Mykola Iabluchanskyi

We often think of our inner lives as private realms, sealed off from the world around us. Yet our mental and emotional states quietly shape the environments we share. The way we feel and focus doesn’t stop at the edge of our skin — it ripples through families, teams, and communities, influencing how people connect, collaborate, and decide. When one person is exhausted or fearful, it colors their words, their patience, their choices. Over time, inner chaos spills outward: meetings tense up, communication frays, trust erodes. A family that can’t discuss mistakes calmly often mirrors that rigidity in workplaces. A society that silences its people eventually recreates that pattern in its politics. Stability grows from self-regulation; the condition of the system depends on the resilience of its individuals. Still, these links also mean small changes matter deeply. A simple pause, a moment of honesty — “I need a break” — can shift the tone of an entire environment. Decision-making is a sh...

Medicine measures many things. It measures the speed of recovery, the length of hospital stays, the reduction of inflammation, the stabilization of a lesion. Yet the most important question — the one that should precede all measurement — is rarely asked clearly enough: what, exactly, are we trying to achieve? The Trap of Short-Term Targets The temptation in clinical practice is to replace the ultimate goal with the nearest visible one. We focus on shortening hospital stays, limiting the extent of myocardial infarction, suppressing pulmonary inflammation, sealing a gastric ulcer. These are not wrong objectives. But when they are treated as ends in themselves, rather than as milestones on the way to something larger, they become a kind of medical tunnel vision — and tunnel vision, in medicine, causes harm. The problem is not negligence. It is, more often, a quiet erosion of the strategic goal: the physician remains technically competent while losing sight of the person sitting across t...

Modern medicine is in quiet crisis — not one of technology or resources, but of concept. The most persistent source of clinical disappointment is a philosophical misunderstanding that has embedded itself at the heart of medical practice: the rigid equation of health with "normality" and disease with its deviation. The Two Frameworks: Sanos-Patos vs. Norm-Pathology Medicine operates with two foundational frameworks, and conflating them has consequences. The sanos-patos binary — health versus disease — is a sound clinical observation: the two states are distinct, yet deeply interconnected and mutually defining. Health and disease are better understood as dynamic emergent states arising from the body's adaptive responses rather than as fixed categorical opposites. The norm-pathology framework, however, introduces a different logic — one that is far more problematic. It reduces disease to a mere deviation from a fixed healthy standard and implicitly treats health as a unive...

Heart rate variability — the beat-to-beat fluctuation in the interval between heartbeats — has long been recognized as one of medicine's most sensitive windows into the autonomic nervous system. After decades of refinement in research settings, including its application in space medicine to monitor astronaut health during extended missions, HRV has entered general clinical practice as a tool for assessing cardiovascular function, stress resilience, and overall physiological balance. Its value lies in its ability to detect subtle shifts in the balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system before those shifts become clinically obvious. Conventional interpretation of HRV has focused almost exclusively on one direction: low variability as a warning signal. When HRV decreases, it typically reflects sympathetic dominance — the body locked in a state of chronic activation, unable to recover efficiently. This pattern is associated with cardiov...

The principle of symmetry as a compass for cardiology In the complex landscape of clinical diagnostics, the principle of symmetry serves as a fundamental foundation that allows researchers to find solutions where others encounter serious difficulties. This regularity is particularly evident in the study of cardiac rhythms and intervals. While the prolonged QT syndrome has long been recognized within the cardiological community as a significant risk factor for lethal arrhythmias, its symmetrical counterpart—the shortened QT interval—remained hidden for decades. The discovery of this syndrome illustrates how a holistic assessment of medical parameters, viewed through the lens of symmetry, can reveal deep mechanisms of functioning that are otherwise missed. From intuitive questions to scientific breakthroughs The honor of identifying the shortened QT syndrome belongs to I. Gussak, whose journey began at the Kaunas Center for Arrhythmias in the 1980s. During the development of intelligen...

We tend to think of ageing as something that happens to us. Muscles weaken, bones thin, memory slows, and the world gradually narrows. In this picture, the person is a passive recipient of biological forces beyond their control — a spectator watching the clock wind down. But this picture, however familiar, is incomplete. And accepting it uncritically may be one of the most consequential mistakes we make in how we approach the final decades of life. Ageing is indeed an involution — a real, objective reduction in biological reserves. Connective tissue loses elasticity, energy systems become less efficient, neural networks thin, and the margin for error shrinks. This is not pessimism; it is biology. But within these objective limits, there remains an enormous space of ways in which the later trajectory can unfold. The script is not fixed. And that distinction — between the fact of involution and the shape it takes — is where everything important happens. Modern medicine has become extraor...

For decades, fat has been cast as the villain in the story of heart disease. Dietary guidelines warned against it, food industries reformulated products to eliminate it, and generations of patients were told to reduce their fat consumption to protect their arteries. The logic seemed straightforward: eat less fat, develop less atherosclerosis. The reality, as science has gradually revealed, is considerably more complicated — and the oversimplification has consequences. What Actually Happens to the Fat You Eat The first point that tends to surprise people is this: the fat you consume at the table is not the fat that ends up in your arterial walls. Dietary fats are broken down in the intestine, absorbed, processed by the liver, and either used immediately for energy or stored. The human body is not a passive conduit that simply redirects food components into the bloodstream unchanged. It is an active, tightly regulated biochemical factory — and when it comes to fats, the factory does most...