Tabula Rasa

Creatine is moving out of the muscle-and-brain box and into cancer immunology

The textbook role of creatine is a phosphate buffer. Creatine kinase keeps a reserve of phosphocreatine on hand, and when a cell burns ATP faster than its mitochondria can replace it, that reserve donates a phosphate to regenerate ATP almost instantly. Muscle relies on this during hard contractions. The same buffering chemistry exists in any cell with sharp, bursty energy demand, and a tumor-infiltrating immune cell is one of the most energy-stressed cells in the body. It has to proliferate, migrate, and execute effector functions inside a microenvironment that is hypoxic and stripped of glucose by the tumor itself.

Di Biase and colleagues at UCLA built the first direct evidence in 2019. Tumor-infiltrating T cells sharply upregulate SLC6A8, the surface transporter that pulls creatine into a cell. Knocking that transporter out in mice severely impaired the antitumor T cell response, and supplementing creatine suppressed tumor growth across several mouse tumor models. They described creatine as a molecular battery that conserves bioenergy to power T cell activity. The result that drew the most attention was a combination effect: creatine plus PD-1/PD-L1 checkpoint blockade suppressed tumors more than either alone. Checkpoint inhibitors are already frontline immunotherapy, so a cheap metabolite that amplifies them is a real translational hook.

The 2026 study from the same lab moved the mechanism one step upstream, and that is what makes it interesting rather than repetitive. T cells do not act on their own. Dendritic cells are the antigen-presenting scouts that capture tumor proteins and activate T cells in the first place, and they were not part of the original story. Kang and colleagues found that intratumoral dendritic cells also upregulate the creatine transporter and depend on creatine uptake to function. Transporter-deficient dendritic cells failed to activate and could not prime an effective CD8 T cell response. Creatine supplementation restored their activation and suppressed tumor growth in a syngeneic melanoma model. Mechanistically, creatine preserved the intracellular ATP these cells need to drive energy-dependent inflammatory signaling, which is the same molecular-battery logic operating in a different cell type. The same activation boost showed up in human monocyte-derived dendritic cells in culture, which is the first signal the biology might carry across species.

Two cautions belong on this directly. The evidence base is preclinical. It is built on mouse tumor models with in vitro human cell confirmation, and no human cancer trial has tested creatine as an immunotherapy adjunct. The senior author also holds UCLA patents on the approach, which is worth knowing when reading the framing of any single paper. Neither caveat is disqualifying, and both are standard for an early translational program, but they set the ceiling on what can honestly be claimed today.

What the two papers together establish is a coherent energetic model: creatine feeds an ATP buffer that both the dendritic cell and the T cell draw on to do metabolically expensive immune work inside a hostile tumor. That reframes a compound most people file under athletic performance as a candidate metabolic adjunct to immunotherapy, and it gives a concrete, testable rationale for the human trials that would have to come before any of this reaches a clinic.

References: Di Biase et al., Journal of Experimental Medicine, 2019 Kazak and Cohen, Nature Reviews Endocrinology, 2020 Kang et al., iScience, 2026

You manage your blood sugar with food. You count carbs. You time your meds. You never think about the light you sit under for eight hours.

A 2026 study put 13 adults with type 2 diabetes through two setups. Same meals, same desk, same activity. The only thing that changed was the light during work hours: natural daylight through windows versus standard office lighting.
Under daylight, their glucose was steadier. More time in the normal range. Smaller daily swings. A shift toward burning fat for fuel.

Average glucose did not drop. Daylight did not lower their blood sugar. It made it more stable. Fewer spikes out of range, not a lower baseline.
The mechanism is your body clock. Daylight is the main signal that tells your brain it is daytime, and that clock sets the metabolic clocks in your muscle and fat. Aligned clocks handle glucose better.

Bright light at night does the opposite. A separate trial found evening bright light raised peak glucose and increased insulin resistance compared to dim light. The lever is not more light. It is light on schedule.

This was 13 people with type 2 diabetes over 4.5 days. Small and short. The benefit was modest but real. It is not a replacement for anything you already do.

But it costs nothing. Work near a window. Get morning light. Dim the screens at night. Your environment is a metabolic input, and almost no one is selling you on the free one.

Harmsen et al., Cell Metabolism, 2026
Cheung et al., PLOS One, 2016

Summer has a way of revealing what we’ve been carrying.

The longer days invite us outside, but they can also shine a light on just how full life has become.

Notifications. Deadlines. Endless scrolling. Plans to make. Places to be. People to keep up with 😥 Have you ever considered that maybe, just maybe, you’re not tired or stressed after all? Perhaps it’s something deeper. 

In a world that rarely slows down, it’s easy to move through our days on autopilot. But summer provides us with a different lesson.
Nature doesn’t rush into bloom. A garden doesn’t flourish through constant activity. Growth happens through cycles of action and rest, expansion and pause.

This season invites us to consider:

🌿 What helps you feel grounded when life feels overwhelming?
🧘 What small rituals help you reconnect with yourself?
☀️ What would it look like to make a little more room for presence, joy, and ease?
☺️ What do you want more of? Not just this summer, but in your everyday life?

Maybe the answer isn’t doing more.

Maybe it’s planting the seeds for a strong foundation. Providing yourself with the right support.

We’ve started a community list of simple ways to slow down, reconnect, and navigate the pace of modern life.

What would you add? Share your ideas below and help us grow the list 🌻

PSST! Speaking of community, we wanted to give back to our growing, herbal family here and extend our Holistic Approach for Tick-Borne Diseases Course sale and gifts through June 9th 🙏 Comment TICKS to accept your gifts with enrollment today!

Women came to her with chronic pain doctors called “psychosomatic.”

She found the physical cause medicine had ignored — and they dismissed her too.

In the 1940s, Ida Pauline Rolf had a problem that wouldn’t go away: she was a brilliant biochemist in a world that didn’t know what to do with brilliant women.

She had earned her PhD in biological chemistry from Columbia University in 1920 — one of the few women in her field. She had worked at the Rockefeller Institute. She had published research. She had the credentials, the training, the mind.

But chronic health issues — her own and her children’s — kept leading her to doctors who had the same response: rest. Wait. Accept it. There’s nothing structurally wrong.

Clean X-rays. Normal blood work. No visible pathology.

The implicit message: maybe it’s in your head.

Ida Rolf didn’t accept that answer. She was a scientist. If the pain was real — and she knew it was — there had to be a physical mechanism medicine was missing.

So she started looking where nobody else was looking: at fascia.

Fascia is the dense, fibrous connective tissue that wraps around every muscle, organ, nerve, and bone in the body. It’s everywhere — a continuous web that holds you together, transmits force, and shapes your structure. In the 1940s, medical schools barely mentioned it. It was considered inert packing material, something you cut through to get to the “important” stuff during surgery.

Rolf saw something different. She saw fascia as dynamic, adaptive, and capable of holding patterns — patterns created by injury, posture, repetitive stress, and emotional trauma. When fascia tightened and reorganized around these patterns, it pulled the body out of alignment. And that misalignment created pain that no X-ray would ever show.

Women came to her with stories doctors had stopped listening to.

Shoulders that never relaxed. Hips that felt crooked. Backs that ached without visible injury. Necks that couldn’t turn fully. Chronic headaches. Jaw pain. Pelvic pain. Exhaustion from holding their bodies together against invisible forces.

They had been told: lose weight. Exercise more. Take a vacation. See a psychiatrist. It’s stress. It’s hormones. It’s menopause. It’s motherhood. It’s life.

The subtext was always the same: you’re unreliable. Your pain isn’t real. You’re exaggerating. You’re too emotional. You’re a difficult patient.

Ida Rolf believed them.

She developed a method she called Structural Integration — a systematic approach to releasing fascial restrictions through deep, sustained manual pressure. She worked methodically through the body in ten sessions, each targeting specific fascial layers and regions. The goal wasn’t relaxation. It was reorganization.

And it hurt.

Rolfing wasn’t gentle. She pressed deeply into tissue, holding pressure until the fascia released. Patients cried. They trembled. They had emotional breakthroughs as their bodies let go of patterns they’d been holding for decades.

But when they stood up afterward, something had shifted. Shoulders dropped. Spines lengthened. Hips balanced. Pain that had been constant for years eased or disappeared entirely.

The women whose suffering had been dismissed as psychosomatic were getting structurally better. Their bodies were changing shape. Their movement was improving. The pain was real, the cause was physical, and the treatment worked.

Ida Rolf tried to bring her work to the medical establishment.

They rejected her completely.

She was a woman. She didn’t have a medical degree. Her method was based on manipulation of tissue doctors considered irrelevant. She talked about “energy” and “gravity” and “structural integration” in ways that sounded unscientific. And worst of all, she was claiming to cure conditions medicine had already categorized as psychosomatic — which implied doctors had been wrong.

The medical community called her a quack. They dismissed Rolfing as pseudoscience, dangerous manipulation, and exploitative bodywork preying on desperate patients. Some doctors warned people to stay away from her.

But the people she helped kept coming. And they kept getting better.

Throughout the 1950s and 60s, Rolf trained practitioners, refined her technique, and built a following — mostly among people medicine had failed. Dancers and athletes came because they understood bodies in ways doctors didn’t. People with chronic pain came because they had nowhere else to go.

Women came because Ida Rolf was one of the only people who believed them.

She was uncompromising, intense, and absolutely convinced she was right. She didn’t soften her approach to make doctors comfortable. She didn’t apologize for lacking an MD. She kept working, kept teaching, kept proving that the pain medicine dismissed was structurally real.

And slowly, science began to catch up.

In the 1970s and 80s, researchers started studying fascia seriously. They discovered it wasn’t inert — it was rich with nerve endings, mechanoreceptors, and cells that responded to mechanical stress. They found that fascial restrictions could create referred pain, limit range of motion, and alter movement patterns. They confirmed what Rolf had been saying for decades: fascia mattered.

By the 2000s, fascia research had exploded. Biomechanics labs were mapping fascial networks. Physical therapists were incorporating fascial release into treatment. Medical textbooks were updating their anatomy sections. Scientists were publishing papers on fascial plasticity, myofascial pain syndromes, and the role of connective tissue in chronic conditions.

Ida Rolf had been right all along.

Today, Rolfing is practiced worldwide. The Rolf Institute trains certified practitioners. Research continues to validate the biomechanical principles underlying her work. Fascia is now recognized as a key player in chronic pain, postural dysfunction, and movement disorders.

But here’s what still needs saying: Ida Rolf’s story isn’t just about fascia. It’s about who gets believed.

Women are significantly more likely than men to have their pain dismissed, minimized, or attributed to psychological causes. Studies show women wait longer in emergency rooms, receive less pain medication, and are more likely to be prescribed psychiatric drugs for physical symptoms. Chronic pain conditions that predominantly affect women — fibromyalgia, endometriosis, chronic fatigue syndrome — took decades longer to be taken seriously than comparable conditions affecting men.

Ida Rolf saw this pattern in the 1940s. She saw women being gaslit by a medical system that didn’t have the tools — or the interest — to understand their suffering.

And when she developed those tools, when she found the physical mechanism medicine had missed, the same system dismissed her too.

A PhD biochemist with reproducible results was called a quack because she was a woman working outside traditional medical hierarchies, treating a patient population medicine had already decided was unreliable.

It took decades for science to validate what she and her patients already knew: the pain was real. The tissue held the story. The body could be reorganized. And women weren’t making it up.

Ida Pauline Rolf died in 1979 at age 83. She lived just long enough to see her work begin to gain scientific recognition, but not long enough to see fascia become a major field of research.

She spent most of her career being dismissed by the very establishment she had been trained in.

But she kept working. She kept believing her patients. She kept insisting that invisible pain deserved visible solutions.

And she proved that the most profound healing often begins not with a diagnosis written by someone who doesn’t believe you, but with someone who listens — to your body’s structure, its silent stories, and the tissue that remembers what medicine chose to overlook.