Dr. Rollins Articles
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Keys to Great Health
“Before you heal someone, ask him if he’s willing to give up the things that made him sick.” —Hippocrates (Who, it should be noted, did not own a microwave.) The Long, Unsexy Truth About Health Health does not arrive on a white horse. It does not burst through the...
A Christmas Music Prescription
If laughter is the best medicine, then I’d like to think music is a close second. I discovered around the age of 18 that I have an ear for playing music, which is a blessing and a curse. I'm confessing that my love for music borders on problematic. Most days if I’m...
Understanding the Ketogenic Diet
What Is the Ketogenic Diet? The ketogenic diet is a high-fat, moderate-protein, very low-carbohydrate nutrition strategy designed to shift the body’s metabolism away from glucose and toward fat as its primary fuel source. Although it has surged in popularity for...
Why a Whole-Food Plant-Based Diet Makes Sense — Even According to Our Ancestors
A sweeping 2025 study titled “The Broad Spectrum Species: Plant Use and Processing as Deep Time Adaptations”, published in Journal of Archaeological Research, fundamentally re-examines what early humans ate, and in doing so, challenges the popular mythology behind the...
The Hidden Power of Bone Stock
A Timeless Healing Food Returns We make lots of bone stock at our house. It's super easy and extends our food budget considerably. The usual go-to stock is chicken. A small free range hen costs about $10 and provides several meals just with the meat. The night the...
Harmonizing Your Brain – How Music May Be a Key to Cognitive Longevity
As someone who moves between the world of medicine and the world of music, I’ve long believed in the power of sound not just as something aesthetic, but as a therapeutic medium for body, brain and spirit. For me, playing the piano or guitar is a daily treat. ...
Influenza Vaccine Pros, Cons & Natural Treatments
If you are weighing the pros and cons of getting the flu shot this year then you are not alone. Recent studies have questioned how well the flu vaccine really works. Here are some summary studies to help make an informed decision whether to get the jab, or not. And...
Cross-Reactive Antibodies and False-Positive Serology in Tick-Borne Disease Testing
Understanding Borrelia, Bartonella, and Babesia Beyond the Lab Report Serologic testing for tick-borne diseases is among the most challenging areas of infectious disease diagnostics. Patients frequently present with antibody positivity to multiple organisms, sometimes...
T Cells – The Immune System’s Traffic Cops
If you think of your immune system as a city, T cells are the skilled responders, the detectives, firefighters, and paramedics who rush in when trouble appears. They identify threats like viruses or cancer cells, coordinate the rest of the immune force and when...
Colorful Berries for the Heart
If you want to lower your risk of high blood pressure or heart disease then add more color to your diet. Vibrant colored fruits and vegetables are the key ingredients to a heart healthy diet – especially black, blue, purple, and red. The Colors of Berries...
High Intensity Interval Training
If you don’t have time to exercise, then you had better make time to be sick, because so much of our health depends on getting the right amount and the right types of exercise. We all know it, but we get distracted with life, and guess what gets put off until tomorrow...
Are Food Allergies Making You Gain Weight?
If you struggle with losing weight despite eating well and exercising then consider investigating for delayed food allergies. Along with hormone imbalance and poor intestinal health we find the connection between food allergies and weight gain to be quite common. ...
Heavy Metals and Cardiovascular Health
When we think of cardiovascular risk factors, we typically focus on diet, exercise, and genetics. But lurking beneath the radar is a silent threat of toxic heavy metals, ubiquitous environmental pollutants increasingly linked to heart disease. A major 2024 review in...
Why Am I So Tired – Could it be Adrenal Fatigue?
The body has a marvelous system for dealing with acute stress, allowing us to meet challenges and perform at a high level both physically and mentally. But, chronic stress, day in and day out without respite, leads to burnout and numerous health problems, especially...
Managing Stress by Finding Your Nervous System’s Sweet Spot
Stress is rampant and it's creating many health problems. Each day in the office I'm talking to patients about "dialing down" their stress response. We can't avoid every stressful situation, but we do have some simple and powerful tools to minimize the impact stress...
Bath vs Sauna: Which Heat Therapy Packs the Biggest Punch?
I love our hot tub. Our son loves his dry sauna. And many of my patients love their infra-red sauna. Last week I wrote about the benefits of heat therapy related to the heat shock proteins. But I've always wondered, is one heat therapy better than another? I just...
Heat vs. Cold Shock Proteins: A Battle of the Elements
Last week I was in Santa Fe enjoying a soak in a hot spring then alternating with a jump into icy cold water. Our friends were questioning the health benefits of both, and the sanity of the latter, and it got us talking shock proteins. In the quest for better health,...
A Long-Overdue Victory for Women’s Health
For more than three decades, I’ve worked alongside women navigating the complex and often overlooked terrain of perimenopause and menopause. I’ve witnessed the life-altering improvements that hormone therapy can bring - clearer thinking, better sleep, stronger bones,...
The Surprising Power of Activity for Insomnia Relief
Millions of people struggle each night with insomnia - difficulty falling or staying asleep, waking too early, or experiencing poor quality rest. While medications are commonly prescribed, they come with risks like dependency, next-day grogginess, and long-term health...
Busting Weight Loss Myths
Many well-known and long held beliefs regarding weight loss are untrue according to recent scientific research. Despite the popularity of some media and health-provider guidance, it appears much of this weight loss advice is presumptuous and unproven, or worse yet,...
Chronic Pain Therapy with Dr. Rachel Zoffness
Here’s a summary of the podcast episode Dolorology (PAIN) with Dr. Rachel Zoffness (from the series Ologies with Alie Ward) featuring pain-psychologist Rachel Zoffness, including its key ideas and implications. In the episode, Dr. Zoffness asks: What is pain? Where...