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Merge Health

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Merge Health

We help people with complex chronic illness achieve real & lasting health transformations.

Get updates on new research in mental health, fatigue and digestive health, see real food made and eaten by your practitioners, and be inspired to change!

30/10/2026

Six questions. Answer them honestly, nobody's watching.

One. You know what you're supposed to be doing and you're not doing all of it.
Two. You've started more than once.
Three. When a week goes badly, the whole plan goes with it.
Four. You've bought more information about this than you've used.
Five. You're the person everyone else relies on.
Six. You've thought about asking for help with this and decided you should be able to manage it yourself.

If most of those are false, you're fine. Keep going, it's working.

If three or more are true, the thing that's missing probably isn't another plan. It's someone alongside you while you run the one you've got.

That's the whole of what health coaching is. Not advice on top of your practitioner's advice. The layer that makes it survive a normal week.

We do a free welcome call to work out whether it's a fit. No obligation, and if it isn't we'll say so.

Link in bio.

Sarah - Health Coach and Patient Advocate

26/10/2026

A phone call. A hot shower. Crash.

And you were told to rest more.

Rest more. As if you hadn’t already spent years resting and waking up just as wrecked.

There’s a reason it hasn’t worked, and it isn’t willpower.

Watch, then tell me yours. The activity that completely crashes you out.

Steph

24/10/2026

The relief isn't getting an answer. It's finding out there was a question.

Four posts ago I said your immune system isn't overreacting, it's responding to something. And that either something is still there, or the response forgot to switch off.

What changes when you know which one you're dealing with isn't that it gets easy. It's that the next thing you do stops being a guess.

Those two need genuinely different work. And if you've been doing the second kind of work on the first kind of problem, that explains a lot about why it didn't hold.

Which is the whole reason we ask the question at all. Not to add another label to the pile. To work out which of the two we're looking at, for you.

That's the series. Thanks for staying with it, the comments on these have been the best part of the month.

Which of the two did you land on? Tell me below.

Kate

23/10/2026

Your safe list keeps shrinking and you're no better than you were.

Last week I said cutting things lowers exposure but not the baseline. Fair enough, people said. Then what does.

The honest answer is that it depends on what's holding yours up, which is why there isn't one list that works for everyone. But there is a way of thinking about it.

If something is still there, in a building or in you, the baseline usually doesn't come down much while it's still there. That's the part where cutting foods can feel like running uphill.

If the trigger has gone and the response stayed on, that's a different job, and it's the one where the nervous system side does real work rather than sitting there as a nice extra.

Most people we see are some of both, in different proportions. Which is usually why a generic protocol does something and then stops.

None of which is a reason to eat something that reliably makes you unwell. It's a reason to stop expecting the shrinking list to be the thing that fixes it.

How short has yours got? Tell me below.

Kate

23/10/2026

You're not reacting to more things. You're reacting to the same things more often.

The list gets shorter. W**e went first. Then perfume. Then the hot shower, then being in a car with someone wearing aftershave. And it starts to feel like you're becoming allergic to the world.

But look at what's on the list. Those aren't new things. You were fine with them for thirty years. What changed isn't the things.

Think of it as a threshold. Below it, nothing happens. Above it, you react. Every exposure adds a bit, every quiet day takes a bit away. If the baseline creeps up, the same glass of w**e that was fine last year can tip you over, and nothing about the w**e has changed.

Which is the second of the two possibilities from part one. Not something still there, but a response that hasn't come back down. Which is why the more useful question is often what's holding the baseline up, rather than what do I cut next.

Because cutting things lowers exposure. It doesn't lower the baseline. That's usually why the list keeps getting shorter without things getting better.

All exploratory, and worth working through properly rather than deciding from a reel.

Part 4 of 4.

What went first on your list? Tell me below.

Kate

16/10/2026

Mine ran three to four days behind. A reasonable Tuesday, and I'd pay for it on Saturday.

For years I thought Thursday was random. It wasn't random. It was late.

Somewhere in that I started calling myself unreliable, which is a very different word to delayed, and nobody had shown me there was a shape to it.

How far behind does yours run? Tell me below.

Steph

13/10/2026

No chopping, no decisions, and you're not standing up for long.

Because that's the loop. The week you're flattest is the week you've got the least in you to cook something decent.

Beef strips, a bag of baby spinach, a lemon, olive oil and salt. Hot pan, beef in for four minutes, spinach on top, lid on for two, lemon over the whole thing at the end.

The lemon isn't only there for flavour. Vitamin C alongside plant sources of iron improves how much of that iron you absorb, so it's doing a job.

Six minutes, one pan, and the only decision left was whether you could be bothered.

A good meal sits alongside whatever you're already taking and doing for this. It's a partner to it, never a swap.

Save this one for a flat day.

Leah - Clinical Nutritionist

12/10/2026

The infection you had once, that you've stopped mentioning.

Glandular fever at seventeen. A chest thing that took three months to shift. A bad gastro on a holiday you can still name. Something you got over, so it stopped being part of the story.

Part one set out two possibilities: something is still there, or the response forgot to switch off. Last week was something still there in the building. This one is something still there in you.

There are a few versions of that. An organism that hasn't fully cleared. Something dormant that has become active again. Or an immune system that stayed on alert after the original thing went, which is where this starts to overlap with part four.

Post-viral patterns have had a lot more attention in the last few years for obvious reasons, but the idea isn't new. It was being described long before any of us were talking about it every day.

Which is why we ask what you had, when, and what happened afterwards. Not to blame a virus from 2009. To work out whether what started it is still part of the picture.

Part 3 of 4.

What was yours? Tell me below.

Kate

12/10/2026

You stopped mentioning the migraines. They didn't stop.

They stopped being the interesting thing. When you're managing fatigue, an unpredictable gut and periods that take a week out of every month, headaches get filed under things I live with.

Which is a shame, because migraine has a habit of sitting in the same room as a few other things. There's an association described in the literature between migraine and endometriosis. There's an overlap described between mast cell activation and migraine. Endometriosis and mast cell patterns come up together as well.

None of that means one causes another. Associations aren't mechanisms, and plenty of people have one and none of the others.

But it does make the migraines worth putting back on the table rather than leaving them off it. When several things keep turning up together, the useful question stops being which one is the problem.

This is a newer area of interest for me and I'm reading a lot on it at the moment, so there'll be more.

What did you stop mentioning? Tell me below.

Steph

09/10/2026

Your antihistamine stopped working. That doesn't mean you got worse.

That's the conclusion most people jump to, and it's a miserable one. It worked, now it doesn't, so I must be deteriorating.

Histamine is one mediator. Mast cells can release a long list of other things alongside it, and an antihistamine is doing one specific job on one specific receptor. It was never covering the whole list.

So when the picture shifts and a medication seems to stop holding it, that can be less about getting worse and more about which mediators are doing the talking. Which is a different question, and it points at what might be driving the activation rather than at how much is being blocked.

To be clear, none of that is a reason to change or stop anything you've been prescribed. That's a conversation with whoever prescribed it. It's a reason to ask a second question alongside it.

Did yours stop holding? Tell me below.

Kate

Address

678 Victoria Street, Level 1 Suite 100
Richmond, VIC
3121

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Monday	10am - 6pm
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Wednesday	10am - 6pm
Thursday	10am - 6pm
Friday	10am - 6pm

Website

http://www.mergehealth.com.au/

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