Your best health resources
The gold standard of research is learning from the experiences of people suffering the same illness, condition or injury that you are suffering. You can learn about other people's specific symptoms and situations and read detailed descriptions of what has and has not worked for them.
You will want to read the experiences of dozens if not hundreds of people, not only to see trends of what works for people with your condition but also to discover how people have overcome hurdles that might apply to you also.
Specifically, read comments made in Facebook groups.
Examples:
- Iodine for Beginners
- The Iron Protocol (for Iron Deficiency with or without Anemia)
- Trying Low Oxalates
- Coimbra Protocol: North America (English) for autoimmune disorders
To find groups, enter the type of group that you are seeking in the Facebook search bar; e.g., "type-1 diabetes group". Look for groups with intriguing names, as general support groups are not likely to tell you anything your doctor hasn't already told you.
YouTube Channels
Many of the the most insightful functional-medicine doctors and experts have YouTube channels and Facebook pages.
Examples:
- Elliot Overton
- Dr Peter Osborne
- Dr Darren Schmidt
- Andrew W. Saul
- Dr Paul Saladino
- Dr Ken Berry
- Candi Frazier
- Mark Sisson
- Gary Brecka
- Dr. Mindy Pelz
- Eddie Abbew
- Dr Anthony Chaffee
- Dr Jason Fung
- Dr Lindsey Fauveau
- Dr Suzanne Humphries
We are not saying that the above experts are right or wrong or that we agree or disagree with them. Rather, these experts provide a range of views that might get you thinking about health from different angles.
Artificial Intelligence
ChatGPT and other AI models open health to the non-specialist:
- Start with the phrase: "Explain this to me in layman's terms: "
- Follow up with "Explain it even more simply..."
- And then proceed with follow-up question after follow-up question until you feel that you have got a grip on subject.
An example of asking ChatGPT to explain blood tests for iron
Therefore, AI models are best used for learning the concepts and language surrounding your condition and understanding how doctors might view your illness. This will give you confidence in making your own decisions about your health.
As of May 2025, the Cellular Medicines' website will have its own AI Health Discovery chatbot, accessible at the bottom right of each page. The chatbot is powered by ChatGPT, but it is directed toward the latest practical health information from world experts, which other AI models are not sufficiently trained on.
Classical Study
If you want in-depth explanations of vitamins and minerals and diseases associated with their deficiencies, a comprehensive series of videos is provided by:
If you want to learn the science of the body, a remarkable educator is:
- Khan Academy (scroll to the biology section)
And if you want to understand the science of soil and the nutrients therein, a brilliant educator is Dr Elaine Ingham:
Peer-reviewed Studies
Largely speaking, peer-reviewed studies (papers) do not suggest new treatments. Instead, papers are written after treatments have long shown promise. They are thus not your source for the latest breakthroughs in health science.
However, if you want to begin reading papers to get an academic perspective on health:
- Use Google Scholar or PubMed to search for papers and use ChatGPT or our AI Health Discovery to look up the terms and concepts that you do not understand.
- You can even ask ChatGPT to completely rewrite papers in everyday language.
- ChatGPT better explains concepts to those who are learning and allows follow-up questions, whereas Wikipedia typically requires you to be an expert in a particular field already and is often censored and politicized in terms of what it states is scientifically valid.
- Use Google Scholar or PubMed to search for meta or review studies, which summarize past research on a particular health topic, as they often analyze how different variations of a treatment have worked across different groups of people.
- Start a paper by reading the abstract and conclusion, rather than losing yourself in the methodology and results sections of the paper. In many cases, you will only have access to the abstract of the paper unless you pay for full access.
Other Considerations when Reading Research
In reading research, keep in mind that health science has been compartmentalized, with experts in one field rarely talking to experts in another field. This approach is not well suited to understanding the complexities of human health. As such, much of your progress will involve piecing together information. Also keep in mind that your average doctor will not be interested in the papers that you read and what you discover. Few doctors are scientists or scientifically minded.
Finally, we best keep in mind how much science, particularly health science and medicine, is censored.
- Health science is censored by government, the media, the journals in which scientific papers are published, and online resources such as Wikipedia.
- Doctors who have raised concerns about treatments or drugs have been fired, censured and struck off. This is no secret; the boards and organizations who have ended the doctors' careers have proudly declared that they have done so.
- Scientists studying topics that are inconvenient to the medical establishment and university funding donors have had their funding pulled and their teams shut down by their universities.
- Whistleblowers have been silenced. Drugs that could have saved millions of lives have been demonized, even by their own manufacturers, because there are other drugs that can make the industry more money.
- Nutrients in which the global population is severely deficient, and whose supplementation could halve world disease tomorrow, are demonized as dangerous to supplement in the most unscientific manner.
- In our own research, we often discover the most promising solutions and advances in medical science by searching for what is currently being censored.