Media and writing
Gut health advice keeps assuming a life my patients do not have.
Not another wellness script
Most gut health content follows the same script: eat this, avoid that, buy the supplement. It assumes a kitchen, a schedule and a body that all behave themselves.
Seventeen years inside the NHS taught me something different. I have sat with a family whose child was withholding stool because there was no private toilet at home. I have watched patients with entirely normal test results carry symptoms that were entirely real. The clinical advice was correct. It was often pointed at the wrong target.
So I write from a different starting point: gut health is not purely a personal failing to fix with better habits. It is shaped by housing, poverty, sleep, stress and the ordinary chaos of real life. My work argues for normalcy and for equity, treating a tired, busy, imperfect life as valid ground for good clinical care, not an excuse for why the advice did not work.
In practice, that means writing in more than one register: peer level argument for a clinical or policy audience, plain English science for a general reader who still deserves to be respected, and the honest, funny, real life voice behind Your Gut Friend. Different rooms, same expertise underneath.
Recent writing
Clinical essays for people who ask harder questions, and practical guides for people living the symptoms.
Clinical and policy writing, Medium
Child Poverty and Gut Health in the UK
Childhood constipation is often treated as a behaviour problem to manage in a ten minute appointment. It is more often the predictable outcome of food insecurity, overcrowded housing and a nervous system stuck on alert.
When Tests Are Normal But the Patient Is Not
On the gap between a normal investigation and a patient who is still unwell, and why that gap is where the real clinical work begins.
Why Your Gut Feels Like IBS (But Might Actually Be Hormones Doing What They're Supposed to Do)
Unpacking the hormonal connection that so often gets mislabelled as a standalone functional disorder.
Patient guides, Simply Gut Health
What Your Poo Is Trying to Tell You
A practical, science grounded guide to what bowel habits really reveal.
Why Am I Bloated All the Time (Even When I Eat Healthy)?
Bloating is not always about what you eat. Here is what usually drives it.
Stress and Gut Health
How the gut and brain connection makes stress a direct driver of symptoms, not a side effect.
Navigating IBS in the Real World
Separating evidence based IBS management from the noise online.
Why That Safe Lunch Works
The science behind why certain foods feel predictably safe, and what that tells us.
Your Gut Friend
Real life. Real guts. Real support.
Your Gut Friend is the informal, honest cousin to my clinical writing. It exists because knowing what to do for your gut and actually doing it are two very different things when you are also managing a full time job, two kids, a dog, a cat and a possible perimenopause you have not quite named yet.
Every fortnight, a post pairs a cartoon with a short piece of real talk: no carousels and no seven step protocols, just what gut health actually looks like in an ordinary week. Free to read, with paid posts arriving later for anyone who wants to go deeper.
Follow Your Gut Friend on Substack