Mental Health
4 min read
December 10, 2022
The diversity of depression

The diversity of depression

Depression is not a single, uniform condition but a multifactorial disorder influenced by biological, psychological, environmental, and social factors. While diagnostic criteria help identify symptoms, the underlying causes can vary greatly from one individual to another, requiring a personalised and systems-based approach to understanding and treatment.

Depression is a complex disease with multiple contributing factors. The diagnostic criteria for depression include:

  • Depressed or irritable mood
  • Decreased interest in pleasurable activities and ability to experience pleasure
  • Significant weight gain or loss (>5% change in a month)
  • Insomnia or hypersomnia
  • Psychomotor agitation or retardation
  • Fatigue or loss of energy
  • Feelings of worthlessness or excessive guilt
  • Diminished ability to think or concentrate
  • Recurrent thoughts of death or suicide
    (Berton O, et al. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2006)

Chances are that you have felt several of the above criteria but yet you may not have associated it with depression.

This is because depression is a broad term that may affect one person differently to the next, along with having a diverse range of possible causations.

Below is a list of some of the factors that can lead to depression and apathy:

  • Trauma
  • PTSD
  • Abuse
  • Post-natal depression
  • Adverse childhood exposure
  • Lack of safety
  • Economic struggles
  • Autoimmunity
  • Social isolation
  • Heartbreak
  • Social media
  • Lack of purpose
  • S.A.D – Seasonal Affective Disorder (Vitamin D deficiency)
  • Mold exposure
  • Anaemia
  • Sex hormone imbalances (Low/high oestrogen, low testosterone)
  • Hypo/hyper thyroidism
  • Stress
  • Pain
  • Chronic illness
  • Genetic traits
  • Methylation issues
  • Heavy metal toxicity
  • Parasites
  • Nutrient deficiencies (B6, etc)
  • Nutrient excess
  • Artificial light exposure
  • Poor sleep
  • Mitochondrial dysfunctions
  • Poor gut health
  • Gut/brain axis inflammation
  • Cytokine model of depression
  • Medication
  • Loss of a loved one
  • Divorce
  • Substance abuse
  • Neurotransmitter imbalances
  • Lyme
  • Toxic and ambivalent relationships

Each reason, being so unique, may require a completely different approach for therapy from the next.

This reverberates a quote of William Osler, stating ‘It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has’. Unfortunately, society generally neglects the beauty of individuality whilst overlooking the crucial interplay and synergy from the multifactorial systems essential for optimal function within our body.

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A defining moment in human health

We are standing at the edge of a defining moment in human history — one that will reshape how health is understood, managed, and lived. Most practitioners won’t see it coming until it’s already here. The pace of change is no longer linear; it’s accelerating at a parabolic rate.

Over the next ten years, healthcare will undergo a larger transformation than it has in the past two hundred. What once took generations to evolve will soon happen within a single career span.

Why the next leap will eclipse the last 200 years

In the 1850s, global life expectancy hovered around 35 to 40 years. In industrial cities such as Manchester, it was recorded as low as 26. Up to 40% of children died before the age of five. Since then, humanity has doubled its average lifespan — one of the greatest achievements in modern history.

But that magnitude of progress will soon appear slow compared to what lies ahead. To understand why, we must look at how medicine has actually evolved — not as a straight line, but as a series of paradigm shifts.

Medicine has never moved in a straight line

Medicine does not evolve gradually. It moves through distinct eras, each defined by its dominant questions, tools, and limitations. Every era solves the problems of its time — and creates the blind spots of the next.

Medicine 1.0: survival through intervention

The age of infection and emergency care (1800s–1950s)

The first modern era of medicine was built around one core mission: survival. Its philosophy was direct and uncompromising — find the problem, cut it out, kill the pathogen. The focus was acute illness, trauma, and infectious disease. Surgery, antibiotics, vaccines, early imaging, and public health measures transformed mortality rates almost overnight.

Breakthroughs such as germ theory, penicillin, antisepsis, and sanitation saved millions of lives. Yet this era had little understanding of long-term health. There was no framework for chronic disease, prevention, or personalisation. Medicine 1.0 was exceptional in emergencies, but largely blind to the slow decline of health over time.

Medicine 2.0: managing disease, not health

The rise of chronic disease frameworks (1950s–2010s)

As life expectancy increased, the medical challenge shifted. Infectious disease gave way to chronic illness. Medicine 2.0 emerged with a new goal: management. Cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, and mental health disorders became the dominant focus.

Pharmaceuticals, specialist referrals, evidence-based medicine, and large clinical trials defined this era. Disease was framed as isolated dysfunction within individual organ systems. While imaging, surgical techniques, and electronic health records advanced rapidly, care became fragmented. Poly-pharmacy increased, symptoms were suppressed rather than resolved, and patients often cycled endlessly through the system.

Medicine 2.0 kept people alive — but rarely helped them thrive.

Medicine 3.0: personalisation, prevention, and patterns

From symptoms to systems (2010s–2025)

The limitations of chronic disease management gave rise to a new way of thinking. Medicine 3.0 reframed health as a dynamic, interconnected system shaped by genetics, environment, lifestyle, and time. The focus shifted toward root causes, prevention, and optimisation.

Functional blood work, genomics, microbiome testing, wearables, and systems biology expanded what was possible. Practitioners began looking for patterns rather than isolated markers. Precision nutrition and functional reference ranges replaced one-size-fits-all recommendations.

Yet this era introduced new challenges. Data became abundant but scattered. Interpretation demanded high cognitive load. Standards varied widely, access remained inconsistent, and outcomes depended heavily on practitioner experience. While powerful, Medicine 3.0 was difficult to scale.

Many believe this is the peak of modern healthcare.

Why medicine 3.0 is not the end point

Despite its advances, Medicine 3.0 still relies on humans to manually integrate overwhelming amounts of data, make predictions, and adjust protocols over time. It improved insight — but not intelligence. It offered tools — but not true systems.

The next era changes that entirely.

Medicine 4.0: intelligence, automation, and decentralised health

Predictive, adaptive, and continuously evolving care (2025–2040+)

Medicine 4.0 represents a fundamental shift in how health is defined and managed. Health becomes a continuously evolving dataset, updated in real time across all stages of life. The focus moves from reaction to prediction, from static plans to adaptive systems, from intervention to self-correction.

Artificial intelligence, machine learning, digital twins, predictive analytics platforms, continuous multi-biomarker wearables, synthetic biology, and autonomous medical systems will allow health trajectories to be forecast before disease manifests. Diagnostics will become ambient. Treatment will adapt dynamically. Biology itself becomes increasingly programmable.

But this transformation comes with real challenges — data privacy, equity, over-reliance on technology, loss of human connection, and the risk of eroding individual agency. Intelligence must be guided, not blindly trusted.

Building the infrastructure for medicine 4.0

This is where MyHealthPrac enters — not as a response to Medicine 4.0, but as an early foundation for it.

MyHealthPrac is a decentralised health management system designed to translate complexity into clarity. Built on over a decade of research, line-by-line journal reviews, and clinically informed logic, it transforms vast amounts of health data into actionable, root-cause solutions. Hard-coded algorithms, pattern recognition, and predictive frameworks allow practitioners to move beyond interpretation and into intelligence.

This is not theory. It is not a distant vision.

Not the future of health — the next standard

Medicine 4.0 is not coming someday. It is arriving now. And the systems built today will determine whether this new era empowers practitioners and individuals — or overwhelms them.

MyHealthPrac is being built to lead that transition.

Philosophy
6 min read
The 4 ages of medicine and the one we haven’t met yet
The 4 ages of medicine and the one we haven’t met yet
Medicine is entering a new era. From infection control to intelligent, predictive systems, this article traces the evolution of healthcare — and explains why Medicine 4.0 will transform how the world manages health.
August 5, 2025

If you are unfortunate and have had your palatine tonsils removed or have reoccurring infections with your tonsils, this may just help …

The group of tonsils provide:

  • Protection against pathogens and toxins
  • Lymphatic detox
  • Excretion organ
  • One of the greatest immune modulators
  • Supporting the brain's glymphatic system

This last point is massively overlooked, here’s why …

The glymphatic system is essential in mitigating risk against neuro-developmental disorders and degeneration, this ranges from Autism, Alzheimer’s through to some categories of depression.

This system clears the brain during sleep (mostly delta-wave sleep) of harmful proteins (such as amyloid-beta) and waste products by pumping the cerebral spinal fluid through the brain’s tissues. This flushes the waste into the body’s circulatory system in which it eventually reaches the liver where it can be eliminated.

This process is roughly 10 times more active during sleep as opposed to when awake. The brain also shrinks by around 60% of its original size to increase the efficiency of waste removal.

The removal of tonsils will also reduce the efficiency of the immune system, resulting in an increased chance for the development of food intolerances and possibly acting as a contributing factor towards autoimmune diseases (the severity of this risk is not currently quantifiable). If you have had your tonsils removed, there are several options you can do.

In my opinion, here are two of the most important:

  • Massage the intracranial lymph (around the jaw and neck) to improve glymphatic circulation and possibly decrease neuroinflammation
  • Ensure you have a good duration and quality of sleep (promoting delta wave sleep through binaural beats, gratitude logs or specific devices may help)

* The group of tonsils provide direct lymphatic drainage through the cribriform plate to Waldeyer’s Ring – this is a formation of lymphatic tissue situated in and around the:

  • Pharyngeal tonsils (adenoids)
  • Two tubal tonsils (posterior to Eustachian tu)
  • Two palatine tonsils (this is what the tonsils is most commonly referred to)
  • Lingual tonsil (base of tongue)
  • Laryngeal tonsil (near the vocal cords in the larynx)
Gut Health
6 min read
Tonsils – the brain’s drain
Tonsils – the brain’s drain
Tonsil removal or chronic tonsil infections may reduce immune efficiency and impair glymphatic circulation. Supporting lymphatic flow around the jaw and neck, alongside deep, high-quality sleep, may help compensate and protect long-term brain and immune health.
December 10, 2022

The paradigm of depression being a disease/disorder has evolved around the concept that neurotransmitters are primarily the root cause.

Yet, dysregulation in this field could very well be a symptom, coping mechanism and signal from a multitude of different issues ranging from inside, as well as outside of the body (as explained in my previous post).

The association of depression solely being linked to low levels of norepinephrine and serotonin is flawed throughout studies. There are many other variables that can result in this outcome.

Several studies indicate that as few as 25% of depressed patients have low levels of neurotransmitters, while paradoxically, some patients have abnormally high levels of neurotransmitters with no history of them ever being low.

Does the placement of depression into the category of disease/disorder attach a greater overwhelming thought process to the word than if we were to label it as a symptom?

One could argue that generally speaking, symptoms are alleviated with greater ease when compared with the disease.

It is easy to allow our identity to be taken hostage by adopting the ownership of depression and succumb to its depths.

Yet when we shift our thinking to understand that depression does not embody us as individuals, nor does it yield an element involved in modeling our identity, we shift our thoughts to a greater sense of self-empowerment.

We can overcome the ‘depression vs self’ mentality by accepting that depression is an adaptive and protective mechanism from the human body, accompanied with respect for the opportunity it brings forth to gain further insight into what needs nurturing.

I understand this is a challenging and delicate shift to take, yet the perception of the experience is paramount to one’s thoughts.

Could we disempower the shackling chains of emotional paralysis, gain buoyancy in the swamp of thoughts and restore vitality into one’s behaviour when depression is approached in the light of a symptom?

Can we utilise it as foresight with direction to what may require attention and care within our body and how we live?

This paradigm shift allows more of a harmonious level of awareness with the experience of depression and what possibilities it may bring.

References:

  1. Asberg M, et al. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1976
  2. Mol Psychiatry. 2010 March
  3. Della FP, et al. Pharmacol Biochem Behav. 2012
  4. Della FP, et al. Behav Brain Res. 2012
  5. Della FP, et al. Metab Brain Dis. 2013

Mental Health
6 min read
Depression: disease or symptom?
Depression: disease or symptom?
Viewing depression as a symptom rather than an identity can foster self-empowerment, insight, and more personalised paths to healing—shifting focus from labels to understanding what the body and mind may be asking for attention and care.
December 10, 2022
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