Gabriel Radu, DO

Gabriel Radu, DO is a physiatrist — a physician specialising in physical medicine and rehabilitation — and the founder, author of record and medical reviewer of Magellan Longevity. Every evidence grade, product monograph, study write-up and article on this site is published under his name and reviewed by him against the sources cited on the page.

The identifiers below are public and independently checkable. They are printed here in full, with the government lookup tools, because a health site asking you to trust its grading should be the easiest thing on the internet to verify.

Physiatry — physical medicine and rehabilitation, usually abbreviated PM&R — is the medical specialty organised around function rather than around an organ. A cardiologist owns the heart; a physiatrist owns the question of whether you can still climb the stairs, grip a jar, walk to the shop, sleep through the night, and go back to work.

In practice that means a physiatrist spends the working day on musculoskeletal and neurological problems: back and neck pain, arthritis, tendon and nerve injuries, stroke and spinal-cord rehabilitation, deconditioning after illness, and chronic pain. The tools are diagnosis by history and physical examination, image interpretation, targeted injections and procedures, medication management, and — the part that matters most here — exercise prescription and functional retraining.

The specialty’s unit of measure is unusual in medicine. Physiatrists are trained to ask “compared with what, and measured how?” about outcomes that patients can feel: metres walked, degrees of range of motion, kilograms of grip, seconds to stand from a chair, a validated pain or disability score. That habit of demanding a functional endpoint rather than a surrogate one is exactly the habit this site applies to longevity claims.

Longevity marketing sells lifespan. What people actually want is healthspan — the years in which the body still works. Healthspan is measured in the currency physiatrists already use, and the endpoints that dominate the longevity literature are, almost without exception, rehabilitation endpoints.

Three examples from this site’s own catalogue make the overlap concrete:

• Grip strength. The hand grip dynamometer is graded Strong evidence here, because lower grip strength is consistently and independently associated with higher all-cause and cardiovascular mortality across large prospective cohorts and meta-analyses — in the 17-country PURE study it predicted death better than systolic blood pressure. A dynamometer is standard physiatry equipment. It is also one of the best-validated aging biomarkers there is. See the grip strength monograph.
• Falls and balance. The balance and strength trainer is graded Strong evidence because large Cochrane and WHO meta-analyses show balance-challenging exercise at a sufficient dose reduces the rate of falls in community-dwelling older adults by roughly 20–24%. Fall prevention is a core PM&R competency long before it is a longevity intervention.
• Muscle. Creatine monohydrate earns the same grade for gains in strength, power and lean mass alongside resistance training — a training adjunct, not a treatment. Sarcopenia is the mechanism by which many people lose their independence; see the skeletal muscle monograph and the long-form article on creatine and healthy aging.

There is a second, less comfortable reason. Pain medicine is a field that has been badly burned by interventions that looked mechanistically obvious and turned out not to work, or to harm. That history produces a specific professional reflex: assume the mechanism story is not enough, ask for the randomised trial, and read the primary endpoint before the press release. That reflex is the editorial method of this site. It is why the catalogue contains a grade called “Tested — did not work” and why null results are published rather than quietly dropped.

Being specific about authorship matters more than a flattering biography, so here is the actual division of labour:

• He assigns every evidence grade. 104 of the 130 products carry a curated compound-level grade and 26 carry a product-level grade written for that specific device or test. The rules are published in full on How we grade.
• He writes the caveat on every graded page. The caveat is the part that says what the evidence does not show — missed primary endpoints, industry funding, short follow-up, safety signals. It is written before the buy button, not after.
• He writes the long-form articles and the Tech Desk stories listed below, and reviews the 314 study write-ups and 155 compound monographs generated from the citation database against their cited sources.
• He does not choose products by commission. Grades are set before, and independently of, any affiliate relationship. The complete list of money relationships is published on the editorial policy page.

Pages built from the citation database are template-assembled — that is how 2,756 study records and 155 monographs can each carry their primary sources — but every claim on them traces to a cited study, effect statements are quoted from the source rather than paraphrased into something stronger, and the physician review is of the page as published. Where this site does not know something, it says so.

The rest of the corpus

Beyond the signed articles, the same review applies to the database-built pages: 314 plain-language study write-ups, 155 compound monographs such as creatine, omega-3 and NMN, and the 130 graded product pages across Nutraceuticals & Cellular Energizers and six other categories.

Start anywhere: the supplement guide, the research map, or the grading rubric.

Open the methodology page in the Magellan store →