop. My husband is sealed up in a hyperbaric chamber with two atmospheres of pressure and oxygen pumped in through a mask.
It may be Halloween but neither of those activities are horror movie material even though you could easily imagine them featuring as props in a serial killer series or Final Destination.
And yet these are things we are doing for health and wellness. One man’s horror movie is another man’s idea of a good night off and you can really tell we are tired childless adults that this is our idea of winding down on a Friday night.
The childless part wasn’t entirely a choice but we picked lives of professional intensity a long time ago so Friday night spent in self care is a sign that we’ve earned some respite.
Millenial success stories involve long hours. Millennials being all hallowed out on All Hallows’ Eve shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone, given the current state of American politics.
I’ve never liked Halloween much as if I want to dress up I don’t need social permission and I really don’t care for parties or socializing. I got all partied out in my twenties when I had to do a ton of it for professional reasons. I know it sounds glamorous but nightlife is work.
I had a tequila client and I had a hotel with the hottest nightclub in the New York City. I somehow managed to have both Patron and Le Bain as a client in my advertising agency era, and while loved both clients it did mean eventually all I can associate with nightlife is work. When I had a night off I stayed at home and read science fiction with a face mask.
Which means some things never change. There is no suburban holiday with children to dress up and take out. And I barely have recollections of doing any of that as a child. It’s no surprise this holiday has no hold on me
I don’t know why I have no fond memories of it but I don’t. I have almost no memories of Halloween. The precious few years in which we lived in suburbs, where I had both parents and I was young enough to go trick or treating barely register. And I don’t feel sad about it
I am much sadder about the kind of world we fought to succeed in as adults. I am happy to be home and with the horror movie treatments to heal the ravages of the real world that have been enacted on both of our bodies.
The long hours over decades, the multiple Covid infections my husband suffered, my own autoimmune issues and the realities of aging are not horrors but they are real. And I acutely am aware that Halloween is pretend.
And nobody should have to pretend that they aren’t hollowed out when they are. That is a fairy tale for children and for the people who still are. Neither category include me. It’s perfectly fine to be tired on a Friday.
If I’m going to put on a mask tonight it damn well better have health benefits. Here is to red light therapy and collagen masks. May they heal what ails you on all hollows eve. You can face the dead and your demons tomorrow.
I suspect that if I am any good at seeing the future it’s because I enjoy touching the present so much.
I think it’s a fools errand to professionalize “the spark” of active players meeting and exchanging information. Not to say that working at your game is wrong. You should work at it. But know what game you are playing.
I’m experiencing a kind of multi-modal view of my own focus and how it can be turned into more time touching reality. I know it sounds silly but the verbiage of the moment is enabling in strange ways.
I don’t always like consensus. I need to experience the consensus myself before I’ll join up. But I love to be first. I love being your first fan. I love being first to a new trend, narrative or aesthetic. I want to see a thing first.
To engage with others in this market place of ideas and trade in our knowledge for our own priorities, is for me, the stuff of life. I love a market. What is the mood of now so I can find others who might understand the possibilities of tomorrow. Every angle counts
I do think it’s all up for grabs future at the moment. I am leaning into some personal weirdness partially for my own happiness but partially because I think maybe this strange node of “people who want to communicate that they value beauty” to the world will be a vector for finding interesting people working on what is going to explode next.
I am trusting when everything goes up in “the churn” I enjoy picking up new skills. I am enjoying turning myself in a new direction. I think it might actually get me to my original goals. To invest in founders building their weird chaotic nodes of next should be.
It has not been an easy year for me or my family. The struggle to find a path to a sustainable place of health feels harder than ever.
I am living in some type of thermodynamic hell. Everything I try comes with equally forceful reactions and I wish I could say more of them were positive.
Even when results look positive they have high costs that make me reconsider if I should have done it at all. Switching my immune suppression drug put my inflammatory markers in the best place we’ve seen them in years.
Alas it is so effective that I’ve had four major skin infections in 2025 of which four required going under the knife. And the fourth was caused by a small incision that was considered so safe and routine we almost didn’t consider antibiotics at all.
I just so badly want something to work in a way that doesn’t come with staggeringly high costs. Normally I’d link around to all the relevant posts but I just need a break so I’ll leave it as an exercise.
But can you imagine anything more depressing than having an infection on your ass? I sure can’t. I am stuck trying to keep pressure off of it while working on all the various projects of life and I am a slow healer.
I don’t even get to see if the HBOT is doing anything for my main concerns, as if it is we are only going to see it when I clear this crazy infection.
I suppose the good news is that one of the best treatments for high risk wound care is actually hyperbaric oxygen therapy so the positive and the negative are at least balanced.
