Don't surrender responsibility for your health to someone else

In a column reflecting on a year of writing under her own name, the author says she took over a long-running newspaper health column after her father, Dr. W. Gifford-Jones, appeared above it for more than five decades. She frames the shift as both continuing his emphasis on evidence and building her own perspective: encouraging readers to ask questions, maintaining skepticism toward medical trends, and recognizing that authorities can be wrong. Writing alone has covered topics from nutrition and preventive health to artificial intelligence and medicine, cardiovascular disease, dementia, and longevity. She argues that health guidance is increasingly noisy due to AI, new drugs, genetic data, and social media, reinforcing her message: don’t hand your health decisions to others. She also notes the growing focus on “healthspan.”