About Staqc

My health tracking journey started when I began having joint pain at 20. I was incredibly frustrated and confused. I was wondering if I had arthritis or another serious illness. The uncertainty was really difficult to deal with. So I started tracking my health in a notebook, but it was a pain to keep track of everything.

After several weeks of tracking everything I did, like my workouts and what I ate, I discovered that every time I ate dairy, I had joint pain the next day.

Around this time I was also getting serious about my fitness and learned about creatine. But I read dozens of stories across Reddit and forums about how creatine caused hair loss. At the same time, tons of people were commenting that the "anecdoters" were lying and creatine absolutely doesn't cause hair loss. The commenters were saying that anyone claiming hair loss from creatine were "actually already losing your hair, you just noticed it when you started taking creatine." But as a biomedical engineering student, I dug into the research and found a study that showed creatine raises DHT levels and that DHT sensitivity is a major factor in hair loss. However, you'd have so-called "experts" with PhDs saying that even though DHT is culpable for hair loss and one study showed an increase in DHT from creatine, that one study was flawed and never replicated. The frustrating part is, in reality, no other studies have tried to replicate it, because supplement studies are often funded by supplement companies. They're incentivized not to try and replicate a study that might show creatine could raise DHT and cause hair loss. I decided to try it out and trust the "experts" that it didn't cause hair loss. Unfortunately, within weeks of taking creatine, I started to notice my hair falling out. I lost faith in the "experts", and started trusting people's stories. If creatine didn't cause my hair loss (see proof ⬆️), the frustration of reading all the contradictory information surely made me pull it out.

With my education in biomedical engineering and experimentation into supplements, my friends constantly came to me asking how to solve health issues they were having or asking for recommendations on supplements, and the pros and cons of each. I kept sharing the same advice over and over again. The same thing happened with people asking questions on the internet, such as on Reddit or Twitter, and I was always typing out the same explanations repeatedly. I realized this problem was widespread, and the current resources weren't cutting it.

Supplement and health advice is so fragmented, it's spread across Reddit, Twitter/X, Instagram and TikTok, YouTube, blogs, various forums, podcasts, and it's incredibly hard to put it all together and figure out the truth. Having a community focused on this topic in one place, with easy navigation to the correct or related topics, is crucial and would be genuinely helpful. Also, the community allows you to find what works for other people and see everything they've tried that did or did not work for them, especially for users similar to you. That collective wisdom is invaluable.

I previously worked in technical services at Epic Medical Records and was a premed student at Clemson University. As a premed and biomedical engineering student, I learned several things about medicine and patients. The medical system is often stuck in old ways; doctors frequently don't have deep knowledge about nutrition or supplementation. Their focus is on solving an issue once you have it, instead of preventing it. And then the biggest issue when you do have a treatment plan is that people consistently do not following their treatment plans. I decided medicine was not for me because I was not interested in the traditional medical system and their lack of preventative medicine and nutrition education.

With a social platform like Staqc, you have a community of people who will be there to support you and hold you accountable, which can be powerful motivators to stick with your plans. The medical system also only has access to the information they test you for, and they don't have a full history or journal of your everyday health. With Staqc, you can keep track of it all yourself and more easily share it with your providers because everything is logged. You don't have to try and remember what you did or how you felt, you just log it, and it's there to see and show. My bioengineering background taught me to think systematically about complex biological systems and data, which is essential for what we're building.

The grand vision is that everybody knows exactly what diets, supplements, and fitness routines are good and bad for their specific biology and body. This knowledge will come from a combination of their own tracking within Staqc, the tracking that users similar to them have done, and also by identifying supplements/diets that consistently seem to have positive or negative effects on nearly everyone who uses them. It's about personalizing health on a massive, data-driven scale.

I hope you join me in building this community and making it a reality.