Our disciplines

73 disciplines. Every one of them reads your answers.

You answer the consultation once. All 73 go through what you said. Around eight to twelve end up in your reading, three or four of them on each of your three findings. After that you can ask it anything you like, as often as you like and it does the same thing again.

Send the same tired woman to a heart specialist and to an acupuncturist and they will notice different things. Not because one of them is right, but because they walked in asking different questions. That is why a reading uses several of them instead of picking one.

They are not all equally well evidenced and we say which is which. A trial of thirty people and forty years of practice are both worth knowing about. They are not the same thing.

Somebody arrives tired

Here is what four of these would want to know about her.

Conventional medicine wants her bloods done and it wants the iron number itself rather than somebody telling her it is fine.

Chinese medicine wants to know which hour she wakes, because three in the morning means something different from one.

Occupational health wants to know whether she gets any say over her week. Having a lot to do is one thing. Having no say over any of it is harder on a body.

Nutrition wants to know what she drinks with her dinner, because a cup of tea with a meal stops her taking in the iron that was in it.

None of those four would have asked the other three.

We don't ask which discipline is right. We ask what each one notices that the others might miss.

Exist Better isn't a panel of specialists and nobody from each of these fields reviews your reading. What each discipline knows is widely published: what an endocrinologist looks for, the questions a gastroenterologist would ask, the tests they might suggest and when something needs to be seen. Your Blueprint reads your answers through each of those lenses and looks for patterns. It doesn't diagnose.

When something points towards a professional, your reading says so and tells you who: your GP, a specialist or a practitioner who can help. For some people the right next step is an audio, an article or a change to their day. For others it is an appointment. Your Blueprint helps you tell which.

The whole constellation

No one discipline can fully explain a human life.
A Blueprint exists because every discipline notices something different.

There are 73 of them and the lines between them are the point. Some are describing the same thing in different languages. Some disagree. Your Blueprint sits where they meet.

Your answers go through all 73 of them and so does anything you ask afterwards. Not the four that suit the topic, the four that suit you. Your pillars, the patterns underneath them and the traditions your own reading has already raised decide which ones are worth opening.

You are also told which ones were considered and set aside, because a narrow answer should say so rather than look like the whole picture. Two people asking the same question rarely receive the same four disciplines.

All of them, in 8 families

Every perspective a question is read against.

Ask your Blueprint anything and all of these are considered before the ones with something particular to say are chosen.

The families matter for one reason. Disciplines inside a family tend to share their assumptions, so when two of them agree it is often the same idea twice. When two different families arrive at the same place, that is worth a great deal more. The number beside each name is how many pieces of reasoning the store holds for it.

Those figures overlap on purpose and do not add up to the size of the store. One piece of reasoning about iron absorption is read by conventional medicine, gastroenterology, nutrition science and Ayurveda at once, so it is counted under each of them. The store holds 715 pieces in all.

Conventional and clinicalConventional medicine · Endocrinology · Gastroenterology · Immunology · Neurology · Sleep medicine · Cardiology · Gynaecology · Urology and men's health · Pharmacology · Oncology · Rheumatology · Obstetrics and maternity · Dermatology · Pain medicine · ENT and audiology · Chronobiology · Orthopaedics · Dentistry and oral health · Infectious disease · Respiratory medicine · Ophthalmology · Sports medicine · Nephrology · Emergency medicine · General practice

The everyday of a lifeNutrition science · Lifestyle medicine · Dietetics and nutritional therapy · Microbiome science

Mind and behaviourPsychology · Cognitive behavioural therapy · Hypnotherapy · Behavioural activation · Behavioural science · Acceptance and commitment therapy · Solution focused therapy · Compassion focused therapy · Sound and music therapy

Body and movementPhysiotherapy · Somatic movement · Breathwork · Exercise science · Yoga · Qigong and tai chi · Osteopathy and manual therapy

Traditional systemsChinese medicine · Ayurveda · Acupuncture · Herbal medicine · Naturopathy · Moxibustion · Energy therapies

Science and systemsFunctional medicine · Epidemiology · Psychoneuroimmunology · Neuroscience · Environmental medicine and toxicology · Genetics

Work, money and freedomOccupational health · Coaching and career guidance · Money and welfare advice · Social determinants of health · Disability and independent living · Safeguarding and abuse

Meaning, grief and the inner lifeLived experience · Spiritual traditions · Philosophy · Mindfulness and contemplative practice · Grief and bereavement · Neurotheology · Logotherapy

° Named by the reasoning engine itself rather than in the 73 it sweeps when you ask it a question.

One of these is here as a tradition rather than as a treatment. Homeopathy is read for what it notices about a person. It is not presented as having an effect the evidence does not support and saying that plainly is the condition of including it at all.

In more depth

The 12 that shape a Blueprint most often.

These 12 come up in most readings. Read them and you will have a fair idea of what yours will sound like. The other 61 are just as real and they turn up when they are the ones that fit you.

Conventional medicine

Is there something here that needs treating and is it dangerous?

Unmatched atRuling out the thing that would harm you. Diagnosis, imaging, medication, surgery and knowing when something needs to be seen today.Where it needs another viewIt was not designed for the person whose results are all normal and a ten-minute appointment cannot ask about your week. Absence of disease is not the same as wellbeing and it was never meant to be.

How this appears in your Blueprint. Every safety route in the platform. If something in your answers should be seen by a doctor, this is the discipline that says so and it overrules everything else.

Lifestyle medicine

What is the ordinary shape of this life doing to this body?

Strongest onSleep, movement, food, alcohol, connection and stress, taken together rather than one at a time. The evidence here is large and unglamorous.Where it needs another viewIt knows what helps and is quiet on why somebody cannot do it. Advice that ignores a life with no room in it is not advice.

How this appears in your Blueprint. Most of the evidence behind the steps your Blueprint suggests and the reason it looks at six areas of your life at once rather than at a symptom.

Circadian biology

Not how much, but when?

Strongest onLight, timing, sleep architecture and shift work. It explains why the same behaviour at a different hour has a different effect, which almost nothing else does.Where it needs another viewIt is enthusiastically oversold. Much of what circulates about morning routines runs far ahead of the research and the timing of one meal will not rescue a life.

How this appears in your Blueprint. The reason a Blueprint asks when you see daylight and why morning light is so often the first step rather than an evening routine.

Psychology

What is this experience like from the inside and what keeps it going?

Strongest onLoops rather than states. Why avoidance is protective and expensive at once, why rumination and suppression need opposite treatments, how grief differs from low mood.Where it needs another viewIt can read a body as a mind. Some tiredness is not about your thinking and a psychological explanation offered for a physical problem is its own kind of harm.

How this appears in your Blueprint. The way your Blueprint reads patterns as things being held in place rather than as faults and most of its voice.

Behavioural science

Knowing what to do changes very little. What actually changes behaviour?

Strongest onFriction, cues, sequence and size. Why one small change that holds beats five that do not and why the order of two changes decides whether either survives.Where it needs another viewParts of the field have not replicated well and it is easily used to nudge people rather than to help them. We use it to lower the cost of a change, never to engineer one.

How this appears in your Blueprint. Why your Blueprint gives you three steps in an order rather than fifteen suggestions and why it says what to leave alone for now.

Neuroscience

What is the machinery doing while this is happening?

Strongest onArousal and threat, attention, pain as something the brain produces rather than something it reads off and the fact that a body cannot tell sustained excitement from sustained strain.Where it needs another viewIt is the most misused language in wellbeing. Dopamine, cortisol and the vagus nerve are invoked constantly to make ordinary advice sound like science. A mechanism is not evidence that something works.

How this appears in your Blueprint. The explanations that make a pattern make sense, always labelled as a mechanism rather than as proof.

Nutrition

What is this person actually eating and what is it doing?

Strongest onDeficiency, fibre, protein adequacy, blood sugar stability and structured elimination done properly with someone qualified.Where it needs another viewIts evidence base is genuinely difficult and its public conversation is the loudest in health. It is also the discipline most often sold as a cure for things it does not touch.

How this appears in your Blueprint. Specific reasoning where food is genuinely involved and the confidence to tell you plainly when it is not.

Functional medicine

Is there one process underneath these several symptoms?

Strongest onThe question itself, which conventional practice often has no room to ask. Looking for one explanation across systems is exactly the habit this platform is built on.Where it needs another viewIts answers are far less evidenced than its questions. It tests too much, sells too much and can turn a normal variation into a diagnosis. We take the question and treat the answers with caution.

How this appears in your Blueprint. The habit of asking what would account for the most, which is the central move your Blueprint makes.

Environmental medicine

What is around this person that nobody has thought to look at?

Strongest onOccupational exposure, damp and ventilation and night-time noise. Nobody asks what you breathe at work and the evidence there is genuinely strong.Where it needs another viewThe culture around it overstates almost everything. Occupational exposure and a plastic lunchbox differ by orders of magnitude and detox products are sold on a mechanism that does not need buying.

How this appears in your Blueprint. A question about your surroundings that no health service asks, kept proportionate. Most of the time the honest answer is that the room is fine and the lever is elsewhere.

Traditional Chinese medicine

What is the pattern and what is its timing?

Strongest onReading a whole person as a pattern and taking timing seriously. Waking at the same hour every night is treated as information rather than as insomnia, which is a genuinely useful instinct.Where it needs another viewIts physiology is not modern physiology and it should not be presented as though it were. Trial evidence is mixed, thin in places and strongest for acupuncture in a small number of conditions.

How this appears in your Blueprint. Questions about pattern and timing that Western practice rarely asks. Offered as a way of thinking and labelled as one.

Ayurveda

What kind of constitution is this and what does the day ask of it?

Strongest onRoutine, rhythm and the idea that the same regime does not suit two people. Its emphasis on daily order anticipated a good deal of what circadian research later found.Where it needs another viewConstitutional types are a frame rather than a finding. Some traditional preparations carry real risk, including heavy metal contamination and none is recommended here.

How this appears in your Blueprint. The instinct that rhythm and individual difference matter, which shows up in how your Blueprint sequences things.

Herbal medicine

What has long use and what does the research say about it now?

Strongest onA small number of preparations with real trial evidence and a long observational record that has occasionally sent modern pharmacology somewhere useful.Where it needs another viewNatural does not mean gentle. Interactions with prescribed medication are real and often missed, quality varies enormously and most claims are far ahead of the evidence.

How this appears in your Blueprint. A small number of specific, evidenced options, always with the interaction question attached and never as a first move.

Why it is all of them

Most people only ever get one of these.

You see your GP and you get conventional medicine. You see an acupuncturist and you get Chinese medicine. Each of them is good at something the other one is not even looking for and you will almost never get the two of them in the same room.

A Blueprint puts what each of them would have noticed about you in one place. It says which ones had something to say and it says which ones had nothing, because an answer from four disciplines should admit it is an answer from four.

One of these gives you part of the story. Four of them, on you and you start to see a life.

There is one more thing underneath all of it. A discipline is a way of looking. A system is something actually happening in your body. All 73 of these are lenses and the systems are what they are pointed at.

See the Human System

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See how they read together.

A sample Blueprint shows four of these disciplines arriving at the same question by different routes, which is easier to recognise than to describe. The Human System is the map underneath them all.