Dr. Rollins Articles
Hormesis
Why a Little Stress May Be Exactly What We Need We have spent much of the modern era succeeding in making ourselves comfortable. We heat the house...
Unlocking the Nutrients in Your Food
We tend to think of nutrition as inventory. A carrot contains this much beta-carotene. A tomato contains this much lycopene. Spinach has iron....
Diagnose and Adios
Modern medicine is very good at naming things. We have codes for everything. Codes for high blood pressure. Codes for low thyroid. Codes for high...
Mitochondrial Aging and the Art of Growing Older Well
The Slow Burn Every cell in your body contains tiny structures called mitochondria. They are often described as the cell's power plants, but that...
Exercise After Cancer
What the research tells us about exercise, recurrence and survival after cancer Cancer treatment has traditionally been built around things done to...
Osteoporosis and the Case for Lifting Something Heavy
For decades, the exercise advice given to people with osteoporosis has sounded something like this. Be careful. Don't lift anything too heavy....
One, Two, Three: The Evolution of the New Weight Loss Drugs
Few medications have changed the treatment of obesity as dramatically as the new generation of GLP-1 drugs. Semaglutide transformed what we thought...
A Longevity Recipe of Grains, Greens, Roots and Beans
The Foods That Keep Showing Up Where People Live Well Nutrition has become unnecessarily complicated. We have continuous glucose monitors, ketone...
The Buzz on B Vitamins
Eight Tiny Nutrients That Quietly Keep You Alive There are some vitamins that seem to get all the attention. Vitamin C has long been the poster...
You Can’t Supplement Your Way Out of a Lousy Diet
Walk into any health food store and you'll quickly conclude that modern nutrition apparently comes in bottles. Shelves stretch from floor to ceiling...
Twenty Years of Gratitude
A Story About Patients, Purpose, and the Privilege of Practicing Medicine Anniversaries have a way of inviting reflection. They encourage us to look...
The Alphabet of Life known as Amino Acids
Why the Building Block of Protein Matter More Than You Think There are certain words in medicine that sound far more complicated than they really...
One, Two, Three: The Evolution of the New Weight Loss Drugs
Few medications have changed the treatment of obesity as dramatically as the new generation of GLP-1 drugs. Semaglutide transformed what we thought medication-assisted weight loss could accomplish. Tirzepatide subsequently produced even greater weight loss. And now...
A Longevity Recipe of Grains, Greens, Roots and Beans
The Foods That Keep Showing Up Where People Live Well Nutrition has become unnecessarily complicated. We have continuous glucose monitors, ketone meters, genetic testing, microbiome sequencing, supplement cabinets large enough to require zoning permits, and enough...
The Buzz on B Vitamins
Eight Tiny Nutrients That Quietly Keep You Alive There are some vitamins that seem to get all the attention. Vitamin C has long been the poster child for immunity. Vitamin D has become the celebrity of modern nutrition. Vitamin K is finally getting the recognition it...
You Can’t Supplement Your Way Out of a Lousy Diet
Walk into any health food store and you'll quickly conclude that modern nutrition apparently comes in bottles. Shelves stretch from floor to ceiling with capsules promising more energy, stronger immunity, sharper memory, healthier joints, younger skin, better sleep,...
Twenty Years of Gratitude
A Story About Patients, Purpose, and the Privilege of Practicing Medicine Anniversaries have a way of inviting reflection. They encourage us to look backward with gratitude, forward with hope, and perhaps most importantly, to pause long enough to appreciate the...
The Alphabet of Life known as Amino Acids
Why the Building Block of Protein Matter More Than You Think There are certain words in medicine that sound far more complicated than they really are. Mitochondria. Neurotransmitters. Phospholipids. And perhaps one of the most misunderstood of them all, amino acids....
Milk, Memories, and Modern Nutrition
Understanding A1, A2, Whey, and Finding the Right Protein for You Like many children of my generation, I grew up with whole milk delivered to our front porch in heavy glass bottles. Before breakfast, the familiar clink of glass announced the milkman's arrival. The...
Movement as Medicine
Why the Human Body Thrives When It Refuses to Sit Still There is a curious phenomenon that occurs as we age. The less we move, the less we feel like moving. A sore knee becomes a reason to skip a walk. A stiff back encourages another evening in the recliner. A few...
Know Your Brain Numbers for Alzheimer’s
The New Blood Tests That May Detect Alzheimer's Disease Years Before Symptoms Begin There was a time when nobody knew their blood pressure. People simply walked around until they had a stroke. Then came the sphygmomanometer, and suddenly medicine had a crystal ball...
A Healthy Republic
What America's 250th Birthday Can Teach Us About Integrative Medicine Two hundred and fifty years is not a particularly long time in the history of civilizations, yet it is a remarkable achievement for a constitutional republic. Like people, nations are born with...
Can Alzheimer’s Disease Be Reversed?
New Research Reinforces the Promise of Precision Medicine For more than a decade, I've closely followed the work of neurologist Dr. Dale Bredesen, beginning with his pioneering research during his years at UCLA. Long before "precision medicine" became a common phrase,...
Music as Medicine
There are some therapies that come in bottles. Others arrive in syringes, IV bags, or operating rooms. But some of the most powerful medicines in life come disguised as ordinary pleasures. A walk through an alpine meadow. Salt air rolling in from the Atlantic. A...
Benefits of Ozone Therapy
The Power of Ozone Ozone therapy occupies an unusual place in medicine. Ozone itself is a simple molecule composed of three oxygen atoms (O₃), highly reactive and naturally produced in the atmosphere. While inhaled ozone is known to irritate lung tissue and can be...
The Healing Power of Mountain Air
Before Sunrise There is a moment in the mountains that never gets old. It often arrives before sunrise. Frost clings to the grass. A mountain stream murmurs nearby. The tent zipper opens with a familiar metallic rasp, and beyond the door waits a landscape that seems...
The Endurance Athlete’s Paradox
Why Some of the Fittest People on Earth Have High Coronary Calcium Scores For years we have operated under a wonderfully simple equation: exercise equals cardiovascular health. And broadly speaking, that equation is still profoundly true. Move more, suffer less. Walk,...
Psilocybin and Aging
The Curious Case of Cells That Refused to Act Their Age Modern medicine likes its boxes tidy. Drugs are for symptoms. Therapy is for feelings. Aging is something that happens in the background, like the slow dimming of the lights after a long dinner party. You can...
The Medicine of Salt Air
Why the Coast Makes Us Feel Human Again By the second morning at the Carolina coast, something subtle begins to happen. The shoulders descend half an inch. Sleep arrives with less negotiation. The mind stops refreshing itself like an anxious browser tab. The modern...
Statins: The Cholesterol Diet Coke of Modern Medicine
Statins are marvelous drugs. They are also misunderstood, overtrusted, and occasionally treated like tiny orange seatbelts for the human heart. Lower your cholesterol, they say, and you lower your risk. Which is true - as far as it goes. The trouble is that...
Supporting Nerve Health During Chemotherapy
Integrative Supplements for Chemotherapy-Induced Peripheral Neuropathy (CIPN) Some chemotherapy drugs, especially oxaliplatin (FOLFOX/CAPOX), paclitaxel, docetaxel, vincristine, and bortezomib, may damage the nerves in the hands and feet, causing numbness, tingling,...
Intravenous Therapies in Modern Integrative Medicine
An intravenous (IV) infusion changes the scale of what’s possible. Instead of being limited by digestion and first-pass metabolism, nutrients and compounds can reach the bloodstream in concentrations that are difficult, often impossible, to achieve orally. That shift...
Get the Lead Out with Chelation
A Mad Hatter Problem That Never Left ‘In THAT direction,’ the Cat said, waving its right paw, ‘lives a Hatter… and in THAT direction,’ waving the other, ‘lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.’ Lewis Carroll wasn’t writing a toxicology textbook,...
Please Pour the Coffee, But Do It Right
There’s an old story about an Ethiopian goat herder watching his animals dance after eating bright red berries. Curiosity did what curiosity always does - it pulled a human into the experiment. A few centuries later, somewhere in Arabia, those berries met fire, and...
Good Calories Bad Calories
There is a certain elegance to the idea that all calories are created equal. It’s tidy. Democratic. A calorie is a calorie, we’re told - burn more than you consume and the body will obediently shed weight like a well-trained accountant balancing a ledger. If only...
The Body That Improves Under Pressure
Every so often, a study comes along that challenges the operating assumptions underneath how we think about health. Not with drama, or with sweeping claims, but with results that feel just a little out of step with the story we’ve been telling. The dominant narrative...
Aging in Motion
What it Really Means to Stay Active for Life There’s a quiet revolution happening in longevity science, and it doesn’t come from a pill bottle, a peptide vial, or some gleaming machine humming in a high-end clinic. It comes from something much older than all of that...
The Quiet Battle Over Compounding — and Why Colorado’s SB 26-066 Matters Now
From renewed FDA scrutiny to sharp criticism from segments of organized medicine, and even debates spilling into mainstream media, compounded medications have become the focus of a growing national conversation. At first glance, the issue is framed as one of safety. ...
The Mediterranean Diet: A Prescription Written in Sunlight
Where the Story Begins If you want to understand the Mediterranean diet, you don’t begin in a laboratory or a clinic or even with a stack of nutritional studies. You begin on a narrow stone street somewhere in Spain or Portugal, where the morning air carries the...
The Anti-Aging Cheat Sheet
How to Turn 101 and Still Know Where You Left Your Glasses Some people collect stamps. Some people collect regrets. And some people, apparently, collect proteins that refuse to age. In 2026, a group of Swiss researchers did something wonderfully inconvenient: they...
When the Cancer Scan Is Clean but the Blood Isn’t
Cultivating the Biology of Cancer Remission There is a new kind of limbo in oncology. It did not exist twenty years ago. It arrived with molecular surveillance. It lives in the space between what we can see and what we can measure. The cancer is in "remission". ...
The Lipid Highway
Particles, Payloads, and Why Counting Trucks Matters More Than We Thought For most of modern medicine, cholesterol has been treated like a suspicious substance sneaking through the bloodstream - greasy, malevolent, and best arrested on sight. This is unfortunate,...
Mitochondria – The Small, Smoldering Power Plants Inside You
A Slightly Irreverent Field Guide to Cellular Energy If you zoomed in far enough, past skin, past muscle, past internal organs and all the way into your cells, you’d find a city of tiny power plants humming along in the dark. These are mitochondria. They do not care...
How French Fries Wreck People
French fries have an image problem. They sit in the cultural dock like repeat offenders - greasy, addictive, and somehow responsible for everything from metabolic syndrome to the collapse of Western civilization. The potato, the poor innocent tuber, has been...
Long Covid – When the Lights Stay On but the Power Is Gone
Mitochondria, Meaning, and the Long Goodbye of Viral Illness Long after the fever breaks and the test turns negative, many people discover that something essential never came back online. The body is present. The labs look acceptable. The doctors are polite. And...
Baking With the Major Wheat Types
How Different Wheats Shape Flavor, Texture, and Bread Most people think of wheat as a single ingredient. In reality, “wheat” represents an enormous family of grains with dramatically different baking behaviors, flavors, textures, and nutritional characteristics. Some...
Wheat: From Wild Grass to the Breadbasket
Genetics, Civilization, and the Evolution of the World’s Most Influential Grain Wheat may be one of the most consequential plants in human history. Entire civilizations rose around it. Empires taxed it. Armies marched because of it. Religions incorporated it into...
The Quiet Power of Massage
Modern medicine is spectacular at emergencies. It can replace hips, restart hearts, and peer into the body with machines that would have looked like witchcraft a century ago. Yet it remains strangely awkward around one of the most ancient, effective, and low-tech...
We Saved Money on Dinner and Spent It on Doctors
There was a time - recent enough that your grandparents could still complain about it - when Americans spent a ridiculous amount of money on food. Not truffle oil money. Not chia-seed pudding money. Just… food. Real food. Flour, eggs, vegetables that looked like...
Preventing Diverticulitis Flares
A Practical Guide to Keeping the Colon Calm Diverticulitis often develops when pressure builds inside the colon and small pouches (diverticula) become inflamed. Prevention is less about a single fix and more about creating a stable, low-pressure, low-inflammation gut...
The New Dietary Guidelines And Why They Still Point You Toward Real Food
Why the New Guidelines Caused Confusion Every few years, new dietary guidelines are released and a familiar wave of anxiety follows. This time, the emphasis on protein has left many people wondering whether everything they’ve learned about healthy eating has suddenly...
Understanding Nocturnal Oximetry
What That Little Red Light Actually Reveals About Your Sleep Nocturnal oximetry is a simple overnight test that continuously measures oxygen saturation (SpO₂) and pulse rate while you sleep. It is not a full sleep study, but it is an effective screening tool. When...
Understanding the “Biotoxin” Labs Used in CIRS
Patients being evaluated for Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (CIRS) frequently encounter a collection of blood tests sometimes referred to as “biotoxin labs.” The name is somewhat misleading because most of these tests don't actually measure mold toxins or...