Most of us have had hives at some point. A new washing powder, a sting, a virus, and a few itchy welts appear and fade within a day or two. For some people, though, the hives keep coming back, week after week, with no obvious reason at all. They might appear on a forearm before breakfast, on the neck by lunch, and on the thighs by bedtime. That is chronic spontaneous urticaria, or CSU.
When Your Body’s First Responders Won’t Stand Down.
Autistic pattern recognition, ‘just knowing’, and the cost of being right too early.
Manipulation, the crowd, guilt, and why neurodivergent people so often lose a game they never agreed to play.
What ableism is, what it looks like in everyday life, and the very real toll it takes on people with disability.
Complex PTSD and neurodivergence can produce almost the same picture, and each is regularly mistaken for the other. This deep dive looks at why the two overlap so often, why trauma in autistic and ADHD adults so often goes unrecognised, and what the evidence actually says about the differences between men and women — including one finding that cuts against almost everything written on the subject.
A hot northerly in October, a shallow night sky, a storm that arrives without rain — and what each of them does to skin that is already working hard. Plus the parts of this story that belong to asthma and anaphylaxis, and why they are not separate stories at all.
How a two-square-metre organ turns pressure, stretch, warmth and pain into electricity — and what it takes, chemically, to keep that conversation running.
When food itself — its taste, its texture, its risk — becomes the thing a body cannot get past, no matter how much the mind wants to.
There is a particular silence that falls in a consulting room when a doctor decides they have heard enough. The patient is still speaking — still describing the fainting, the dislocations, the pain that moves, the racing heart that arrives the moment they stand, the flush and the hives, the fatigue that no amount of sleep touches — but the listening has already stopped. Something has been concluded. And the person on the examination table can feel it happen.
Why a scratchy tag, a fluorescent light, or a crowded room can feel like an emergency — and what science, and Australia’s health system, actually have to say about it.
