Frequently Asked Questions
Not a self-contained FAQ. This page is an index of the questions readers arrive with. Each answer is deliberately short: a paragraph in the resource’s own voice, then a set of links to the pages that develop the point in depth. If you already know what you want to look up, the search box in the header is faster. If you want to be led in from a question, this page is for you.
Getting started
I’m chronically tired and my labs are “normal”. Could it be a deficit?
Yes, often. “Normal” on a lab report is a statistical range built from the sampled population, not a threshold of physiological function. A ferritin of 24 sits inside the reference range for adult women in most laboratories and describes a subject who is functionally iron-depleted. A serum potassium of 3.6 sits inside the reference range and describes a myocardium that is not receiving enough. The failure of the routine test to name a deficit is not the same as the absence of the deficit.
- The Ferritin 24 model case
- Otherwise healthy
- The life we call normal
- The tragedy of diagnosis
- The specific pages for Iron, Magnesium, and Potassium
I don’t know where to begin. The doctor won’t help, the market worries me, the law isn’t in place.
That situation is the founding case of this resource. The medical mainstream will not order the tests that would name most subclinical deficits. The supplement market monetizes what medicine declines to provide, at inflated prices and around novelty compounds. The physiological-rights framework this resource argues for does not yet exist as an enforceable instrument. You are not without a door. Informed self-medication is already a codified right, and the pages below are written to help you exercise it without being taken by either the medical refusal or the market opportunism.
- No one is coming
- Self-medication as a codified right
- The store that sells the right
- What the label cannot say
Can I supplement without a doctor?
Yes. The right to self-medicate is codified in the Alma-Ata Declaration (1978), in the WHO Self-Care Interventions programme, in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights read alongside the doctrine of informed consent, and in most national frameworks. What that right presupposes is informed self-medication: knowing the substrate, its role, its dose range, and where possible a verifying test. The recurring worry that “supplement doses are dangerous” collapses when one notices that medicine’s own repletion protocols use the same substrates at ten to five hundred times the recommended daily allowance.
On diagnosis
My blood test says everything is normal. What does that actually mean?
It means your values fall inside a statistical range built from the sampled population. It does not mean your tissue reserves are adequate, that your function is optimal, or that your symptoms are unexplained. Reference ranges were calibrated on a population that is itself widely subclinically depleted, which pushes the lower bound of “normal” below the threshold of function.
My potassium is “normal” but I have palpitations. Why might that be?
Palpitations have many possible causes: thyroid dysfunction, iron-deficiency anaemia, primary arrhythmias, stimulant or medication effects, dehydration, and anxiety among them. The point this resource makes is narrower. It is that serum potassium, when it is used to rule out an electrolyte cause, is a poor proxy for intracellular potassium. Roughly ninety-eight percent of the body’s potassium is inside cells; the two percent circulating in serum is tightly buffered by mechanisms that will strip potassium from tissue to preserve the plasma reading long after the tissue is depleted. So a serum potassium in range does not exclude chronic intracellular depletion, and the depletion, when present, is one etiology worth investigating alongside the others. Magnesium sits next to this: without adequate magnesium, the ROMK channel cannot retain the potassium the cell needs, so the two deficits tend to travel together.
- The false negative of serum potassium
- Potassium
- Magnesium (the co-required cofactor)
How do I know if I’m iron-deficient without being anaemic?
By reading ferritin against a threshold of function rather than a threshold of anaemia. Anaemia is the last stage of iron depletion, not the first. Ferritin below roughly 50 μg/L in adult women, and comparable thresholds in men, describes a subject whose tissue reserves are depleted and whose function is already affected, even though the haemoglobin remains in range. The routine iron panel of most jurisdictions will read this subject as normal.
On nutrients
Is a “balanced diet” enough?
The phrase carries an ambiguity that has done substantial harm. In principle it names a diet that supplies all essential nutrients in adequate amounts. In practice it names whatever the current dietary guidelines describe, which have been shown to fall short on magnesium, potassium, iodine, vitamin D, several B-vitamins, and marine omega-3 in most of the populations that follow them. The phrase does the work of closing the question of adequacy without answering it.
- The ambiguities of the balanced diet
- The limits of healthy eating
- No universal good food
- The hunger we don’t see
Which nutrients are documented here?
Twelve substrates so far, each with its own page: magnesium, potassium, iron, folate, choline, glutathione, coenzyme Q10, riboflavin (B2), thiamine (B1), vitamin E, omega-3, and a page on optimal hormonal levels. Each page follows the same structure: historical context, the researchers who named the deficit, a critique of the current thresholds, the mechanism, associated conditions, and a referenced bibliography.
Medicine never prescribes these doses. Isn’t it right to be wary?
Medicine prescribes these doses routinely when it decides the situation calls for them. B12 by injection at a thousand micrograms (four hundred times the RDA), folate at five milligrams for megaloblastic anaemia, thiamine at five hundred milligrams intravenously for Wernicke’s encephalopathy, IV magnesium for eclampsia, high-dose vitamin D for deficiency loading. The distinction between “vitamin dose” and “pharmacological dose” tracks the setting of administration more than the physiology of the substrate. What it tracks, when applied to the ambulatory subject, is the hand holding the syringe.
On the right
What is a physiological right?
The right of every person to the maintenance, protection, and active restoration of their essential physiological parameters. It is the right to have one’s biology named, measured, and, where deficient, corrected. It operationalizes the right to food and the right to health by closing the gap those two rights leave open at the level of the substrate itself. The term was first used in the sense meant here by Jean Mayer, in a 1979 address to the Société française de nutrition.
- Physiological Rights (the definition)
- Beyond the right to food
- The inadequacy of the right to health
- Rights-based vs evidence-based
- About (on the term’s origin in Jean Mayer’s 1979 address)
What international instruments does the right draw on?
The right to health under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Article 12, read through General Comment 14). The Alma-Ata Declaration (1978). The WHO Self-Care Interventions programme. The Oviedo Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine (Article 5). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 25). And, as a doctrinal origin, Jean Mayer’s 1979 address, which named “physiological rights” as a category on which civil rights themselves rest.
- The instruments already exist
- Self-medication as a codified right
- Legal texts
- International recommendations
- Jean Mayer, “Les droits physiologiques de l’homme” (1979)
Can a physiological right be justiciable?
The argument this resource makes is that it can, and that the failure to prosecute it has been a matter of naming rather than a matter of doctrine. When a measurable biological deficit goes uncorrected because the standard of care refuses to test for it, the harm that follows is a rights violation and can be litigated as one. The framework for such litigation is already present in existing instruments; what has been absent is the vocabulary that names the harm under those instruments.
On this resource
This resource was written with AI. How can I trust it?
The current text is the product of collaborative drafting between the founder and Claude Opus. The founder is the origin of every idea, argument, and editorial position. The AI has done the drafting work under those constraints, admirably most of the time. In another sense this is a collaboration between one human and the human writing that was absorbed as training data by the model. The references are there to make clear the text is not hallucinated: each specialized claim rests on a paper, a monograph, an author, or an instrument named in the bibliography. Every page has been read closely to confirm its conformity with the ideas of the resource. The hope is that as readers and collaborators arrive to give the text a more human form, the AI’s contribution will recede while the founder’s argument becomes fully readable in the tradition it belongs to.
Why does my supplement carry a “does not treat any disease” warning?
Because in every major regulatory framework (DSHEA in the United States, Regulation 1924/2006 in the European Union, the Natural Health Products Regulations in Canada, the TGA scheme in Australia), the therapeutic claim requires a drug dossier the substrate cannot fund. Riboflavin cannot claim to prevent migraine on its label even though the Cochrane database has read the trial evidence for twenty years. The absence of the claim on the label is a legal artefact, not a scientific verdict.
How can I contribute or report an error?
The resource is developed in the open on GitHub. Pull requests, issues, and email to the founder are all welcome. Every page carries an “Edit on GitHub” link in the sidebar for typographical or factual corrections. Larger contributions, especially from clinicians and jurists, are the reason the resource exists in its current draft form.
- About
- The GitHub repository
- Or email the founder directly: [email protected]