Capsules

Nursing

The care of the sick, injured and dependent. Nursing is the largest health profession by a wide margin, its outcomes are measurable and substantial,…

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Aug 5, 2026

Surgery

Treatment by physical intervention in the body. Surgery was limited for millennia not by knowledge of anatomy but by three specific obstacles, and…

Insulin

The hormone that allows cells to take up glucose from the blood. Its discovery in 1921 turned type 1 diabetes from a fatal disease into a manageable…

The Lungs

The organs that bring air into contact with blood so that oxygen can enter and carbon dioxide can leave. They achieve this across a surface roughly…

The Liver

The largest internal organ and the most chemically versatile, performing several hundred distinct functions. It is the only human internal organ that…

Contested

Microplastics and Human Health

Plastic particles smaller than five millimetres are now found throughout the human body. Whether they cause disease at the levels people are actually…

Radium Quackery

The sale of radioactive substances as general health tonics in the first decades of the twentieth century. Radium was added to water, ointments,…

Lobotomy

The surgical severing of connections to the frontal lobes as a treatment for mental illness. It was performed on tens of thousands of people between…

Autointoxication

The doctrine that waste retained in the large intestine putrefies and poisons the body, causing a wide range of unrelated diseases. It was mainstream…

Stomach Ulcers and Stress

The belief that peptic ulcers are caused by stress, personality and diet, and that they are a chronic condition to be managed rather than cured. Most…

Proven

Blood Clotting

The process that seals a damaged blood vessel, combining a physical plug of platelets with a mesh of fibrin produced by a cascade of enzymes. It has…

Developmental Origins of Health and Disease

The proposal that conditions in the womb and in early infancy set a person's risk of heart disease, diabetes and other conditions decades later. It…

The Glutamate Hypothesis of Schizophrenia

The proposal that schizophrenia involves underactive NMDA receptors rather than, or as well as, excess dopamine. It explains what the dopamine…

The Seed and Soil Hypothesis

The proposal that cancers spread to particular organs not by accident of circulation but because those tissues are hospitable to them. It was…

The Warburg Effect

Cancer cells burn glucose wastefully, converting it to lactate even when oxygen is plentiful. The observation is a century old and undisputed, it is…

Proven

The Two-Hit Hypothesis

Cancer caused by loss of a tumour suppressor requires both copies of the gene to be knocked out. Alfred Knudson deduced this in 1971 from the…

The Inflammatory Hypothesis of Depression

The proposal that inflammation causes depression in some patients. The evidence is better than for the serotonin account it partly replaced, and the…

The Social Defeat Hypothesis of Psychosis

The proposal that chronic experience of being excluded or subordinated raises the risk of psychosis, by sensitising the brain's dopamine system. It…

The Cancer Stem Cell Hypothesis

The proposal that tumours are sustained by a small subpopulation of cells with stem-like properties, and that killing the bulk of a tumour without…

The Gut-Brain Axis

The proposal that gut microbes influence mood, behaviour and neurological disease, and that altering them could treat psychiatric and…