This is not a post about how people are using chatbots to help them figure out how to manage symptoms and deal with chronic illness. That’s a different, and totally fascinating, subject.

This post is a statement of method, offered for the sake of conversation and transparency. Saying “I use AI” is not enough, and specific infrastructural choices matter to me. What follows is my tech stack (ugh, jargon), and why each piece is where it is. Some of these words are GenAI, but most of them are not.

My research workflow runs in four stages.

Raw material arrives through email alerts and RSS feeds. If I have a specific set of questions to explore, I use an AI-powered research search engine called Consensus, or OpenAlex, or I check Anna’s Archive, and I surface peer-reviewed literature matching keywords I set. This allows me to scan across databases covering 400 million articles at a velocity that makes weekly curation possible, which I could not otherwise do alone without a research team or an academic position. The alerts land as PDFs and structured digests in a folder, already tagged by topic beat. From there, a purpose-built agent evaluates each article against criteria I have set.

By doing this a bit, I’ve realized that one article I engage with properly is always better than reading ten summaries. So I’m slowing my work back down, and allowing more space to digest the research. As things that I find interesting accumulate enough signal, they get turned into a field note. The scholar alerts and curation keeps this publication alive week to week. Essays, the 4000-6000 word behemoths barely anyone reads (thank you to those of you who do!) take months of personal research and writing longhand on paper, and they are my project’s spine. My system is a more like distillery than a printing press or a content engine.

So obviously this is not the same thing as asking a chatbot to “write a blog post about agni in ayurveda.” A chatbot is a single conversational window where you type a question and get an answer. You copy the answer, paste it somewhere, and start over. The next time you open the window, the chatbot remembers nothing, the context is transactional and memoryless.

An agent is a different architecture. The system I run has persistent memory powered by a local SQLite database with vector embeddings. The memory system is open source, I didn’t build it from scratch, but I’ve modified it to suit my purpose and work. When I correct a fact, the correction supersedes the original. When I state a preference, it persists across sessions. When an agent flags a pattern, that flag stays in the record. Entities, people, projects, relationships between them, all carry provenance. Every memory can cite where it came from, whether that be me, an email, a research paper, a voice note I left, etc. Contradictions surface rather than silently resolving. The memory database is a substrate of my work, and operates in tandem with plaintext RAG (retrieval augmented generation) that has access to my years of notes and research.

This distinction, copy-paste versus persistent memory, is where I find the most help in working this way. A chatbot amplifies whatever you paste into it each time as well as its own biases. It has no sense of whether last week’s output contradicts this week’s, no way to accumulate editorial judgment, no mechanism for detecting that three articles flagged over six weeks are building toward an argument. Persistent memory makes the distillery possible. Without it, LLMs are just a faster way to generate volume, and the result is, as we know by now, slop. My tendency is to believe that LLMs can not be genuinely creative. They are good at administrating existing information, and continually re-digesting what they are given. Maybe only once have I witnessed genuine, artistic creativity in my interactions with a language model, and I had had to give it some very strong field directives for it to act like a dramaturge, pitting historical figures against one another in a dialogue with me as a sort of interactive roleplaying game.

Anyway, my entire textual archive lives in plaintext on my local machine rather than on the cloud. I run regular backups to a SSD. To write and organize, I use Obsidian, a knowledge management application that stores everything without a proprietary database or vendor lock-in. If Obsidian goes paid tomorrow, every file is still there, readable by any text editor on any operating system. The app uses wikilinks to connect notes to each other, but the underlying data is just folders and text. This matters because the knowledge this project accumulates, citations across Ayurvedic textual traditions and contemporary immunology, chinese medicine, the connections between Desha Prakriti and epigenetic transmission, literature and continental philosophy, the lineage between a Charaka Samhita verse and a 2021 proteomics preprint; all those fields talking across divisions is the substance of my work. It has to survive any single platform’s decision to shut down, change pricing, or sell to a different company.

There’s a real risk here, again, AI-assisted publishing often, maybe always (?), produces slop. Not just bad prose, though that too. Slop in the sense of content that has the surface features of signal, citations, formatting, coherence, without the structural weight underneath. A model can generate a summary of a paper it has not deeply engaged. An agent can flag a pattern that is not a pattern, but a coincidence. A curation pipeline can produce volume indistinguishable from curation until you read closely and find the joints where the model connected two ideas because they were adjacent, not because they resonate. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve even published a blog post where it happened, because I wanted to post some content that week.

The efforts to ride the line between signal and noise are architectural and aspirational. My setup operates under explicit directives: surface conflicting evidence rather than resolving it, hold tension rather than closing it. The field directives that govern my own writing, the prohibitions, are loaded into the agent’s context-window. The weekly curation cycle includes a review step where I read every flagged article and decide what enters the Field Notes. The essays have a harder boundary. I write the whole thing myself, while using AI to research the claims. I am not saying that my architecture prevents slop, but I am claiming it makes slop legible. When something drifts, it is traceable. When a model generates something that sounds like signal but isn’t, the curation directives are designed to catch it, and when they fail, the human review step is there.

Those safeguards can fail too. I have published things I later changed or removed because the quality wasn’t there. My setup does not guarantee quality, but it guarantees traceability, and traceability is the precondition for correction. The infrastructure I have described is the current state of a practice that is still being built.

The computational layer splits between what runs locally and what leaves my machine. For file classification, triage, and batch operations, I run smaller open-weight models directly on my laptop through Ollama. The data never touches a network. For the large-context inference that local models cannot yet match, I use cloud models under a no-log policy. This is a compromise, and I treat it as one. I cannot afford the hardware to run a large model myself. The biases of Chinese open-weight models are slightly different than American ones, not better or worse, and their ecological footprint does not diminish for being “open-source.”

Closed models like GPT or Claude process your data on infrastructure you cannot audit. For research material that includes health data, autoimmune correspondence, and transcripts from bodywork sessions, that is a boundary I will not cross for routine operations. Open-weight models on local hardware are necessary.

The people I work with deserve a privacy architecture that doesn’t treat their health data as raw material for someone else’s business model. My email sits at mailbox.org, encrypted in Germany. My static site and automations run on a Quebecois VPS powered by hydroelectricity. n8n threads between services: scholar alerts arrive, get parsed, flow into the curation pipeline; booking confirmations route to a database I control; meeting transcripts process offline on my machine. Each automation replaces a manual step that would otherwise eat the hour between sessions.

All the actual “thinking” happens in my body: in the sessions, in the qigong practice where I have finally learned to just stand there and listen, in the decades of tracking the felt sense of blood against thermal transitions, in the grief that moves through ecosystems. My offline practice is irreplaceable. The bodywork, the voice that records the podcast, the ear that hears what a client means when they say their body has been confusing them, the years of training in somatics and martial arts, none of that passes through a large language model. My situation right now is that I use language models to speed up the work that makes me money right now, so that I can do way more contemplative and physical practice, read novels and philosophy, and engage more actively in presence and conversation with the people around me.

Is it wrong to use the tools that are available right now? Maybe. I’ve done my research. I know it’s an OpSec disaster and will hallucinate regularly. I know that data centers are draining the water table and the supply chain of GPUs requires rare earth metals in astounding quantities. I understand that training these models requires slave labor in Africa and Asia. I am the benefactor of ongoing colonial extraction. The 996 working hour system that powers global industrialization is inhumane, and would kill me if I were subject to it. My body would collapse. And, I benefit from its existence. I cannot exit the system, but I can help us imagine alternatives. At present, my livelihood, my monthly income, my bills getting paid, requires that I know how to use these tools, and not just for this substack, which generates 6$ a month. So I make the choice to use the tools, consciously. Do you?

I have a work/life balance to protect, and a message to share amidst an ocean of noise. AI is a massive amplifier. Because the technology is there, I use it to increase the throughput of my message and speed up my workflow. I will do what it takes to get it heard. But long term, I remind myself, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. Seizing the means of production is not possible with a technology as entangled in the techno-imperialist mess as AI is.

This is not techno-optimism. I’m a solo person building a publishing platform, and the only way that works is if the machine handles what the machine can handle, while the ecological cost of that computation stays known and minimized. My goal is a modicum of sovereignty: over the data, over the toolchain, over the conditions under which the work reaches you. Thanks for reading.

The rubber hand illusion is a classic experiment: you hide your real hand, put a fake rubber hand in front of you, and someone strokes both at the same time. Eventually your brain starts treating the rubber hand as if it belongs to you, your sense of where your real hand is actually drifting toward the fake one. How strongly this happens varies a lot between people, and nobody really knew why. Researchers found a piece of the answer: people with an autoimmune condition feel the illusion more strongly than people without one. Their brains more readily incorporate the fake hand into their body representation. The proposed reason is biochemical, of course. The same inflammatory messengers involved in the immune response also affect how the brain integrates sensory signals. When those cytokines are chronically elevated, the brain’s window for deciding “this sensation belongs to my body” stays open wider. The boundary between what counts as me and what does not is, at the level of tissue signaling, more permeable.

Reading that research gives me shivers. What does it imply about how we discern boundary? What does it mean that we feel so porous?

This permeability has been framed as a problem. The immune system’s core function is discrimination: self from not-self, threat from terrain, the familiar from the foreign. When discrimination falters, the clinical frame reaches for error. The body attacking itself. The self that has mistaken itself for enemy.

A destabilized boundary between self and not-self makes that boundary visible in a way the stable, bounded body never experiences. The autoimmune body arrives already positioned at the threshold that somatic education spends decades teaching people to reach.

Psychology has spent decades showing that much of what we think we know about ourselves, we don’t. In the classic studies from the 1970s, people could not accurately report why they made the choices they made. They confabulated reasons, reached for plausible stories, and sincerely denied the factors that actually drove their behavior. A vast set of mental processes handles perception, motor learning, implicit attitudes, social judgment, all of it running below awareness, never surfacing. We figure out our own attitudes largely the way a stranger would, by watching what we do. And we suffer from a systematic blind spot: we trust our own gut sense of ourselves deeply while dismissing everyone else’s, and we find no evidence of bias because bias operates below the level introspection can reach. The self, in this view, is a story assembled from scraps: partial data, observed behavior, gaps we fill without noticing. The strangeness is adaptive. Consciousness would overload if it had to process everything the unconscious handles. The limits are functional. This is how self-knowledge works, and it works fine, mostly.

Somatic education arrives at a parallel conclusion from the other direction. Feldenkrais’s foundational claim: the self-image is a body image, the integrated whole of movement, sensation, feeling, and thought as they organize themselves in a particular nervous system. And it’s plastic. It can be expanded. Lie on the floor and make a movement so small, so slow, so far from habit that the automatic motor program cannot run. At that moment of unfamiliarity, consciousness must intervene. What was preconscious body schema becomes available to body image. The implicit becomes explicit.

Thomas Hanna named the automatic pattern “sensory-motor amnesia”: muscles held in chronic contraction below the level of voluntary awareness, the sensory-motor cortex having surrendered control to subcortical reflexes. His method: voluntarily contract those muscles fully, then release them slowly enough that the cortex registers the change. The goal is restoring what had gone underground to conscious reach.

There’s a man known in the research as IW. He lost all proprioception from the neck down: no sense of where his limbs are in space, no tactile feedback. To move at all, he must substitute conscious visual monitoring for the automatic body schema that no longer runs. He has to watch his body to know where it is. Somatic education does this voluntarily: it brings schema into image so that making it conscious allows reorganization.

The autoimmune body lives at the intersection of these two ways of knowing without having chosen either. Our immune system processes vast amounts of information below awareness, discriminating, remembering, responding, a version of that unconscious processing running at the molecular level. The immune self is an ongoing process of self-definition. It knows itself by continuously constituting the boundary between what belongs and what does not.

When that boundary becomes unstable, when cytokines alter multisensory integration, when affected body regions feel less owned, when the internal signals that normally anchor the sense of being a body become less reliable, the autoimmune person is forced into the position that somatic education cultivates deliberately. The body image must be actively maintained. The body schema can no longer be taken for granted. What the stable body leaves unconscious, the autoimmune body must negotiate.

This is the fulcrum.

I cannot avoid the question of what is me and what is not me. For others, the question is philosophical, occasional, safely academic. For this body, it is continuous, practical, negotiated at the level of tissue. Every flare asks the question again. Every remission gives a temporary answer.

Anthropologists have a word for this: liminality. The state of being betwixt and between,, neither here nor there, suspended between established categories. Chronic illness researchers have mapped this territory in chronic pain, in cancer, in HIV, in fibromyalgia: people caught between sick and well, visible and invisible, diagnosed and not. Autoimmunity adds a layer that most other conditions cannot: the mechanism of the condition is the mechanism of self/not-self discrimination. The threshold is simultaneously a social position, a phenomenological state, and the biological function that has become a question.

From this position, certain things are visible that remain invisible from the stable center. Somatic educators may say: make the implicit explicit, and the self-image can reorganize. A psychologist may say: much of the self is structurally implicit, and this is functional. The autoimmune body lives both claims at once. The permeability that somatic practice cultivates through slow, attentive movement: I arrive with it. The self/not-self questioning practiced on the floor, I practice in tissue, continuously. The condition placed me here.

From that position, self-knowledge is something the body does. The flare is the body’s signal made visible. The remission is a temporary stabilization in a system whose boundaries are constitutively negotiated. The self is an active, continuous, tissue-level process, made and remade at the boundary. The fulcrum is the place where that making becomes visible.

Field Notes are less polished than essays on Autoimmune Theory And Practice. Their goal is share what’s alive for me right now.

I read White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985) on the island of Koh Tao while I was recovering from the fever that laid me out into an autoimmune flare the first week of my trip. DeLillo is a satirist of American culture. White Noise is an acerbic take on the absurdity of the life of an academic whose sole purpose is the study of Hitler, and what befalls his nuclear family, suburban life, and the small town where he lives as natural and man-made chemical disasters. Reading DeLillo reminds me of reading Bret Easton Ellis, whom I loved as a teenager and have outgrown. You should read White Noise if you want to hold a mirror up to the monoculture.

In Chiang Dao and Chiang Mai I read The Sea Priestess by Dion Fortune (1935). Dion Fortune is interesting because she was an occultist in the early twentieth century, who was very influential in making magical theory and practice available in the English language outside of closed esoteric orders like the Golden Dawn. She self-published books and started a foundation to disseminate core teachings on magic. The Sea Priestess is a story that has as its actual purpose to teach about working with the land and the ocean. It is a love story between a Victorian suburban real estate agent and the Sea Priestess who is a sorceress of untold power. You should read Dion Fortune if you like camp and you like learning about the European magical tradition through story.

Also in Thailand, I read The Need for Roots by Simone Weil (1949). I did not read it for fun, but I also did not read it to learn about autoimmunity, so I’m including it here. I don’t know why I read it. I did not enjoy it. It is a treatise of moral philosophy. It outlines the obligations of each human being for each other. Simone Weil was a Christian, and her care was for the human labourers of society. Her opinion seems to me to have been that we need to take care of the earth only insofar as the earth is a resource for humanity. Insofar as she holds that position, I disagree with her. The earth is valuable regardless of us. But her description of the obligations of humans to each other is powerful, more so for having been written during the Second World War in exile from France. I agree with her conclusions about how society ought to be organized: decentralized, with spirituality at its center, and all of us doing meaningful work that directly benefits our communities. It was funny in a bleak way to read Simone Weil at the same time as White Noise because while Simone is in exile from occupied France, the protagonist of White Noise is a Hitler scholar. You should read Simone Weil if you’re interested in Christian mysticism and moral philosophy. In french if you can, because her prose is very precise.

When I got to Kerala I read The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin (1969) for, I don’t know, the fourth or the fifth time. I seem to read it every year or two. People always seem focus on the gender fluidity, the gender-bendy nature of this novel. Yes, it is an account of a world called Winter in which the human population has evolved such that their sexual impulse can drive them to have the sex characteristics of males or females depending on context and environment. It’s a wonderful epic of speculative fiction that is very relevant to the trans experience, and I love that, but that’s not the main reason I love this novel. Ursula Le Guin is a master of world building and The Left Hand of Darkness is the fourth novel in The Hainish Cycle. It is a potent piece of that puzzle, of the wider cosmology in the intergalactic cross-civilizational speculation that is also laid out in The Dispossessed, Rocannon’s World, and City of Illusions, among others. I love this novel in particular for its take on religion and spirituality. Surprise, surprise. The planet Winter is home to the Handdara, and to a form of contemplative practice that they have honed over millennia into an art. The main ritual of this cult is a foretelling, peering into the future in order to answer the question of a querent. The question almost never gets the answer that is desired. It gets a true answer, if it is answerable. As readers, we are shown time and again that knowing the future is not necessarily desirable. You should read The Left Hand of Darkness if you like speculative anthropology.

Then I read Wild Seed (1980) and Mind of My Mind (1978) by Octavia Butler, for the third time. I was astounded, absolutely astounded, again. I read them according to the story’s internal chronology, and I had no idea the whole Patternist series were published in roughly reverse-chronological order. These are the first two of a four-part saga. I decided to stop after the first two, this time.

Wild Seed is the story of two immortal Africans named Doro and Anyanwu. Doro is a spirit who was once human, who wears human bodies as clothes, and extends his life by taking human bodies and inhabiting them. Doro is drawn to power, and difference, among humans. He is a practicing eugenicist over centuries and millennia. He breeds humans together to get very specific potential outcomes. And this saga is set on Earth between the 1600s and the present. Because Doro is so long-lived, and his work spans generations. At the beginning he is drawn inexorably towards Anyanwu, in the deserts of Africa, where she is a powerful shape-shifting sorceress who has developed over her long life the capacity to change the molecular structure of herself. She can heal her body, create medicine in her body, create poison in her body. She can transform into a bird, a panther, a dolphin, any number of beings, and become those others for as long as she desires. Doro recognizes her power and convinces her to leave behind the life and the family that she has known all along. And thus the story begins, and it lasts centuries. This tale of these two hugely powerful people, hating and loving each other for their power and for their cruelty. I am particularly interested in Anyanwu because of her alchemy, because of her healing powers. She only really has control over herself. And she never forces that control on other people. She is beautiful.

Octavia Butler’s prose is entrancing and the books are impossible to put down. All of Octavia Butler’s books are impossible to put down for me. So you should read Wild Seed if you want to immerse yourself in historical speculative fiction that runs parallel to the horror of the last few centuries while emphasizing the brilliance of human ingenuity and the resilience of the soul in the face of cruelty.

Then I read The Dreamblood Duology by N.K. Jemisin. I had never read any N.K. Jemisin yet. I had meant to, for years, and it hadn’t happened before. And I cried. Over and over and over reading these two novels, I just sobbed constantly. These are high fantasy novels, inspired by the ancient Middle East. The feeling tone is the Thousand and One Nights meets Dune. This is a tale of dreams. It is a tale of nightmares. It is a tale of high desert political drama. It’s a tale of blood magic and tribal sorcery. It’s a lot of fun, it’s a wild ride. It is the best pair of atmospheric world building I’ve picked up in ages. It’s the most enjoyable reading experience I’ve had in years. I read the first one in one sitting. And I’m gonna read it again. It fascinates me, and I am going to have a lot more to say about it eventually, because blood is a central component. Dreamblood. The life force that keeps people alive. You should read the Dreamblood Duology if you like political intrigue and you don’t mind reading violence.

Then I read The Madonna Secret by Sophie Strand (2023). In parallel, I also read The Body Is a Doorway (2025), but The Body Is a Doorway is not fun. In her memoir, Strand wrote the illness memoir I needed five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. She put words to experiences I have repeatedly struggled to translate into a form I can share. She lapses into a lecturing tutorial voice only ever long enough for the reader to get the gist of the facts, and otherwise maintains the thread of story throughout sublime and harrowing life. She refuses to lie and deliver a neat package to the reader. In this she is strong. She wrote the book we needed about illness and ecology today. The text does not resolve, does not promise absolution. It dissolves, melts and, in her words, composts experience into soil. Where I am obsessing over distillation, the industrial alchemy of blood, she shows us blood is always dirt.

Strand’s novel, The Madonna Secret, is loads of fun to read, if no less harrowing and heartbreaking. It is exquisitely researched and textured historical fiction set during the life and times of the historical Jesus. It is told from the point of view of Mary Magdalene, who in this story was Jesus’ wife. It feels like reading a true story about Jesus, and it is a balm to the soul. As a lover of Christ as a teacher of the heart, and a hater of empire, this novel really soothed me. Strand’s prose is beautiful. She sets the stage through the smells and textures of the earth and the soil. Alongside her romantic tendencies, the sensorial nature, the sounds, it’s a very engrossing reading experience. You should read The Madonna Secret if you like historical fiction, and you want to think differently about the life of Jesus, to put him back in the context of the first century in which he was a naturalist magician.

Then I read Boudica: Dreaming the Eagle by Manda Scott (2003). Boudica is a historical fiction saga that reimagines the life of the Celtic warrior queen Boudica and her people. The story takes place in the British Isles and Gaul, at the edges of the Roman Empire. It is a story of dreaming. It is a fiction, largely because there is no written record of Boudica’s life and her people’s life. And, as both a fiction and a historical look at the horrors of Rome, it is striking. After reading this novel, I started dreaming again and taking my dreams seriously and writing them down, which I had not done systematically in years. Having read some of the context from Manda Scott’s writing this novel, I understand that dream initiation was in part her intention. In that, it is a complete success. As a page-turning adventure novel, it is totally engrossing. You should read Boudica if you love the earth, you love animals, and you want to read fiction that helps you feel closer to the land instead of further away from it. There’s a lot of horses in it. Manda Scott was a veterinary surgeon, and she’s really good at talking about animals.

I love books that are just for fun. When I need to take a break from studying all of the things that I study, I read novels. I read epic fantasy and speculative fiction and stories of dreams and magic and high drama. Stories of magicians and assassins and seduction and sorcerers vying for geopolitical power in fantastical lands. At no given moment is there anything I would rather be reading, and this has been the case for decades. For my whole life. For as long as I’ve been able to read.

Reading for fun is really important. It’s really important to feed the creative inner child with stories that are long form, complex, and emotional. I find myself crying during novels a lot. I do not weep and sob when I read political theory, ancient traditional medical texts, immunology papers, or substacks. Very rarely. So it is important to me that I foster my love of reading.

I occasionally get very romantic and whimsical about living in a pre-literate culture and wondering what it would be like if, oh damn, if I just had never learned to read, if we didn’t need books, if we didn’t need text, if I could just live in an oral culture, have amazing place-based ancestral memory, be so connected to the earth because I don’t have this medium between me and the world that is the written word. Wouldn’t everything be so much better? But that’s not necessarily true, you know. It’s a very romantic vision of things, to think things would be better if we didn’t have texts.

And, anyway, I can read. So I might as well do it. It is something that brings me a lot of joy. I feel enriched by using my time reading. I find that when I read novels specifically, I feel fulfilled and I feel a sense of purpose. And I feel a sense of escape, also, from the harder parts of the current reality, which are too many to list here. You know what I’m escaping from. While the point of this blog is primarily to talk about autoimmunity in a more framed way, more specifically about the health and the illness and the politics and the philosophy of it, I give myself space to read for fun. And I think you should too.

Okay that’s it! Now I’m reading The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin. I’m heading back to Montreal this week.

Each week I follow what emerges from a set of Scholar Alert queries tuned to this project’s framework, pull the papers that are relevant, and trace what connects them. The prose sections make claims that no single paper makes alone. If that’s not interesting, the curated list still tells you what to read and why it matters. Everything here is free. Zotero collection links for paid subscribers are at the bottom.

This week’s subjects:

• Gut-Immune Axis / Microbiome

• Traditional Medicine + Autoimmunity

• Healing Frameworks / Ethnomedicine

• Immune Mechanisms / Ecological Frameworks

Gut-Immune Axis / Microbiome

Doyon-Laliberté makes the structure visible: BAFF, a signaling molecule that drives B-cell activation in the immune system, doesn’t just respond to gut disruption in long COVID. It feeds back into the gut barrier and the microbial ecology that produced it. The immune system reshapes the terrain that shaped it. Once you see that feedback loop, you see it everywhere in this week’s papers. Fu finds that aging itself passes through a microbial phase transition, a threshold crossing where the interior ecology shifts character and autoimmune prevalence shifts with it. Jung extends the frame to the oral cavity. Wang to the reproductive tract.

The body is a series of mucosal surfaces in ongoing negotiation, and immunity is the pattern of those negotiations. Ecosystems within ecosystems, each layer shaping the conditions for the one above it.

• Microbiota-induced intestinal barrier disruption drives BAFF-mediated B-cell dysregulation and autoimmunity in long COVID — Doyon-Laliberté et al., Preprint, 2026. This week’s structural key. BAFF feeds back into the intestinal barrier and the microbial ecology itself. Bidirectional causality: the immune system reshapes the terrain that produced it. From the abstract: “Here we show that non-hospitalized individuals with long COVID have intestinal barrier dysfunction associated with increased B-cell activating factor (BAFF), perturbation of the B cell compartment and autoimmunity that peak at 12 months after infection and begin to resolve by 24 months.” (Preprint)

• The dual roles of microorganisms in inflammatory diseases: initiators and regulators — Liao et al., Critical Reviews in Clinical Laboratory Sciences, 2026. Collapses the pathogen/commensal binary. Microorganisms are both.

• From dysbacteriosis to ecological remodeling: a new breakthrough in microbial treatment of IBD — Xie et al., iScience, 2026. Research on Inflammatory Bowel Disease. The gut is an ecology to be remodeled, not a system to be corrected.

• A global metagenomic atlas of aging identifies a microbiota phase transition associated with disease risk — Fu et al., npj Biofilms and Microbiomes, 2026. The aging microbiome passes through a phase transition, a sudden threshold where the interior ecology shifts character, and autoimmune prevalence shifts with it. From the abstract: “This perturbation was associated with a decline in ecological stability and substantial changes in the abundance of core species. Notably, the association between gut microbiota age and diseases was identified to be significantly altered before and after this inflection time.

• Oral Microbiome in Systemic Autoimmune Diseases: A Systematic Review — Jung, Militsi, Huck, Oral Diseases, 2026. Another mucosal surface (the mouth, which like the gut is lined with tissue that manages the boundary between inside and outside), another ecological conversation. 42 studies met inclusion criteria: 19 on rheumatoid arthritis (RA), 18 on primary Sjögren’s syndrome, 5 on systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), and 1 on anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic autoantibody-associated vasculitis

Ayurveda + Autoimmunity

Shripat names Ojas explicitly. The concept is already there in the classical texts, already doing the work of describing vitality and metabolic capacity rather than surveillance and response. The vocabulary predates the discovery of the biomedical mechanism, which raises a question that all of the papers leave unaddressed: what kind of observation produced the vocabulary? What kind of attention produced the knowledge that this plant does something worth remembering?

Rajendran’s beverage plants paper touches something more specific than hormesis. The rasayana principle is sustained low-dose challenge that maintains the system’s responsiveness. Stimulation and suppression are both wrong frames. Ecological conditioning: a small regular demand keeps a muscle capable of more. The vocabulary of “immunomodulation” misses it, because modulation presupposes a system that needs adjustment from outside. Rasayana presupposes a system that can be strengthened from within, given the right conditions. This is a different model of what immunity is.

• Role of Ayurvedic Principles in Addressing Malnutrition and Non-Communicable Diseases — Shripat et al., Cureus, 2026. South Asian field research. From the abstract: “This review critically examines Ayurvedic principles as a complementary, systems-based framework for addressing shared nutritional and metabolic determinants underlying both conditions. Drawing on conceptual foundations and available empirical evidence, the analysis evaluates how dietary regulation, digestive optimisation, lifestyle modification, and Rasayana-based preventive strategies can be operationalised using locally accessible foods, herbs, and community-level delivery models.”

• Phytochemistry, pharmacology, and traditional uses of beverage plants with dietary hormetic potential — Rajendran et al., Food Chemistry Advances, 2026. Hormesis (the principle that a small dose of a stressor strengthens the system’s response) meets rasayana (the Ayurvedic practice of sustained low-dose tonic intake that maintains vitality). Low-dose challenge that maintains responsiveness.

Healing Frameworks / Ethnomedicine

Ethnomedicine papers consistently say: other knowledge traditions have been describing what Western immunology calls autoimmunity, using vocabularies that preserve the body as ecology rather than reducing it to a machine. This is the territory where autoimmunity is a set of disrupted relations.

• Decolonizing Mental Health in Algeria — Memchout, Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 2026. Jinn (spiritual beings in Islamic cosmology that can possess or afflict), baraka (blessing or spiritual power), sorcery as structured knowledge practices. From the abstract: “Algeria’s mental health system still bears the scars of a colonial asylum regime that delegitimized indigenous cosmologies and ruptured ties among self, family, community, and the sacred.” What happens when you take indigenous practices on their own terms?

• La Recta Provincia and the Logic of Resistance: Magic as Decolonial Heterotopia in the film Brujería — Ávalos, The Latin Americanist, 2026. Healing as cultural resistance. Colonial epistemology calls it sorcery. The Huilliche had their own categories, their own logic for why ritual works. 1. magic as epistemology; 2. magic as justice; 3. magic as territory, where physical and symbolic places resist the colonial hierarchies and mechanisms of domination.

Immune Mechanisms / Ecological Frameworks

• Decoding the exposome for type 1 diabetes prevention — Rollet et al., Diabetes & Metabolism, 2026. The exposome (the totality of environmental exposures a person encounters across their lifetime) as the field in which autoimmunity emerges. “Infectious agents, air pollutants, and early-life diet are well studied and consistently associated with T1D onset. However, little is known about the role of cumulative and combined exposures, or the exposome’s influence on disease progression and complications.” The gap they find is onset versus progression. The Ayurvedic and somatic practices live in that gap: what sustains dysregulation, not just what triggers it.

Bonus:

• The Body Is A Doorway, by Sophie Strand

  Make Me Good Soil

  The Body Is a Doorway: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human is available for pre-order!

  I am SO excited to announce that my memoir about ecology and chronic illness The Body is a Doorway: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human is available for pre-order on all online bookselling platforms ahead of its release in March 2025. You can find different ways to order…

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  2 years ago · 220 likes · 50 comments · Sophie Strand

That’s it for this week! I’ve finally got a workflow that makes it reasonably possible for me to put these together on a regular basis. Hopefully you find something that piques your curiosity.