I wasn't in time to save my old friend Tiernan
Biomechanical collapse got him in October 2021... right before I think I could have saved him.
Today i’m going to share a little bit of my past.
Because this journey the past 10 years has been much more than just some type of science experiment.
It was personal. It massively impacted my life and I saw how it impacted the lives of folks I cared about around me.
This story today is for you Tiernan…. I hope you’re resting peacefully up there with our app ‘Diarize’ :)
Back in around 2012 I had a friend Tiernan
During my time in Kiev from 2010 to early 2014, I befriended a British expat named Tiernan.
He was one of those genuinely good guys you meet along the way. Good natured. And loved to go out.
He was a mainstay at one of the favorite expat bars in Kiev named Shooters where this photo above was taken.
We got to know each other and he trusted me enough in 2012 to invest in an app that i tried to develop at the time called Diarize. It was kind of a mix between Instagram, which was just shooting up at the time, and a diary.
The app unfortunately never made it.
But our friendship outlasted the business venture and we’d continue to do drinks with other mutual friends on a fairly regular basis.
Tiernan was your classic story of structural collapse
Looking back, Tiernan's story was tragically typical of what I now understand about biomechanical collapse.
He struggled with obesity, but it wasn't just about weight - his neck was completely gone, a telltale sign I now recognize all too well.
Despite years of trying different diets and health approaches, nothing seemed to help.
The structural issues underlying his condition meant that traditional weight loss methods were doomed to fail.
And so at some point he just basically gave up.
In 2018 I told him about this stuff
By 2018, I was deep into understanding these biomechanics and thought they could help Tiernan.
When a mutual friend, Steve, mentioned Tiernan's continuing health struggles, I reached out via Facebook.
I shared my journey since 2014, when a dentist's drilling had sent me into my own health crisis.
I tried to explain what I'd learned, but I could sense his skepticism. And I knew that I hadn’t yet fully figured it out yet (that wouldn’t happen till a few years later).
He was intrigued. Particularly because he’d had numerous teeth extracted and so what I was saying resonated with him a bit (as you see above).
But he had this sort of resigned tone… and as you can see above says “Too late for me”.
I then tried to explain to him all the logic…but the fact that i’d fallen back from where I was in 2015 and had not fully figured it out left him unconvinced.
His last words to me were a polite but noncommittal "Ok, I will look. Thanks."
And I doubt he ever did look much further than that.
He died in October 2021
Learning of Tiernan's death from a mutual friend a little bit after his death in October 2021 hit in a weird, sad way.
The timing was particularly cruel - I had just finally figured out the correct path with these biomechanics.
I’d been doing it myself for some months already and was remembering how the whole ‘curve of spee’ bit works as I was checking my progress on a tracking splint regularly.
I was confident enough that i’d put flat composite on my son, Kevin’s, teeth just some weeks before.
If I'd remembered this stuff just a year earlier, maybe I could have helped Tiernan. Maybe he'd still be here. It's the kind of "what if" that stays with you.
Closing thoughts
Tiernan's story represents countless others - good people who die too young because they can't find a way out of their health maze.
They're told it's genetics, or diet, or just bad luck.
They try everything conventional medicine suggests, but nothing works because they're addressing symptoms rather than the root cause.
I share this story not just as a tribute to Tiernan, but as a motivation. Every time I feel frustrated with trying to spread the understanding of these biomechanics, I think of him and others like him.
I think about how many people are out there right now, trapped in the same cycle he was, believing there's no way out.
I was too late to help my friend, but I hope that by sharing what I've learned, others might have a different ending to their story.
One day, I hope we'll live in a world where stories like Tiernan's become increasingly rare because we’ve fully digested how these biomechanics work.
Thank you for sharing this. Sharing a painful story like this had to be hard and I know how helpless you must have felt. Thank you for all of your work and effort in your research; you honor your friend in all of this.
que Dieu ait son âme