In 2023 I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. If you have lived with RA, or watched someone you love live with it, you will know what the next two years looked like. The mornings were the hardest — stiff, swollen joints that took hours to loosen. My left hand became so painful and inflamed that I was eventually told I would most likely need surgery on it.
The crossroads
My doctors recommended the standard path for RA: disease-modifying drugs such as methotrexate, and biologic medicines such as adalimumab (Humira). I want to be clear — these medicines are effective and they help enormous numbers of people. But I was young, I was frightened by the idea of being on powerful immune-suppressing medication for the rest of my life, and I wanted to understand why my body was attacking itself in the first place before I committed to that road.
So I made a decision — for myself, and with medical guidance and monitoring — to first explore a functional-medicine approach and see how far it could take me.
What I actually did
It was not a single “miracle”. It was a system, followed patiently over many months:
- Root-cause investigation — proper testing to understand the drivers of my inflammation.
- Deep lifestyle change — how I ate, slept, moved and managed stress, drawing on ayurvedic principles that treat the whole person.
- On prescription and under supervision — hormone optimisation (including testosterone) and peptide therapy aimed at calming inflammation and supporting tissue repair.
Slowly, the picture changed. The swelling settled. My hand recovered function. The surgery I had been told I would need never happened, and in time my disease reached remission.
I need to say this carefully: that was my journey, not a guarantee for anyone else. But it changed my life — and it changed what I believed medicine could be.
Why I founded SwissMedic
That experience is the entire reason SwissMedic exists. I had felt, first-hand, what it means to be treated as a whole person rather than a set of symptoms — and I wanted to share that Swiss functional-medicine approach — the one I had known back home in Geneva — more widely. So we brought the franchise to South Africa, to help people here revive and regenerate the way I was able to.
Why South Africa — and why regulation matters
One of the reasons South Africa is the right home for this work is our regulatory environment. South Africa is among the countries that formally regulate compounding pharmacies, under the oversight of SAHPRA (the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority). For us that is not red tape — it is a promise to our patients.
Our peptides are produced in licensed, SAHPRA-regulated compounding pharmacies, using ingredients that are regulated, assayed and tested at each stage of the production process. When you receive a product from SwissMedic, that chain of oversight is the reason you can trust what is in the vial.
An invitation
If you are standing at a crossroads of your own, I understand exactly how that feels. I am not here to tell you what to choose — only to offer a considered, whole-person path, alongside the medical care you already have. That is what we do at SwissMedic, every day.
— John Cooney, Founder, SwissMedic • Geneva, Switzerland. Read more about our team.