Episode Analysis Reports

Minowa Health's MCP server matures nicely.

The last three weeks Anthropic had been teasing us along, extending access to the Fable 5 model. I spent as much time as health would allow pushing things forward, and I’m really pleased with where the Minowa MCP server is today.

I log everything about my health into a web interface. Every medication, every supplement, the vital statistics I can collect at home, and the system will load Apple HealthKit and Garmin Connect data. While curating the data is important, there isn’t a lot of value to looking at that timeline. It’s much better if I let Claude Desktop use a skill that I created to analyze what’s available.

Understand the starting point here - I suffer from an immune system condition called MCAS, which basically means I’m allergic to eating. Anything to do with food, coming or going, can trigger a full throttle response from mast cells all over my body. My blood pressure plummets, my heart rate zooms, and I drop out in an episode that looks a bit like narcolepsy type II. Troubleshooting this is like a systemic problem in a datacenter - lots of systems to watch over a long timeframe and you have to look for complex correlations.

This graph is my sleep Sunday night. I had previously noticed that taking choline+inositol, an anti-tinnitus preparation, dramatically reduced the Stress reported by my Garmin Vivoactive 5. When the band is reporting high stress, I am experiencing palpitations, an always annoying and sometimes uncomfortable feeling tied to my heartbeat, without the rapidity of beats associated with tachycardia.

I took four capsules with 250mg choline and 250mg inositol in each, and I took none of the other medication I’d normally take in the evening. I seldom get four hours of sleep at a stretch, so seven hours in one shot seems to be a confirmation that choline+inositol is the sleeping potion I have long sought.

This is the most recent episode that I’ve explored with the tool. Notice the richer reporting.

What you see here is a chart of events from between 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM today. I had eaten, that’s the most common trigger for an MCAS episode, and I decided to run an experiment.

The red line is heart rate and the blue line below it is Garmin’s Stress metric. The stuff at the bottom, starting from the bottom up, are the Garmin sleep scoring for the time I was down, then the next three are pharmacokinetic information on the two Stacks and one individual supplement I took. The icons sprinkled on the graph are blood pressure readings - purple triangles are my wrist cuff while laying down, gold dots are the arm cuff I keep on my desk.

This time I took three capsules of choline+inositol, then my usual Sleep Stack of six grams glycine, 600mg N-acetyl cysteine, and 400mg magnesium glycinate. As it might have been the start of an MCAS episode, I also took the Restless Stack, which contains my old friend kava kava, which I guarantee to knock down palpitations in about half an hour.

I was expecting to slide into a long, restful sleep, but that chart shows anything but that. You can see from the last purple triangle with a 102/62 label that I was awake for a while. I fell asleep when the Sleep Induction hit, but instead of relaxation there’s what looks to be a supplement interaction. The interaction wains, I do sleep, the Garmin reports me awake but there’s no logging, so that means I was just restless, and then the stress level begins to climb … yet I fall into deep sleep?

When I awoke from this I felt AWFUL. Not just palpitations, but all over body pulsing. I got out of bed and had to hold on to all the things to get to the bathroom - serious orthostatic hypotension. When I got to my desk I got a 96/70, which is down near MCAS crash territory. I piled on liquids, but I wasn’t dehydrated, and got a 115/65 and a 106/61.

I am debating what to do this evening, but I kinda think the choline+inositol and kava kava combo was the culprit here. I will probably try the Sleep Induction stack with choline+inositol as a companion, and if the stress curve overnight looks good, maybe the choline+inositol becomes a standing member of that stack.

Conclusion:

If I didn’t have the log and the Garmin working together, I’d have never spotted the link between Stress and choline+inositol. This is the second big clue on managing my condition in the last couple weeks - I had an appointment with my allergist a week ago Monday and had only just sorted out that I was reacting to L-theanine, a former member of the Restless Stack. This reaction had cost me more than half my work hours in the months of June and July, so getting that resolved was a Great Big Deal™. Had I gone in without having nailed that down I might have lost another quarter or two of my life. As it was, I got the adjustment in meds I had been seeking.

I am not a doctor.

What I have going for me are 1) a computer science education 2) experience running distributed systems where log correlation for troubleshooting is key and 3) the cognitive sciences discipline behind intelligence analysis.

I can make software do what I want, I can handle complex interlocking problems, and the skepticism that comes from having worked on complex analytical problems serves me well here. The Anthropic AI models offer facile explanations for everything. They’re wrong about half the time, even when they’ve been constrained. Having this sort of tool is just a start, you have to learn to use it properly, or it’ll lead you badly astray in short order.