The Food Phoenix

14/10/2026

For years I was the doctor deciding whether a child needed contrast. I can count on no hands the times I said yes to gadolinium. Never ordered it for a single child. Never watched a contrast MRI done on one. We were cutting back on contrast CT in kids too, quietly, because you don't reach for a needle when a plain scan will do.

Then it was my turn on the table, and every rule I'd applied to my patients evaporated.

The leaflet said I "may" be offered contrast. Nobody mentioned a drip. When they said I needed one, some part of me went, hang on, and a louder part went, don't make a fuss. I was raised to be a good girl. So I rolled my sleeve up.

I've spent the years since learning what I signed for without being asked. If a paediatrician who spent a career being cautious with contrast can still get swept into it, so can anyone.

That's why I wrote down the questions no one hands you before a scan. It's free, and the link is in the first comment.

12/10/2026

The supplement that was meant to change everything. The detox protocol. The specialist with the six-month waiting list who gave you eight minutes. The chelation that made you worse before it made you anything else.

Every time, you let yourself hope. Every time it didn't work, it cost you something. Money, energy, and a little more faith in yourself.

So when someone says "people get better", I understand if part of you shuts the door.

I'm going to say it anyway, because I've watched it happen and I've lived it. People do get better. In our survey, 47% of the tested group said things improved with time or natural progression alone. Others were helped by dietary changes, exercise, supplements, or chelation. It rarely runs in a straight line. There are weeks when you can't tell whether a flare means you're going backwards or something's finally shifting.

Part 4 of my guide is about the road back, and I've tried to be honest in it about what a guide can and can't do.

It tells you what recovery tends to look like, from the chaotic first months to the point where symptoms settle into a pattern you can learn from. It explains why a flare isn't always a setback, and why the wrong response to one can cost you months.

It sets out the principles I work from. Stop adding to the load. Dissolve slowly. Replace what's been locked away. Support energy and elimination. Look after the whole person, because grief and isolation make the chemistry worse.

And it's honest about the traps. Oxalate lowered too fast. Supplements in the wrong form, dose or order. Tests run in the wrong metabolic state, so they come back normal when they shouldn't. I've watched people lose months, and thousands of pounds, to well-meant mistakes like these.

It'll also help you start noticing your own patterns. Which foods, stresses and changes make things better or worse, and which reactions are worth riding out. That's the skill that moves recovery along, whoever you're working with, and it's one you can start building tonight.

There's a checklist for choosing anyone to help you, whether that's me or someone else, so you don't pour more money into the wrong hands. And it ends with a short exercise: what you most want your health to give you back, and one small thing you could do this week.

The link is in the first comment. You'll get it one part a day, starting from Part 1.

12/10/2026

I’ve been meaning to harvest this beauty I discovered last week down a narrow lane way in the hedge.

I actually took one and left the other.

Smells amazing.

I know what it is, but do you?

09/10/2026

This one's for you if you love someone who got ill after an MRI with contrast, and you're not sure what to believe.

You trust doctors. Most of us were raised to. So when her tests come back normal and the consultant says it's probably anxiety, it's natural to wonder. You've watched her go from the person who held everything together to someone who can't get round a supermarket. You want the simple explanation to be true, because the other one is too petrifying.

Here's a harder question. Which is worse: that a trusted doctor used something that harmed her, or that she's imagining every burning pain, every swollen joint, every night she can't sleep?

I was a consultant paediatrician for six years. I also had one of these scans in 2016 and spent years being told much the same thing she's being told now. I've sat on both sides of that desk.

Part 3 of my guide explains why the system hasn't caught up to the science. Why the safety studies were never designed to find someone like her. Why a normal blood result doesn't mean what it seems to. Why doctors who suspect something often say nothing.

Read it, and you'll understand what she's been trying to tell you, from someone who isn't her. That takes the pressure off both of you. She stops having to argue her case at the kitchen table, and you get to stop wondering.

She's probably sent you links before. This one is short, and it was written for exactly where you're standing. The link is in the first comment.

09/10/2026

Did you know that the way I fell down the nutritional rabbit hole was because of acne?

I finally discovered in 2010 that my acne, which is had since I was a teenager, was, after all, caused by diet.

And I’d tried every topical cream and solution under the sun, oral antibiotics that made me sick, the oral contraceptive pill, and even heavy duty roaccutane.

Roaccutane is the drug with a warning about suicidal ideation.

My doctors had told me there was no link between acne and diet.

They were wrong.

And they didn’t know that a link had been established about a century ago… and then buried.

As you can imagine, I was unamused to discover this. But it wasn’t all that I discovered about how diet, gut health, and acne are connected.

You can discover what I’ve been learning about acne in my blog post:

After two decades of acne drugs, giving up chocolate for Lent cleared my skin. Every dermatologist said diet didn't matter. A 1916 study said otherwise.

08/10/2026

The Frontiers training on using lanthanides (the same class of toxic rare earth heavy metals that gadolinium falls under) as carriers in imaging dyes is starting in under 20 minutes. Not just for MRIs but extending them to other uses, too.

I can’t wait to discover what other toxins they have up their sleeves to poison us.

Anyone want me to take notes?

07/10/2026

"It'll flush out in 48 hours. Just drink plenty of water."

You've probably heard it. Maybe you drank the water. Maybe you're still drinking it.

So where did the 48 hours come from?

It goes back to two small studies published in 1984. One used five rats, given five times the clinical dose, with blood taken for three hours. The other used 20 healthy young men.

At 24 hours, around 9% of the dose given to those young men hadn't been accounted for. In some dose groups it was more. Nobody went looking for where it went.

And the water? The human study never measured fluid intake at all. There's no hydration data in it anywhere.

Those two papers became the foundation for the reassurances you were given: It leaves in 48 hours. In the official narratives, what leaves is all that matters. The metal is held so tightly that the free, toxic form can't escape, so nothing can go wrong.

Huh! if only. 🙄

Forty years later, the people living with the consequences are people in their forties and fifties and older, children, pregnant mothers, people with hypermobile joints, people with kidney stones, sick people, people on antibiotics. None of them was in the study.

Part 2 of my guide walks through what happens once the contrast is in your tissue, and why a normal blood test was never designed to see it. You'll come away able to explain, in plain English, why your results are clear and you still feel like this.

There's a section for parents too. If your child was scanned, or you had contrast in pregnancy, there's data in there you deserve to see.

The whole guide is free, one part a day, and the link is in the first comment.

07/10/2026

Send help! Quick!

I seem to have become a perch for a beautiful white cat. It’s on my back.

I don’t own a cat.

06/10/2026

It’s been ages since I bought a packet of crisps. I’m sure it’s over a decade.

Crisps are what we in the UK and Ireland call potato chips in the USA. On the other hand, what we call chips, Americans call French fries.

Initially, it was because they’re made with potatoes, which I’ve known since 2010 were high in nightshades and for several years I’ve also known they’re oxalate bombs.

Potatoes genuinely give me back pain now if I eat too much of them. Which is essentially very little indeed.

That and the fact that they’re deep fried in rancid polyunsaturated vegetable oils (usually… I did find some ages ago, I’m pretty sure it was pre-2016, fried in coconut oil).

And because most of them have wheat flour added, so they’re a source of gluten.

Then there are all the other additives.

I don’t really buy processed foods much ever these days. When it’s not berry season in my garden, I’ll buy dark chocolate to keep my oxalate levels up enough to keep the worst of the dumping at bay.

Yes, I’m still oxalate dumping.

No, I’ve no idea how much longer it’ll continue. Or whether it’ll ever stop, given that I’m pretty sure I’ve been an endogenous oxalate producer for decades, even long before the gadolinium dialled it up to 11. Overachiever, eh?

Anyway, I was out with some friends over the summer and they bought potato crisps. I read the ingredients and there was no gluten. The ingredients list wasn’t horrific (clearly not optimal, but I’ve seen worse).

So I tried some.

And I didn’t die.

I probably reacted a little bit. But it wasn’t awful.

So, last week, I ended up buying some crisps.

Since then, they’ve been sitting unopened in the bag, mocking me.

Daring me to eat them.

So far, I haven’t worked up the guts. I have no cravings for them. Not really much desire for them. So, it’s not like I’m missing out.

What I really as looking for was something to stand in for extra oxalates instead of the chocolate, because it’s hard to shake the feeling that I react to chocolate.

I guess I could just have a slice of beetroot or 2 a day instead.

But here I am.

Staring down a packet of potato crisps like it’s high noon in The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly. Wondering when I’ll muster the courage to open them.

Which sounds weird.

Do you ever buy anything on the spur of the moment and then wonder whether you’ve lost your marbles?

05/10/2026

Metallic taste.

A cold arm during the scan.

A headache that arrived that evening and still hasn't left.

Skin that feels like it's on fire.

Pain boring deep into your bones.

An appetite that's disappeared.

Bowels that stopped working properly.

Sleep that deserts you after only two short hours, leaving you far too exhausted to face the day.

Then the stranger things. Twitching. Ringing ears. Strange rashes that migrate. Dizziness when you stand up. A brain that used to run the household, now losing words halfway through a sentence.

And underneath all of it, the question you can't say out loud. What if this is it? What if this is me now?

I know how frightening this stage is, because I've been in it. In 2016, it took me months to piece together what was happening. I was too foggy to read more than a page at a time, and terrified I'd made an irreversible mistake by trusting the people I was meant to trust.

Part 1 of my guide is written for exactly where you are now...

It'll show you that the list of symptoms that seem to have nothing to do with each other is a pattern, and silent hordes of us share it. We counted. The survey behind this guide asked hundreds of people what happened after their scans, and the answers look like yours.

It'll help you stop the 2 am spiral of "what have I done?" The decision you made wasn't informed, and that's not on you. But more importantly, it doesn't have to represent a point of no return.

It'll help with "but you look fine", and why the people around you can't see what you're living with.

And it'll help you name the grief. For the person you were, the plans you had, and the trust you gave. Part 1 calls it what it is, and shows you the road so many of us have been pushed down since: harmed, disbelieved, left to gather our own evidence, then abandoned. Once you can see that road, it stops feeling like a verdict on you.

It's free, it's short, and it's the first of four. The link is in the first comment.