THE COMPANION BOOK TO THE FILM
BEYOND MEDICINE
The Man Who Invented His Way Back to Life, and How You Can Too
I walked down off Ben Nevis with a broken back and had a pint in the pub. (I didn’t find out it was broken for the best part of two years.) Within a couple of years I was stuck in one small bedroom at my parents’ house, staring at a white ceiling, and that’s where I spent most of the next seven years.
The book is the whole story of how I got out of that room, and of what I’ve worked out since about where the energy in a body comes from. I wrote it for anyone who’s tired in a way that sleep and blood tests haven’t explained.
Hardcover $29.99 · Paperback $19.99 · Ebook $9.99 · Ships early December
Free US shipping · 30-day money-back guarantee
WHO IT'S FOR
You can go way below tired
You know what ordinary tired feels like. You get a bit short with everyone and you sort of trudge around all day. Well, that’s frigging nothing. You can go way below that, way below.
You get to a place where you can hardly think at all. A little thought starts to form, and you think it was probably a good one, and you’re trying desperately to hold on to it, and then it’s gone. That was me for years, and it wasn’t a great place to be.
Maybe yours isn’t that bad. But I’d guess you know the kind of tired that’s already there when you wake up, whether you slept six hours or ten. Coffee gets you through the morning and something sweet gets you through the afternoon, and by the evening you’re exhausted and somehow wide awake at the same time. You’ve had the blood tests, probably more than once. And somewhere in the kitchen there’s a shelf of bottles, the magnesium and the B12 and the green powder you stopped taking in the spring.
I did all of that too, for years, the conventional stuff and the alternative stuff. After about five years I noticed what it all had in common. Every approach assumed my biochemistry was wrong. So, lying in that room, I asked a different question. Where does the energy in a body come from, and how does it work when everything’s working properly?
THE EQUATION
It’s taken me the best part of twenty-five years to boil it down to one line. I picture it as a car, where information is the map, voltage is the fuel and resistance is the handbrake. With a full tank and no idea where you’re going, you’ll just burn it all driving around in circles. A perfect map and an empty tank won’t get you out of the driveway. And you can have both and still crawl along, because the handbrake’s on.
Nearly everything I tried in that bedroom was more fuel.
INFORMATION the map
The instructions every cell in you needs, getting through clearly and on time.
VOLTAGE the fuel
The charge your cells hold, and the reserve you’ve got to spend.
RESISTANCE the handbrake
Anything that gets in the way of your energy. Later in the book I call it the leaks, because that’s how it feels from the inside.
WHAT YOU TAKE AWAY
Most of it needs a notebook
Alongside the story, the book gives you a handful of things to do. You can start most of them the evening you read the chapter, and none of them asks you to buy anything.
Chapter 1
The energy ledger
Seven days and two columns, R for rest and P for pressure. At the end of the week you can see whether you’ve been living on built energy or borrowed.
Chapter 9
The mirror check
Five minutes once a week, on the same day and in the same light. Your tongue, your face and your voice, which happen to be the three things the scan in the GEM app looks at.
Chapter 12
Your recovery time
Give every day a score out of ten for two weeks and count how long a big day really takes to get over. After that, the easy day goes on the calendar first.
Chapter 16
The morning notebook
Gratitude, Intention, Surrender, Trust. Ten or fifteen minutes, and you’re allowed to start with the cup of tea. I do it every morning.
What to Do Next
Your first 90 days
A thirty-second scan in the free GEM app, one practice at a time starting with your lowest score, and somewhere between day sixty and day ninety, your first scan laid next to your latest.
“Medicine saves lives every day. It just stops a bit too early for people like us.”
THE CONTENTS
What’s inside
Seventeen chapters in five parts, then an epilogue and a section on what to do next. There’s a line on each below, so you can see where it goes. You can read it front to back, or do the scan in the free GEM app first and let your lowest score tell you which part to lean on.
Foreword
by Professor Hemal Patel, UC San Diego
“If you don’t have energy, you’re dead. I mean that literally.” A cardiac researcher on the one thing medicine doesn’t routinely measure, and what happened when the man who kept calling him sent over some water.
A Note Before You Start
Who I am, what I sell, which people in these pages are connected to the company, and how every note is labeled. It sits at the front so nobody finds out on page 150.
PART ONE
The Room
How a fit 21-year-old ended up in a bedroom ten feet by seven for most of seven years.
Chapter 1: Way Below Tired
Seventy-five feet up the ice on Ben Nevis, on about four hours’ sleep in two days, the ice shatters like glass and I fall the whole way. Then built energy versus borrowed energy, and a one-week ledger that shows which one you’re living on.
Chapter 2: Three Hits
A virus I picked up halfway up a mountain above Chamonix. The fall. And a sort of boyfriend who’d said he wasn’t coming, turning up at my 21st and introducing himself to my parents in front of a hundred people. All of it in about five months.
Chapter 3: In Solitary They Feed You
A paragliding crash, and a doctor who says, “You haven’t actually broken anything today. But by the way, you’ve got two fractures in your spine.” Then a fasting clinic in Johannesburg, a driver with a machine gun, and the line this chapter is named after.
Chapter 4: A Different Question
For five years everyone asked which chemicals were out of balance in me. I started asking why my body didn’t have the energy to put them right itself. And what a 1910 report and 94 million Rockefeller dollars have to do with your last checkup.
PART TWO
The Map
A fax, the man at the other end of it, and the instructions every cell in you is running on.
Chapter 5: The Fax
“I don’t know why I’m sending you this.” One sentence from a scientist in Australia, on my next-door neighbor’s fax machine. Then a pink jumper and a white convertible at LAX, and a bottle of water that had me sweating for two or three hours.
Chapter 6: Which Book From the Library
Every cell in you carries the same DNA, the whole library. So who tells a liver cell which book to take out, and a brain cell a different one? A worm that grows two heads with not one gene changed, and where I part company with the textbooks.
Chapter 7: Water Is the Paper
Six machines before one worked, and a member of staff pushing bottles through with a broom. Then a heart researcher who thought the whole idea sounded crazy leaves our water on his shelf for months, and finally tests it blind, on cells. A cell has no beliefs.
Chapter 8: Relentless
Eight people came to our first meeting, two of them my mum and my aunt. Years later I asked Mum if she’d believed I’d build a proper business. “You were so feeble.” By year five, a thousand practitioners in twelve countries, none of it from advertising.
Chapter 9: Clear Signal
For years the only advice that did anything for me was a timetable, and Mum held me to it. Why so much hangs off the time you get up, and a five-minute mirror check once a week: your tongue, your face and your voice.
“I read it and understood about ten percent of it. The rest was complete and utter double Dutch to me, but I could tell he was a genius, and for the first time in five years I felt hope.”
PART THREE
The Charge
Where the charge in your cells comes from, and how to build more of it.
Chapter 10: The Injury That Wouldn’t Heal
Every wound is an electrical event. That part is some of the most solid science in the book, and hardly anyone has heard of it. Then why I think an old injury can go on drawing on your charge for years, and a jiu-jitsu world champion who lost four world finals in a row.
Chapter 11: Square One
2011. A second company, a film and a move to America, and the stress of all three at once puts me right back where I started. Peter’s last years, news that reached me halfway across the Pacific, and the day a professor took my favorite metaphor apart on camera.
Chapter 12: Charge the Battery
Most people keep tools and brooms in the garage. Mine holds things I’d never recommend you try at home. Everything in this chapter you can do at home, from my own day, waking to bed, to a two-week test that finds your recovery time.
PART FOUR
The Leak
The energy you lose without noticing, and how I finally learned to see mine.
Chapter 13: I Thought I Was Resting
In that bedroom I lay still most of the day and still burned through everything I had. Why the leak you can’t see is often the biggest, why a grudge costs energy, and the conference where I froze, threw down my notes and walked out.
Chapter 14: What the Hell Happened?
A new wearable on my wrist before anyone else’s, a twenty-person trial in Park City, and an airplane mechanic whose house burned down the day after Christmas. She asks the question most of us ask at the end of a long day, and then she answers it.
Chapter 15: No Energy on It
Twenty-seven years after the party, I go home with a film crew and a prototype on my wrist to talk the whole thing through with Mum. We still don’t agree on what the fancy dress was.
Chapter 16: Let It Move
Gratitude, Intention, Surrender, Trust. The morning practice that came to me on a hike in Utah, ten or fifteen minutes with a notebook, why you can start with the cup of tea, and how to put a worry down for the night.
“I never once thought of it as a leak. I thought I was resting.”
PART FIVE
Beyond Medicine
Back to the mountain, and where all of this is heading.
Chapter 17: The Next Mountain
The director asks if I can go back and reclaim Ben Nevis. A changed flight, a walk up a hillside in Glencoe, and the mountain I climbed instead of the one I fell off.
Epilogue
The Rest of Us Catching Up
A patient asks a neurologist, “If you guys are so good, how come no one else is doing what you’re doing?” His answer, why I think he’s too gloomy about the timing, and the last line of the film.
What to Do Next
The scan, your first ninety days, and every address in one place, kept at the back so none of it gets in the way of the story.
“There was a time I thought I’d need full-time care for the rest of my life. I got out of that room in the end, though not in one go.”
That’s the book. It ships in early December.
Hardcover $29.99 · Paperback $19.99 · Ebook $9.99 · Free US shipping
THE FOREWORD
“So the one thing that separates the living from the dead is the one thing we don’t routinely measure.”
Hemal runs a membrane and mitochondria lab. When we met in 2021 he thought the idea “sounded batshit crazy,” and he says so in the foreword. He tested it anyway.
HOW THE BOOK HANDLES EVIDENCE
Where the line is
Everything up to a point in this book, you can look up. After that it’s what I think, and I tell you exactly where that line is.
There are about 250 notes at the back, and every one carries a label. Published means peer-reviewed research. Ours is our company’s own data and results that haven’t been published yet. Mine is what I believe or saw for myself, and Other covers things like a maker’s own material or a press report.
I founded Energy 4 Life and I run it, and the book talks about what we make. I say so before chapter one.
This is a book about energy and wellness, so nothing in it is a diagnosis, and nothing in it should be read as one. Keep your doctor, and keep taking anything you’ve been prescribed, while you go further.
THE PEOPLE WHO KNOW HIM
“He is very determined. Whatever he’s going to do, he’ll do it somehow.”
“Harry has been innovating from day one. He was so far ahead of his time and it’s really such a joy to see the rest of us catching up.”
“There’s a difference between a scientist and a scientist whose life depends on his own research. And so that is where Harry comes from.”
GARNETT MORRISfriend “He’s this eclectic individual that’s just got lots of ideas and lots of questions.”
PROFESSOR HEMAL PATELUC San Diego “And then one day the old industries look over and go, oh, my God, they’re bigger than we were. And that’s what Harry’s working on.”
DAVE ASPREY “He walks the walk and he does that first.”
DR TOM MOORCROFT “Harry doesn’t lie. Harry doesn’t make stuff up. Harry doesn’t make elaborate stories about stuff.”
GARNETT MORRIS “He’s a hero. He’s a person who goes against all odds and delivering his message. And he is unstoppable.”
DR ZULIA FROSThas known Harry since he was 25
Some of the people quoted work with Energy 4 Life or use its tools. Who’s who is listed at the back of the book.
PRE-ORDER NOW
Pre-order Beyond Medicine
All three editions have the whole book, Hemal’s foreword and the labeled notes. The print editions are 6 by 9 inches, about 184 pages, and ship in early December.
HARDCOVER
Ships early December
The one to keep on the shelf, or give.
$29.99
Pre-order the hardcoverPAPERBACK
Ships early December
Same book, lighter in a bag, and ten dollars less.
$19.99
Pre-order the paperbackEBOOK
Emailed on publication day
For your e-reader, tablet or phone.
$9.99
Pre-order the ebook
Free US shipping · 30-day money-back guarantee
Standard shipping is free in the US. Tracked ($9.99) and express ($24.99) are options at checkout, and Canada is $9.99 flat. Checkout is on the Energy 4 Life store, and your order confirmation comes by email straight away. The hardcover has the cover printed on the boards, with no dust jacket.
FROM HARRY
Why I wrote it
I was ill for about seven years, and I spent most of them in one room. Every three months my parents drove me two and a half hours each way to London to see the leading specialist in England, for half an hour and a prescription. I felt incredibly guilty about those drives, with nothing changing, and somewhere on one of them I thought, there has to be a way to find out what’s going on in a body without a five-hour round trip.
That idea took me the best part of twenty-five years and an awful lot of help, most of all from Peter Fraser, the scientist who sent me the fax. The film had about an hour. In the book I finally had room for the lot, the science with its sources and the everyday things I still do myself.
I know what it’s like to spend every penny you can get hold of on trying to get better. I’d like the next person lying in a bedroom like mine to have a cheaper place to start than I did.
Harry
Harry Massey is the founder of Energy 4 Life, which makes the GEM app, the GEM wearable, Infoceuticals and the miHealth. He is the executive producer and writer of the documentary Beyond Medicine, directed by Mitchell Stuart, and co-wrote Decoding the Human Body-Field with Peter Fraser (2008). He lives in Park City, Utah, where he skis and scrambles up mountains.
FAQ
When does it ship?
Printed copies ship in early December 2026. The ebook is emailed to you on publication day.
What if I don’t like it?
Then you get your money back. Everything in the Energy 4 Life store, the book included, comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
How much is shipping?
Standard shipping is free in the US. Tracked shipping is $9.99 and express is $24.99, and you choose at checkout. Printed copies also ship to Canada, for $9.99 flat.
How does the ebook arrive?
On publication day BookFunnel emails you a download link and walks you through getting the book onto your e-reader, tablet or phone.
Is this medical advice?
No. It’s a book about energy and wellness, and nothing in it is a diagnosis. Keep your doctor, and keep taking anything you’ve been prescribed. Please don’t stop a prescription because of something you read in it.
Do I need to see the film first?
No. The book stands on its own. If you’ve seen the film you’ll have met a lot of the people already, and the book gives them more room, often in their own words. The film is free to watch from November 5.
How is it different from the film?
The film gives you the story in about an hour. The book has the years the film had to skip, the science behind each part of the equation with its sources in the Notes, and practices you can use yourself.
Do I have to buy anything else to use the book?
No. The energy ledger, the mirror check, the recovery test and the morning notebook need nothing more than a pen and paper. The book does point to the scan in the free GEM app and to what Energy 4 Life makes, and I say plainly at the start that I sell them.
Who am I buying from?
Energy 4 Life, the company I founded. Checkout is on our store at shop.e4l.com, and your order confirmation comes by email straight away.
“So read this book the way a scientist would. Keep the question open, and then go and find the answer.”
Hardcover $29.99 · Paperback $19.99 · Ebook $9.99 · Ships early December
Free US shipping · 30-day money-back guarantee