About Tom O'Connor

Who Is This Guy, and Why Should You Listen to Him?

My mother cleaned offices to make ends meet. One of them was the office of our family physician — a German-Jewish doctor named Dr. Hamburger, who had come to Worcester, Massachusetts the way a lot of people came to Worcester in those years, which is to say he'd had no other choice and made the best of it. While she worked, I was allowed to wander.

This was the 1950s. Before emergency rooms. Dr. Hamburger made house calls. His office held a cauterization machine, suturing supplies, the full apparatus of a physician who was, in practice, the neighborhood's emergency room. I was six years old and I thought it was the most serious place I'd ever been.

When I was seven, I ordered a fish preserved in formaldehyde and dissected it on the kitchen table. Then a frog. I went med in college. Washed out on organic chemistry. Never lost the interest.

In 1973, I was a graduate student at Stanford University School of Medicine, studying anatomy and physiology alongside first-year medical students. I was in the cadaver prosection lab when a professor named Dr. Milan told us the vagus nerve — the longest cranial nerve in the body, the one that runs from your brainstem to your gut — was now considered vestigial. A remnant with no remaining purpose.

I sat there and thought: that can't be right.

It wasn't. The vagus nerve is now understood to be one of the most important structures in human physiology. FDA-approved devices stimulate it to treat epilepsy and depression. Clinical trials are underway for Crohn's disease and PTSD. I spend part of every morning deliberately activating it.

That afternoon in 1973 gave me a method that has served me for fifty years: when an expert dismisses something in a way that doesn't hold up to basic logic, don't argue. File the question. Go find out for yourself.

I have Tourette syndrome. I don't say that as a disclaimer — I say it because I've come to believe it's part of what made me good at this. Tourette's is associated with pattern recognition, with the ability to hold many variables in mind simultaneously, with a kind of relentless noticing that most people learn to tune out. I notice things. I follow threads. I don't let questions go.

I raised two children as a single father. I became a licensed massage therapist and taught at the Seattle Massage School. When I was sixty, I started Market Fresh Fruit (marketfreshfruit.com) — a fresh produce delivery service for Seattle offices. The idea was simple: if people were going to spend eight hours a day somewhere, they deserved something real to eat. The company has been running for sixteen years. My daughter Molly runs it now.

I was an early subscriber to Arivale — Dr. Leroy Hood's P4 Medicine (Predictive, Preventive, Personalized, and Participatory) platform, which gave me my first systematic look at what was happening inside my body at the molecular level. I attended the Seattle Quantified Self Meetup, held at the Institute for Systems Biology, where I sat in rooms with researchers who were ten years ahead of the mainstream conversation on metabolic health and the microbiome.

Five years ago I became a Viome subscriber. Sixty supplements in one packet, calibrated to what my specific gut microbiome actually needs, based on ongoing RNA-level analysis.

I take no prescription medications. I have no lifestyle diseases. Earlier this year a full-day medical workup at Hospital Diagnostico in San Salvador — one of the most thorough physicals I've ever had — confirmed what the numbers have been saying for years.

This site is not a wellness blog. I'm not selling a program, a mindset, or a morning ritual you can buy in a weekend. What I'm doing is opening the lab notebook — fifty years of experiments, adjustments, and results — and making it readable.

I call it self-health. Not self-help. Self-help is motivational. Self-health is biological. One makes you feel better temporarily. The other changes your body's operating conditions.

I've been the guinea pig for my entire adult life. This is what I found.

Tom O'Connor is the founder of 75goingon50.com. He lives along Hood Canal in Washington State.

He is not a physician. Nothing on this site is medical advice. Everything here is a personal record of what one person tried, measured, and found. Run anything you want to try past your own doctor first.