A Critical Review of Tout et al. (2024) Evidenced Based Sleep Hacks Shift work is not simply an inconvenience of scheduling—it is a biological contradiction. In The Shift Worker’s Paradox, I argue that the healthcare system relies on a workforce whose physiology is sy...

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#nurses
#nursing
#nursewhowrites

Language Matters: When Words Drift from Description to Dehumanization In public discussions of politics, health, economics, and science, language is not a luxury; it's a civic responsibility.

Illegals......Rapists, Criminals & Murderers

#nursewhowrites
#nurse
#alexpretti
#violence
#minnesota

Picture of R.E. Hengsterman, author, standing in hospital corridor. Black shirt, arms folded

One of the biggest things I hear is that everything about me feels impersonal. Truth is, I hate social media.

The Hustle. The Grind. The Grifters. It's all BS.

But as an author, it's required. Otherwise, no one pays attention.

See you next shift

#nursing
#nurse
#nursewhowrites

Caffeinated Gum vs Capsules: A Small Sports Study With Big Night-Shift Implications For nurses—especially nights—this is less about gym PRs and more about what we’re really doing with caffeine: trying to manufacture alertness inside a body that wants to sleep.

www.nursewhowrites.com/post/caffein...

#nursewhowrites #nursing #shiftworkersparadox #shiftworker

Breaking The Seal Momentum is fragile by design. It depends less on motivation than on what surrounds you when motivation is gone.

www.nursewhowrites.com/post/breakin...

#nurse #nursing #nursewhowrites #shiftworker
#breakingtheseal #willpower

THE BEGINNING (AGAIN) Do I chase the workouts? Do I tighten the nutrition? Do I try to optimize both? We all know the phrase: you can’t out train a bad diet. From an energy and caloric perspective, that’s true enough.

www.nursewhowrites.com/post/the-beg...

#nurse #nursewhowrites #shiftworkersparadox #shiftworker

A One-Year Experiment in Living the Shift Worker’s Paradox A 12-month experiment that focuses on rhythm, repair and resilience. I will give frequent updates, yet not with the goal of being perfect, or of being perfect in the way of being a performer, but rath...

www.nursewhowrites.com/post/the-exp...

#nurses #shiftworkers #nursewhowrites #health

When Science Bends: The New Hepatitis B Birth-Dose Recommendation and the Quiet Risk We’re Creating There are moments in healthcare when the ground shifts beneath your feet. You feel it in the pit of your stomach before the policy changes arrive. This week was one of those moments.I Don’t Have a Dog...

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#nursewhowrites #vaccine #hepbvaccine #publichealth

The Four-Count Reset: A Night Shift Lesson in Physiology and Survival I remember the night with absolute clarity. A routine shift, until it wasn’t.The room compressed, the air thinned, and my own physiology staged a quiet rebellion. I’m not built for anxiety, if anythin...

www.nursewhowrites.com/post/the-fou...

#nurse #nursing #shiftworker
#nursewhowrites

The Realities of Night-Shift Work—and Why Understanding Them Matters More Than Ever For nurses, this is not an academic footnote. It is our lived environment.

www.nursewhowrites.com/post/the-rea...

#nightshift #nurse #nursewhowrites #shiftworker #cancer

Props to my cover artist. Turned out amazing. Early copy in hand. Available everywhere 12/10/2025

Preorder for paperback this week. Ebook link in bio.

#bookish #bookaholic #bookish
#bookcover #shortstory #nursewhowrites #literaryfiction #read

Coffee, Caffeine, and AFib: The Evidence That Upends Decades of Caution What we actually see in epidemiology is that AFib risk is driven far more by age, sex, and comorbidities than by caffeine.

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#CaffeineAndHeartHealth #AFibAwareness #ShiftWorkersParadox #NurseWhoWrites #CardiacHealth #NursingEducation #HeartRhythm #HealthLiteracy #EvidenceBasedPractice #MedicalWriting #CoffeeAndAFib #ScienceOfSleep #NurseLife #HealthResearch #CardiovascularWellness

Refuting the Claims and Reframing the Reality of Nursing The Claims We’ve Heard 1. “The system runs on the back of nurses — breaking themselves to keep it from collapsing.”2. “We (nurses) are the safety net for a system with holes too big to mend.”3. “It’s ...

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#NursingShortageMyth #NurseStaffing #HealthcareEconomics #MedicalErrors #HospitalUnderstaffing #PatientSafety #NurseAdvocacy #HealthcareReform #NurseWhoWrites #ShiftWorkersParadox #SystemicChange #NursingLeadership #WorkforceReality #ClinicalEthics

Polygenic Embryo Selection and the Future of IVF: Science Nearing Prime Time Even then, I felt the tension between scientific wonder and social unease—questions of control, randomness, and what it means to intervene in creation.

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Polygenic Risk Scores (PRS) and the Future of IVF: Science, Ethics, and the Edge of Eugenics

#PolygenicRiskScores #IVFScience #EmbryoScreening #GenomicEthics #EugenicsDebate #ReproductiveTechnology #AGI #FutureOfHumanity #ShiftWorkersParadox #NurseWhoWrites

Is Long-Term Melatonin Use Putting Your Heart at Risk? Insights, Limitations & Practical Takeaways Sleep disturbances and insomnia are themselves major cardiovascular risk factors; distinguishing the effect of the supplement from the underlying sleep disorder is critical.

www.nursewhowrites.com/post/is-long...

#LongTermMelatoninUse #HeartFailureRisk #SleepHealth #InsomniaResearch #CardiovascularHealth #NurseWhoWrites #EvidenceBasedPractice #ShiftWorkersParadox #ClinicalEducation #MelatoninStudy #CircadianHealth #HealthLiteracy #SleepMedicine #HeartHealth

Night Shift Fuel: My Go-To Protein From chalky whey isolates to overpriced “wellness” powders wrapped in pastel labels — most left me bloated, wired, or worse, disappointed. But one blend has stood out, hands down: True Protein Custo...

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#nightshift #Protein #truenutrition #nightshift #nurse #shiftworker #nursewhowrites

Perturbation: The Repetitive Trauma of Shift Work Perturbation (noun): a disturbance of motion, course, arrangement, or state of equilibrium.Shift work isn’t one great trauma. It’s thousands of small ones. A kind of repetition injury—biological, not ...

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#ShiftWorkersParadox #CircadianHealth #BiologicalTrauma #ChronicPerturbation #InflammationCycle #NightShiftScience #OccupationalHealth #MetabolicDisruption #SleepDeprivationScience #NurseWhoWrites #EndothelialHealth
#SystemicInflammation #ScienceAndStory

Between Credentials and Claims: The Functional Nurse and Florida’s Wellness Gold Rush And while the intent might be genuine—wellness, nutrition, mental health, balance—the machinery behind it is not just about care.

www.nursewhowrites.com/post/between...

#nurse #wellness #functionalnurse
#funcrionalnursing
#nursewhowrites

Between Conspiracy and Cure: What RFK Jr. and Healthcare Get Right—and What They Get Wrong Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has become one of the most polarizing figures in modern health discourse. To some, he’s a truth-teller—a whistleblower holding institutions accountable. To others, he’s a dangero...

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#RFKJr #HealthcareReform #PublicHealth #EvidenceBasedMedicine #ScienceCommunication #MedicalMisinformation #VaccineConfidence #FunctionalMedicine #HolisticHealth #PreventativeCare
#nursewhowrites #Misinformation #TrustInScience #HealthDebate #HealthPolicy

The Myth of “Alkaline & Acidic Foods”: Why What You Eat Can’t Change Your Blood pH Spend five minutes on social media and you’ll see the same list of “miracle” foods — lemon water, celery juice, apple cider vinegar, chlorophyll drops, “alkaline” water — all promising to “reset” or “...

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#nursewhowrites #bloodpH #health #wellnes

Book cover of “The Paper Boy & The Winter War” by R.E. Hengsterman — a haunting winter landscape with snow-drifted houses and a lone paperboy in the distance, evoking memory, loss, and the quiet wars of ordinary lives.

The Paper Boy & The Winter War (Second Edition) —
A collection of short stories by R.E. Hengsterman
Available in print (12.10.25) and ebook (Preorder Now)
#LiteraryNonfiction #CreativeNonfiction #NarrativeNonfiction #EssayCollection #MemoirWriters #NonfictionBooks #LiteraryMemoir #nursewhowrites

If We Left Biology to Human Choice What if we could decide which of our body’s systems ran — and when?Imagine an app that lets you toggle survival itself: • Heartbeat: Pause when tired. • Breathing: Disable during stress. • Pain: Mute ...

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#ScienceOverMyth #EvidenceBased #PublicHealth
#HealthLiteracy #VaccinesSaveLives #TrustScience
#VaccinesWork #ImmunologyMatters #VaccineEducation
#InScienceWeTrust #ProScience #ScienceNotSilence

Cold Showers in the Morning: Risk, Hype, and the Truth Beneath the Ice It’s making the rounds again — the claim that cold showers cause nearly two-thirds of all strokes. Spoiler: they don’t. But like most health trends that get boiled down (or in this case, chilled down)...

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#stroke #coldshowers #NurseWhoWrites #ShiftWorkersParadox #HeartHealth #CardiovascularWellness #EvidenceBased

When Nursing Becomes a Brand: Ethics, Crowds, and Commerce There was a time when nurses didn’t need a “personal brand.” The work was the identity. The uniform, the license, the oath—all spoke for themselves.But scroll through social media in 2025, and you’ll ...

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#NurseWhoWrites #NurseWriter #NarrativeNursing
#StoriesInMedicine #HumanizingHealthcare

The Cost of Linguistic Drift Somewhere along the pandemic timeline, the word “vaccine” lost its footing — replaced by a single, punchy syllable: jab.The term isn’t new. In the U.K., “jab” has been shorthand for “injection” since ...

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#NurseWhoWrites #NurseWriter #NarrativeNursing #StoriesInMedicine #HumanizingHealthcare

The Rise of the Functional Nurse: When Healing Turns Inward It often starts with a personal health crisis.A nurse—burned out, disillusioned, or broken by a system that rewards resilience over recovery—steps away from the bedside. After years of twelve-hour shi...

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#NurseWhoWrites #NurseWriter #NarrativeNursing
#StoriesInMedicine #HumanizingHealthcare

We’re All Fallible — Why This Moment Calls for Grace and Accountability A headline rolled through my feed this week: a nurse who’d been honored for extraordinary bedside care is now out of a job after allegedly telling officers during a DWI stop, “I’ll let you die” — and ...

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#NurseWhoWrites #TheNurseWhoWrites #RNHumans
#NurseWriter #WritingNurse #HealthcareVoices

When Science Meets Facebook: The Myth of Seeing “Heavy Metals” in Someone’s Eyes This week, a post slid through my feed—the kind that makes you pause somewhere between disbelief and despair. A self-described “concerned citizen” claimed to have witnessed a healthcare worker receivi...

www.nursewhowrites.com/post/when-sc... #nursewhowrites #health #antivax #RN #fluvaccine