Sarah Phillips
Sarah Phillips focuses on service-led health and wellbeing features that turn expert insight into practical changes readers can make, from joint care and pelvic floor health to mental health and workplace habits. She is a freelance journalist, editor and writer who works with the Guardian's Saturday newspaper and website on special supplements about neurodiversity, anxiety and the brain, and contributes health coverage for the masthead. Her pieces combine clear explanations with structured tips and real people's stories, giving her coverage a grounded, everyday tone.
Protecting joints and making exercise workable
Phillips covers joint health through practical, expert-led guides that show how small, realistic amounts of movement can make a difference to mobility and pain. In her piece on exercise and joints, she frames “smaller doses of exercise” as a kind of “miracle cure”, using a format built around 14 expert tips to help readers protect their joints in everyday life. The focus is on what people can actually do: adjusting how they move, choosing exercises that fit into busy routines, and understanding how incremental changes support long-term joint health.
Her approach in this area is direct and instructional, but rooted in specialist knowledge rather than opinion. By organising advice into clear, numbered tips and highlighting specific actions, she positions joint care as something achievable rather than daunting, which fits with her broader pattern of turning health guidance into step-by-step service journalism.
Pelvic floor health and body awareness
Phillips brings the same service mindset to pelvic floor health, writing an introductory piece that explains what the pelvic floor is, why it matters, and how people can look after it. The article is described as “a fabulous intro to pelvic floor health” and is noted for including information about men’s pelvic health and dysfunction, showing that she treats the subject as relevant across genders rather than as a niche concern. She uses accessible language to demystify an intimate and often overlooked part of the body, and frames pelvic health as part of everyday wellbeing rather than a specialist clinical topic.
In this strand of her work, Phillips emphasises body awareness and prevention. She explains common problems and highlights practical steps people can take to strengthen or protect the pelvic floor, again using clear guidance rather than abstract discussion. The tone is reassuring and normalising, which makes it easier for readers to engage with a subject that many might find embarrassing or unfamiliar.
Neurodiversity, anxiety and the brain
Alongside her health features, Phillips edits special supplements on neurodiversity, anxiety and the brain for the Guardian’s Saturday newspaper and website. Working on these packages gives her coverage a strong focus on mental health and how people experience their minds in daily life, from anxiety and stress to different ways of processing the world. This role means she is used to shaping material that spans science, lived experience and social context, and to presenting complex ideas about the brain in clear, readable formats.
Her involvement with these supplements shows an interest in the intersection of health and identity: how neurodivergent people navigate work and relationships, how anxiety affects routine choices, and how readers can better understand their own mental states. It adds a reflective, psychological dimension to her health reporting, and complements her more explicitly practical pieces on joints and pelvic floor health.
Couples who met through books and everyday wellbeing
Phillips also writes human-focused features that explore how relationships and habits shape wellbeing. In one piece she interviews couples who met through books, capturing how shared reading and literary spaces brought people together and changed their lives. The article is built around direct interviews, giving space to personal stories and showing how cultural interests can become the foundation for long-term relationships. This strand of her work adds an emotional and social layer to her health beat, connecting wellbeing to connection and community.
She extends this everyday lens to the workplace, reporting on administrators who share their productivity tips and efficiency hacks for staying afloat amid heavy workloads and digital overload. By collecting and organising these strategies, she treats productivity as part of health and self-preservation rather than just performance, highlighting the practical ways people protect their time and mental energy. Across these pieces, Phillips draws on real voices and specific routines to show how small choices in reading, relationships and work can have large effects on how people feel.
4 more health journalists.
Abida Tasnim
Abida Tasnim is a health writer for The Daily Star who focuses on clear, practical guidance that helps readers recognise risks early and act before everyday illnesses turn into wider public health problems. She reports on infectious disease prevention, using measles coverage to show how outbreaks start with individual decisions and behaviours, not just hospital statistics. Her work explains what happens during an outbreak and then anchors the story in simple steps people can take, such as avoiding crowded places when symptoms appear, practising good hygiene, and seeking medical advice early. She writes direct, action‑oriented health explainers that turn clinical questions about contagion and disease burden into everyday choices. Across her beat, she stresses early recognition, timely care, and prevention as the foundations of healthier communities.
Adrián Carballo Casla
Adrián Carballo Casla stands out for turning complex cohort data on ageing into clear, food‑level advice on what older adults should eat to protect brain health and slow chronic disease. He is a researcher in nutritional epidemiology focused on ageing and chronic disease prevention and a postdoctoral researcher in geriatric epidemiology at Karolinska Institutet, writing health explainers for The Conversation. He reports on how diet quality, especially Mediterranean and Mind‑style patterns, shapes dementia risk, grey matter loss and neurocognitive ageing, and how healthy versus pro‑inflammatory diets alter multimorbidity trajectories. His articles translate findings on flavonoids, polyphenols, folate, omega‑3 fats and dietary nitrates into specific food choices and small, practical changes. Much of his coverage is anchored in his own studies on multimorbidity, high‑risk older adults and tailored dietary recommendations, often syndicated to other outlets.
Ahmed Elbediwy
Ahmed Elbediwy brings a lab-based understanding of cancer biology and clinical biochemistry to public-facing health reporting, linking drug mechanisms and molecular pathways to everyday choices about medicines and products. He writes for The Conversation on weight-loss injections, cancer overdiagnosis and anti-ageing supplements, focusing on obesity medicine, cancer signalling, screening trade-offs, skincare and supplement science. His pieces on GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro explain why some people do not respond, how gut hormones and appetite signals work, and where psychological support and nutrition fit alongside prescriptions. He co-authors explainers on cancer risk and overdiagnosis and on whether supplements can reverse ageing, separating established knowledge from emerging research. An award-winning senior lecturer at Kingston University, he favours clear, structured explainers, careful definition of key terms and evidence-based appraisal over hype.
Amanda Sheppeard
Amanda Sheppeard is a managing editor and health journalist known for long, detailed explainers that connect complex clinical research, disability policy and political narratives with the daily realities of doctors and patients. She works at The Medical Republic across editorial leadership and commercial content while reporting widely on medicine for its specialist titles. Her real beat spans autism, disability policy, autoimmune disease, infectious threats and system pressures in primary care and hospitals. She covers subjects such as autism diagnosis and the NDIS, rheumatology’s clinical shifts, weight-loss agents in rheumatoid arthritis, infection control, antimicrobial resistance and new modalities like CAR T-cell therapy and microneedles. She reports by doing the synthesis inside the story, linking trial design, molecular targets, funding rules and policy changes to concrete decisions and workflows in clinics and hospitals.