Peter Bryce

Peter Bryce is a pen name used for a set of books about living in a body and a mind: steadying anxiety, becoming a father, and understanding the numbers a doctor reads off a lab report. The name is a pen name and it is stated as one everywhere it appears — including on theballastprinciple.com, the companion site to the first book.

The books are not written from clinical authority, because there is none to claim. They are written from a different premise: that most people are handed numbers without being told what produced them, and that this is fixable. So every formula on this site is named, every source is linked, every reference range is attributed to the body that defined it, and every check is dated. When the evidence is thin or the formulas disagree, the page says so rather than picking a winner quietly.

That is also why you will not find advice essays here. The calculators do arithmetic and cite their sources; what any of it means for you is a conversation with your clinician, who can see the rest of your chart. The methodology page lists every formula and where it came from, and the changelog records every time a reference value was re-checked.

As the site grows, the highest-stakes pages — the A1C and pregnancy tools — are the ones lined up for review by a licensed clinician. When that review happens, their name and credential appear on the page. Until then, those slots are empty rather than filled with something reassuring and false.