The Interior Medicine Method: Introduction

Welcome!

This is a fun, thought-provoking, and completely free curriculum about how to evaluate the health impact of the products in your home. It's been percolating in my mind for the last five years, and is informed by my 20 years in research, science, medicine, and design. The Method is a breakdown of my exact thought process for evaluating every material, product, and brand on Interior Medicine.

My goal in sharing it is for you to feel calm, empowered, and like you have x-ray vision. I want you to feel serenely confident evaluating products, brands, research, and the non-toxic advice circulating online.

Reasons I Made This

Misinformation about non-toxic living is rampant. So is the knee-jerk reaction in the opposite direction — the dismissal of any concern as “wellness hysteria” — without any useful middle ground. Both modes leave people worse off. It is my firm belief that hard science and open-mindedness aren't opposites. I hold both and want to contribute more to this middle ground.

Healthwashing is accelerating. Brands have figured out that people care about this, and "non-toxic" has become a marketing tool with no standard definition. I don’t want you to be tricked, and this is a way to see through it.

My own non-toxic living arc started with earnest zealousness, and has settled, over fifteen years and a lot of formal training, into something much more balanced. I hope that this method can help accelerate the process for you if you’re just getting started.

My long-term goal is that you eventually don't need me — the same way a good doctor works with you closely enough that, at some point, you don't need them anymore.

A Quick Note on Language

"Non-toxic," "chemical," and "toxin" are words I use throughout this method and this entire website, and they're all technically imprecise. “Non-toxic” does not have a standard definition. Everything is made of chemicals, and not all chemicals are harmful. "Toxin" technically refers to naturally occurring poisons (plant compounds, venoms), while "toxicant" is the more accurate term for synthetic chemicals with negative health effects.

I use these words anyway because they're the most culturally understood, descriptive, and searchable terms we currently have. Accuracy with vocabulary matters to me, so I want to be transparent about this intentional use of imprecise language. If better terms become standard, I'll update.

How to Use The Method

If you go through in order, a complicated problem will feel simplified. You can skip around, but the sections build on each other, so going in order makes the most sense.

I wrote this specifically for home products, but the same thinking applies to personal care, what you read online, and most decisions involving uncertain evidence. Here's what's in each section:

Part 1: A Framework for Assessing Any Health Risk: The core toxicology framework that underlies everything else. If you only read one section, read this one.

Part 2: The Hidden Chemistry of Home Products: How to “see” every chemical in every layer of every product and understand whether they’re VOCs, sVOCs, other substances, and how small they really are.

Part 3: Making Sense of Conflicting Research: Why you see very legitimate-looking scientific research articles, including very alarming studies, that contradict others, and how to tell which one is right.

Part 4: What Your Home Exposes You To: Not a random list, but one built from what the WHO, IARC, and other major health agencies say actually warrants concern.

Part 5: How Exposures Reach You: We are neither completely porous nor completely protected. How exposures actually get into your body, or how your body blocks them out.

Part 6: What Your Body Does With Exposures: Once an exposure does make it into your body, what your organs do to protect you, where they fall short, and what bioaccumulation means.

Part 7: Choosing Dismissal, Overcaution, or Balance in Uncertainty: There’s a lot we don’t know about environmental toxins. The crux of the wellness-versus-conventional-medicine debate, and how to make decisions in the middle of genuine uncertainty.

Part 8: Spotting Healthy Brands vs. Healthwashing: How to tell the difference between a brand doing the work and one using "non-toxic" as misleading marketing.

Part 9: Making Sense of Conflicting Non-Toxic Advice: How to evaluate sources, spot fear-based content, and hold multiple valid perspectives at once.

Part 10: The Big Picture: Where home exposures actually fit in your overall health, and why context matters as much as information.

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