The Sunlight Experiment, Reborn

I started The Sunlight Experiment while I was still in university.

Then, for the better part of a few years, I let it sit on the sidelines. Life moved, priorities shifted, and the site quietly gathered dust.

But I never really stopped. The whole time, I kept building my notes, kept reading, and kept digging deeper into herbal medicine — I just wasn’t publishing any of it.

This is where that changes.

Why bring it back now?

I’ll be honest: I’m not reviving this for the world.

Most of what I write here is, at this point, widely available. If you want to know what an herb does, you can ask an AI and get a reasonable answer in seconds. I’m not pretending to fill some gap that only I can fill.

I’m bringing it back for me.

I’ve always learned best by writing. Something about having to explain a plant clearly — its chemistry, its traditional uses, the research behind it, the risks — forces me to actually understand it, instead of just recognizing it. The Sunlight Experiment is, first and foremost, my notebook: a place to think out loud, in public, and hold myself to a higher standard than any private note ever could.

If it turns out to be useful to you too, that’s a wonderful bonus. But the reader I’m really writing for is future me.

What’s new

This is a brand-new website, rebuilt from the ground up.

Along with it comes a stack of new herbal monographs I’ve never published before — pulled from years of accumulated notes and research. There’s a lot more still to come, and I’ll be adding to it steadily.

The ethos hasn’t changed

What I write has always lived in the space between two worlds: evidence-based research and traditional herbal knowledge.

Traditional knowledge comes first. It’s the foundation — the accumulated experience of healers stretching back to the very beginning of medicine, long before we had the tools to explain why any of it worked. I let that tradition guide what I pay attention to.

But I don’t stop there. I follow the research closely — for confirmation of what tradition already suggests, and just as importantly, for the things tradition can’t give us on its own: effective dosing, drug interactions, and safety.

Tradition points the way. Research sharpens it.

Come along

If you’d like my herbal notes and new monographs delivered to your inbox — every week or two — sign up for the email list below.

Thanks for being here at the start of this next chapter.

— Justin