I heard a story once from a spiritual teacher. He related how a beginner in the spiritual path, like many beginners, wanting to impress his new teacher, regaled him with how much he had previously read on mysticism, including having read the entire Mathnawi of Jalaludin Rumi, the mystical poets magnum opus, usually published in 5 or 6 volumes, it has 25,000 verses of poetry and can run to 1400 pages of text.

The teacher listened carefully to the student expounding on Rumi, and when he paused in his exposition, offhandedly asked him, “What’s the first word of the Mathnawi?”

The student was taken aback by the question and went silent. He sat there wracking his brains, but couldn’t think of what it was. Finally the teacher had to leave, so he got up and went out the door and down the steps and was just about to get into his car, when suddenly it hit him and the student leapt up and ran outside yelling, “It’s ‘listen’! It’s ‘listen’! The first word is ‘listen’!”

Rumi begins by teaching the most important point for a student of any traditional knowledge: to leave behind what you think you know, listen carefully, and by extension apply what you hear to yourself and your life. When this is done with sincerity one quickly realizes that what seems obvious, or well known, at first glance, reveals important information only after reflection.

The story also reveals a teaching technique often used by mystics of every persuasion: nudging the student to realize what needs to be done themselves, rather than saying it explicitly.

This reduces resistance which comes when advice is given to someone about something they hold dear, and often have convinced themselves is not a problem at all, i.e. their own bad habits. It also comes in handy when the student is completely unaware of what is standing in their way, and would resist even believing it exists until they realize it themselves by way of a series of indirect hints.

So in the spirit of the mystics, though with much less flair and nuance and ultimately falling back on directness rather than mystery, this is initially going to be a bit of a roundabout piece. I promise I’ll circle back to this idea after a detour and it will all make sense in the end.

So, when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, if you were constipated you often had a basket of magazines to browse while you sat on the toilet (there may be a bit of a chicken or egg problem with this constipation too, the more you read the more you have to read before your done as your gut begins to accommodate your desire to retreat for your alone time. Also sitting on the pot too long may cause hemorrhoids).

Nowadays of course everyone has their phones for their bathroom “throne” time.

But they also have their phones out every other spare moment of the day.

One of the little discussed or even known problems with this is the disruption of a normal part of brain function called the default mode network that switches on various brain regions when you have nothing else to do.

This network is activated when you aren’t consuming information, as it leads to introspection and reflection - so it’s crucial for learning from experience. It also helps in processing emotions and therefore is important for healthy interpersonal interactions (we’ll come back to this too).

Learning from experience is an abstract concept and easy to dismiss, but it’s actually at the very heart of a successful life, even if you believe in nothing but the material, but especially if you believe in a greater purpose and life after death.

A recent episode from my own life is a good illustration of this concept and links to the idea of synchronicity - where it seems that the universe itself is trying to tell you something in multiple different ways and even trying to facilitate your aims.

As background I’ve been taking a handful of natural supplements for nearly 2 years now. In the beginning I went through a deep detox phase with an extremely restrictive diet and many chronic issues disappeared - I wrote about the experience here:

Later I normalized the diet to a great degree and entered a maintenance phase that was more manageable and was doing well until a few months ago when I came down with a very mild viral infection that probably lasted no more than 2 days and was manifested but not much more than slight runny nose. But it also coincided with a deep emotional upheaval as unprocessed emotions around my mother’s death late last year came to the surface.

Afterwards I started sleeping more and when I wasn’t sleeping I seemed extremely productive, but in an obsessive way working on one project constantly while procrastinating on everything else I needed to do, which was my way of avoiding the emotion and life in general which felt more and more difficult to deal with.

Things just kept getting worse in a vicious spiral until someone told me to just force myself to go out once a day and be with other people because my kids needed to see their father doing something to get better.

The words came at the right moment, as by then I was ripe to hear them, so I decided to force myself to do this and it proved to be a turning point.

Although things did not get significantly better for a month or two there was a very gradual upswing which snowballed over time.

A friend also came to visit for a few weeks and I spent a lot of time with him and it helped a lot.

I gradually became much more active, felt much better, and eventually felt much more like myself.

Except for one thing that lingered, which was a need for a lot more sleep than normal. I was sleeping at least 9 hours at night, waking up slowly instead of jumping out of bed full of energy, and then getting tired again a few hours after waking up and needing a nap in the afternoon also.

For a while I just thought I had chronic fatigue from a new bout of long COVID or something and also figured if I needed the extra sleep I shouldn’t worry about it.

But around this time I also started hearing repeatedly about the importance of the default mode network, about the importance of having regular time for reflection, the importance of getting off the phone, so I purposely spent less and less time looking at my phone, less time scrolling through content, more time just thinking about things.

When I did look at my phone I started to see related content recommended to me e.g. on the importance of “being bored” - as usual youtube had intuited what was on my mind and served it up to me.

Then someone spoke to me about the importance of sleep and described how they made sure to get enough sleep and recommended getting 7 hours and not using an alarm clock in the morning, and if tired taking a catnap in the afternoon.

I didn’t think much of it, other than maybe something like “I already know that.” I understood the importance of getting enough sleep, I also slept without an alarm, waking up when I felt like it. I also took a catnap in the afternoon.

Then the same person told me much the same thing soon after, nearly in the same words, which was a bit strange as they aren’t prone to forgetfulness.

Then soon after they once more told me the exact same thing a third time.

This time I thought to myself there is obviously something important for me here, whether they know something I don’t or simply feel inspired to tell me in nearly identical terms the same thing thrice, so I paid closer attention and turned it over and over in my mind afterwards.

Over the next 24 hours I fixated on the 7 hours part, that night while sleeping I dreamt that I was calculating over and over again how many hours of sleep I get and kept coming up with 9 or so hours.

When I woke up I thought maybe the issue isn’t that I’m not sleeping enough or well enough, but that I’ve gotten used to sleeping too much. Maybe it’s just a habit at this point, maybe I don’t actually need those extra 2 hours anymore.

The next morning perhaps spurred by some subconscious alarm going off I did wake up after 7 hours and got out of bed and thought, hm, maybe I really was getting too much sleep. Maybe I just need to start getting out of bed after 7 hours. In fact, maybe I need to set an alarm.

But that afternoon I still felt wiped out, and that night it didn’t feel like the answer was to start setting the alarm. The next morning I was back to waking up after 9 hours.

I started thinking I really needed to work on improving sleep quality. I would sometimes wake up repeatedly in the last few hours of sleep. I started rubbing castor oil on my eyelids and forehead which helped with that.

At the same time I kept thinking about sleep, and noticed an interesting X post on the subject, which spurred me to write a small article on sleep published here on Substack.

While writing it I remembered the case of a patient who made a big impression on me.

He had struggled with severe insomnia for something like a decade, trying everything possible and impossible, including an expensive online sleep academy. Finally he realized the entire problem had been precipitated by a single supplement that had initially been very helpful for him.

So in the back of my mind I started wondering if maybe I should reconsider all my supplements, but I kept putting it off.

Then a close friend consulted me about his fathers struggles with fatigue and depression, and it was clear that it was due to a medication side effect - something recently started by a new cardiologist. He started tapering the medication and immediately felt revived.

A few days after that I suddenly woke up in the morning after 7 hours again instead of 9, though I hadn’t purposely changed anything.

I was confused when I looked at the time because I had been languishing in bed half asleep for what felt like a very long time, then gradually becoming more awake, but still delaying getting up, and felt for the life of me that I must have been in bed even longer than usual, definitely not 2 hours less.

And then I realized that just by happenstance for the last 2 nights I had forgotten to take any of my nighttime supplements.

I looked them up and sure enough I was taking a supplement at night that can produce longer sleep with more non-REM and may be associated with grogginess in the morning.

I was also taking many supplements in the morning which might cause drowsiness in the afternoon and many that could lower blood pressure and blood sugar, which might be contributory mechanisms as well.

Since I had become complacent about my supplement regimen, and didn’t really think my herbs and supplements could so profoundly affect me or start affecting me negatively in such a strong way when before they had not, making this connection depended on noticing and reflecting back on a string of loosely related occurrences in my life over the course of months.

If I had been more alert and reflective I would have made the connection much sooner.

On the other hand if I had been filling every waking moment with “content”, stuffing my brain and awareness with anything and everything my whims and fancies found interesting, I may not have been present enough or aware enough or reflective enough to make the connections at all. I would likely have been too distracted to realize what I needed to do next, and would have continued for however long stumbling around in the dark.

So, having empty moments for contemplation can certainly help you practically, but every mundane thing also has a deeper significance, to which we now turn, before circling back to the practical business of health.

“Know thyself” Socrates famously said and made the cornerstone of his philosophy - repeating a phrase inscribed at the Temple of Delphi hundreds of years earlier. What is less well known is that for him it was a means of knowing the Divine.

Pythagoras, born 100 years before Socrates expressed the entire proposition plainly: “Man, know thyself; then thou shalt know the universe and God," and centuries later the early Church Father, theologian and mystic, Clement of Alexandria, wrote that it "seems the greatest of all disciplines to know oneself; for when a man knows himself he knows God."

Later, eastern mystics condensed it further: “He who knows himself knows his Lord.”

Which begs the question, how exactly do you know yourself? And perhaps more important for many, what does that have to do with knowing the Divine?

Well, you don’t get to know yourself or God by just sitting in a room meditating on your navel.

What happens to you in life reveals to you who you are. Adjusting who you are can lead to realizing Divine attributes of perfection within yourself.

Sitting in a room by yourself, not coming across anything stressful or difficult, you might eventually imagine yourself quite evolved spiritually.

Then you venture out and someone cuts you off in traffic and you start hurling epithets and can’t stop perseverating about the encounter to the point you can barely get to sleep that night.

Life is a series of unveilings of yourself. A seeing of oneself reflected in the mirror of events and other people.

And it’s not just meant to be informative and left at that. It’s meant to spur you to change yourself. Discomfort and dis-ease are meant to spur you to improve yourself, to bring yourself into balance.

Aristotle described virtues as a midpoint between two extremes of vice, a concept mirrored in other traditions. Workaholic on one end, lazy bum on the other, and between the two extremes healthy diligence.

Healthy contemplation allows one to fine tune one’s own soul, to improve, to figure out what God and the universe are getting at with what passes in front of the screen of your awareness.

Which brings us back to the DMN.

The default mode network (DMN) is a network of brain regions as far removed as possible from the sensory cortex. They are activated when you have nothing to do.

They are involved in introspection, in modeling reality, in creating meaning, in digesting what happens to one - similarly to how sleep helps one digest the events of the day in a more peaceful, parasympathetic dominant state and can defuse them.

The DMN is more concrete than what you experience during sleep, which is more representative and abstract. So the DMN is more important for creating practical plans.

But there’s a healthy and unhealthy way to engage the DMN. A healthy and unhealthy way to turn things over in the mind. Thinking of what happened to you can be constructive or destructive.

When something bad happens you can either ask yourself “Why does this always happen to me?” in an abstract and unhelpful “woe is me” kind of way, or you can wonder concretely about what exactly happened, how you could go about things differently next time to avoid it happening, what about your habits or even the way you are in a deeper sense lead to this happening to you, and what you can do to change it.

Another aspect of the DMN is whether someone tends to get stuck on one thing overanalyzing and obsessing about it, or zips between too many different thoughts too fast, or between those extremes traverses various topics in a healthy, measured way.

To better understand the importance of a healthy DMN we turn to luck.

Research on self described very “lucky” people, suggests that what being lucky may simply boil down to four main principles, one of which involves turning bad luck into good by seeing what is perceived as bad in a good light, and reflecting on negative experiences and why they happened so they don’t happen again - i.e. using the DMN constructively (we will return to this and enumerate all 4 principles below ).

Being persistently lucky or experiencing synchronicities doesn’t necessarily point to the existence of Divine providence in life, but it can certainly feel as though it involves it.

Which brings us back to the beginning: spiritual guides who speak in koans or the like are really mimicking the way the Divine intelligence communicates with human beings - through the creation around us, through the sequence of events within and without. Through the people we come across.

Learning to “listen” carefully and figure out what the events in your life are getting at is an invaluable skill that can help you heal not only physically, but also emotionally and spiritually, and make any kind of outward life into a fantastic inner journey of progress and growth.

This is a source of meaning that is missing for most people today, meaning which our minds make by default, but which we can’t develop when we stuff our senses with a constant stream of inputs.

When you stuff a pipe it clogs, stuff your mouth and you get constipated. Stuff your brain and it stops working the way it should too.

So consider putting down the phone, consider pressing pause on the endless stream of entertainment disguised as informing, or learning, or relaxing (it’s not!).

A healer is important especially in the beginning, but eventually you can learn to listen to your body, and your mind, and interpret what happens around you in order to take part. in tweaking your own path and your own protocols.

It’s not that Reishi is bad for me, maybe Reishi was right for me then, and it’s wrong for me right now. Maybe it doesn’t mix well with whatever residual long COVID may still be there in my mitochondria after this recent reinfection.

None of us are the same moment to moment, let alone day to day or week to week.

Our lives are a constant journey even if we just seem to go in circles to and from work, or even if we don’t seem to move even an inch in space.

A health journey, a work journey, an interpersonal relationships journey, an emotional journey, an intellectual journey, a spiritual journey.

The point is that what we need for the next step of these journeys is always changing.

The diet, supplements, workouts and sleep schedules that worked last month or last year may not work any more.

As you come into balance you may become more sensitive to herbs and other natural interventions, they may start having much stronger effects on you, you might simply need to take lower doses or stop them entirely.

Think of a spider’s web, any tiny thing that falls into it will send ripples down the entire web, but if something really heavy falls into it and stretches it all taut the tiny bugs falling in will have less of a noticeable effect on it.

Similarly if your body has gotten used to powerful pharmaceuticals you may not notice much effect from ashwaghandha or reishi mushrooms, but once you become sensitized you may experience quite profound effects.

You always have to stay on your toes and pay attention to the details of your own life. The answers are there waiting for you.

Maybe we can learn more from the lucky ones as described in The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman who studied lucky and unlucky people for 8 years: the first principle is increase your chances of being lucky, the second principle is to learn to listen to yourself, you often know the answer, but ignore it, you often have good hunches, but don’t act on them. Listen to your heart.

The 3rd principle is to always expect the best to happen for you.

The 4th which we mentioned earlier: when it looks like bad fortune has struck, figure out how it’s actually good for you, and learn to turn what looks bad at first glance into something good.

Each of the 4 main principles has sub principles too:

1. Increase your chances:

   1. build and maintain a strong ‘network of luck’,

   2. have a relaxed attitude towards life and

   3. be open to new experiences in life.

2. Listen to intuition and gut feelings:

   1. take steps to boost intuition like meditation

3. Expect Good Fortune:

   1. expect good luck to continue in the future,

   2. attempt to achieve your goals, even if chances of success seem slim,

   3. persevere in the face of failure and

   4. expect interactions with others to be lucky and successful.

4. Turn bad luck into good:

   1. always see the bright side of any bad luck,

   2. be convinced bad fortune will eventually turn out for the best,

   3. don’t dwell on the bad, but:

   4. do reflect long enough to learn from it and take constructive steps to prevent the bad from happening again in the future.

As we’ve seen some of these principles are related to a healthy way of activating the default mode network, to developing a healthy and positive outlook and taking the time to ponder it, having “down time” (really “up time”) to think positive, and reflect and regroup and plan.

Some of these principles are also related to having a healthy nervous system that feels deeply safe and optimistic and trusting of other people.

As discussed in my last Substack article, people who were breastfed and cared for at home by their mother in the first 3 years of their lives are more likely to feel safe and that other people are likely to be helpful and friendly towards them.

They are more likely to feel unguarded during interactions and open to the connections and experiences and chance encounters that lead to synchronicity or good luck.

To some degree it seems that the difference between a lucky and unlucky life is just a matter of perspective, context and a particularly generous point of view, and that in Wiseman’s study a lot of luck was kind of circular, people who thought themselves more lucky became more lucky or thought they were, and that it was subject to confirmation bias.

But I do believe that while all of that is part of what’s going on, and like all research, but especially social sciences it is very difficult to measure anything reliably, still these principles, just from a common sense perspective - which seems more important than elusive study proof - do seem likely to be involved in having a “luckier” life, not just perceiving it to be so.

Wiseman believed the principles could be taught and his book is littered with exercises and advice on how to become luckier.

But much of what makes a person lucky or unlucky is deeply ingrained and difficult to change without a comprehensive spiritual program.

And when that is present in the right person at the right time, what can otherwise seem like insurmountable difficulties in personal transformation can come remarkably easy and fast.

I’ve seen people go from being overly guarded and frightened of interactions to feeling open and safe around others within days or weeks.

But for people who believe in a higher power and have a larger context that includes a next life, being unlucky is part of the “argument” God is making in their lives - show them why and what that they need to change. In other words it’s part of the guidance He’s giving - the mysterious ways of “God works in mysterious ways”.

The bad luck and misery they put up with are driving them to change in just those ways that they need to change in order to not just become lucky, but grow spiritually into what they need to become.

If such a person becomes hyper-focused on this worldly benefits of becoming lucky and kind of artificially forces themselves to act in lucky ways, they may lose sight of the deeper change that bad luck was trying to push them towards making.

From this perspective not everything that looks bad is actually bad, it really depends on the context and the time horizon.

A life of misery after misery that reshapes a person’s soul into something beautiful and leads to an eternity of endless bliss, is better than a life of luck and happiness followed by endless torment.

Which relates to the deeper meaning of medicine and healing. A medicine that only sees atoms and molecules bumping mindlessly into each other may seem to fix the body, but leave the mind and heart to wither away. In the grand scheme of things this is sham medicine, not real healing.

On the other hand a medicine that takes a person as they actually are in all their wonderful complexity may shepherd them to a good death, at peace with themselves and having corrected their relationship with the Creator and that would be perceived as a failure, a negative study endpoint in the modern paradigm.

Not that you can’t have a good life and physical healing and eternal happiness both - if you realize what your life is getting at, what it is that you need to change and keep sight of why you need to change it.

God is too generous to allow his servant to deal with Him in cash and He deals with them in credit. Going straight in this world usually leads to a good life now and later.

The real problem I have with Wiseman’s approach is that everything good is so deeply interconnected that you can’t separate it out into what makes someone lucky and what makes someone deeply good in a general sense. What I mean is not that you can’t be lucky without being good, but that if you are unlucky and want to become lucky, the easiest path is not to focus just on becoming lucky, but to major in becoming good in general with a minor in luck.

Maybe not everyone is meant to be lucky, but those that are I think will have a much better chance of getting there if they focus on a comprehensive plan of personal transformation. Trying to work on isolated fragments in any endeavor is far harder and less effective, and often fails, whether you’re working on your health or your luck.

Everything that bothers you, that sits in the back of your mind, or even in your subconscious and pokes at you, if left unresolved will interfere with your ability to be open to the world and the people around you moment to moment - one of Wiseman’s first principles of being lucky.

This can include things that you have left unresolved, procrastinated on, things you do that you don’t want to do, ways you act that upset you, etc. Basically all the ways that you are not living up to your own personal deeply held beliefs.

Contemplation is how you untangle this mess that makes up a life and start to figure it out bit by bit, and the more you untangle the easier it becomes and the better life seems to get.

And sometimes your deeply held beliefs do need to change, which is often part of a healing protocol in its later stages.

But the physical changes always have to come first because of a kind of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

You have to build up from a base of physical correctives before your nervous system calms down enough to unlock the ability to mentally deal with deep emotions, deeply held beliefs, and spiritual themes.

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Ultimately even if you know enough to treat other people it’s often impossible or very difficult to treat yourself effectively. It’s always best to find someone who can see from an outsider’s perspective past your blind spots.

Which brings me to my final practical medical thought for this piece, which is that relying on luck or hoping for the best is not a strategy. You can make your own luck as we’ve seen, and instead of hoping for a miracle to wipe away your chronic disease, you can make your own miracle.

Too many patients are drowning and get thrown a rope but ignore it because it seems too difficult to grab on and pull themselves out of their ocean of troubles. They would prefer to pop a pill and hope for the miracle, when the rope itself is the miracle.

The miracles are all around you beckoning to be grasped wholeheartedly.

And if the situation is truly life threatening, like cancer, all the more important not to be hoodwinked by popular misconceptions and disinformation.

Any and every “miracle cure” that sounds too good to be true comes to mind here. Lately it’s ivermectin and fenbendazole, or mebendazole for those prescribing them. Recently a study has been going around perporting to show an 84% response to ivermectin and mebendazole based on collected patient/consumer data from The Wellness Company.

Life only ever happens right now, now is all there ever is, so you have to balance between healthy constructive reflection on the past, healthy positive planning for the future, and just being present in the moment to see what wonders the universe is offering up to you.

In the end being lucky requires being open enough and willing enough to recognize, then take a leap of faith on whatever promising solution it is that comes your way, regardless of how daunting it may seem.

Every thing worthwhile is hard, and everything hard is made easy if you but begin.

Most modern chronic disease is “multifactorial”, not just at a physical level, but with major mental, emotional and social contributors.

In our experience people with serious chronic disease often easily improve by 90-95% within months with sustained dietary changes, personalized detox and treatment protocols and other lifestyle measures like getting better sleep, 20 minutes a day of breathwork, etc.

Many are satisfied with this level of improvement, but the last 5-10% of complete resolution is where people find they can most completely normalize their maintenance phase, meaning they are not only free of symptoms, but can reintroduce most foods that were previously triggers, and they are more resilient to stressors.

It’s also expected that this deeper healing that leads to full resolution will prevent progression of the disease and other diseases of aging developing later, and lead to fuller, healthier, longer lives. It’s also at this stage that people unlock personal progress and find deeper meaning in their lives.

To get there and resolve the last bits of lingering illness in a robust way usually requires working on deeper thought patterns, harmful beliefs, negative emotional responses, and social conflicts, e.g. with spouses, children and/or parents.

What these have in common is that they all create deep sources of profound stress on the nervous system and create autonomic dysfunction, or an imbalance in the ying yang of sympathetic vs parasympathetic tone. This imbalance then suffuses every organ and affects every cell, either directly via nerve fibers or indirectly via blood borne hormones.

A major source of nervous system dysfunction can be traced back to the first 3 years of life when babies can’t regulate their own nervous systems and depend on their mothers to do it for them.

Babies in daycare have measurably higher salivary cortisol levels, a marker of stress and they have been shown to suffer more from anxiety and depression as they hit their teens.

Socially they are more likely to develop dysfunctional patterns of interaction with their loved ones, including their future spouses. This stems from how they learned to deal with the stress of what they perceived as abandonment as children - either withdrawing emotionally from their mothers, or becoming very clingy and trying to prevent them from leaving them every day, or cycling between those extremes with no fixed coping mechanism.

Basically the first 3 years of life are when someone develops a deep sense that the world is a safe place, or they don’t.

Similarly with breastfeeding, babies either learn that there is more to human nourishment than just filling up their stomachs, or they don’t.

I was in daycare for a year or two and I don’t blame my mother, it’s not an insurmountable problem to correct the dysfunction it may cause, but it can be a huge problem if you aren’t even aware of it to begin with.

I know people who can’t seem to have a healthy relationship with another person and they don’t understand why.

Simply knowing a problem is possible is important in monitoring for it or coming up with mitigation strategies. And understanding the possible cause of an established problem is the first step in solving it.

Since we aren’t widgets that all respond exactly the same way to early life stressors, some of us won’t be as negatively affected by daycare or lack of breastfeeding as others. And some of us may not have such deep psycho-social roots to our chronic conditions, but for the most part every patient we see has something stemming from a deeper level that is involved in their chronic disease process.

The disease is like a message from deep within inviting a person to address long ignored ways of thinking, feeling, and being with themselves and others.

Many problems spontaneously resolve when chronic nervous system imbalances are addressed.

For example many people nowadays inhale their food as if they’re starving, which may come from trying to fill an emotional emptiness with food. Speed eating leads to satiety hormones not being triggered as well. including Nature’s own version of Ozempic made in our own gut.

Just forcing yourself to slow down can eventually lead to a new habit of eating slowly and naturally losing excess weight, but what’s more important is to reassure our nervous system and retrain ourselves to fix the deeper drivers of the anxiety manifesting as a need to rush things.

Consider this story of every day dental fraud:

Many people have woken up to the corruption in Big Medicine, but too many are still asleep to the corruption present in dentistry.

As Warren Buffet’s long time partner Charlie Munger put it: “show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.”

Dentists, like surgeons, are paid per procedure. They aren’t paid to tell you about Dr Weston Price’s famous 1910 book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration which proved that the standard American diet caused malnutrition, leading to misshappen palates, small jaws, rotting teeth, and compressed sinuses prone to congestion.

They aren’t paid to help you come up with a plan to overhaul your diet, or deal with stress - another big cause of dental disease (and all other diseases).

Chronic stress puts the body in emergency mode, which is characterized by the mobilization of all resources to fight a battle that never comes. Instead of building for the future the body breaks down tissues like bones and muscles and becomes prone to unhealthy, inflammatory visceral belly fat accumulation. In the moouth chronic stress changes the levels of microorganisms in the mouth, the composition and amount of saliva - all of which can make one more prone to tooth decay. I think tension in the neck muscles also plays a role as it creates abnormal tension on the roots of teeth.

Once you do drill in to a tooth it sets you up for a lifetime of repeat drilling as the filling usually falls out in a couple decades and they have to redrill a bit deeper each time they fill it up again.

Most people get started in childhood so have to redrill a few times during their lives and eventually end up with dangerous root canals, that have been shown to be filled with harmful bacteria that damage the brain and heart - a root canal simply cannot be done safely because it is impossible to sterilize fully.

Many a chronic disease has abated when root canals were removed. Unfortunately many a new chronic disease has also been triggered due to replacing a root canal with an implant.

It doesn’t matter how “non-reactive” or “biocompatible” something is, whether metal or ceramic, the body doesn’t like anything foreign living inside it and studies show that every implant leads to some degree of inflammation of the surrounding area including titanium and ceramic ones.

Until we can safely regrow teeth the best bet for missing teeth may be a bridge.

Either way I would definitely avoid metal. We’ve seen too many cases of chronic diseases including cancers starting after metal implants were placed (hip and knee osteoarthritis can be fixed, often very rapidly).

What Can Be Done

An ounce of prevention: as with any chronic health issue, removing the harm is usually more important than adding curatives. A bullet can do a lot more damage than any procedures or restoratives we have for reversing the effects of a gunshot wound.

Similarly removing as many sources of stress as possible will often help more than a special toothpaste. This includes eliminating or mitigating EMFs, inflammatory foods, unresolved emotional issues, being overweight, lack of exercise, poor sleep, etc.

I suspect more harm than good comes from dental cleanings as they remove a ncessary and normal biofilm that includes both healthy and pathogenic organisms. the ones that should be there help drive off the ones that shouldn’t and affect the makeup of saliva. If your teeth don’t naturally feel smooth and clean all the time then it’s usually a sign you’re eating something you shouldn’t be eating - an elimination diet can help you figure it out for your own unique physiology, but it’s hard to go wrong with eliminating grains and other refined carbs to start.

Animals in the wild don’t need dental visits to maintain healthy teeth and neither do most humans if they eat right, exercise, manage stress, sleep well, get some sun and move enough.

On the addition side of the equation there are now topical peptide therapies available at forward thinking dental clinics that can reverse early cavities.

I don’t know much about the peptides, but one of my children was diagnosed with an early cavity and we stopped grains and sweets (including fruit), added coconut oil pulling at night (1 tablespoon of oil with 1ml of gum spirits turpentine mixed in), hydroxyapatite toothpaste and had them put a castor oil soaked wrap around their neck to help them relax at night, and a couple months later at the follow-up visit the cavity was gone.

Another thing that helps is chewing naturally sourced mastic gum. It not only helps prevent and reverse early cavities, it also supports healthy jaw development.

Have you or someone you know ever reversed a diagnosed cavity?

Due to multiple instances of gross negligence and misconduct, the department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is decertifying the organ donor organization Network of Hope that served Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia.

At a press conference with RFK Jr announcing the move, Donna Rhorer described what she witnessed when her brother was declared brain dead and was being prepped for organ harvesting:

“His eyes were open, he was tracking me, and they told me it was just reflexes— then during the heart cath, he was thrashing and crying and grabbing the doctor’s hands to stop him. Even after those signs the organ procurement process continued until the physician refused to proceed. One of the organizations own coordinators called the home office after the doctor refused. She was told: ‘find another surgeon, or you’ll lose your job, because we’re finishing this case.”

Thankfully that didn’t happen and her brother was in the audience reportedly weeping openly as she described those events.

Any reasonable person would agree that this organization should be decertified, but the explicit framing of the situation by HHS is that safe organ donation is possible, which itself presumes that brain death is a valid diagnosis.

Until medical school and particularly my medical residency, I would have agreed. But every physician learns the list of common conditions and biochemical abnormalities that can, and more often than not, do temporarily interfere with measurable brain function and make it essentially impossible to ever practically be absolutely certain that someone is irrevocably brain dead.

These most commonly include: electrolyte abnormalities, sepsis, organ dysfunction, shock, and the adminstration of narcotics and benzodiazepines that suppress neural function.

Every single patient I ever saw in a hospital that looked like they were brain dead or was assessed for brain death had more than one of these extremely common confounding factors present at the time of the neurology consult for brain death (usually called when the family was trying to decide to pull the plug on a ventilator and let their relative die a natural death - I was thankfully never involved in an organ donation case).

What would often happen after the first consult would be a note from the neurologist listing all the reasons why a diagnosis of brain death would be impossible to make, and advising that the medical team correct the electrolytes, treat the septic shock, stop the confounding medications, rule out other factors, ie get brain imaging for a stroke, a spinal tap for brain infection, etc.

However, despite our best efforts there was often no way to entirely eliminate every confounder. The ultimate diagnosis of brain death was like so many diagnoses just an educated guess.

Now, regardless of whether or not anyone agrees with the principle of harvesting organs in someone declared brain dead while they are literally still physically alive (as they must be to donate organs), we should be able to agree that if there is even an outside chance that they could recover bodily and brain function eventually then we should never, not even once, risk killing such a person by taking their organs and giving them to someone else.

That would clearly be a case of some kind of murder.

Regardless of how needy or deserving the recipient is, it is simply wrong by every religious and secular convention modern civilisation was built upon.

And yet the case of Donna Rhorer’s brother is not the lone exception of someone who was declared brain dead and later recovered.

To state it clearly: there is no way to be absolutely certain organ donors are irrevocably “brain dead” before their organs are harvested.

While organ donation is clinically “effective”, it cannot be made “safe”.

I would check those driver’s licenses and make extra certain that neither you nor a loved one checked the organ donor box.

Andrew Huberman recently shared a sleep hack of his. He says it’s based on neuroscience and involves closing your eyes, moving them back and forth slowly, then counterclockwise, then clockwise, then converging on the imagined tip of the nose while exhaling slowly.

He says this works because in order to go to sleep the brain has to lose track of body position and this technique helps accomplish that by confusing the mind and inner ear … or something like that.

Of course I tried it and it didn’t do anything that I noticed.

I suspect many sleep hacks are a lot like hiccup cures: everyone has something they swear by (I push on pressure points behind my ears while taking very deep breaths, works like a charm).

Maybe such things are just placebo effects.

Either way I never found my sleep placebo. The more I try to fall asleep the less likely I am to fall asleep.

At the other end of the body I recently came across another sleepy time trick: wearing socks to slightly warm the feet in a cool room (around 74 F) apparently helped someone enough that they decided to study it on 6 volunteers.

Perhaps their thinking was that sleep onset is associated with a drop in core temperature. The feet are one of the main areas where body heat is released since they have large shunts sending warm core blood through large vessels near the surface where heat radiates out of the body. A cool room is known to help people go to sleep, but if the feet get too cold then those peripheral shunts may clamp shut and not work as well, preventing core temps from dropping.

In the study wearing socks shortened sleep onset by 7.5 minutes, increased total sleep time by 32 minutes and reduced nocturnal awakenings.

So it worked, right? Maybe, but core temperature didn’t seem to change. Maybe they just expected to sleep better and did so. It’s hard to blind someone to wearing socks or not wearing them. The study was meant to show socks improved sleep. Placebo effects are to be expected.

It’s easy to dismiss such small time research as silly, but all of medical research is plagued by similar problems from sample size issues, blinding trouble, and many other inherent biases that conspire to reaffirm preconceived notions. Much of medical science and practice is as prone to superstition as any shaman might be.

As Ionnidis famously put it in th4e introduction to his 2005 paper:

“There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.”

The patient of mine with the worst insomnia, that failed everything, eventually figured out it was all due to a known side effect of one supplement, but usually chronic sleep troubles are more complex than that.

Personally speaking my own battle with insomnia stemmed from long COVID. The solution was a comprehensive approach to healing involving multiple antimicrobials, general detox and broad nutritional and energetic support. And perhaps most importantly time, which we know heals all wounds.

What about you? Beyond the usual exhortations to fix sleep timings, eat early, get morning sun, wear blue blockers at night, avoid stimulants, etc, have you found anything that works for a long standing recalcitrant sleep problem?

Placebo cures with or without plausible mechanisms welcome. Who knows, it could help someone.

One of my most popular posts on X is about the efficacy of humming for chronic sinusitis.

I wrote about chronic sinusitis before and showed that there is strong reason to believe that almost every case is a fungal infection, so the widespread use of antibiotics and steroids makes no sense whatsoever. The antibiotics only serving to wipe out healthy bacteria and the steroids serving only to pour fuel on the fire by inhibiting the immune system’s ability to keep the fungus in check.

Antifungals may work, but the prescription ones we have are relatively hard on the liver and prolonged use requires regular monitoring of liver function. There are natural antifungal protocols that can be used as well, and humming alone seems particularly powerful according to this case report where the patient did an hour a day for 4 days then 10 minutes a day thereafter to maintain the benefits:

A case report is a useful starting point for making hypotheses. What it proves is just that humming worked for this particular person, it may work for others and it may not. According to the founders of evidence based medicine the most powerful bit of data is the case report, when used on that particular case, meaning the best data comes from what you have tried on yourself.

If you think about it what most mainstream researchers and clinicians trust, the double blind randomized controlled trial, doesn’t tell you much at all about any particular person. It tells you what happens on average to an average person as defined in that trial, and if the data set is large enough it may give you some information on subsets of “average persons” from within the data, men and women of certain age ranges for example, or those with certain preconditions like heart, lung or kidney disease. But without trying the study intervention on yourself you won’t know what will happen to you. The problem is compounded the further an individual is from the average in terms of genetics, lifestyle, metabolism, health, stress, etc. Outliers who are particularly healthy or unhealthy are least well represented in the data of any trial and while the results mean little for any one person who wasn’t in the trial, the results are particularly meaningless for them. And this bleak realization comes before accounting for the fraud and bias endemic in all big pharma connected trials where the datasets are almost always proprietary and closed to outside review, where various shenanigans frequently occur like the removal of inconvenient data points to skew the outcomes to the desired results, or to fit preconceived notions, or to advance careers.

To understand why humming isn’t an automatic panacea we have to understand that the chronic sinusitis sufferer may have developed the disorder for a number of reasons. Maybe a course of antibiotics wiped out a keystone bacterial species in the nose that was necessary for blocking the growth of pathogens. Maybe they are exposed to a lot of EMF and the mold they have is stimulated by that radiation (like the mold that grew towards the radiation of Chernobyl). Maybe they are under a lot of stress and their cortisol heavy metabolism suppresses their own immune response to the mold. Maybe the mold was stimulated to grow by the presence of toxins in the tissues of the nose, binding those toxins and in some sense protecting the person’s cells from them. Maybe there is an emtoional issue that ties into the problem affecting the energetic balance in the sinuses.

Depending on the mix of causes humming may rid one person of chronic sinusitis in days, and do nothing for another. Either way 10 minutes a day is a good general practice for managing stress and stimulating immunity. Modern science has confirmed what ancient ayurvedic wisdom knew, namely that humming calms the autonomic nervous system which has profound body wide effects on healthy functioning. This is particularly important for us in the modern world since many if not all our chronic health problems have a component of autonomic dysfunction. Our fight or flight responses are dialed up to 11, even when there’s nothing to fight or fly from. This leads to poor sleep, weight gain, poor digestive function, poor immunity, and a suceptibility to all manner of chronic diseases.

So humming is worth a try for anyone and is a useful tool to have on hand even if used only as needed. But if you’re suffering from severe persistent chronic disease you need a broad and comprehensive approach to ridding the body of the actual causes, and supporting it in healing.

It began with a simple question about lunch. An afterthought really.

Elizabeth had been sitting in a quiet room in her home — soft daylight washing the walls, a tree-print canvas behind her, the dark railing of a staircase visible over one shoulder — recording a video testimonial for her naturopathic practitioner, Hakim Shabaz Ahmed. She wore a dark-green knit sweater and slim drop earrings. Her brown hair was loosely curled. The camera on her phone did not move for eleven minutes. There were no cuts. Every shift in what she was feeling registered only through her eyes, her mouth, the set of her shoulders.

She had a lot to compress. Her husband had emerged from twenty years of lupus. She herself had followed him into a grueling protocol that was finally, after eight months, restoring a menstrual cycle that had been wrecked by fifteen years on birth control. There were moments during the recording when her brow narrowed and her shoulders braced and she pushed her words out with visible effort before regaining her composure. There were other moments when a protective tenderness crossed her face at the mention of her husband, her daughter, the life they were rebuilding.

After she finished, she sent the video. Then she sent the email: could they eat sushi?

The reply she received was not just a dietary recommendation. It was a philosophy of existence.

Empowerment Medicine

“When it comes to foods like sushi or sashimi,” Shabaz wrote back, “I always approach the subject through what I call empowerment medicine rather than victimhood medicine.” Yes, parasites exist. Yes, there are risks. “But when our nervous system is resilient, our immune system is robust, the body is capable of managing and clearing what does not belong.”

“There is almost always a trade-off in the world outside of ourselves. Very rarely is something purely good or purely bad.” The real question, he wrote, is not whether the world contains threats. It is whether we are building a body, a mind, and a heart capable of dealing with them wisely. “The path is not isolation, but empowerment.”

And as usual he did have practical counsel too. If she was going to eat Japanese, he preferred sashimi over sushi — simpler, but, more importantly cleaner. Sushi almost invariably came with a large portion of industrially grown and processed rice alongside imitation crab, poorly sourced seaweed, questionable fish roe, and low-grade oils. The gap between the sanctity of the traditional food and its modern, commercialized version was, for Shabaz, not a trivial distinction. It was a microcosm of everything he believed had gone wrong.

But the weight of his reply lay elsewhere. “Yes, there are social, political, and environmental parasites and termites in the world that consume human life from within,” he wrote. “What is a life without a villain? We are designed to absorb what is beneficial and neutralize what is harmful, thereby moving forward toward our purpose in life.”

He called this a hormetic philosophy of life.

What Hormesis Means

The word comes from the Greek hormáein — to set in motion, to excite, to urge forward.

In toxicology and biology, it describes a common class of phenomena: how low doses of a stressor that would be harmful at high doses can actually stimulate adaptive responses that make an organism stronger. Cold plunges that trigger cardiovascular resilience. Brief fasting that activates cellular repair. Exercise that tears muscle fibers so they rebuild thicker. Sunlight that, in moderate doses, provides natural vitamin D, structures water in the body and releases nitric oxide for circulation — but burns if you stay too long.

The principle is not controversial in the sciences. What is controversial is extending it, as Shabaz does, into a philosophy of engagement with all of reality.

“If instead we live in constant avoidance, fear, and restriction,” he wrote to Elizabeth, “we may deprive ourselves of deeply nourishing interactions with the world because of a small potential downside.”

It is a deeply unfashionable position in the contemporary wellness space, where entire identities are built around increasingly elaborate protocols of elimination. Don’t eat this. Avoid that toxin. Eliminate this exposure. The world is hostile and your body is fragile — so withdraw. Shabaz argues this gets it exactly backward. The robustness of the immune system, he wrote, “is not built through fear-based restriction alone. It is built through nourishment, nervous system stability, metabolic strength, and a confident relationship with life itself.”

Nearly every conventional immunologist would strongly object here. The immune system - they would argue dismissively, if not contemptuously - is not principally shaped by confidence. It is shaped by genetics, prior exposures, nutritional status, sleep, age, and the stochastic complexity of immune cell maturation. However he idea that psychological orientation meaningfully alters immune function is supported by the psychoneuroimmunology literature — the field is real, and the connections between stress, cortisol, and immune suppression are well established, even if they haven’t filtered down to your local immunologist yet. On the other hand the degree to which a “confident relationship with life” translates into protection against, say, Anisakis larvae in raw fish is not something any controlled study has measured.

Shabaz would not dispute this. His claims are grounded not in randomized trials but in a clinical tradition that predates them by millennia, and in the outcomes he has observed in his own patients. The question is whether those outcomes can earn a hearing.

The Healer Who Began With Himself

To understand how a question about raw fish became a treatise on human resilience, you have to understand the man who wrote it.

Shabaz Ahmed was not trained in a conventional medical school. He was trained first as an engineer, then spent decades studying and reconstructing from first principles what he calls Hikmah — the Arabic word for wisdom — and the name for the traditional medicine practiced across the Indian subcontinent for centuries, drawing on the same Greek, Persian, and Ayurvedic roots that once intertwined in three of the ancient world's greatest medical traditions. He studied and obtained certification as a naturopath as much to allay patient anxiety as to learn anything he couldn’t learn on his own. He likewise obtained a traditional apprentices certification from an Indian Ayurvedic master. He now calls the framework he developed The Tibb Methodology, or simply The Medicine in English and he is trying to do something that sounds, on its face, preposterous: explain all chronic disease under a single coherent set of principles. To ultimately reclaim the name Medicine itself from what he regards as an interloper that has stripped it from its true inheritors, relegating them to a string of adjectives: alternative, holistic, traditional.

When Shabaz introduces himself, he does not lead with credentials. He leads with results. Beginning with the results he wrought on his own body. He was not blessed with flawless health as a young man, but he accepted his suffering as an invitation. At one point he was as bad off as some of his patients. As an infant a virus paralyzed one of his legs. The antibiotics that followed destroyed his gut. A childhood and early adulthood spent consuming the Standard American Diet aged him so severely that by thirty, he could pass for forty-five. Now, approaching fifty, people routinely guess he is in his late twenties or early thirties. “My qualification is myself,” he has said in public lectures. “I have moved. You have seen the transformation.”

In the same lectures, he can also be blunt to the point of provocation. He once told a group of physicians who approached him for support against COVID vaccines that they were sixty years late — that the real scandal was not their villain du jour, mRNA gene therapy, but the fact that they had countenanced so many travesties for so long - pointing out that metformin, one of their pet favorites, had been interfering with the most basic of metabolic pathways since 1957. Despite which they routinely prescribed it for life, while openly admitting they could not properly explain why the patient even had diabetes in the first place. “I go to the root causes of the problem,” he said, and then turning reflective: “I cannot just go ahead and rally behind their demonstrations against the vaccine while the same doctors are taking metformin themselves.” While he is no fan of vaccines, he felt convinced that the real villain was the entire corrupt system compounding a long line of catastrophic errors that would continue steamrolling over human beings if they focused myopically on just one sliver of the problem.

It was this combination of radical self-transformation and uncompromising character that caught the attention of Dr. Syed Haider, a Western-trained internist who had built a large telehealth practice during COVID, treating tens of thousands of acute cases, long-haulers and vaccine injured. Dr. Haider had known Shabaz as a friend for twenty years. He had watched his physical transformation with his own eyes. Watched his growth from someone who knew little about traditional medicine, to someone who not only mastered it, but knew more about cutting edge modern medical science than most conventional doctors. He had traveled the Jordanian countryside for months with Shabaz seeing patients in far flung villages and seeing their lives transformed by his often simple recommendations. He had finally referred his own parents and even his five-year-old daughter for treatment. He knew other mainstream physicians and functional medicine practitioners who had done the same.

So he asked if Shabaz would bring his treatments to the West. He streamed a live interview while traveling overseas because it just couldn’t wait. Sitting in the lush courtyard of a hotel one brisk autumn morning, squinting into the rising sun, he introduced the man who had so impressed him to his patients. And then, at the end of the long conversation in which Shabaz walked him through the seven layers of the human being — physical body, energetic field, mind, emotions, will, philosophical worldview, and spirit — Dr. Haider said something that altered the trajectory of his career and his life.

“I think it’s time for me to start healing with you,” he said. “It’s been long overdue, but I think you convinced me. I’d like to be your next patient.”

And he was. In the first five weeks alone his obesity reversed, his lifelong psoriasis dramatically reduced, his chronic constipation improved, and his lingering long-haul brain fog cleared. He documented the experience on his Substack, admitting he had been "stuck in this paradigm of Mind Body Soul" — he'd had pieces of the picture, but not the architecture that made them cohere, or the inspiration to consistently apply them. Their collaboration, now housed at mygotodoc, represents an unusual alliance: a board-certified physician lending his platform, his credibility, and his own body to a naturopath operating from principles that most of modern medicine does not recognize.

“Probably the highest praise a doctor can give another doctor,” Dr. Haider told his audience in a later livestream, is “that they trust them with their most beloved.”

Twenty Years in Twenty Months

Elizabeth’s husband Reed was diagnosed with lupus over two decades ago.

Lupus is one of those autoimmune conditions for which mainstream rheumatology prescribes an utterly resigned protocol of management they dourly predict will eventually fail. Immunosuppressants. Anti-inflammatories. Monitoring. And the frank acknowledgment that the cause is idiopathic: a fancy word covering for plain ignorance. The working theory is that the immune system has made an error — mistaking the body’s own tissue for a foreign invader and attacking it. Treatment aims to suppress that attack. The word “cure” is not in their standard desk reference.

“No doctors or rheumatologists can really figure out what it is,” Elizabeth explained, her gaze fixed on the camera lens. “So, they covered the symptoms. They tell you you’re going to end up down the road with this and that, and that it was just kind of what it was.”

They had been searching for years. "We had different pieces of what we now know was the full picture," Elizabeth said. "And until we were able to gather all the pieces in the proper order at the proper times with the proper discipline — nothing really worked." Shabaz's framework offered them what no one else had: the architecture, the progression and the inspiration to implement all of it. The immune system, in his view, does not make mistakes. Autoimmune activity is not a malfunction but an appropriate — if desperate — response to an internal terrain so burdened with toxins, pathogens, and damaged cells that the body’s clearance mechanisms have been overwhelmed. The inflammation is not the disease. It is the body’s attempt to resolve a deeper problem. Suppress it, and you pay that problem forward with interest.

It is a reframe, not a proof. But it is a reframe that, for Elizabeth and her husband, pointed toward something no rheumatologist had offered: a protocol aimed not at dampening the immune response but at finally cleaning out the pollution that provoked it.

The protocol Shabaz designed was tailored, specific, and brutal. Deep detoxification — the kind that produces what practitioners in the alternative space call “die-off,” the miserable symptomatic flare that occurs when parasites, fungi, and stored toxins begin to mobilize. Radical dietary change. Herbal regimens. Emotional excavation. And an absolute prohibition on half-measures.

Elizabeth tried to describe it:"We started, and what I watched my husband go through was …" she stopped abruptly, considering her next word. Her eyes glistened. The word that finally came was "incredible," and her voice rose uncontrollably with emotion as she glanced away to compose herself before looking back.

“The protocol is real,” Elizabeth said. “The protocol is hard.” She paused, steadied herself. “The things that you must do to reset your body from a truly spiritual, cellular level — it’s real. It’s deep. It’s authentic.”

She described watching her husband go through it, the detox symptoms, the months of discomfort. “It was challenging to watch the detox symptoms and not be able to alleviate any of it,” she said, a brief strain crossing her face before she pushed through. “But because my husband stuck through it, because he continued to push and was determined to heal — not only based on the protocol, the diet, the processes, the oils, the herbs — but he was also determined. And that mindset is what got him through.”

It was supposed to take six months. Life intervened, the timeline stretched — and Shabaz stayed with them through it all, with a patience and kindness Elizabeth would later single out as inseparable from the protocol itself. But now, approaching eighteen months — the change had, in Elizabeth’s word, not just trickled in, but “waterfalled”, into their lives, washing away the illness that has been with them for as long as she had known him.

“He wakes up and he doesn’t hurt. He’s not sick. He can enjoy food again.”

Then came a moment that echoes in the hearts of those who watch it. The emotion started in her eyes before it reached her voice. “The only person in my life and my husband’s life that remembers him before he was sick,” she said softly, “was his mother.”

“And after he healed —” Her voice lifted, bright with feeling, and for a moment something like a smile crossed her face before the emotion overtook it. “I got —” The words caught. Her eyes were wet and her hands had come together over her heart without her seeming to notice, wedding ring catching the daylight. “I got to know the man that she raised.” And then she held there — years of helplessness and longing suddenly showing through, answered by a fulfillment she still seemed unable to believe was hers.

She faced the camera again, eyes still glistening. “I got to feel his spirit and his light and his vibrancy come back to a degree I didn’t know.” Then, steadying: “I already loved him and he was my best friend to start. But now I got so much more.”

Remove Before You Add

The results speak for themselves. How they are achieved speaks to something else entirely, something that includes medicine, but reaches far beyond it.

They also raise a question Dr. Haider has spent considerable time with. Every modality Shabaz employs — detox protocols, herbal regimens, dietary overhauls, energy medicine, emotional processing, intellectual regrounding and more — exists in some form or other across the vast and always expanding alternative and functional medicine landscape. So what accounts for his outcomes? Why does he consistently reverse conditions that others cannot, including the many cancer cases that form the backbone of his patient base?

“The answer,” Dr. Haider told me, “is that it’s not a system. It’s a man.”

One of Shabaz’s patients is a world-renowned geneticist and cofounder of a leading online functional medicine portal who owns and runs some of the most respected functional medicine clinics in the world. He performs full genome sequencing on his patients and uses the results to design customized supplement protocols. He did all of that on himself. It didn’t work. Now he is on a deeply individualized protocol from Shabaz protocol, and so is his mother. That physician came to Shabaz and offered to find investors to scale his practice. Shabaz told him it couldn’t be scaled — that the very idea was anathema to everything he believed in.

Shabaz explains that the key that unlocks true understanding of any discipline is not a specific string of facts, relationships, formulas and procedures you can teach to anyone. It’s an alignment of the heart with Divinity that casts light into whatever one does. “Human beings are not widgets you can pump through a factory as fast as you can slap together the raw materials,” Dr. Haider said. “This is the failing of modern medicine and modern institutions in general. In a madcap rush to expand they watered down what couldn’t be industrialized and systematized.” The training of a real healer in every old tradition cannot be compressed into a standardized four-year degree or even a ten-year one. It depends not only on intellectual mastery but on a transformation of the soul — an alignment with what Shabaz describes as an unbroken line of masters extending into the depths of ancient time, back to the source of all true knowledge: Divine inspiration. Shabaz walked that path himself. He became the very viceregent he urges his patients to become. His heart itself became the crucible that melts other hearts and reshapes them into what they were meant to be. No book can replicate that. It can’t be modeled by AI. It can only be replicated by becoming as he became. It only ever happened that way, which is why real medicine and any real knowledge that served to benefit rather than harmed human beings was only ever passed on through a master and apprentice relationship, heart to heart.

Still people who have not met the man cannot help but ask: what may I be asked to do? Can I even do it?

It begins with an unnassuming conversation. When a new patient comes to him, Shabaz does something that modern medicine, with its fifteen-minute appointments and organ-specific referrals, has largely abandoned: he weaves their medical history into their life story. He needs to know not just the diagnosis but the relationships, the traumas, the mental attitudes, the daily habits, the griefs and resentments and unspoken fears that have shaped the terrain the disease now inhabits. He sees himself in the tradition of the old village physician who knew the family across generations — who understood a patient’s inner world because he had watched them grow. The modern patient arrives as a stranger with a chart. Shabaz seeks to make them known not only to him but to themselves.

The effect can be startling. Patients arrive having heard the protocols are harsh, saying they will do what they can, a little bit at a time. After a single session in which Shabaz explains how they became the authors of their own condition — how the violations accumulated across every layer, how the body adapted, why the symptoms are not failures but maneuvers — something shifts. “The same person,” he said, “from the very next day starts to do the full protocol.” The understanding itself is the first medicine. Without it, compliance is fragile. With it, the patient becomes an advocate for their own healing.

The physical work follows a principle he returns to constantly: remove before you add. The modern instinct — in conventional and alternative medicine alike — is to keep stacking interventions. Another supplement. Another drug. Another protocol layered on the last. Shabaz argues the body cannot absorb what it needs when it is already full of what it doesn’t. “Your glass is full,” he tells patients. “See what it’s filled with. Remove it. Detox it. Flush it. Make space — and then the body will take up the nutrition, because it finally has room.” The detoxification is specific to each patient — parasites, fungi, heavy metals, stored pharmaceutical residues, whatever the terrain has accumulated over decades — and it produces the die-off that Elizabeth described watching her husband endure: the miserable flare as the body finally begins to clear what it has been warehousing for years, sometimes since childhood.

But physical detox is only the foundation. The treatment ascends through the layers — energy rebalancing, circadian rhythm repair, nervous system stabilization — and then into territory most practitioners never enter. Shabaz described treating a young woman with severe depression and agonizing menstrual pain. She had never had a normal period. Underneath that he found a fear of relationships rooted in childhood trauma. She was suspicious of everyone — even her own mother. He started with the physical — cleansing, hormonal detox — and then, as her body stabilized, he began to sit with her and renegotiate her stories. Her family had wounded her. But was what she remembered really so evil? Could what happened be interpreted differently? This is not conventional therapy, which Shabaz argues too often reinforces the narratives patients arrive with, “enhancing the sense of victimhood and entitlement” rather than challenging them to grow beyond it. His approach is closer to philosophical counsel: expanding the patient’s interpretive frame until their own history becomes something they can assimilate rather than something that annihilates them. Over time, the same woman who would not even leave her house rebuilt her shattered family relationships. Her physical symptoms resolved. She developed a desire to marry — something unthinkable before she began with him.

The sequence matters. Physical first, because a body in crisis cannot do emotional work. Emotional work before philosophical regrounding, because beliefs cannot shift while feelings are in revolt. And the philosophical layer — the patient’s relationship to meaning, purpose, Providence — last, because it requires the most from one and holds the most at stake. Even something as common as high blood pressure, in Shabaz’s framework, reflects this layering: hypertension often mirrors an inner constriction, a person who feels threatened and has tightened against the world, their arteries reflecting their psychology. Prescribing vasodilators fights the body’s protective response without asking why the constriction exists. Address the inner threat, and the body’s need to constrict resolves on its own.

Every plan is individualized, because every person’s disease is as unique as their fingerprints. No two patients are hypertensive for exactly the same reasons. There are no standard dosages, no universal stacks. And the commitment must be total. Half-measures, in Shabaz’s experience, produce half-results at best and outright deterioration at worst.

The Body Is Not Stupid

The philosophical architecture behind these outcomes is not what most people expect from a health practitioner. Shabaz does not begin with lab markers or supplement stacks. He begins with a model of the human being as seven interpenetrating layers — with the light of consciousness as the layer from which all others manifest.

Disease, in this framework, is never a mistake. It is never the body failing. It is always a message and a maneuver — an intelligent adaptation to conditions that have become unbearable at some layer of being.

In a lecture to a group of functional medicine physicians hosted by Dr JP Saleeby in November 2025, Shabaz illustrated this through a series of Alzheimer’s cases — real patients, names changed, whose families had become his patients over time. The point was not to discuss the diagnosis so much as the diversity of paths that led to the same destination.

There was Bob, a distinguished Florida dentist. Academically gifted, constitutionally sensitive — the kind of child who felt another person’s pain as if it were happening inside his own body. He spent an entire career performing procedures on patients he could not fully spare from discomfort, absorbing their pain while handling amalgam fillings and chemical compounds day after day. The physical assault was heavy metal toxicity. But Shabaz argued that what really made his brain vulnerable while most of of his colleagues shrugged it off, was the decades of silent nervous-system corrosion from a man who could not stop feeling what his patients felt.

There was Carolene, the divorcée who still deeply loved her ex husband even after thirty years — and then one day discovered he had finally remarried a much younger woman. Her disease entered through an entirely different doorway: emotional devastation. Her heart just broke. Her response was to shut down, to protect herself from the thoughts that would not stop stirring her to torment.

And then there was Lizzy, a social worker who ran an orphanage and one day tragically discovered that the children entrusted to her care had been abused under her very nose. Her worldview — her understanding of how the world operates, her trust in people, her relationship with the Divine — collapsed. The assault came through her philosophical and spiritual plane.

Five patients. Five completely different origins. The same diagnosis.

“Every single disease needs to be interpreted as a maneuver of the body,” Shabaz told the audience. “The body is not stupid. Calling the body stupid is an affront to infinite intelligence.”

And then he told the story that stayed with me and probably every physician in that room.

The Story He told

At this point the physicians in Saleeby’s lecture were primed to hear how Shabaz had actually helped his five Alzheimer’s cases heal. That’s not what he told them. He told them about the sixth.

Mary was not his patient. He refused to take her.

Her extended family had become his patients over the years — her daughter, her son, her daughter-in-law, her grandchildren. They kept asking him to treat Mary’s Alzheimer’s. He knew her history: decades of abuse in her marriage, shocks, traumas, betrayals, losses that had left marks on her psyche so deep that her brain had, in Shabaz’s framework, done the only merciful thing available to it. It had shut down her memory.

“She will live longer if you leave her alone,” he told her relatives.

They did not listen. They took tips from his treatment of other family members — dietary changes, certain supplements, strategies he had shared for memory support — and applied them to Mary on their own.

And it worked. Her memory began to return.

Then within three months of what her family first interpreted as a miraculous revival and vindication, she developed aggressive uterine cancer. It spread rapidly. Six months later she was dead.

Shabaz had predicted exactly this outcome. It was why he had refused to treat her. The body had muted her mind to protect itself, to protect her, from memories that were destroying her. When the protective mechanism was removed — when memory came back — without her being ready to undergo the concurrent emotional and philosophical work that would have allowed her to reprocess what had happened, her mind turned again on her body. The unbearable thoughts flooded back and her body, now weakened from years of disease, could no longer contain the damage.

“When you go ahead and force the brain to start functioning,” he told the physicians, “now the brain is going to destroy the body instead of the body trying to shut down the brain.”

It is a story that would make a conventional neurologist deeply uncomfortable. There is no controlled mechanism to validate the causal chain Shabaz describes. Alzheimer’s pathology involves amyloid plaques, tau protein tangles, hippocampal shrinkage, neuroinflammation. These are measurable, observable, reproducible. The idea that a woman’s cancer emerged because her memory returned is a startling, revolutionary narrative, not a testable etiology.

But it is also the kind of story that makes a thoughtful person pause. Because Shabaz did not treat Mary and claim success. He refused to treat her and predicted failure. He told her family she would die sooner if they intervened. And he was right. Whatever explanatory framework you place around that outcome, the outcome itself is remarkable.

Elizabeth’s Own Path

After watching her husband’s transformation, Elizabeth decided to undergo the protocol herself.

Her issues were different. Fifteen years on the birth control pill. Severe hormonal acne that had persisted since adolescence. Rounds of antibiotics — tetracycline and others — that never resolved it. An unpredictable menstrual cycle that her OB-GYN could not explain. “My OB-GYN just looked at me and said, ‘I don’t know,’” Elizabeth recounted. “I’m not kidding on that either.”

She had not really thought of herself as sick. She could make it through her days without major issues. “It’s funny to think that I was sick,” she said, “because I never struggled.” But she knew things were out of balance — her cycle, the aches, the hormonal chaos that no one seemed able to address. And she had seen, with her own eyes, what was possible.

Her protocol was less intense than her husband’s, but it was still demanding. She was the primary caregiver for their daughter. She homeschooled her. She ran the back end of their business. There were moments during her detox when she looked at all of it and thought: How am I supposed to do this?

“And I just kept going,” she said. “I knew that there was light on the other side.”

By the four-month mark, after fifteen years of hormonal disruption, her menstrual cycle was finally beginning to level out. At eight months, she was still working through the emotional layers of the protocol — the renegotiation of old stories that Shabaz considers the deepest and most essential work. Elizabeth still had much of that ahead of her.

But her expression, when she spoke about where she was now, carried something that the first minutes of the video had not: a quiet, settled certainty. "I feel like I look younger than my …" she named names — then caught herself with a grin: "who are younger than me. Hope this doesn't come back around to them, so you might have to cut that."

“I’m on the same path as my husband,” she said. “I know that I will have a very long, healthy life.”

The Hormetic Philosophy

When Shabaz wrote to Elizabeth about sushi, he was not making a point about fish. He was articulating the central principle that governs everything he does: that the goal of medicine is not to eliminate threat but to build the kind of organism that grows better through every encounter.

“We make ourselves strong first,” he wrote, “so that we not only protect ourselves from external harm, but also benefit from engagement by becoming a positive force in the world — bringing change, transforming what is harmful, rather than living in fear of it.”

This is the hormetic philosophy extended beyond biology and into the full scope of human life — the human being acting as the representative of the Divine in creation - a living philosopher’s stone for the darkness and misery encountered in oneself and in others. Cold plunges, and fasts, and exercise, in isolation - all are an easy way out. The path less taken, the high road to real growth, is the willingness to engage with a world that contains real parasites — biological, emotional, social, political — and to trust that a body, mind and heart freed from drosses and finally fully nourished at every level can metabolize what would overwhelm the more fragile. Turn even harm into health.

There is no randomized controlled trial that proves this. There is no institutional validation. There is a naturopath who was an engineer and a philosophy rooted in traditions that predate modern medicine by millennia, a Western-trained physician who staked his reputation and his own body on that philosophy, and a growing legion of patients from around the world whose stories describe the kind of reversals that mainstream medicine considers impossible. Whether that constitutes satisfactory evidence or not no longer matters to those who get fed up enough to live through it. Everyone remembers that the proof is in the pudding. Few remember that the real test is in the tasting.

Elizabeth remembered because she lived through the intimate struggles of someone she held most dear. Near the end of her eleven minute testimonial, her expression softening into conviction as she looked directly into the lens of her phone: “You’re already there. You’re already at the bottom. Why not try something that’s so different, that’s so simple compared to a lot of things, to truly reset the body? You’re already suffering through it. So why don’t you walk a path that allows you to step out into the light on the other side?”

Somewhere in the gap between a question about sushi and an answer about everything stands the hormetic philosophy of life: that the things which challenge us are precisely the things that make us capable of living fully. That the opposite of disease is not the absence of threat but the presence of vitality. That the heart, if you trust it enough to listen, already knows the way.

And that sometimes the hardest part is not the protocol. It is the decision to begin.

In the fourth-century Egyptian desert, the monks had a name for the thing that came for them at midday. They called it the noonday demon, after the destruction that wastes at noon in the Psalm. It struck when the sun stood highest. It made the hours seem to stop. It filled the one it afflicted with a restless disgust for the task at hand and the place they were in, and a longing to be anywhere else. Evagrius of Pontus, who catalogued it, called the condition acedia, and he did not break it into parts. He treated it as one thingⁱ.

The phrase outlived the monks. A reader today is likelier to know it as the title of Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon, the great modern atlas of depression — a book that maps the illness across its full range and depth. But an atlas charts a territory taken as given; the desert monks did something different, reading the noonday demon not as a country to be surveyed but as a message to be deciphered.

The modern mind usually does neither. A person who suffers the condition today often tells themselves they have not one thing but three. The fragmentation encouraged by those who have something to sell. For the collapsed discipline there is a system — habit stacks, accountability partners, a calendar tiled edge to edge. For the scattered attention there is a regimen of subtraction — applications blocked, notifications silenced, the phone exiled to another room. For the grey weight there is a diagnosis and, often, a prescription for the chemical the brain is presumed to lack. Three malfunctions, three repairs, three industries.

None of this is a fraud. Structure genuinely externalizes a will that has weakened, and many are helped by it; a silenced phone really does return some hours to the day. The talking therapies are not theater either: behavioral activation, among the best-studied treatments for depression, reliably lifts people out of it, and the meta-analytic record assembled over two decades by Pim Cuijpers and others is not a record of nothingⁱⁱ. Nor is the medication strictly a placebo in disguise. The largest synthesis ever built — a network meta-analysis of 522 trials and 116,477 patients — found all twenty-one antidepressants studied more effective than a dummy pill in acute depression¹. To wave any of it away is to argue against the evidence instead of from it.

But the same literature, read to the last page, fully digested, does tell us something very concerning that the headlines omit. The advantage of drug over placebo is small — on the standard rating scales, a difference of roughly two points out of fifty-two — and for most patients it falls short of the three-point margin that Britain’s clinical-guidance body set as the threshold for a change a person could feel, clearing that bar only at the most severe end². The story that sold the pills — that depression is a shortage of serotonin the way scurvy is a shortage of vitamin C — turns out to have no consistent evidence behind it at all³. And when dozens of psychiatrists rose to defend the field, their rejoinder was revealing: no serious researcher, they said, had ever held so crude a modelⁱⁱⁱ — a strange thing to say about an idea that had saturated a generation of drug advertising, which told the public, in language the science never supported, that their suffering was a serotonin imbalance a pill could set right [iv]. Meanwhile, the record itself was heavily curated for both public and professional consumption: checked against the complete set of trials held by regulators, the published literature showed ninety-four percent positive where the full data showed fifty-one⁴. The trial most often cited to prove that persistence pays — that switching drug after drug eventually remits most patients — yields, on a contested reanalysis, a true cumulative remission nearer thirty-five percent than the celebrated sixty-seven⁵. This is the familiar signature of a captured field, not a sinister cabal. Upton Sinclair famously pinpointed the banal mechanism in 1935: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

The deeper error, though, is not in the size of the effect, nor even in the curation of the record. Those are scandals to be sure, but the deeper error is one of kind — the premise that the heaviness is a malfunction at all.

Watch what a body does when it is fighting an infection. It withdraws. Appetite falls, energy drops, interest narrows, sleep distorts, the world loses its savor. No good physician mistakes the symptoms for the disease; it is sickness behavior, an evolved program that pulls resources back from the periphery toward the fight, and it runs on the cytokines a stressed or infected body releases. Give any healthy person those cytokines and low mood follows; take the measure of the depressed and the markers are often raised^{6, 7}. This does not prove that every depression is a useful maneuver; a withdrawal held open too long becomes a burden of its own. But it is more reasonable to begin looking for a solution from within this paradigm than from the mainstream one that admits to not knowing the cause of depression or any other complex chronic disease. If depression is an adaptive retreat perhaps the first question should not be what has broken but what the retreat is from.

Depression like all diseases may also be a message. One serious evolutionary reading holds that the rumination of depression — the mind circling a problem it cannot set down — is not malfunction but function: a costly state that seizes attention and pins it to a complex situation the person has failed to resolve⁸. On this account the grey weight is the organism halting a life that is going wrong and refusing to let its owner look away from the question. The symptom is doing something important. The older traditions said as much in another vocabulary: that affliction is not an accident that befalls the self but information about it.

This much, a growing number of mainstream dissenters from the serotonin story would grant. In the last decade those searching for depression’s true cause have waded upstream, finding multiple tributaries to explore. One school locates the disease in the mitochondria, the cell’s power plants, and reads it as a failure of brain energy metabolism^v. Another locates it in the reward system, and reads it as the debt the brain runs up when a flood of cheap, engineered pleasure forces it to turn down its own capacity to want^vi. A third locates it in chronic inflammation, or in the insulin resistance that increasingly travels beside it. Each is right exactly where the serotonin model was wrong: the cause is upstream, in the body, not in a single synapse. And each, having seen that much, repeats the original mistake at a different level of abstraction, crowning a new master mechanism and calling that the disease.

Mitochondria, dopamine, and inflammation are not three candidates competing for a single title. They are three instruments reading the same ground of being, and systems biology has learned to read them together: the links form a loop. Inflammation makes the body’s cells answer insulin poorly; the resulting overload damages the mitochondria; the damaged mitochondria spill reactive waste that inflames the tissues again. Those same mitochondria are the hub where the body under stress turns a dial, setting the amount of energy available for the brain’s reward circuits, the ones that decide whether an effort is worth making⁹. So a depleted terrain — starved of movement and sunlight and real food and sleep, saturated with the inputs it cannot metabolize — registers the loss in its energy metabolism, its reward circuitry, and its inflammatory load together, not because three machines happened to fail at once but because they were never three separate machines to begin with. To ask which is the cause is to ask whether the fever or the racing pulse is the truer sign of the infection. And the terrain claim makes a wager it can be judged by: restore the inputs, and the whole state should lift together rather than one mechanism at a time. That simultaneous lift has not yet been measured head-to-head; it is a prediction, not a result. But the terrain view does not need to refute the upstream findings. It is what they add up to.

This recasts the discipline problem too, because lack of discipline was never the fundamental problem. For an entire generation, willpower was imagined as a kind of fuel — a finite reserve that effort drains and rest restores. That model has not survived inspection: when twenty-three laboratories ran the decisive experiment in concert, the effect meant to prove it came in at essentially zero¹⁰, and the field now describes willpower not as a tank that empties but as attention following motivation. A readout, not a muscle. Dopamine, to run the risk of oversimplifying it as much as we have serotonin, plays a big role in providing motivation - the willingness to climb the hill and pay its cost. Unnaturally deplete it with cheap overstimulation and an animal takes the small reward it can have for nothing over the larger one that costs work — not because it doesn’t want the hard earned reward any longer, but because the engine that turns wanting into moving has run down¹¹.

Attention is the same faculty under another name: to hold the mind on one hard thing and to make oneself do one hard thing are a single capacity. The scattered mind and the slackened will are not two failures but one — and the flood of frictionless novelty that fractures focus is the same flood that drains the drive to act. This used to be common sense, and laboratory findings have been returning us to it: desire — the sense that something is worth its cost — comes first, and the will follows it the way a shadow follows a body walking towards the light. St. Augustine spoke of it sixteen centuries before there was a word for dopamine, likening love to a weight, a force that pulls the soul where it goes^vii. When desire is intact, discipline is nearly invisible; no one needs an accountability partner to do what they love, nor a focus app to attend to what they cannot look away from. When desire is gone, no system easily survives contact with the morning. Todos are downstream of the heart, and the heart is downstream of the terrain.

What the monks described in the language of demons, the physicians described in the language of the body. Melancholy, for Galen, was a disturbance of the whole constitution and not a single broken part; and the physician Ibn Sina, whose Canon taught European physicians for six centuries, carried that forward — melancholy belonged to the whole temperament, and could be met while still forming or left until it hardened, i.e. it was considered a condition whose treatment provided an easy window of opportunity that closes. It turns out this was no quaint intuition. In an individual-participant meta-analysis pooling ten cohorts and nearly 118,000 people, the constitutional cast a Galenic physician would have called melancholic — what moderns measure as neuroticism — both accompanied depression and was the less severe symptom that preceded it¹². Different ages arriving at the same place, one by way of assertion, often from higher first principles and the other by way of evidence: health is a property of the terrain, not of any single thing that happens to be standing on it, and the further that terrain deteriorates the harder it is to purge, replenish and rebuild it.

A healthy terrain is not a coddled one though. The body is neither built for constant comfort nor for constant alarm, but for intermittent stress: the brief, recoverable challenge that leaves it stronger. This is hormesis, and it is not folklore but a measured dose-response, in which a moderate, intermittent stressor — exertion, hunger, cold, the demand to solve something hard — triggers an adaptive overcompensation¹³. It is one reason why, in a head-to-head trial, physical exertion held its own against an antidepressant drug¹⁴: effort is a hormetic input the body expects and has usually been starved of by modern convenience.

But hormesis is only part of the equation. Another is what the terrain is built up from and what it is poisoned by, and there the lever is not stress but substance. When a randomized trial put depressed patients on whole food in place of the processed kind, roughly a third of them remitted against a twelfth of the controls, from nothing but the change of diet: inflammatory inputs withdrawn, the body’s raw materials restored¹⁵.Our tightly engineered environments get both halves wrong at once. They strip out the stressors the body is built to meet — movement, sunlight, hunger, cold, the friction of difficult work — and flood it with ones it cannot adapt to: stimulation calibrated to capture, light at midnight, food that inflames. A ground starved of what builds it and saturated with what wears it down will, eventually, send a sign, and the sign is the symptom.

If the lowest layers of a person can be inputs to the terrain, so can the highest. The very studies used to prove the efficacy of antidepressants depend in part on the placebo’s power - the difference between the sugar and the substance is nearly nil. When researchers look directly at what an inert pill does, they find real events in the brain: the release of the body’s own opioids and dopamine, measurable changes set off by nothing but the expectation of help and the meaning of the encounter¹⁶. The instrument designed to prove the drugs ends up proving an older claim instead: that meaning is a physiological force, not nice to have, but necessary. The same shows up at the scale of a life. In a study of nearly seven thousand adults, those with the least sense of purpose died at well over twice the rate of those with the most, across the full span of causes¹⁷. Viktor Frankl, who survived the camps and built an entire psychiatry based on what he saw there, made a line of Nietzsche’s the center of it: a person with a why to live can bear almost any how. The reasons a person lives for are not decoration laid over the biology. They are part of it.

All of this is why adding a simple remedy to an unchanged terrain so often fails. There is no simple solution when a hurricane hits. Repair and destruction cannot proceed at the same time; a body still being depleted cannot also be healing. The first move is not to add — not the supplement, not the stimulant, not a new system bolted onto an exhausted self — but to remove the inputs wearing you down. And the removing runs from the bottom up, the physical before the emotional before the things of meaning, because the higher faculties stand on the lower — Maslow knew that it’s very difficult to be reasoned or inspired into wanting what an exhausted body cannot yet supply. The mainstream’s most effective talking cure already obeys this logic without naming it: behavioral activation works by walking a person back toward the activities that once nourished them, which is a form of terrain restoration under another name. The desert monks with acedia had it for a very good reason: intense isolation, sensory deprivation, and the monotony of their ascetic routines. Their remedy was to stay — not to flee the cell or chase a new distraction, but to remove the impulse to escape, to remain with the work and tough it out until the noonday demon passed. We don’t have to do what they did. We can just get up and walk out of the room and back into a well-rounded life well-lived.

When the ground of being is restored and the true causes are addressed, something returns that no artificed system can manufacture: desire. The wanting comes back, and with it the effort, and with the effort the discipline and the focus that were never the problem to begin with. This is where real hope lies, and it is no small thing. The body is built to heal: it closes the open wound, knits the broken bone, and replaces the lining of the gut every few days without being told to, without needing a liniment or herb or pharmaceutical to do so. Restore the conditions it requires, and it will do the same with disease. The cure is neither automatic nor painless. It asks the one thing no system can supply: that the person actually change the life that emptied them, which means changing the self, which few are wont to do. Most will not, or cannot yet, and so the hope has to be framed honestly. Every disease has a cure; not every patient is willing to be cured. The noonday demon does not yield to a better todo list. It was never a territory to be mapped or ailment to be medicated but a message to be read, and it yields only when the one it afflicts stops trying to outrun it and begins, instead, to live in a way that gives the heart its reasons back.

You may have missed it in the byline, but we have a new staff writer, Gabriel Malachi, and this is his first of hopefully many pieces to come. Let us know what you think and what he should write about next.

While I’m here I can’t help but leave my two cents: prescriptions are always easier written and given than completed, and the easiest prescription to write is the general one. But that’s really the only kind that can be written for public consumption. Every article that lists a dozen things to do and not do to treat a particular disease is at best making something of a mockery of the human condition and at worst leading some to what may harm them though it helps another. Every good specific prescription is as specific as the person it’s written for. My wife asked me today what treatment would work for a disease and I said there are as many right treatments as there are people suffering with it. Perhaps a bit hyperbolic given the similarities people have with each other, we do tend to fall into groups after all, but it’s probably never more true than it is with depression, which can stem from so many causes and be treated with something as simple as a well-placed idea coming from someone who knows just how to say it to transform a long held worldview, or something as complicated as a multihour daily detox regimen. I’ve seen nothing seem to work for weeks or months and then suddenly the sun rises after someone starts taking just the right kind of propolis, or starts doing a tailored chi kung drill, or starts eating a few grams of roe. The operative word here is “seem”, while nothing may seem to be working, the groundwork is being laid for the change a person needs whether they’re making an effort to get better or not. The disease itself is often the cure for the problem you don’t even know you have, because the disease is just another creation, and the Creator cares more for us than we do for ourselves and knows just what we need to become our best selves.

-Dr Haider

Our thanks goes out to the long time reader who wrote in with the request that turned into this article: “write me something that will help me to adhere to goals, alleviate my depression and bring focus and discipline back into my life.” We hope this is that something for you.

References:

[i] Evagrius, *Praktikos*; carried to the Latin West by John Cassian, *Institutes*, Book X.

[ii] Cuijpers et al., network meta-analysis of psychotherapies for depression, *World Psychiatry*, 2021.

[1] Cipriani et al. Comparative efficacy and acceptability of 21 antidepressant drugs for the acute treatment of adults with major depressive disorder. *Lancet* 2018;391(10128):1357–1366. PMID 29477251.

[2] Kirsch et al. Initial Severity and Antidepressant Benefits: A Meta-Analysis of Data Submitted to the FDA. *PLoS Medicine* 2008;5(2):e45. PMID 18303940.

[3] Moncrieff et al. The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence. *Molecular Psychiatry* 2022. PMID 35854107.

[iii] Jauhar, Cowen, Browning et al., “A leaky umbrella has little value,” *Molecular Psychiatry*, 2023.

[iv] (Lacasse and Leo, *PLoS Medicine*, 2005).

[4] Turner et al. Selective Publication of Antidepressant Trials and Its Influence on Apparent Efficacy. *New England Journal of Medicine* 2008;358(3):252–260. PMID 18199864.

[5] Pigott et al. Efficacy and effectiveness of antidepressants: a reanalysis (STAR*D reanalysis). *BMJ Open* 2023;13(7):e063095. PMID 37491091.

[6] Dantzer et al. From inflammation to sickness and depression: when the immune system subjugates the brain. *Nature Reviews Neuroscience* 2008;9(1):46–56. PMID 18073775.

[7] Miller and Raison. The role of inflammation in depression: from evolutionary imperative to modern treatment target. *Nature Reviews Immunology* 2016;16(1):22–34. PMID 26711676.

[8] Andrews and Thomson. The bright side of being blue: depression as an adaptation for analyzing complex problems. *Psychological Review* 2009;116(3):620–654. PMID 19618990.

[v] Palmer, *Brain Energy*, 2022.

[vi] Lembke, *Dopamine Nation*, 2021.

[9] Picard and McEwen. Psychological Stress and Mitochondria: A Conceptual Framework. *Psychosomatic Medicine* 2018;80(2):126–140. PMID 29389735.

[10] Hagger et al. A Multilab Preregistered Replication of the Ego-Depletion Effect. *Perspectives on Psychological Science* 2016;11(4):546–573. PMID 27474142.

[11] Salamone and Correa. The Mysterious Motivational Functions of Mesolimbic Dopamine. *Neuron* 2012;76(3):470–485. PMID 23141060.

[vii] St Augustine’s Confessions, Book XIII.

[12] Hakulinen et al. Personality and Depressive Symptoms: Individual-Participant Meta-Analysis of 10 Cohort Studies. *Depression and Anxiety* 2015;32(7):461–470. PMID 26014798.

[13] Mattson. Hormesis defined. *Ageing Research Reviews* 2008;7(1):1–7. PMID 18162444.

[14] Blumenthal et al. Exercise and Pharmacotherapy in the Treatment of Major Depressive Disorder. *Psychosomatic Medicine* 2007;69(7):587–596. PMID 17846259.

[15] Jacka et al. A randomised controlled trial of dietary improvement for adults with major depression (the SMILES trial). *BMC Medicine* 2017;15(1):23. PMID 28137247.

[16] Wager and Atlas. The neuroscience of placebo effects: connecting context, learning and health. *Nature Reviews Neuroscience* 2015;16(7):403–418. PMID 26087681.

[17] Alimujiang et al. Association Between Life Purpose and Mortality Among US Adults Older Than 50 Years. *JAMA Network Open* 2019;2(5):e194270. PMID 31125099.

Like most physicians I had never heard of it until Dr Jordan Vaughn started popularizing the diagnosis in the setting of Long Haul and mRNA vaccine injury syndromes.

Even then I shied away from doing a deep dive. It was confusing, it was weird, I couldn’t immediately see a great way to treat it outside of stenting which seemed extreme.

But one patient finally inspired me to figure it out. And truly understanding a disease makes the treatment rather obvious, because real treatment just boils down to knowing and correcting the deepest root causes (and the more superficial triggering ones).

So, to start with, what is Pelvic Congestion Syndrome?

It’s hard to define without explaining some anatomy and physiology, but I’ll try to simplify it as much as I can, and then we’ll get into all the details a bit later. So if this doesn’t make a lot of sense don’t worry, it will become clear.

Pooling of blood in the pelvis leads to elevated pressure in the veins of the pelvis, which leads to elevated pressure in the tissues of the pelvis and legs, which makes it more difficult for nutrients to diffuse in and toxins to diffuse out, which can manifest as leg pain, cramps, leg heaviness, stiffness and perceived weakness and later on as pelvic pain and heaviness, and urinary urgency. As the problem worsens it can spread to the autonomic nervous system leading to orthostatic hypotension (dizziness on standing), postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) and generalized fatigue. These symptoms can be continuous or intermittent, in which case they can be short-lived or prolonged depending on the duration of aggravating factors like standing or sitting. Symptoms may improve with movement or laying down as the congestion itself is relieved.

Symptoms would be expected to worsen from static standing without activation of the calf pump, when the hip is flexed and the iliac veins get kinked, and when there is lowered oxygen tension and dehydration, as when flying.

RISK FACTORS

Factors that make pelvic congestion syndrome more likely include pelvic surgery, prolonged standing (not the perfect solution to sitting we thought it was) and a generally sedentary lifestyle , frequent heavy lifting, anatomical abnormalities that increase the likelihood of pelvic vein compression, joint hypermobility syndromes, mineral deficiencies including low salt diets, dehydration, multiple pregnancies, hormonal fluctuations, and more which will be discussed below.

PCS ANATOMY & PATHOPHYSIOLOGY

The common iliac veins are the two large veins that drain blood up out of the legs. Just above the pelvis, they, along with many other veins, combine into the inferior vena cava which ascends to drain directly into the heart. Since veins are low pressure vessels moving blood against gravity by the contraction of surrounding muscles, they have one way valves within them. As blood moves up the vein towards the heart through the one way valves, it will be secured from refluxing back.

Pelvic venous congestion is primarily due to excessive laxity of the walls of the iliac veins and other lower extremity veins, along with deteriorating venous valvular function. The pathology is related to inflammation and in some cases misfolding of intrinsic and surrounding structural proteins, and secondarily due to stagnation of the blood which might be influenced by microscopic clotting, clumping of red blood cells, and decreases in (Gerald Pollack’s) “4th phase of water” structured gel-like consistency of the blood. All of these are here postulated to contribute to excessive pooling of blood in the pelvis.

Pelvic congestion increases the “interstitial” fluid pressure - the pressure of fluid around the cells of tissues - in all areas that drain into the pelvis, from the kidneys down to the bladder and into the legs. This stagnation deteriorates oxygen and nutrient delivery, as the incoming arterial blood has more trouble exiting the arteries into the interstitial fluid space. On the other hand there is a buildup of metabolic waste products as they have trouble getting out from the interstitial fluid space into the veins. Pelvic congestion also decreases circulating blood volume since there is excess blood remaining in the pelvic veins, unavailable for circulation, which also contributes to body-wide decreased blood perfusion and nutrient delivery.

The kidneys respond to this situation by upregulating the hormonal renin angiotensin aldosterone system (RAAS) in an attempt to increase blood volume by increasing blood pressure (via angiotensin) and retaining salt and water (via aldosterone). The adrenal glands respond by increasing stress hormones which further stimulate increased arterial pressure and cardiac output. Both of these pathways are dialed up in an attempt to deliver more blood to tissues. However they aren’t designed to be chronically stimulated, so eventually lead to a dysfunctional state: the increase in sympathetic dominance further reduces venous smooth muscle tone which further promotes venous pooling, which again feeds back into worsening sympathetic dominance in a vicious cycle.

PREVALENCE & ASSOCIATED RISKS

Until Long COVID and COVID vaccine injuries were linked to this syndrome it had historically been diagnosed exclusively in women, thought to affect only around 5% of them, and the mainstream consensus continues to ignore the possibility of the syndrome occurring in men.

Rather than being rare and limited to women, we suspect that most people in modern industrialized societies have some degree of chronic pelvic congestion due to excessive sitting, which likely contributes to the frequency of prostatic hypertrophy in older men, various pelvic disorders in women including infertility, and bladder, kidney, cardiovascular and metabolic disorders in both sexes, either directly or indirectly, due to harmful effects on the autonomic nervous system.

CAUSES REVEAL CURES

We’ll be covering Spike protein related pathologies, physical trauma (primarily surgery), excessive standing and sitting, diet (this is where it gets really interesting), including salt and potassium, macro and (other) micronutrients, water, sunlight (also remarkably interesting), artificial light, and POMC, artifical fibers, the impossiblity of titrating supplement-based vitamin D and how harmful that can be (definitely read this even if you skip the rest), grounding, and body building.

Warning: this is a long one. Over 8000 words.

And it’s dense.

So buckle up, turn off Netflix, get off Facebook and (ideally) print it out so you don’t have to stare at this backlit blue light screen for an hour or three.

If you make it to the end, or even the end of the beginning you will know more about PCS than 99.99% of doctors on this planet.

We’ll start with everyones favorite villain: spike protein.

Spike Protein-Related Pathology

Pelvic congestion is thought to be particularly characteristic of so-called COVID-19 spike protein-opathies, which can be caused by both mRNA COVID-19 vaccines (vaccine injury), as well as COVID-19 infections (Long COVID). It is possible to diagnose in some cases with advanced imaging of pelvic veins when done by a skilled and experienced operator (aware of the syndrome).

Spike protein associated injuries, like those from any toxin, have a minimum dose required for manifestation and therefore can develop after repeated exposures with incomplete clearance. They may also reflect ongoing chronic infection with COVID-19 within sequestered tissues which are not amenable to confirmation via testing.

The vascular inflammation of so-called spike protein-opathies is initiated by the destruction of the cells lining the walls of arteries and veins. This destruction is either triggered by the intravascular spread of the mRNA vaccine or a bloodborne (relatively severe) COVID infection. In the first case cells are transfected while in the second they are infected. In both cases the affected cells machinery is taken over and in the case of the vaccine used solely to produce spike protein, while in the case of infection to produce spike plus other viral proteins. In both cases these affected cells are targeted and destroyed by the immune system.

It was initially claimed the vaccine stayed in the arm where it was injected, despite data clearly showing this was untrue. Mechanistically it could not have remained at the site of muscle injection because muscles are very well vascularized and simple mechanistic modeling shows that any injection into a muscle will always be in close proximity to numerous tiny arterioles and simple diffusion of the injected material will lead to intravascular leakage. This will be even more likely and severe in the athletically fit since their muscles can be up to 40% more vascularized than those of sedentary individuals. This may explain why there seemed to be a preponderance of young, fit patients in some clinics devoted to vaccine injury and long COVID.

Pelvic congestion seems to particularly affect patients with Long COVID and mRNA vaccine injuries. If the above mechanism is correct then it stands to reason that once the COVID virus or vaccine lipid nanoparticles become bloodborn they would concentrate in areas of chronic blood pooling like the pelvis.

Following from the above, there are two primary reasons pelvic veins become lax in spike protein-opathies.

First there is connective tissue weakening due to misfolding of normal bodily proteins triggered by the partial digestion of spike protein which exposes prion-like domains. Prions are proteins that trigger the misfolding of other proteins, which themselves then trigger misfolding of further proteins in a cascading manner. True prion diseases like Mad Cow Disease and Creutzfeld Jacob’s disease (CJD) in humans are self propagating and rapidly fatal. Prion-like diseases are not, and include Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, ALS and perhaps long COVID/Vaccine injury syndromes, all of which are reversible.

Blood is a specialized fluid connective tissue and it doesn’t escape the protein misfolding problem. In the blood this presents as amyloid fibrin microclotting and destruction of the negative zeta potential (making it more positive), which, again, is a negative charge found on surfaces of cells and proteins inside the blood. Collapse of the zeta potential leads to red blood cell clumping and vascular wall damage since the negative surface charges in the blood keep not only blood constituents separated, but also prevent them from scraping against and damaging the walls of the vessels.

The amyloid fibrin microclots are reportedly very difficult, if not impossible for the body’s own clot busting enzymes to deal with, so require treatment.

Along with misfolded proteins there is general tissue inflammation and these together lead to weakening of connective tissues generally including within the walls of veins, which leads them to become more compliant or stretchy, leading directly to venous pooling.

Usual medical treatments for pelvic congestion syndromes in spike protein-opathy focused clinics include filtering the blood via various types of plasmapheresis (to remove the microclots), stem cell growth factors, natural and prescription blood thinners (to break down the microclots), and stenting open the iliac veins, all of which have lead to relief of symptoms in some patients.

A rational approach to root cause treatment would include generally removing the harmful predisposing factors, and optimizing any health promoting lifestyle factors that are missing or deficient, and supporting the body in reversing the pathology. A traditional medical approach would consider even natural clot busting treatments with some caution and veer away from the implantation of stents, which though they may immediately improve flow and relieve congestion, are ultimately just a temporary measure that doesn’t address the underlying pathologies, rather leaving them to continue worsening.

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Trauma

Pelvic congestion syndromes are more likely in patients who have had prior pelvic surgeries, even minimally invasive ones, because of how packed everything is in the pelvis. Any manipulation or surgical intervention causes inflammation and edema which will affect surrounding structures, not just what was targeted. Surrounding organs, along with arteries, veins, lymphatics and nerves will all be impacted and the correlation between prior surgical trauma and the syndrome indicates there is a persistent decrease in resilience after surgery despite what may seem to be a full functional recovery.

Standing

Earlier studies on activity and health outcomes led to the popular refrain that “sitting is the new smoking,” since it was linked to an elevated risk of stroke and heart disease. This kicked off a boom in standing desk sales. However, followup studies showed that static standing did not mitigate the risk of stroke and heart disease, rather it added a new risk: that of developing lower extremity venous stasis diseases. The latest guidelines recommend frequent movement and have given rise to a new product: under (standing) desk treadmills, or all-in-one treadmill desks.

Excessive static standing increases pressure in the legs and forces veins to remain chronically expanded and can lead to dysfunctional venous wall dynamics and damaged venous valves. Prolonged static standing, like chair sitting is not a natural behaviour in primitive or traditional societies where frequent movement and postural shifting is the norm. Walking does not raise pelvic pressure the way standing does because it activates the venous calf pump, also referred to as the second heart, driving blood out of the lower body venous network and back to the actual heart.

Standing while doing intellectual work is similar to looking at a backlit screen in that just as the eyes tend to stay open without blinking when staring at a screen, the legs tend to stay abnormally still when standing during intellectual work because focusing the mind automatically suppresses bodily movement.

Prolonged standing predisposes to the development of pelvic congestion as the veins have been trained to be abnormally compliant and there tends to be more blood pooling in the pelvis and lower limbs than in someone who doesn’t stand as much.

If and when leg swelling develops it is a natural, protective reaction to increased pressure in the venous system. As fluid shifts from the veins into surrounding tissues it lowers intravenous pressure while raising interstitial fluid pressure - the pressure in the fluid around cells. Higher interstitial fluid pressure helps support the veins by pushing back in on them from without. While leg swelling is bothersome it provides a buffer against venous damage which is removed by artificial external compression forcing tissue fluid back into the venous system, once again raising the pressure to unsustainable levels and eventually leading to their excessive laxity and valvular damage. The unrelieved pressure triggers chronic inflammation which damages the venous walls and then leads to a chronic condition of fluid exudation out of veins even with minimal pressure increases that would have previously been well tolerated without swelling.

The solution is not external pressure to counteract edema, but first recognizing that the symptom itself is perfectly designed to provide the (temporary) mitigating solution, as is so often the case in natural homeostatic systems. Interfering with the system’s natural feedback loops only worsens the original problem those loops are meant to buffer or resolve, creating a vicious cycle of ever more aggressive bandaid-style fixes applied to ever worsening symptoms. The body will continue attempting to find the best possible solution given the escalating circumstances until and unless it is unable to do so.

The natural root cause solution while repairing the structural integrity of the venous system is to avoid excessive static standing and replace it with slow continuous walking or frequent changes in position, perhaps alternating at fixed intervals between immobility and motion. For example one study showed reduced leg edema in participants who moved for 1 minute in every 10. Another study showed marked benefits on insulin resistance and cholesterol levels from simply raising and lowering the heels continuously while sitting (coined the “soleus pushup”, as it specifically activates the soleus muscle, termed the “second heart” due to it being the primary muscle the body uses to pump blood back from the legs, and which is functionally unique in its metabolic effects, reminiscent of the fidgety, bouncing legs of young children when forced to sit still in a chair. Specifically the study showed that those who performed this simple heel raising exercise continuously while seated for a few hours had a 52% decrease in blood sugar post meals, 60% less rise in insulin, and decreases in VLD and triglycerides.

Excessive standing is also a stressor as the vascular system is trained to rely more on sympathetic nervous system activation to maintain blood pressure in the presence of decreased effective circulating blood volume on the arterial side. Excess sympathetic activation itself worsens any chronic condition.

Diet

Salt and Potassium

Most adults need 1-2 teaspoons of salt daily, and it’s best consumed with food spread out throughout the day. Increased amounts of salt are required in the presence of dietary carbohydrates because salt is required to absorb glucose in the intestine, and the body requires 3-4 grams of water for every gram of carbohydrate it stores as glycogen. While very low salt intake can be tolerated by many without apparent issue for decades due to imperfect, but powerful conservation mechanisms, the situation can eventually destabilize into a disease state when compensatory systems start to break down.

Salt is absolutely necessary to osmotically anchor water in the bloodstream and therefore in order to maintain adequate blood volume, upon which tissue perfusion depends. When salt intake is chronically low the kidneys become very good at preventing salt from leaving the body in urine by excreting potassium instead (and the skin excludes salt from the sweat as well). The kidneys also become very good at immediately expelling any excess water taken in which would further dilute salt in the blood, which leads to sudden trips to the bathroom after drinking even small amounts of water.

Long term salt restriction chronically activates the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system (RAAS) to increase sodium retention in the blood at the expense of expelling potassium into the urine. This also impairs the clearance of calcium, inflammatory proteins and metabolic byproducts during stress. Over time when the kidneys can no longer adequately compensate for low and declining salt levels, circulating blood volume decreases and the sympathetic nervous system is recruited to maintain blood pressure in the arteries, but this isn’t completely compensatory, as some blood volume still shifts into the venous side of the system, because venous wall tone can’t rise as much as arterial tone. The resultant chronic venous pooling eventually leads to excessive venous wall laxity, the primary cause of pelvic congestion.

Potassium loss in the urine to retain salt has broad downstream consequences that are also especially relevant to pelvic congestion syndrome. Potassium is essential for maintaining normal electrical polarization of muscle cells, vascular smooth muscle, and autonomic nerves. As potassium declines, cells become more electrically unstable and calcium entry increases, promoting muscle tension, cramping, and poor relaxation. In the venous system, this destabilizes smooth muscle tone, making veins less able to coordinate constriction and relaxation in response to posture and pressure changes. Rather than improving venous return, sympathetic activation becomes noisy and ineffective in the setting of these electrolyte disturbances, which promotes pelvic pooling rather than correcting it.

Potassium depletion also worsens insulin sensitivity in the muscle cells, slowing glucose uptake and glycogen storage. This prolongs stress hormone signaling after exercise or standing, keeping the autonomic nervous system biased toward a high-alert state. In PCS, where recovery from pressure loading is already impaired, this delayed metabolic recovery means venous walls and pelvic support tissues spend more time under stress without adequate repair.

At the microcirculatory level, low potassium degrades zeta potential, which is a measure of the strength of the negative surface charge on bloodborne constituents which create the electrostatic repulsion (opposites charges attract and like charges repel) that keeps blood cells and proteins dispersed and flowing smoothly. Potassium also supports stable “hydration shells” around proteins (basically a coating of water molecules) and electrical gradients at other cell surfaces, including the cells lining the blood vessels. When potassium is low, calcium’s effects dominate. Calcium has a 2+ electrical charge vs potassium’s 1+ charge, so when the ratio shifts to more calcium it interacts more with cell surfaces and strongly diminishes the surrounding negative zeta potential. Decreased zeta potential means red blood cells get sticky and clump together more easily, and their movement becomes more sluggish. This worsens capillary flow and venous drainage because individual red blood cells have to deform and squeeze through single file inside the smallest capillaries, compounding pelvic congestion even in the absence of visible clotting or structural obstruction.

In the broader PCS context, chronic low sodium leading to potassium depletion creates a vicious cycle: reduced plasma volume triggers sympathetic and hormonal compensation, potassium loss destabilizes vascular and autonomic control, blood flow dynamics worsen, and venous pooling increases. The body remains upright and perfused, but at the cost of inefficient flow, heightened autonomic noise, pelvic pressure, urinary urgency, muscle cramps, and poor tolerance to prolonged standing, sitting, and low oxygen states like air travel.

Given these mechanisms it would be expected that preventing and/or reversing PCS would in part involve optimizing salt and potassium intake. It’s been estimated based on population level research that 4700mg per day of potassium is required for most people to avoid signs of deficiency. This is far more than most people obtain from food unless specifically including potassium dense sources like potatoes and juiced vegetables.

Water

Most people when not sweating excessively need around 2-3 liters of fluid a day from all sources to maintain healthy blood flow to the kidneys and normal urine output. Excessive and more frequent urination at these levels is usually in part due to electrolyte abnormalities, especially a deficiency of salt, along with inflammatory and stress signaling as alluded to earlier.

Despite normal fluid intake the body can still have decreased blood and urine volume in PCS since an excess of fluid is shifted out of the blood and into tissues like the pelvis and legs. In this situation there is less than adequate excretion of waste products (urea, uric and other organic acids, sulfates, phosphate, oxalate) due to diminished urine production and chronic stress on the kidneys to maintain blood volume as well as chronic sympathetic nervous system activation. The reduced clearance of metabolic waste directly worsens PCS. In the case of urea this is via further contributing to the drawing of water out of the blood and into tissues. Increased uric acid acts as a danger signal, activates endothelial inflammation, reduces nitric oxide, and increases vascular smooth muscle tone dysregulation. Increases in organic acids like lactate increase pain sensitivity in the legs, impair mitochondrial enzymes and promote muscle fatigue and cramps. Sulfate retention leads to thicker extracellular fluid and poor drainage. Phosphate retention promotes vascular calcification, stiffens smooth muscle and connective tissues, and decreases mitochondrial function. Oxalate retention triggers local inflammation and activates pain signals.

In this pathological state there is an outsized difference in the physiological effects of water consumed with food, and plain or mineral water consumed between meals.

The water consumed with food, or within food itself is subject to the peculiar hormonal milieu and physiology of the feeding state. In particular the water is part of the digestive process and is only slowly absorbed into the blood stream, then once absorbed it does not adequately raise effective circulating blood volume throughout the body for two reasons: 1. There is an increase in blood flow to the gut arteries and veins during digestion, meaning less blood left for the rest of the body, and 2. Insulin release quickly drives water that is absorbed into the blood stream back out of the blood and into tissues. In this state, despite consuming relatively large amounts of water with a meal, e.g. in the form of soup, yogurt, or fruit, the effective circulating blood volume may actually drop during the meal, triggering an acute danger response by the kidneys to raise stress hormones and blood pressure.

The water consumed between meals is dealt with entirely differently: it rapidly enters the bloodstream without being driven back out by insulin, so it expands blood volume and sends the kidneys a signal of sufficiency prompting them to decrease RAAS stress signaling, and quieting the adrenals as well, lowering cortisol and adrenaline. Along with adequate salt intake, consuming more of the daily water requirement outside of meals rather than during them is likely required for gradually unraveling the pathology of PCS.

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Widespread Effects of Dehydration in PCS

When the blood is thicker than it should be (dehydrated), it decreases nutrient delivery due to poor blood flow and inefficient capillary exchange, which is a stressor that chronically up regulates the sympathetic nervous system. Concomitant fluid excess in the extracellular compartment also impairs repair processes there, and slows healing of the lining of blood vessels.

Blood stagnation worsens with salt and fluid restriction not only because of decreased blood volume, but because of decreased renal perfusion, which decreases clearance of harmful substances and activates the renin angiotensin aldosterone system to retain more salt and water. These tilt the balance towards positive charges in the blood, meaning negative zeta potential decreases, which leads to blood cell clumping and impact collisions and damage to the cells lining the blood vessels.

Urinary frequency and urgency in this context are related primarily to inflammation of bladder wall and nerves from pelvic congestion itself, and sympathetic dominance, dehydration, and decreased effective circulating blood volume due to venous pooling, all of which lead to intermittent delivery of blood to the kidneys during postural changes, at night, after meals, and in cold weather, and make the bladder more sensitive to the intermittent filling. Though drinking less can acutely decrease trips to the bathroom, in the long term it tends to worsen the syndrome itself, so it eventually backfires.

Muscle cramps in addition to being triggered by pelvic venous congestion itself can also be a problem before the pelvic congestion even develops because of low salt intake and dehydration caused by the low effective circulating blood volume causing relative lack of nutrient delivery, and sympathetic overdrive causing increased excitability of muscle fibers. Dehydration in the setting of already increased blood viscosity due to zeta potential defects and other factors to be discussed below, also worsens circulation to the muscles. Increased inflammation, vitamin D excess from supplementation, and the resulting relative calcium excess and magnesium and potassium deficiency, can all contribute to increased cramping. Finally as connective tissue breaks down with age or due to sudden onset of spike protein-related inflammation (discussed below) muscles lose some of their structural scaffold and under acute physical stress, parts of the muscle may cramp in an attempt to provide necessary support where it is now lacking. This will also tend to decrease functional strength which depends on sufficient connective tissue strength to safely allow maximal muscle contraction since internal tendon/muscle fiber reflex loops will automatically tamp down on muscle contraction despite signals to the contrary from the brain, in order to protect from tendon rupture.

Dry eyes are in part related to relative dehydration as well as inflammation and autonomic dysfunction affecting the tear-producing glands, Meibonian gland oil secretion, and blink rate. Further reduction in blinking rate is induced by backlit computer monitor use.

Normalizing hydration can seem to worsen the situation if it’s done without also addressing lack of frequent movement and other factors to ensure the extra fluid increases effective circulating volume rather than simply contributing to the pooled pelvic volume.

The type of hydration also matters, with big cold boluses of pure water being more likely to worsen symptoms than frequent small sips and warm, electrolyte-rich fluids.

Macronutrients & Micronutrients

The timing of carbohydrates relative to exercise is important because muscle glycogen (the storage form of glucose) repletion is most efficient in the hours following training, when insulin sensitivity and glucose uptake are highest. When carbohydrates are not concentrated around this window, total daily intake may appear adequate on paper, yet glycogen stores remain suboptimal. This mismatch can lead to persistent low-grade stress signaling despite sufficient caloric intake, contributing to fatigue, orthostatic symptoms, pelvic heaviness, leg weakness and pain, and poor recovery. In this context, carbohydrates function less as “fuel” and more as a signal that allows the nervous and vascular systems to stand down from the stress of exercise.

A related concept is the “stress-dominant diet,” which does not refer to psychological stress but to a metabolic state characterized by low sodium, insufficient glycogen restoration, marginal protein signaling (due to incomplete, in terms of amino acids, or insufficient quantity of protein for activity levels), and/or chronic caloric limitations. In such diets, the body relies disproportionately on cortisol and catecholamines to maintain blood pressure, blood sugar, and performance. This state increases sympathetic tone, raises baseline pelvic floor tension, and destabilizes venous and bladder reflexes, all of which can worsen PCS symptoms even in the absence of overt nutritional deficiency.

Micronutrient balance further modulates this picture. For example, diets high in dairy products often provide large amounts of calcium, which is not inherently harmful but becomes problematic when not balanced by adequate magnesium, which is very difficult to obtain with modern whole foods due to soil depletion. Excess calcium relative to magnesium increases smooth-muscle excitability and pelvic floor guarding, indirectly raising intra-abdominal pressure and thereby impairing venous outflow from the pelvis. Magnesium and potassium deficiencies—quite common in low-salt, and stress-dominant diets—worsen cramps, venous tone instability, sleep disruption, and autonomic reactivity. Manganese, copper, zinc, iodine, iron, and vitamin K2 are also frequently marginal in diets that appear otherwise healthy, and inadequacy in these nutrients can impair endothelial function, thyroid-mediated vascular tone, and connective-tissue maintenance. Manganese especially has been noted by some functional practitioners to improve the chronic and acute ligamentous laxity syndromes that are associated with a predisposition to developing pelvic congestion syndrome.

To review and expand on these, sodium deficiency lowers effective circulating blood volume, worsens venous pooling, increasing sympathetic tone, increases urinary frequency and worsens cramps.

Manganese is often low in those not consuming whole grains, nuts and seeds, especially since soils are poor. Manganese is required for mitochondrial health, connective tissue and vessel wall maintenance and repair and neurotransmitter balance.

Potassium is found in vegetables, but unless specifically aiming for sufficiency (estimated at 4700 mg+/day, based on large population data sets) it is likely low especially in those limiting salt, due to renal wasting to conserve sodium. Low potassium increases muscle excitability/cramps, and worsens venous tone.

Due to soil deficiency, magnesium is difficult for anyone to get enough of from diet alone, unless purposely eating significant quantities of magnesium rich foods like pumpkin seeds. Deficiency is linked to a wide array of symptoms and signs since it’s involved in hundreds of chemical reactions, but in PCS specifically it can cause muscle cramps, and venous tone instability.

Iron absorption is impaired by dairy intake, and iron is poorly absorbed from vegetables, a problem for those not eating red meat regularly. Deficiency can worsen fatigue, exercise tolerance and autonomic nervous system stability.

Zinc is often deficient in those avoiding red meat, shellfish and seeds. Deficiency impairs connective tissue repair, lowers testosterone, and worsen immune and autonomic function.

Iodine may be low unless eating plenty of seafood and sea vegetables. This can decrease thyroid functioning which worsens venous pooling. However repletion must be gradual and titrated carefully as the thyroid is extremely sensitive to sudden changes in iodine intake.

Finally, chronic under-eating deserves special mention. Even when body weight and gym strength appear stable, prolonged low-calorie intake can suppress metabolic flexibility, reduce tissue repair capacity, and maintain elevated stress hormones. The body does its utmost to preserve muscle mass at the expense of all else including vascular resilience, autonomic stability, and connective-tissue turnover (however once calorie restriction and chronic stress do lead to cannibalization of muscle, it is the postural muscles that go first - this along with connective tissue breakdown is why the posture of older adults tends to deteriorate). In PCS, this pattern often manifests as worsening pelvic symptoms, increased sensitivity to posture and travel, and slower recovery times, despite maintaining other signs of fitness.

Overall, dietary patterns that tend to be better tolerated in PCS, and contribute to healing, share common features rather than a strict macronutrient formula: adequate sodium relative to fluid intake, fluids between rather than in food or with meals, sufficient complete protein including from red meat (for iron) with adequate levels of the amino acid glycine for connective tissue repair (from broth) and leucine, to trigger mTOR and signal the body to rebuild (from eggs), enough total calories to support recovery, sufficient carbohydrates timed to activity for restoring glycogen and anti-stress signaling, and balanced mineral intake. These patterns improve venous filling, stabilize autonomic reflexes, reduce urinary and pelvic symptoms, and increase tolerance to standing, sitting, and travel. In PCS, relatively small nutritional shifts often produce disproportionately large changes in daily function.

Sunlight

Sunlight is a nutrient as essential as food and water. Like processed or artificial foodstuffs, processed natural light and entirely artificial light are both harmful.

Sunlight positively impacts the functioning of the immune, endocrine, lymphatic, musculoskeletal, gastrointestinal, cardiovascular, and central/peripheral nervous systems, in other words there is nothing in the body that doesn’t depend on sunlight for proper functioning.

Some of the physiological effects of sunlight that impact Pelvic Congestion include:

1. Imparting energy used to charge separate (as in a battery) and structure intra- and extra-cellular water into a gel-like liquid crystal matrix necessary for all of life’s functions including many that are dependent on quantum effects like electron and proton hopping and tunneling. Structured water in the blood helps prevent vessel wall damage by creating a gel-like layer that physically excludes solutes and the charge separation between the inner and outer segments creates spontaneous circulation of the blood, not dependent on the pumping action of the heart or muscles, that is present in the developing fetus before the heart even forms, and contributes to normal blood flow and is crucial for moving blood out of the capillaries and through the veins.

2. Increasing dopamine improves autonomic flexibility, and encourages movement.

3. Alpha-MSH produced by sunlight is anti-inflammatory, stabilizes the endothelial lining of blood vessels, and supports tissue repair.

4. Increases Vitamin D in the context of UVA/infrared signaling which also balances other hormone levels and Nitric Oxide which leads to coordinated support for collagen synthesis. Vitamin D also improves smooth muscle functioning in vessel walls.

5. Improving estrogen and testosterone balance which normalizes venous wall stiffness and recoil.

6. Increasing thyroid hormone improves venous smooth muscle tone and supports lymphatic and venous return.

7. Increasing BDNF/GDNF supports the autonomic nervous system, improves baroreceptor reflex control to lower venous pooling, reduces erratic bladder signaling which reduces urinary urgency symptoms and improves pelvic floor neural coordination.

8. Increasing oxytocin promotes parasympathetic tone, reduces destructive stress hormones, and modulates smooth muscle and vascular tone.

9. Increasing Nitric Oxide improves endothelial function, enhances microcirculation, reduces shear stress and improves RBC deformability.

10. Increasing prostaglandins decreases inflammation, and supports tissue repair.

11. Improving mitochondrial efficiency increases ATP availability.

Each of these individual effects is small to moderate, but they stack together to create an overall effect that is incredibly powerful while remaining perfectly balanced.

UVA light is especially important for anchoring circadian rhythms, increasing dopamine production, enhancing immunity, reducing inflammation, remodeling collagen in connective tissue, and increasing nitric oxide production (which improves circulation).

Some of sunlight’s effects depend on UV-B, that fraction of sunlight which leads to tanning - particularly vitamin D related ones, and these are important regardless of skin tone. Even very light skinned populations historically were exposed to midday UV-B laden sunlight (without burning) due to a combination of protective reasons including gradually increasing exposures as winter transitioned to summer, nutrient sufficiency, lack of inflammatory signaling from modern toxins, and protective “pretreatment” and “post-treatment” of the skin with early morning and late afternoon UV-A and infrared rich sunlight, which have antiinflammatory healing effects to counteract any inflammation triggered by the UV-B exposure

Some of the effects specifically depend on infrared which enhances collagen synthesis, as well as other connective tissue constituents like elastin and hyaluronic acid.

Proopiomelanocortin (POMC)

POMC is a precursor peptide that is cleaved into multiple important hormonal products in response to bright morning and daytime sunlight exposure specifically to the eyes, rather than the skin. Indoor lighting is of inadequate brightness and lacking in sufficient UVA and Infrared required for triggering the production of these hormones.

The specific peptides cleaved from POMC that are relevant to the PCS story are:

1. α-MSH which is anti-inflammatory, and helps protect and stabilize endothelium, reduce vascular permeability, enhance nitric oxide signaling, supports collagen and connective tissue repair and contributes to autonomic nervous system balance.

2. Β-endorphin which modulates and reduces pain, improves parasympathetic tone, buffers stress responses and improves emotional resilience.

3. ACTH/cortisol, imbalance of which contributes to increased blood viscosity and venous pooling.

4. γ-MSH regulates salt and water balance, deficiency increases salt sensitivity, blood pressure dysregulation and abnormal volume sensing in the blood.

5. β-MSH secondary contributor to inflammatory balance.

6. Corticotropin-like intermediate peptide (CLIP) modulates insulin sensitivity and influences glucose handling to prevent excessive cortisol driven insulin resistance.

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Immunity, Infrared Light and Original Antigenic Sin (OAS)

Infrared light boosts the functioning of the innate immune system, which is the first line of defense against infection and does not depend on immune memory. This is particularly important for those whose immune memory is suboptimal for a particular infectious disease, e.g. it is suspected that many of those who received the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, developed incomplete immune imprinting, a phenomenon known in immunology as “Original Antigenic Sin” (OAS).

OAS has been well characterized in respiratory viruses since the 1950s and is the phenomenon whereby the immune system imprints strongly upon first exposure to a new antigen, but fails to recognize it in the future if it mutates extensively. This is particularly problematic in the case of vaccines that depend on a single antigen, as the mRNA vaccines depend on the spike protein, as opposed to a natural infection where the immune system imprints on multiple antigens simultaneously and thus creates a more holistic picture of the infectious agent.

For various reasons the issue of OAS was dismissed to clear the way for the rapid development of emergency mRNA vaccines. In hindsight this has been problematic as the virus has rapidly mutated to evade vaccine immune responses and the immune systems of some of those vaccinated have perhaps to greater or lesser degrees been less able to reorient to the rapidly changing variants.

Infrared is particularly helpful in this situation as it strengthens non-specific barriers to infection by enhancing mitochondrial functioning, nitric oxide signaling, blood flow, and broad spectrum immune cell trafficking.

Processed and Artificial Light

Just like processed or entirely artificial foods are categorically unhealthy, processed and artificial light is similarly harmful, if not more so.

Clear window glass, despite allowing in all visible light, both inadvertently blocks some and oftentimes purposefully blocks out even more of the important dynamically varying wavelengths of UVA, UVB and infrared, which are required to properly balance the physiological effects of visible light.

Artificial lighting is even more spectrally imbalanced than filtered sunlight, with sharp frequency spikes rather than a natural gradient of wavelengths.

Our eyes and by extension our brains are our most light sensitive organs and they are negatively affected by staring at blue color dominant computer screen backlights, even though equivalent color output could have been achieved (somwhat less economically) with a more natural mix of light wavelengths used to stimulate the same perception of blue and other colors. In particular the 450 nm wavelength at which blue LEDs are most efficiently produced and most effective for backlighting is particularly harmful to the eye, brain and rest of the body via downstream effects on light sensitive proteins and hormonal pathways.

Flickering is a separate source of neurological and metabolic stress and is still found in some computer screens (though most modern ones are now flicker free). It’s also a problem with CFL light bulbs, and some cheaper LED light bulbs. Incandescent and halogen bulbs don’t flicker, and of the commonly available bulb options the spectrum of incandescents is closest to natural light.

Effects of excess blue light exposure during the daytime without other balancing wavelengths (especially UVA and infrared which enhance mitochondrial repair and reduce reactive oxygen species):

1. Harms the retina directly leading to macular degeneration via excessive unopposed breakdown of retinol and oxidative stress.

2. Blue light directly increases oxidative stress which is the underlying cause of cataracts since increased oxidative stress is what leads to build up of the damaged proteins that cloud the lens. In fact in animal models it is extremely cataractogenic, far more than UVB, which is usually singled out as the culprit and a reason people are told to wear UV blocking lenses in the sun. The evidence for the cataract forming tendency of UVB light is confounded by poor study design in the lab where UVB is used in isolation, not taking into account the balancing effects of early morning sunlight to increase antioxidant capacity in the lens, as well as the balancing effects of other wavelengths present in midday sunlight along with UVB. Observational data on outdoor workers and cataracts is confounded by dehydration, heat stress, and not controlling for those wearing corrective lenses which block beneficial parts of the sunlight spectrum and often even block UVB, but expose wearers to blue light. So whereas UVB light in isolation can cause cataracts, in nature UVB is never found in isolation and natural sunlight with UVB is likely protective as would be expected in an organism designed to live outdoors under the sun.

Rather than considering cataracts to be problematic they could perhaps be conceived of as a built-in excess blue light-blocking mechanism. Reversing cataracts without addressing all the reasons they developed allows progression of the deeper problems triggered by excess blue light exposure.

The other causative factor in cataract formation is closely related to static standing and the impaired fluid dynamics that leads to, namely static staring at a fixed distance. The way the lens works is that it changes shape to bend light and focus it on the retina. When the lens is flatter it bends light less than when it fattens. If the lens frequently switches from flat to fat it will tend to pump fluid in and out - moving necessary nutrients like the antioxidant glutathione into the lens and moving metabolic waste out. This will prevent cataract formation by relieving oxidative stress.

So the problem isn’t necessarily reading, or viewing a monitor, it is lack of variety, not frequently switching between near and far, similar to the problem with venous tension related not to being upright, but to being too still.

This highlights how similar categories of underlying root causes are often reflected at different levels. In this case physically, but the principle usually extends to other levels of human existence including the energetic, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual planes.

Other blue light harms:

3. Blue light also increases cortisol levels and overactivates the sympathetic nervous system which impairs collagen repair, venous wall recoil, connective tissue remodeling, and microcirculatory dynamics.

4. Negative effects of nighttime blue light excess from indoor lighting include melatonin suppression, which leads not only to relative sleep deficits/circadian dysfunction, but also to bladder hypersensitivity, worsened immunity, more inflammation, and poor recovery. There is also increased sympathetic tone; worsened insulin sensitivity; and altered leptin/ghrelin signaling.

Most indoor light environments are far too dim during the day and far too bright at night, both of which are harmful.

Solutions include using an e-ink monitor without backlighting (lit from the sun itself or an external lamp that more closely mimics natural light), or less optimally finding a backlit monitor with a more natural LED spectrum that has no or reduced flicker; working outdoors in a balcony, garden or rooftop; adding a solar tube to carry natural light down from the roof (suboptimal if the glass or plastic blocks any wavelengths) or a very bright sun-mimicking lamp indoors during the daytime, and minimizing light exposure at night, including perhaps wearing dark blue blocking sunglasses (both blue light specifically as well as general light intensity switch off melatonin at night and shift the circadian rhythm, though brightness may be more important than the exact spectrum).

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Clothing with Artificial Fibers

While direct studies linking artificial fibers like polyester to Pelvic Congestion Syndrome (PCS) are lacking, some research shows that artificial materials used in close-fitting garments, particularly underwear, can affect local tissue environment and hormone levels. This may occur through alterations in the frequencies of light that pass through the fibers and enter tissues, altered heat and moisture regulation, or the leaching of trace chemical components. Given that hormonal fluctuations are a known risk factor for PCS, and its pathology involves changes in connective tissue maintenance and inflammatory balance (e.g., via alpha-MSH and thyroid hormone), chronic, subtle hormonal disruption from artificial fibers can be reasonably extrapolated to contribute to the syndrome. Persistent mild inflammation or subtle dysregulation of the estrogen and testosterone balance in the sensitive pelvic microenvironment could impair venous wall stiffness and recoil, thereby subtly exacerbating the venous pooling and chronic imbalance that underlies PCS.

Vitamin D Supplementation

Physiological production of vitamin D in the skin in response to sunlight cannot be overdosed because although initial sun exposure stimulates vitamin D production, longer exposures break down any excess that builds up.

Attempting to titrate supplemental Vitamin D by checking levels in the blood (whether “inactive” D2 or “active” D3) is problematic because above the relatively low cutoff of 20ng/mL the blood levels are an inexact measure of adequate vitamin D receptor (VDR) stimulation, which is the aim of supplementation. This is because of individual genetic polymorphisms in the VDR and individual differences in coregulator levels and epigenetic factors, all of which vary the amount of vitamin D needed to activate the receptor; individual differences in structure and levels of serum vitamin D binding protein, which vary the amount of free vitamin D available for measurement; and individual differences in local tissue level activation of D2 to D3 which is not reflected in the measured blood levels of either one. This particular variability is one plausible reason darker skinned populations seem to do fine despite having lower average serum vitamin D levels. Another paradoxical problem with supplementation is that when vitamin D is in excess the body may become resistant to it through sustained upregulation of breakdown pathways.

Together these make it essentially impossible to know whether someone has taken too much or too little vitamin D.

In addition, the common belief that Vitamin D2 is biologically inactive is wrong, it actually decreases activation of the VDR by being a weak agonist, which means that although it does activate the receptor it blocks its even stronger activation from D3.

Also D3 generally has an antiinflammatory effect, which is why it appears to benefit autoimmune disease. So higher D2 levels, by leading to a relative decrease in receptor activity, tend to increase inflammation (in the setting of autoimmune disease this actually makes sense if you believe the body is attacking itself for good reason rather than mistakenly, e.g. because there is an intracellular infection and/or toxins being cleared out).

Overdosing supplemental vitamin D, especially at higher ranges (>3000 IU/day) changes genetic expression which can persist for weeks to months after even one dose. Persistent high D signaling increases calcium absorption in the gut, which means increased calcium passing through the body, even without causing a sustained rise in measured calcium levels. This can lead to venous (and arterial) damage via calcification of the microvessels supplying vein walls, as well as stiffening of connective tissues and excessive tension of the smooth muscles in vein walls both causing dysfunction of venous valves, which over time can cause valvular damage predisposing to venous pooling. The increased calcium raises resting skeletal muscle tone which can contribute to muscle pain, stiffness, perceived weakness, and fatigue. Higher calcium flux also alters proprioception, the sense of where we are in space, so contributes to poor coordination, poor balance and fall risk. It causes increased urination (contributing to dehydration) as the kidneys also work to secrete the excess calcium and also because the renin angiotensin aldosterone system is stimulated. Calcium is a strongly positive ion and as such detracts from the negative zeta potential of blood, which may also be worsened by the loss of potassium ions that support zeta potential via indirect renal potassium wasting due to the increased urination. Calcium can worsen sleep quality by increasing neural stimulation, and higher D levels can worsen it by decreasing melatonin production. Higher calcium also increases demand for magnesium which can further worsen magnesium deficiency, which is already nearly universal.

Interestingly almost all of these negative effects of excess VDR activation can be functionally mimicked by acquired Vitamin D deficiency, a classic example of a U shaped efficacy range where too little or too much are both equally harmful, again driving home the point that the only way to achieve the ideal levels for health is via natural means.

Grounding

Prior to modernity humans were always electrically grounded to the earth. The earth is a source of unlimited electrons which alters the measurable electrical potential of the human body, so our physiology is designed for a particular electrical potential that is no longer available to the vast majority of people the vast majority of the time.

Connecting back to the earth has been shown to improve zeta potential and reduce red blood cell clumping, improve autonomic tone, reduce inflammatory signaling and improve recovery time after exercise, so it should be beneficial for preventing and treating pelvic congestion. Since it drops skin potential to zero it also protects against dirty electricity from indoor wiring which interacts with the surface potential of the skin to cause energy fluctuations in the body which are harmful.

Indoors increased time grounded can be achieved with special mats and bedsheets that connect via a conductive wire to the earth. This is usually accomplished by running the wire into a grounded wall outlet, but this runs into problems with dirty electricity affecting the grounding mat/bedsheet. A better method is to run the wires from the grounding mats outside the building and directly into the earth below using a copper rod, which is sold as an accessory.

Intense Body Building

Heavy lifting increases intraabdominal pressure dramatically which reduces venous return from the legs, spiking intravenous pressure. In the setting of preexisting breakdown of venous dynamics this aggravates the condition and before the condition exists it predisposes to its development in the context of other concomitant risk factors, not by acute injury but by gradual remodeling of the veins to be more compliant and eventually unable to rebound to a normal tone leading to pelvic pooling.

Meet Suleyman, affectionately known as Sooley to his parents and friends, including my own children, a carefree young boy who fell in with a criminally careless older kid in his neighborhood, who decided to show him how to construct a makeshift flamethrower, which unfortunately blew up in poor Sooley’s face a couple weeks ago.

The photo you see at the top of this article is not the immediate aftermath which was too horrifying to post to everyone’s inbox, but is waiting below for anyone who has the stomach for viewing a severe 2nd degree facial burn, the likes of which I couldn’t find a representative example of anywhere online.

You can read the entire article to the end without seeing the photos, after which I’ll leave enough empty scrolling space for any tenderhearted readers who want to click away.

However I urge everyone to take a look and further to send the article to as many people as they can in as many ways as possible, because despite the horrific nature of what happened and what it looked like, not everything that’s horrifying is all bad and the point of publicizing this is that much benefit may come from it.

As Martin Luther King Jr once put it, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Despite all the horrors around us, the mercy of the Divine is paramount, and much good invariably comes of what we initially perceive to be evil.

What makes this case so remarkable is that multiple dermatology and burn specialists recommended debridement (cutting away the dead skin) as well as skin grafting - the harvesting of healthy skin from a donor site, such as the thigh, or back, to place over the burned areas of the face.

If his parents had chosen skin grafting it would have been a harrowing experience with a far less than ideal outcome, to say the least I’ll include some typical skin graft results at the end also).

Not only are there are significant risks to the procedure including a failed graft, infection, permanent scarring, discoloration, mismatched skin texture, lack of sweating, permanent numbness of the transplanted skin, contractures, and lifelong facial disfigurement, there’s also the purposeful creation of a new wound at the donor site.

Now this modern medical treatment is all well and good only if it’s the best or only option.

However as with most of modern medicine, there are far better options that utilize the bodies own intrinsic healing capabilities, which Sooley’s parents ultimately chose to pursue with Hakim Shabaz.

Within 2 weeks of starting his all natural treatment, Sooley’s skin looks completely transformed and nearly normal aside from some remaining flushing. It’s expected that the residual inflammation will die down quickly, leaving completely normal, fully regenerated skin with no signs of the terrible burn.

I hadn’t been in town for a few years, and I hadn’t heard what had happened, so when I met Sooley and his father asked me how I thought he was healing 2 weeks out from a 2nd degree burn I assumed it must not have been much worse than a bad sunburn to begin with.

Later Shabaz sent me the before photos and the story and I was astounded as only someone who really understands what the alternative outcome with skin grafting would have looked like.

A close friend who is a hospital physician and whose children also used to play regularly with Sooley, was deeply moved by the photos and the outcome and inspired to begin looking for a way to end his mainstream medical career in place of a more natural approach, telling me:

“It’s just malpractice what we do, it’s like, it’s assault, we assault people. When you know that there’s a better way, that can not be associated with all this harm and is far more efficacious, but you don’t give that, you give what’s associated with more harm and is less efficacious, what is that? It’s at best malpractice.”

Not only would conventional treatment have had a terrible looking outcome it would have involved serious long term toxicity from all the ancillary lotions and potions they would have piled onto and into his body. Toxicity that would likely have eventually given birth to some future chronic illness.

Instead of toxic chemicals and scarring surgeries, he was given some simply dietary interventions and a natural topical treatment that resulted in a miraculous appearing outcome.

He was put on a mildly restrictive diet to stimulate a healing metabolism, eating primarily vegetables along with plenty of collagen rich trotter soup, powdered colostrum, and powdered tracheal cartilage mixed with ghee.

Simultaneously his parents applied a simple paste made from turmeric and castor oil to the wounds.

This simply regimen helped stimulate the body’s natural means of deep healing in the form of pluripotent stem cells that flooded into his face completely regenerating his skin from the bottom up.

Now imagine the initial horror of the parents and Sooley (who was shell shocked for days, as you can clearly see from the expression on his face captured in the before photos below).

At the first of this ordeal it would be hard to see any good in it for anyone involved. Yet now Sooley is well on his way to a full recovery physically, while mentally and emotionally he was properly supported, without engendering a sense of victimhood, so the trauma of the episode is also a rapidly receding memory.

Meanwhile at least one mainstream physician is already looking for the exits and I hope publicizing this case will lead to many more conventional physicians being convinced to take a hard look at their own practices in light of the alternative natural therapies available (and to at least take an honest look at the alternatives). Similarly I hope and pray that all the patients who have been systematically brainwashed into looking down on natural methods of healing will reevaluate their biases after seeing this case.

Most patients who have the fortitude to stick it out with Hakim Shabaz’s demanding protocols have some form of severe chronic illness and usually multiple, however in many cases, if you met them, or saw an interview with them you would have to take their word for it since severe chronic fatigue, depression, anxiety, many autoimmune conditions, ADHD, vaccine injuries, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, arthritis, brain fog, insomnia, chemical sensitivity, asthma and allergies, and many more, are often essentially invisible to the naked eye.

Not so this case.

Both the damage and the rapid healing are undeniable

Scroll down for graphic content below:

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Sooley just after being burned:

And again the 2 week results of a simple, natural regimen, guided by someone who really knows what they’re doing:

And what kind of cosmetic outcome could he have expected from skin grafting? Here are some representative samples:

Before (this was taken years after the actual burn which healed poorly):

After skin grafting:

Before and after results of skin grafting for severe facial burns:

Consult Hakim Shabaz here for any acute or chronic condition:

mygotodoc.com/hakim

Meet Suleyman, affectionately known as Sooley to his parents and friends, including my own children, a carefree young boy who fell in with a criminally careless older kid in his neighborhood, who decided to show him how to construct a makeshift flamethrower, which unfortunately blew up in poor Sooley’s face a couple weeks ago.

The photo you see at the top of this article is not the immediate aftermath which was too horrifying to post to everyone’s inbox, but is waiting below for anyone who has the stomach for viewing a severe 2nd degree facial burn, the likes of which I couldn’t find a representative example of anywhere online.

You can read the entire article to the end without seeing the photos, after which I’ll leave enough empty scrolling space for any tenderhearted readers who want to click away.

However I urge everyone to take a look and further to send the article to as many people as they can in as many ways as possible, because despite the horrific nature of what happened and what it looked like, not everything that’s horrifying is all bad and the point of publicizing this is that much benefit may come from it.

As Martin Luther King Jr once put it, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Despite all the horrors around us, the mercy of the Divine is paramount, and much good invariably comes of what we initially perceive to be evil.

What makes this case so remarkable is that multiple dermatology and burn specialists recommended debridement (cutting away the dead skin) as well as skin grafting - the harvesting of healthy skin from a donor site, such as the thigh, or back, to place over the burned areas of the face.

If his parents had chosen skin grafting it would have been a harrowing experience with a far less than ideal outcome, to say the least I’ll include some typical skin graft results at the end also).

Not only are there are significant risks to the procedure including a failed graft, infection, permanent scarring, discoloration, mismatched skin texture, lack of sweating, permanent numbness of the transplanted skin, contractures, and lifelong facial disfigurement, there’s also the purposeful creation of a new wound at the donor site.

Now this modern medical treatment is all well and good only if it’s the best or only option.

However as with most of modern medicine, there are far better options that utilize the bodies own intrinsic healing capabilities, which Sooley’s parents ultimately chose to pursue with Hakim Shabaz.

Within 2 weeks of starting his all natural treatment, Sooley’s skin looks completely transformed and nearly normal aside from some remaining flushing. It’s expected that the residual inflammation will die down quickly, leaving completely normal, fully regenerated skin with no signs of the terrible burn.

I hadn’t been in town for a few years, and I hadn’t heard what had happened, so when I met Sooley and his father asked me how I thought he was healing 2 weeks out from a 2nd degree burn I assumed it must not have been much worse than a bad sunburn to begin with.

Later Shabaz sent me the before photos and the story and I was astounded as only someone who really understands what the alternative outcome with skin grafting would have looked like.

A close friend who is a hospital physician and whose children also used to play regularly with Sooley, was deeply moved by the photos and the outcome and inspired to begin looking for a way to end his mainstream medical career in place of a more natural approach, telling me:

“It’s just malpractice what we do, it’s like, it’s assault, we assault people. When you know that there’s a better way, that can not be associated with all this harm and is far more efficacious, but you don’t give that, you give what’s associated with more harm and is less efficacious, what is that? It’s at best malpractice.”

Not only would conventional treatment have had a terrible looking outcome it would have involved serious long term toxicity from all the ancillary lotions and potions they would have piled onto and into his body. Toxicity that would likely have eventually given birth to some future chronic illness.

Instead of toxic chemicals and scarring surgeries, he was given some simply dietary interventions and a natural topical treatment that resulted in a miraculous appearing outcome.

He was put on a mildly restrictive diet to stimulate a healing metabolism, eating primarily vegetables along with plenty of collagen rich trotter soup, powdered colostrum, and powdered tracheal cartilage mixed with ghee.

Simultaneously his parents applied a simple paste made from turmeric and castor oil to the wounds.

This simply regimen helped stimulate the body’s natural means of deep healing in the form of pluripotent stem cells that flooded into his face completely regenerating his skin from the bottom up.

Now imagine the initial horror of the parents and Sooley (who was shell shocked for days, as you can clearly see from the expression on his face captured in the before photos below).

At the first of this ordeal it would be hard to see any good in it for anyone involved. Yet now Sooley is well on his way to a full recovery physically, while mentally and emotionally he was properly supported, without engendering a sense of victimhood, so the trauma of the episode is also a rapidly receding memory.

Meanwhile at least one mainstream physician is already looking for the exits and I hope publicizing this case will lead to many more conventional physicians being convinced to take a hard look at their own practices in light of the alternative natural therapies available (and to at least take an honest look at the alternatives). Similarly I hope and pray that all the patients who have been systematically brainwashed into looking down on natural methods of healing will reevaluate their biases after seeing this case.

Most patients who have the fortitude to stick it out with Hakim Shabaz’s demanding protocols have some form of severe chronic illness and usually multiple, however in many cases, if you met them, or saw an interview with them you would have to take their word for it since severe chronic fatigue, depression, anxiety, many autoimmune conditions, ADHD, vaccine injuries, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, arthritis, brain fog, insomnia, chemical sensitivity, asthma and allergies, and many more, are often essentially invisible to the naked eye.

Not so this case.

Both the damage and the rapid healing are undeniable

Scroll down for graphic content below:

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Sooley just after being burned:

And again the 2 week results of a simple, natural regimen, guided by someone who really knows what they’re doing:

And what kind of cosmetic outcome could he have expected from skin grafting? Here are some representative samples:

Before (this was taken years after the actual burn which healed poorly):

After skin grafting:

Before and after results of skin grafting for severe facial burns:

Consult Hakim Shabaz here for any acute or chronic condition:

mygotodoc.com/hakim

Since paleolithic times modern humans have on average lost about a baseball-sized amount of brain mass.

Why would that be?

Well, life has gotten a lot easier, which means it doesn’t take as much brain power to get through it.

What about the famous Flynn effect, showing rising IQs every year over the last century since IQ testing began?

Well, first of all, does that really pass the sniff test?

Do people seem to be becoming more intelligent over time?

Most would say it’;s just the opposite, and in fact it’s suspected that the rising IQ test scores are simply due to various measurement errors.

One cause has been shown to be an increase in correct guessing, i.e. a change in test-taking behavior whereby test takers on average have become more comfortable guessing with each passing year on items they’re uncertain of.

If there are 4 multiple choice responses you would expect 1/4 of the guesses to be correct and thereby raise the average scores.

Other physiological measures, particularly reaction time, that directly correlate with intelligence by measuring the actual processing speed in the brain, but which don’t vary with familiarity, training or changes in test taking behaviors, have notably been dropping for the last 150 years since we started measuring them.

Is there any consolation to be had? Are we becoming dumber, but more muscular and athletic?

No such luck: along with losing our brains, we’re also losing our strength and physical prowess.

A study showed that just in the last 50 years in English 10-11-year-olds, standing-long-jump and vertical-jump distances dropped by 11.8 % and 16.9 %, respectively, even though BMI remained unchanged.

58 years of Japanese data showed that the generation with the strongest performance (1970–1993) scored at about +0.5 SD (across grip, sprint, jumps & throw), whereas the weakest cohort (2003–2021) averaged roughly –0.2 SD—a drop of ≈ 0.7 SD from peak to trough.

To put that in perspective, in IQ terms it would mean a drop from an above average IQ of 107.5 to a slightly below average IQ of 97, all in just 3 decades.

This is of course because physical activity levels are declining with every passing year.

When I was growing up we played outdoors in the real world every day for hours. Now most kids play indoors in virtual worlds all day and much of the night, meaning they don’t stimulate muscle building the way earlier generations did.

And with the advent of advanced AI systems and robotics our cognitive and physical prospects as a species are getting dimmer by the day.

Offloading progressively more physical work means people get progressively weaker.

Offloading progressively more mental work means people get progressively less sharp.

But what’s worse is that over long time spans natural selection does it’s job and since it takes less to get by, people invariably become less.

Along with changes in behavior we’re plagued by the pollution of our environment.

Not the bugbear CO2, that is after all just plant food, but real pollution like chemical waste products, pharmaceuticals, and hormones that persist in the water supply.

For example Atrazine, the most common pesticide contaminating groundwater, which can partially feminize male frogs, and in some cases even turn male frogs into fully functioning females that can mate with males and become pregnant.

RFK Jr, in a recent public appearance warned that todays teenage boys have lower testosterone levels than todays average 68 year old man (whose relatively high testosterone is a holdover from his more benign childhood and young adulthood).

Testosterone increases with exercise, competition and exposure to danger, but that’s only part of the story.

Xenoestrogens, environmental contaminants that mimic the effects of estrogen in the body, harm both boys and girls, accounting in large part for every common feminine malady, as well as many male ones, includinga trend towards less pronounced masculine development, in other words: feminization.

Xenoestrogens include plastics, forever chemicals, food and pharmaceutical additives, and cosmetics ingredients. Even something as seemingly benign as the ink on printed receipts transdermally introduces xenoestrogens into the bloodstream.

Some argue that the collapse of men and women towards a common phenotype is a good thing, but it’s certainly not a reflection of the inherent tension present in the natural order.

The universe is composed of complementary opposites that together comprise the whole of all natural systems.

Male and female, day and night, activity and rest, summer and winter. This observation has famously been encapsulated in the Chinese principle of yin and yang, but was noted by all ancient civilizations.

Natural systems fall apart when these distinctions become blurred or entirely obliterated.

When a man becomes less masculine, his sperm necessarily become less potent and the same for a woman and her eggs. This leads to collapsing birth rates, a trend that, if continued, obviously ends in extinction.

Balancing of masculine and feminine energies are also required for healthy societies.

There are situations like war where more masculine traits like aggression are necessary and feminine passivity would be misplaced. And there are situations like nursing babies where feminine empathy are necessary and masculine apathy would be counterproductive.

This isn’t to say that the opposites are entirely distinct.

Just as the yin and yang carry a seed of each other within themselves, the best men temper their masculinity with feminine characteristics, and the best women likewise.

But the fact remains that one aspect is ascendant over the other and leads to the natural gravitation (as opposed to compulsion) towards traditional gender roles.

Whether you believe in intelligent design or natural evolution, what’s clear from animal husbandry is that within species variability is quite broad and can be directed by artificial as well as natural selection.

Humans already have a wide range of variability based on eons of optimization for their varied natural environments, but unintended “human husbandry” via chemical and electromagnetic toxins and intentional social engineering for uncritical acceptance of official narratives, passivity and “tolerance” could dramatically drive the devolution of humanity in the future.

Much lip service is paid to diversity nowadays, but the actual agenda is the end of diversity. Genetic diversity in a species helps deal with black swan events, since some subset of the population has traits that better help deal with an unexpected drastic changes to the environment. Those traits then spread through the population, benefitting everyone. Genetic diversity is a form of wealth and lack of it is species poverty. If everyone is already the same when the black swan hits, all our eggs are in one basket. We might have what it takes to survive and we might not.

Encouraging diversity does not mean mixing every one together until within a few generations they’re all genetically and culturally the same. Encouraging diversity would actually mean encouraging the maintenance of naturally coded barriers to mixing.

Diversity is beautiful and diversity is strength, but what we call diversity is neither.

What’s wonderful about travel is experiencing something different. Traveling across the melting pot of America is different than traveling across the segregated countries of Europe. In America you can go coast to coast and never see anything different. Most of the country, with some minor exceptions, has become one identical monolith of construction styles, cuisines, and cultures.

At an individual and family level fighting back against the modern world’s inexorable tide of dysgenic human husbandry takes daily sustained effort and purposefully abstaining from some of modern life’s conveniences.

Many of these conveniences have definite benefits, but they’re often outweighed by their harms.

The good news is that reversing these trends may not be that difficult.

Domesticated dog breeds, including highly specialized ones like Bulldogs or Dachshunds, swiftly revert back towards a generalized feral "village dog" body shape and behavior within just a single generation with their offspring becoming characterized by leaner, medium-sized builds, upright ears, and curled tails.

The feral dog’s coat coloration tends toward patterns like brown, yellow, and brindle, and their coats become notably thicker, coarser, and more weather-resistant.

Behaviorally, these formerly docile, dependent pets rapidly form territorial packs with clear hierarchical structures and become cautious scavengers and aggressive hunters, much more like their distant ancestors.

This highlights the profound importance of our environments, and provides hope, not just inter-generationally, but also individually, because normalizing the environment is not just what renormalizes sexual and behavioral differentiation, but what cures disease.

The approach to this basically boils down to detox and nutrition.

But given the choice between comfort and disease vs struggle and health, most people choose the former.

Most people choose to be the caged lion dependent on it’s captors, rather than the free roaming king of the jungle dependent on it’s own strength and wiles.

If you’re ready to break free of your self imposed limitations and take a higher, harder road, then there’s no time like the present. One way that I know works is to talk to my own family healer, Shahbaz Ahmed at mygotodoc.com/hakim.

There are two popular conceptions of history: that it’s a linear progression from primitive, backwards societies to more advanced and enlightened ones, or that it’s a linear decline from more natural, enlightened societies to more artificial and disconnected ones.

But the ancients saw history as more cyclical, an idea fleshed out in the book The Fourth Turning, and perhaps more famously simplified and memetically encapsulated to some extent in the hard times meme above.

It seems we have come upon hard times, but we can hope that they will eventually forge strong men and women to lead us out of them and begin the cycle anew. And perhaps there is a way to create an upward sloping series of cycles rather than restarting at the same place or lower each time…

It may take well over a thousand words to begin to do justice to a picture, and while pictures can help illustrate ideas, truly complex and nuanced ideas can only be fleshed out in extended written format, with pictures serving only to help elucidate, rather than fully encapsulate them.

So, if there’s any truth to the meme then one sign that our hard times have created strong men will be the reversion back to communicating complex ideas instead of relying on imperfect memes, a return to reading The Fourth Turning rather than being satisfied with a memetic distillation, a tweet or a podcast.

But the most obvious sign will be that men are men again and women are women.

We used to live in Virginia Beach, which is on the coast obviously, and isn’t characterized by much topographical variety, i.e. it’s all flat, no hills to speak of, except there is one large anatopic (anachronistic, but of place not time) hill in the middle of a popular park. The mystery of the out of place hill is explained by the placards: this bulging beauty is actually a reclaimed waste dump, appropriately sealed I suppose and then soiled over, seeded, and voila, turned into a beautiful grassy knoll.

Keep this in mind as we discuss the link between toxins and obesity.

To begin with, I would wager that it’s actually better for many people to be fat than lean and no, I haven’t gone woke (or in other words insane), so just bear with me as I break it all down.

A little over a decade ago I was fresh out of residency and had gained a few dozen extra pounds. My wife and I stopped eating out, but ate whatever we wanted at home, including homemade organic spelt bread, complemented with lots of other whole foods like organic butter, eggs, milk, meat, fish, veggies, and fruit. The only thing we really made a point of avoiding altogether was added white sugar, though we replaced that with honey. Basically we made and ate whatever we wanted, including homemade desserts.

We were surprised when we lost weight effortlessly.

Then we gradually reverted back to our previous eating habits, i.e. eating out often and being less careful about ingredients and soon enough I was somewhat overweight again.

This time I decided to try a low carb, high fat, high protein diet that also eliminated various common trigger foods (the AIP or autoimmune paleo diet). This approach was at one point popularized as the Whole 30 diet, but recently they bent to Big Ag pressure and included seed oils in their eating plans, so they’re no longer fully AIP aligned, since seed oils are definitely not a paleo friendly food, requiring extensive modern industrial processing to make it possible to even stomach them, they are incredibly inflammatory, obesogenic and disease-causing.

So in this experiment I began eating lots of butter and low carb veggies with meat and fish on the side. I had been told it didn’t matter how much you ate on this plan, just eat your fill and you would naturally lose weight, because carbs are what actually make you fat, not fat or protein. Moreover, fat and protein were supposed to be the most satiating foods, so I wouldn’t have much appetite anyway. This eating plan was known far and wide as an easy way of dropping the pounds fast.

Strangely enough I didn’t lose weight, and I had a big appetite for what I was limiting myself to eating: veggies drenched in butter, meat and fish.

So eventually I dropped that and got distracted by life and stopped trying to lose the little bit of excess weight I had.

Then the pandemic hit, I came down with long COVID, and after a year of that my weight suddenly began to balloon alarmingly (some long haulers do lose weight, but that’s less common). Over the course of a year my weight shot up higher than I had ever seen before. I was 25% heavier than my previous body weight maximum. This was very uncomfortable and shocking to say the least.

At that point I went for a more holistic weight loss approach and documented it here:

I lost most of the weight I gained during the pandemic by focusing primarily on healthy sleep, circadian friendly light cycles, sunlight, walking, and generally healthy food.

But I plateaued well before I got back to where I had once been years before the pandemic. Also, as soon as I allowed some sweets my sugar cravings quickly reappeared and I soon gained back some of the weight I had just lost.

I thought I was essentially “allergic” to sugar, the way some people say they're allergic to alcohol, i.e. addicted to it, with no hope of moderating my intake. Unlike a lot of people I could get myself to go without sweets after enough self reflection and self motivation, but as soon as I started eating even a little bit of sugar again it would rapidly snowball into gorging on it.

At this point I began working closely with my friend Hakim Shabaz Ahmed.

We published a number of articles together and I followed along closely as he started helping many of my patients initiate deep healing from severe chronic diseases, while continuing to pro bono treat impoverished patients from around the world, where he had had his earliest successes with end stage cancer, autism, autoimmune disease, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, kidney disease, Alzheimer’s disease, etc. While even close friends and family had already benefited from his guidance, I had never felt I was sick enough to justify committing to his rather demanding protocols. I had kept looking for an easier way.

But, while I had been aware of his journey peripherally for many years, now I was more engaged with it and that involvement finally bred the motivation to finally take my own health seriously, because I deepened my appreciation for the importance of good health and the means of attaining it: detoxification of toxins and pathogens and replenishment of nutrients. These pillars of healing not only addressing the physical self, but all the higher levels as well including the intellect, emotions, thoughts, spirit, etc.

So I got a detailed detox program and supplement plan and dove into it as explained here:

I rapidly lost all the weight I had gained back, then shot past my recent low and got leaner than I had been in many years and after nearly 3 months the fat and inches were still dropping, though at a more reasonable rate. About 4 months in I stabilized, down a startling 27% from my peak weight. I still have just a bit of stubborn belly fat, but there’s good reason for that as we’ll discuss below (and I’m working on it).

On this detox and supplementation plan, which included a more modified version of a low carb paleo diet (only initially to help trigger detox), I found I had very little appetite at all, which certainly accounted for some of the rapid weight loss, but was strange in that I had been on a very similar diet in the past (as just described above) while retaining a significant appetite and not losing any weight.

The first two months with the greatest fat loss were easily explained because I was only eating low carb vegetables and fat, no high carb foods, grains and limited protein, no cooked meat, or fish and only 1 raw egg a day (for its nutrient density I did have 80 grams daily of liver and kidney). However after a couple months I added sardines and then a couple months after that added back in high quality meat and salmon, at which point I was basically back to the version of the AIP diet I had tried before that failed to moderate my appetite, except this time I didn’t experience the same unbridled appetite as I did then.

And then I went even further and added back select grains: mostly amaranth and buckwheat, abandoning the very low carb aspect of the diet entirely. This initially increased my appetite minimally since I had been avoiding grains for so long, though subsequently in the following couple months appetite trended back to baseline. Despite these additions there was no increase in my weight and my appetite was still far lower than it had been on that first AIP attempt where I lost no weight.

It soon became clearer to me how applicable were the ongoing refrains that have characterized this blog over the last few months:

1. all diseases are due to two primary causal categories: a. excess of harmful things, i.e. primarily toxicity/pathogenicity and b. lack of beneficial/essential things, e.g. nutrient, or ore broadly speaking nourishment deficiencies.

2. the body does not typically make mistakes broadly speaking, so disease manifestations are usually in some way helping to fix and/or signal that there is some deeper problem that needs to be addressed, i.e. symptoms are but a message and/or maneuver.

So being overweight comes primarily from toxicity and nutrient deficiency, like all diseases.

As explained earlier in the below post, the best way to conceive of excess weight overall is as starvation: lack of necessary nourishment. The toxicity side of the equation in this paradigm can be conceived as an additional burden weighing upon nutrient sufficiency and organ functioning, when energy systems collapse and can no longer keep up with toxin destruction and expulsion, there is nothing left to do but store them within.

Ozempic: Sabatoge by Siege Because Obesity is Really Starvation

Toxicity may begin, as most toxicity does, at the level of the emotional being. Perhaps someone eats their feelings, or feels unsafe and needs a buffer from other people.

The important point to understand is that emotional imbalance doesn’t just remain at the level of the emotional self, it leads inevitably to physical organ imbalances, e.g. of the thyroid, pancreas, adrenals, kidneys, liver, fat tissue, and more. These organs and tissue variously affect metabolism, insulin sensitivity, stress hormone levels, detoxification, etc - all functions that impact body weight. When these organs come under stress they burn through more nutrients than normal until they become deficient in micronutrients. This weakens them and makes them prone to toxin accumulation.

We’re awash in a sea of toxins from before birth, being exposed even in the womb, so if our natural detox systems begin to fall behind, many of those toxins bioaccumulate, or start to fill up our tissues, rather than being expelled from the body, and this leads to toxicity. As tissues become dragged down by ongoing toxicity, pathogens make inroads, in some cases helping to sequester toxins, in others simply multiplying because our host defenses are down. The immune system does its best to root out the toxins and fight off the pathogens, and this means there is inflammation, which means there are various symptoms.

Getting back to weight gain: many toxins are lipophilic, meaning fat-loving, i.e. they are attracted to and bind with fat, so fat in effect acts as a storage depot for toxins, which may sequester them away from where they can actively cause damage in our other tissues.

Could it be that our bodies, sensing a losing battle with toxicity, actually decide to mitigate the damage by locking up many toxins and pathogens in fat depots, the bodies own version of a landfill hiding beneath a public park on the one hand, and mass incarceration of criminals on the other?

FAT LOVING TOXINS

These are many common pervasive modern environmental toxins for which studies have confirmed storage in human adipose tissue:

1. Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs)

   • Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs): Used in electrical equipment, now banned but persists in the environment.

   • Dioxins: Byproducts of industrial processes, including waste incineration.

   • Organochlorine Pesticides:

     • DDT and its metabolites (DDE): Widely studied for accumulation in fat tissue.

     • Lindane: An insecticide used in agriculture and pharmaceuticals.

   • Hexachlorobenzene (HCB): A fungicide and industrial byproduct.

2. Brominated Flame Retardants

   • Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers (PBDEs): Found in furniture, electronics, and textiles.

3. Heavy Metals (Indirect Storage via Fat Binding)

   • Methylmercury: While primarily stored in the brain and organs, it can bind to fatty tissues indirectly.

   • Lead and Cadmium: Known to affect fat indirectly, though stored primarily in bones and organs.

4. Lipophilic Pharmaceuticals

   • These can accumulate in fat, especially over prolonged exposure (see next section).

5. Plasticizers

   • Phthalates: Found in plastics, confirmed to bioaccumulate in adipose tissue.

6. Industrial Chemicals

   • Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS): Used in non-stick cookware and water-repellent fabrics.

PERSISTENT (P)HARMA TOXINS

Lipophilic (fat-soluble) pharmaceuticals have a high affinity for adipose (fat) tissue, leading to their potential accumulation and prolonged action in the body. Below is a categorized list of commonly known lipophilic pharmaceuticals, organized by therapeutic class:

1. Anesthetics: Propofol, Thiopental, Ketamine, Halothane, Isoflurane, Sevoflurane.

2. Sedatives & Hypnotics:

   • Benzodiazepines: Diazepam, Lorazepam, Clonazepam, Alprazolam.

   • Z-Drugs: Zolpidem, Eszopiclone.

3. Antidepressants & Antipsychotics:

   • SSRIs: Fluoxetine, Sertraline, Paroxetine.

   • TCAs: Amitriptyline, Imipramine, Nortriptyline.

   • Antipsychotics: Clozapine, Olanzapine, Quetiapine, Risperidone.

4. Opioids: Fentanyl, Methadone, Buprenorphine, Oxycodone.

5. Anticonvulsants: Phenytoin, Valproic Acid, Phenobarbital.

6. Hormones & Steroids: Prednisone, Dexamethasone, Estrogen, Testosterone, Progesterone.

7. Antimicrobials:

   • Antibiotics: Rifampin, Erythromycin, Linezolid.

   • Antifungals: Ketoconazole, Itraconazole, Fluconazole.

8. Anticancer: Tamoxifen, Doxorubicin, Paclitaxel, Docetaxel.

9. Lipid-Lowering Drugs: Atorvastatin, Simvastatin.

10. Miscellaneous: THC, CBD, Propranolol, Metoprolol, Cyclosporine, Tacrolimus, Chloroquine, Mefloquine.

TOXINS & OBESITY

There is evidence suggesting that an excess toxic load in the body can contribute to obesity, and this may serve as a protective mechanism to sequester toxins in fat tissue and reduce their harmful effects on other vital tissues. This concept is supported by research linking environmental toxins, persistent organic pollutants (POPs), and certain pharmaceuticals to disrupted metabolic processes and obesogenic effects.

Evidence for Toxins Contributing to Obesity

1. Disruption of Metabolic Pathways

• Many toxins, such as PCBs, dioxins, and phthalates, act as endocrine disruptors, interfering with hormones that regulate metabolism, appetite, and fat storage.

  • Leptin and Insulin Resistance: Toxins can impair leptin and insulin signaling, leading to increased hunger and fat storage.

  • Thyroid Function: POPs and heavy metals disrupt thyroid hormone balance, slowing metabolism and promoting weight gain.

2. Obesogens

• Certain chemicals, known as obesogens, actively promote the formation and growth of adipose tissue. Examples include:

  • Bisphenol A (BPA)

  • Phthalates

  • Perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)

These chemicals:

• Increase fat cell differentiation: Stimulate pre-adipocytes to become mature fat cells.

• Promote fat accumulation: Enhance lipid uptake and storage in adipocytes.

3. Protective Sequestration in Fat Tissue

• Fat tissue acts as a storage depot for lipophilic toxins, effectively isolating them from circulation to protect vital organs like the brain, liver, and kidneys.

  • This protective mechanism reduces acute toxicity but may lead to chronic, low-grade inflammation in fat tissue.

  • As toxic load increases, the body may expand fat stores to accommodate the additional toxins, contributing to obesity.

4. Chronic Inflammation and Weight Gain

• Many toxins stored in fat tissue trigger inflammatory pathways, including the release of cytokines and adipokines, which:

  • Promote further fat deposition.

  • Create a feedback loop of inflammation and metabolic dysfunction.

5. Evidence from Weight Loss Studies

• During rapid weight loss, stored toxins are released back into circulation as fat is broken down, leading to:

  • Increased oxidative stress and inflammation.

  • Temporary metabolic dysregulation, potentially making sustained weight loss more challenging.

Studies have shown that individuals with higher toxin levels may experience:

• Slower fat loss during weight reduction programs.

• Greater difficulty maintaining weight loss.

Protective Role of Fat Storage

The sequestration hypothesis suggests that adipose tissue expansion in response to toxic load:

1. Spreads the burden: Limits the concentration of circulating toxins to reduce harm to vital organs.

2. Buffers metabolic disruptions: Prevents acute systemic effects of lipophilic toxins.

3. Delays toxicity onset: Provides a "safe" storage site, at least temporarily, for otherwise harmful compounds.

So, excess toxic load in the body appears to have an obesogenic effect, driven by:

• Endocrine disruption.

• Inflammation.

• Protective sequestration of toxins in fat tissue.

While this process protects vital organs, it can also lead to chronic metabolic dysfunction and increased fat storage. Addressing the root causes of toxin exposure, improving detoxification pathways (e.g., liver and kidney function), and supporting a healthy metabolism are key strategies to mitigate these effects.

The Toxin That Must not be Named: Non Native EMF

One cellular toxin deserves its own treatment. It is not usually thought of as a toxin, and not usually considered to affect human health at all, despite decades of research to the contrary and 10s of thousands of published papers.

The reason it flies under the radar is that it’s a necessary component of military communications and readiness, and as such the State has endeavored to essentially cover it up, using the same tactics that were used to attempt a cover up of the COVID vaccine side effects. However in the case of this far more pervasive toxin they were largely successful, at least until now (RFK Jr is aware of the problem, so hopefully as HHS Secretary will bring the research to light, conduct further studies and eventually create healthy exposure guidelines that lead to human friendly versions of these necessary technologies).

Electromagnetic fields (EMFs) have been suggested to influence metabolism, obesity, and overall energy regulation through various mechanisms. While research is still evolving, here are some potential ways EMFs may contribute to overweight and obesity:

1. Disruption of Melatonin and Circadian Rhythms

EMFs, particularly artificial blue light and radiofrequency (RF) radiation, can suppress melatonin production and disrupt circadian rhythms. Melatonin plays a role in metabolism and fat regulation, and lower levels are linked to increased fat storage and insulin resistance.

Disrupted sleep from EMF exposure can also alter hunger hormones (ghrelin, leptin), leading to increased appetite and weight gain.

2. Impact on Mitochondrial Function and Energy Production

EMFs cause oxidative stress and impair mitochondrial function, leading to reduced ATP production and metabolic inefficiency. Poor mitochondrial function can contribute to fat accumulation and difficulty in burning calories efficiently.

3. Influence on Calcium Signaling and POMC Pathway

EMFs increase intracellular calcium (via voltage-gated calcium channels, VGCCs), leading to dysregulation of the POMC (pro-opiomelanocortin) pathway. The POMC pathway in the hypothalamus is crucial for regulating energy balance and metabolism. EMF-induced calcium overload may disrupt this pathway, leading to increased insulin resistance and fat storage.

4. Increased Insulin Resistance and Blood Sugar Dysregulation

Studies suggest radiofrequency EMFs (from WiFi, cell phones, etc.) may impair glucose metabolism, leading to higher fasting insulin and a greater tendency for fat storage. Increased insulin resistance means the body is less efficient at using glucose for energy, promoting weight gain and obesity.

5. Disrupting Hormonal Balance

EMFs can affect thyroid function, reducing T3/T4 hormone levels, which are critical for metabolism. Some studies suggest EMF exposure may increase cortisol (stress hormone), which promotes fat accumulation, especially visceral fat.

6. Altered Gut Microbiome

Emerging research suggests EMFs may disrupt the gut microbiome, leading to dysbiosis, which is linked to obesity, inflammation, and metabolic syndrome. A disrupted gut microbiome can also impair nutrient absorption and energy balance, promoting weight gain.

7. Decreased Brown Fat Activation

Brown adipose tissue (BAT) is important for thermogenesis (heat production) and fat burning. Some researchers speculate that chronic EMF exposure reduces BAT activation, decreasing the body’s ability to burn excess fat.

To sum up, while definitive human studies are still lacking, there is strong mechanistic evidence suggesting that chronic EMF exposure may contribute to weight gain, metabolic dysfunction, and obesity. The combination of disrupted circadian rhythms, increased insulin resistance, mitochondrial dysfunction, hormonal imbalance, and gut microbiome changes could make it harder to regulate weight.

If concerned about EMFs and their metabolic effects, strategies such as reducing exposure to artificial blue light, minimizing RF exposure (e.g., WiFi, cell phones), improving sleep quality, and optimizing mitochondrial function may help mitigate their potential impact.

One radical move I’ve been contemplating is to sleep within a Faraday cage, which effectively blocks EMF signals. A simple Faraday cage can be constructed from a fine silver or copper mesh, which can be woven into a fabric and hung around the bed like mosquito netting and will block almost all nnEMF penetration and could be particularly helpful when severe chronic disease has made a mess of a patients bioelectrical systems.

MICRONUTRIENT DEFICIENCY & OBESITY

What about the nourishment side of the chronic disease equation? Doesn’t obesity mean there is over nourishment, rather than mal or under nourishment?

Not quite.

Micronutrient deficiencies are increasingly recognized as a causative mechanism of obesity, influencing the development and persistence of excess weight. This relationship is rooted in how deficiencies in essential vitamins and minerals disrupt metabolic, hormonal, and behavioral processes, leading to overeating, impaired energy balance, and fat storage, as well as how deficiencies lead to the exhaustion of detoxification systems, as explained earlier.

As I’ve written about before, obesity is really a type of starvation (though not just of chemical micronutrients, but sunlight, darkness, sleep, movement, physical and emotional intimacy, connection, meaning, purpose, etc - all of these snowballing to drive people towards consuming more of whatever is available, even if it’s not fulfilling the real deficiencies).

Mechanisms Linking Micronutrient Deficiency to Obesity

1. Disrupted Appetite Regulation

• Deficiencies in specific micronutrients can impair the body's ability to regulate hunger and satiety, leading to overeating:

  • Magnesium, Zinc, and Chromium:

    • These are involved in insulin signaling and glucose regulation.

    • Deficiencies can lead to insulin resistance and sugar cravings.

  • Vitamin D:

    • Low vitamin D levels impair leptin signaling, a hormone that tells the brain you're full.

    • This contributes to overeating and increased fat storage.

2. Metabolic Slowdown

• Micronutrients are cofactors for enzymes involved in energy production and fat metabolism:

  • Iodine, Selenium, and Iron:

    • Essential for thyroid hormone production, which regulates metabolic rate.

    • Deficiencies slow metabolism, leading to reduced energy expenditure and fat accumulation.

  • B Vitamins:

    • Key players in carbohydrate, protein, and fat metabolism.

    • Deficiencies lead to fatigue and reduced physical activity, contributing to a positive energy balance.

3. Impaired Fat Burning (Lipolysis)

• Carnitine (a micronutrient synthesized from lysine and methionine):

  • Deficiency reduces the transport of fatty acids into mitochondria for energy production, resulting in fat accumulation.

• Zinc:

  • Deficiency impairs lipid metabolism by reducing enzyme activity involved in fat breakdown.

4. Increased Fat Storage via Inflammation

• Micronutrient deficiencies contribute to chronic low-grade inflammation, which promotes fat storage:

  • Omega-3 Fatty Acids:

    • Deficiency leads to a pro-inflammatory state, increasing adipose tissue growth.

  • Magnesium:

    • Low levels exacerbate inflammation and insulin resistance, driving obesity.

5. Altered Gut Microbiome

• Micronutrients like zinc, vitamin D, and magnesium are critical for a healthy gut microbiome.

• Deficiencies disrupt the gut microbial balance, increasing energy extraction from food and promoting fat storage.

6. Food Cravings and "Hidden Hunger"

• When the body lacks essential nutrients, it can trigger cravings for high-calorie, nutrient-poor foods in an effort to compensate:

  • Calcium Deficiency:

    • Associated with cravings for dairy or high-fat foods.

  • Iron Deficiency:

    • Linked to cravings for meat or sugary foods.

7. Oxidative Stress and Adipocyte Dysfunction

• Antioxidants like vitamins A, C, and E, as well as selenium, protect cells from oxidative damage:

  • Deficiency increases oxidative stress in adipocytes, leading to dysfunction and abnormal fat storage.

8. Exhaustion of Detox Pathways and Toxin Storage

• Micronutrient deficiencies can impair the liver and other detoxification organs by reducing the efficiency of key enzymes involved in toxin metabolism and elimination:

  • Inadequate levels of antioxidants (such as vitamins A, C, E, and selenium) and certain B vitamins compromise detoxification processes, leading to the buildup of toxins. These accumulated toxins are often sequestered in fat tissues—a protective mechanism that, over time, contributes to further fat accumulation and obesity.

Selected Supporting Evidence

1. Vitamin D and Obesity:

   • Studies show obese individuals are often vitamin D deficient, potentially due to sequestration in fat tissue.

   • Supplementation has been linked to improved weight loss outcomes in vitamin D-deficient individuals.

2. Magnesium and Insulin Sensitivity:

   • Magnesium deficiency is highly prevalent in people with obesity and correlates with insulin resistance and higher body weight.

3. Zinc and Appetite Control:

   • Zinc supplementation in deficient individuals has been shown to reduce appetite and improve weight management.

4. B Vitamins and Energy Metabolism:

   • B12 and folate deficiencies are more common in obese individuals, impairing energy metabolism and physical activity.

So, micronutrient deficiencies definitely disrupt metabolic and hormonal pathways, contributing to the development and persistence of obesity. Addressing these deficiencies through dietary changes or supplementation can:

• Improve appetite regulation.

• Enhance energy expenditure.

• Reduce inflammation.

• Support overall metabolic health.

This all strongly suggests that addressing "hidden hunger" (micronutrient deficiencies) is a crucial strategy for tackling obesity and its associated health risks.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

There are many ways to lose weight fast or slow. Some require a lot of willpower to sustain and others do not. Any system can be hacked to achieve an outcome at odds with the system inputs, but the hackers mindset belies a deep misunderstanding of the actual meaning of the illness state, in this case being overweight.

It’s not the fatness that is the problem, it’s the toxins that the body is trying to neutralize by weight gain that are usually the real problem on the one hand, with nutrient deficiencies contributing to a “starvation” state on the other.

Forcing weight loss by some metabolic, or micronutrient maxing, or caloric restriction, or exercising, or medication hack will not necessarily solve the toxicity. In fact it could worsen it by releasing toxins into systemic circulation without having previously opened detox pathways for elimination, so as they circulate, tapped within, they will just damage all tissues.

If the body makes a decision to increase fat stores, it does so for good reason. It is the best of all possible outcomes, given the situation you’ve put yourself in.

DETOXIFICATION FOR WEIGHT LOSS

So how do you detoxify properly in order to lose weight effortlessly by sending the body the signal that it no longer needs to stimulate weight gain to sequester toxins?

Slow and steady wins the race.

Your body is a crowded theater that’s on fire. If everyone runs for the exits all at once no one will make it out. The way will be blocked.

It’s the same with throwing out the toxins that are slow-burning your body down.

Detoxification requires relaxation, in other words good autonomic nervous system activity, rather than sympathetic excess. The autonomic nervous system is the “rest and digest and detox” arm of the nervous system. It’s the nighttime, letting-go, out-breath yin to the daytime taking-in-breath yang.

Detoxification requires supporting the organs that detoxify and excrete: the immune system, skin, lungs, liver/gallbladder, kidneys/bladder, and vascular systems (especially draining veins and lymphatics).

It requires proactively stimulating those processes that expel toxins, like sweating, deep breathing, hydrating/urinating, eating/defecating, etc.

We can assist our body’s natural detoxification pathways by binding toxins that are on their way out but may be reabsorbed before final exit by using tools like chlorella, which gently sucks toxins out of circulation without greatly impacting nutrients as some other binders do.

Herbs like moringa and food like broccoli sproutscan help us neutralize xenoestrogens.

Along the way we can start to cull the various microorganisms that have overgrown in response to the toxins, like mold which binds heavy metals and helps shield from nnEMFs, using broad spectrum antimicrobials like chlorine dioxide, and various antimicrobial herbs.

There is a lot and the specific plan, including the elements and their sequence, depends heavily on the specifics of each person’s situation. I wish there was something simple and straightforward enough that would work for everyone, but in such a world we wouldn’t be surrounded by the beauty of the varied and complicated expressions of humanity that help make life interesting and worthwhile.

The only way to heal from anything, including obesity and overweight, is individually, 1 on 1 with a master healer. Even masters struggle to heal themselves given the difficulty of maintaining proper perspective and resisting the urge to go too easy, or too hard.

If you’re ready to take the journey to deep healing, get in touch with us at mygotodoc.com/hakim.

There is some benefit in alcohol but also much harm, even at the moderate doses that have been recommended by doctors for generations, and even at low doses if you take a broader societal perspective, where some will invariably imbibe more than recommended and because of it harm others who drink little or not at all in a number of ways.

Both the benefit and harm have direct and indirect aspects, i.e. some related to physiological effects of alcohol and others related to its immediate and wider social effects.

There is some low quality epidemiological evidence of personal benefit in small amounts of alcohol in those who can stick to drinking small amounts of alcohol, though there are many reasons to doubt this evidence, and other higher quality epidemiological studies that are contradictory when certain confounders are taken into account.

The strongest possible benefits are for heart and kidney disease reduction, a reduction of certain cancers, and possible reduction in all cause mortality, especially in hypertensives.

However there are offsetting increased risks for other chronic diseases, cancer and as mentioned the lowering of all cause mortality itself is likely limited to small subgroups, if not offset by painful comorbidities themselves stemming from alcohol use, including severe dementia which limits experiential lifespan.

What this all means is that a moderate drinker might miss developing heart disease or dying from a heart attack only to suffer attacks of cancer and a slow painful decline into dementia.

If there is any benefit to be had on an individual level it could be purely physiologically mediated, e.g. by hormesis, where a small to moderate stressor can strengthen the body. However this may no longer apply since most of us are already overly stressed by the burden of other environmental toxins, nnEMFs, social dysfunction, lack of sunlight, grounding, darkness at night and sleep. Adding any additional stress on top of all that can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, or prevents it from mending.

Alcohol’s benefits could also be mediated via increases in personal intimacy and bonding, which can of course be had without alcohol, at least after some focused practice. And these social benefits can be offset, especially when alcohol is consumed in quantities that affect our experience of reality, by emotional and spiritual numbing that detracts from the reason people exist in the first place.

On the other hand indirect harm comes from alcoholics, especially affecting family members, but also the society at large via dysfunctional, abusive relationships and motor vehicle accidents.

The emotional damage becomes trans-generational because the affected children pass on the interpersonal dysfunction to their own children, so it spreads exponentially across time until there isn’t anyone in a society who isn’t somehow touched by it - either directly or due to such harm afflicting a loved one.

Those most indirectly harmed in this way may not even become alcoholic themselves but still find their lives are as chaotic and dysfunctional as those who are full blown alcoholics (there are 12 Step healing/support groups that cater to alcoholics and others that cater specifically to family members of alcoholics, who may or may not drink themselves).

This state of affairs is a general drag on civilization that could itself lead to a negative spiral into chaos over a long enough time span.

In a small, isolated, uniform community it might be possible to create strict social rules and policing around alcohol use and abuse and limit or even avoid the indirect harm it engenders, but in the modern interconnected, melting-pot world most of us inhabit this is functionally impossible.

Even if there were past societies that benefitted from alcohol use, nowadays alcohol seems manifestly harmful on net, but especially so if you consider a broader perspective including all the indirect effects that impact everyone, even those who can strictly limit their intake.

It’s a public health issue that negatively affects personal health both directly and indirectly since the dysfunction that spreads in society is itself a chronic stressor for every individual, whether they experience direct physiological harm from it or not.

Evidence for Moderate Alcohol’s Physiological Benefits

A substantial body of research – mostly epidemiological – has reported associations between light-to-moderate alcohol intake and certain health benefits, particularly for the cardiovascular system. Numerous large observational studies and meta-analyses have found that people who drink moderately (often defined as up to ~1 drink per day for women or 1–2 for men) have lower rates of coronary heart disease (CHD) and all-cause mortality compared to non-drinkers (here and here). For example, a 2011 BMJ meta-analysis of 84 cohort studies found a 25–30% reduced risk of heart disease in light/moderate drinkers versus abstainers (here). These epidemiologic findings led to the well-known “J-shaped” curve hypothesis, where low doses of alcohol appear protective against cardiovascular events, while heavy drinking is harmful. Proposed mechanisms from clinical and preclinical studies may help explain these associations: moderate ethanol intake can raise HDL (“good”) cholesterol levels, including raising apolipoprotein A1 (here and here), reduce blood clotting tendency (by lowering fibrinogen and increasing fibrinolysis) (here), and dampen chronic inflammation (usually misinterpreted as always positive, but inflammation is your own immune system fighting for good reason, either against extra or intracellular pathogens or to remove toxins). Light alcohol intake has also been linked to better insulin sensitivity and a lower incidence of type 2 diabetes in some populations (here), potentially via improved adiponectin levels and insulin signaling.

Beyond the heart and metabolism, some studies have observed cognitive or neurological benefits of low-dose alcohol. Certain longitudinal studies reported that moderate drinkers had equal or lower rates of dementia and cognitive decline compared to abstainers (here), though findings have been mixed. On a neurobiological level, recent research offers insight into stress-related mechanisms: A 2023 Massachusetts General Hospital study found that light/moderate drinkers showed reduced stress signaling in the amygdala (brain’s stress center) on PET scans, which correlated with fewer heart attacks and strokes (here and here). This suggests moderate alcohol might confer some cardiovascular benefit by blunting chronic stress pathways. In animal models, low doses of ethanol have shown hormetic effects – for instance, improving endothelial function and reducing atherosclerotic plaque development in some rodent studies (here and here). Such preclinical findings align with the idea that small amounts of alcohol might induce mild adaptive stress responses (e.g. upregulating cellular antioxidative defenses) that could be beneficial, while larger doses overwhelm these systems.

Study Quality and Ioannidis’s Reliability Rubric: It is important to note that most “benefit” data come from observational studies, which have inherent limitations. John Ioannidis is famous for noting decades ago that most academic research findings are false, and that most study designs in most situations are likely to return false results, essentially mirroring the mainstream consensus. His criteria for robust, reliable research emphasize factors like large sample sizes, minimal bias, pre-registration, and consistent replication. Many alcohol studies supporting benefits fall short on these counts. They are typically non-randomized cohorts with self-reported alcohol intake, leaving ample room for confounding and measurement error. The effect sizes observed (e.g. ~0.8 relative risk for moderate drinkers) are relatively small, and Ioannidis has cautioned that modest associations in nutritional epidemiology are often non-reproducible false positives if biases aren’t rigorously controlled (e.g. here). Indeed, the literature on moderate drinking has produced conflicting results across different populations and health outcomes – a warning sign under Ioannidis’s rubric. There is also multiplicity of analyses (varied health endpoints, subgroup definitions, etc.): Ioannidis’s team notes that testing many hypotheses without proper adjustments greatly increases the likelihood of spurious “significant” findings (see here). In short, while a considerable number of studies suggest physiological benefits from moderate alcohol, their observational nature and methodological weaknesses mean we must interpret the findings with caution when judged by rigorous standards of evidence quality.

More on Weaknesses and Biases in Studies Claiming Benefits

Despite the suggestive findings above, many other researchers have identified multiple specific major limitations and biases in studies that claim alcohol is beneficial. These issues cast doubt on whether moderate drinking truly causes better health or if other factors explain the correlation. Importantly many of these biases can only skew study results towards overestimating the benefits of alcohol and underestimating its harms.

• Confounding Lifestyle Factors: Moderate drinkers may differ systematically from abstainers in ways that affect health. They often have higher socioeconomic status, better diets, more exercise, and stronger social networks – all of which improve health independent of alcohol - and they may specifically start drinking or moderate preexisting drinking because they have been told that it is beneficial to do so. This artificially inflates the group of moderate drinkers with people who are particularly health conscious. Conversely, the “non-drinker” group can include people who abstain due to underlying poor health or former heavy drinkers who quit (see below). Such differences can mask the true impact of alcohol. Although many studies try to adjust for confounders, no statistical model can perfectly equalize groups on all unmeasured healthy lifestyle factors. Thus, moderate drinking might merely be a marker of a healthier or more social lifestyle, rather than the cause of the benefit.

• Misattribution of Benefit to Alcohol Itself: Although some research suggests any cardioprotective effect in studies is not specific to wine vs beer vs liquor (here), it remains possible that there are one or more beneficial elements other than alcohol present in some or all of them. However, to date, attempts to isolate causal factors aside from alcohol (like the resveratrol in red wine hypothesis) have largely failed to show significant effects in controlled trials. If such a component does exist it’s possible the beneficial effect is only manifest in its un-isolated form, i.e. not separable from the harms of the alcohol.

• “Healthy Drinker” or “Sick Quitter” Bias: A well-recognized bias is that some studies misclassify people who previously drank heavily and damaged their health (“sick quitters”) as “abstainers” as long as they did not drink during the study period. This tends to inflate the risk in the non-drinker study group, making current moderate drinkers (who are relatively healthier, perhaps less predisposed to damage, or just earlier in their drinking career) look good by comparison (here and here). Recent analyses that specifically addressed this bias found that the supposed protective effect disappears. Importantly, when researchers separate lifelong moderate drinkers from those who only later reduced their intake, the lifelong moderate group shows no longevity or heart benefit relative to true abstainers (here and here). One study reclassifying “former” and “reducing” (previously heavier) drinkers demonstrated that mixed populations had created a false J-curve: higher cardiac risk in the abstainers/reducers who had been improperly grouped into the low or no alcohol use category artificially produced the lower risk seen in moderate drinkers (here). In other words, properly designed studies find moderate drinkers are not significantly healthier than genuinely abstinent people, undermining the claims of benefit (here). A 2016 meta-analysis by Stockwell et al., which controlled for abstainer bias and study quality across ~4 million people, concluded that low-volume alcohol consumption has no net mortality benefit compared to lifetime abstention (here). The initial mortality risk ratio of ~0.86 (14% benefit) for light drinkers became ~0.97 (statistically neutral) after correcting for biases (here). This demonstrates how pivotal methodological refinements can wipe out the appearance of protection.

• Self-Report and Measurement Error: Almost all population studies rely on self-reported alcohol intake (questionnaires, interviews), which is famously prone to underreporting and misclassification. People may not accurately recall or truthfully report how much they drink. “Moderate” drinkers in surveys might actually be heavier drinkers who underestimate their intake, diluting the observed risks of alcohol. Conversely, occasional drinkers might be miscategorized as abstainers. Such measurement errors generally bias results toward suggesting safer effects of alcohol than truly exist (here and here). Without objective biomarkers or prospective randomization and controls, it’s hard to ensure that “moderate drinking” is measured consistently across studies.

• Selection Bias and Survival Bias: Epidemiological cohorts often “select” for people healthy enough to remain in the study. Those who can sustain moderate drinking over many years may be a robust subset with genetic or health advantages; less healthy drinkers might drop out (or die) earlier. This survivorship bias can make moderate drinking look protective when in fact the cohort had a healthier constitution to begin with. Additionally, some large studies (like the famous Nurses’ Health Study) showed moderate drinkers had lower mortality, but critics note that participants were primarily health-conscious individuals to start with. Thus, moderate alcohol could piggyback on other selection effects.

• Industry Funding and Influence: The alcohol industry has a vested interest in promoting the idea that moderate drinking is healthy, which can subtly or overtly influence research. Many studies on alcohol and health have received industry funding or have investigators with industry ties. While funding alone doesn’t invalidate results, it raises concern about design biases – similar to how pharmaceutical industry–sponsored trials tend to favor the sponsor’s drug. Documents revealed that the NIH’s 2018 MACH trial (a $100M randomized trial on moderate alcohol and heart health) was shaped behind the scenes by alcohol industry input, with industry partners explicitly seeking to “show the J-curve in all its glory” (here). Investigators and NIH staff were found to have improperly courted industry funding and designed the trial to focus on benefits while downplaying risks, leading to cancellation of the trial for ethics violations (here). This episode exemplifies how industry involvement can bias the research agenda – for instance, by excluding outcomes like cancer to favor a positive conclusion (here). A systematic analysis by Golder and McCambridge (2015) examined dozens of cohort studies and did not find broad evidence that industry-funded studies always showed more benefit, except in the case of stroke (where outcomes varied significantly by funding source) (here). Nonetheless, they cautioned that subtle “funding effects” could be at play and called for further scrutiny (here). In sum, one should ask: Are we seeing a true health effect or an echo of alcohol industry marketing? The heavy critique of the “moderate drinking is healthy” narrative in recent years suggests a lot of prior research may have overstated benefits due to systematic biases or conflicts of interest.

High-Quality Meta-Analyses on Alcohol and All-Cause Mortality

To clarify inconsistent findings especially for all cause mortality, which many consider the ultimate indicator of benefit, researchers have conducted rigorous meta-analyses and umbrella reviews across many populations. These analyses paint a bleak picture:

No Consistent Mortality Benefit After Bias Adjustment: The most recent high-quality meta-analyses suggest that any apparent longevity benefit from moderate drinking is likely not causal. A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis (including 107 cohort studies, ~4.8 million people) found no significant reduction in all-cause mortality for drinkers consuming up to 25 g of alcohol per day when compared to lifetime abstainers, after adjusting for study design factors (here). In this analysis, low-volume drinkers (approximately 1 drink or less per day) had no statistically significant advantage in survival (relative risk ~0.93, 95% CI overlapping 1) relative to never-drinkers (here). By contrast, higher intake was associated with a clear increase in mortality risk – for example, women drinking ≥25 g/day and men ≥45 g/day had significantly elevated all-cause death rates (here). The authors concluded that “low-volume alcohol drinking was not associated with protection against death” and even modest drinking may slightly raise the risk for some individuals (here). These findings update and reinforce earlier meta-analyses (e.g. Stockwell et al. 2016) that questioned the so-called J-shaped curve when accounting for biases. In short, when the healthiest abstainers are properly identified and confounders are controlled, moderate drinkers no longer show a longevity advantage over true non-drinkers.

Umbrella Review and Specific Subgroups: An extensive 2022 umbrella review (covering dozens of meta-analyses of prospective studies) provides a broad overview of alcohol’s effects on various outcomes. Notably, this review found that the only subgroup with strong evidence of reduced all-cause mortality from alcohol was people with hypertension (here). In hypertensive individuals, low-to-moderate alcohol intake was associated with roughly a 19% reduction in overall mortality compared to abstainers (here). This specific benefit (moderate drinking helping those with high blood pressure) had a “high” quality of evidence rating in the umbrella review (here). The likely explanation is that in patients with hypertension – who are at elevated risk of heart attacks and strokes – a small amount of alcohol might reduce cardiovascular strain (via stress relief or modest vasodilation) and improve lipid profiles, thus slightly lowering their high baseline risk. Indeed, a prior meta-analysis focused on hypertensive patients (Huang et al. 2014) also reported that light drinkers with hypertension had significantly lower rates of heart disease and mortality than nondrinkers (here).

Outside of that hypertension subgroup, the umbrella review did not find robust evidence of all-cause mortality benefit in the general population. Some associations that appeared favorable (e.g. moderate drinking and lower overall cancer mortality or non-hypertensive cardiovascular mortality) were graded as “weak” or “moderate” evidence, meaning they could be due to chance or bias (here). In fact, the umbrella review confirmed protective effects of moderate alcohol on only a few outcomes with high confidence – notably, reduced risk of renal cell carcinoma, dementia, and colorectal cancer mortality, and again all-cause mortality in hypertensive patients (here). Meanwhile, it found strong evidence of harm for multiple outcomes even at moderate doses, such as increased risk of several cancers (breast, colorectal, esophageal, skin cancers) (here) and higher risk of hemorrhagic stroke (here). This underscores that any potential benefit is highly context-dependent and outweighed by risks for most people.

Consistency Across Populations: The question of whether alcohol’s effects vary by population (e.g. by age, sex, or region) has also been explored. Some earlier studies suggested that older adults might experience more benefit (since their baseline heart risk is higher), or that benefits were more evident in European cohorts than U.S. cohorts (here). For instance, the 2006 meta-analysis noted the mortality benefit for men was smaller in the U.S. than in Europe (here), possibly due to lifestyle differences. However, contemporary meta-analyses that stratify by age and sex find that no group truly gains in mortality from drinking. The 2023 analysis by Zhao et al. noted female drinkers actually face higher relative mortality risk than males at a given consumption level (women have increased risk even at ~25 g/day, whereas men’s risk climbs more notably beyond ~45 g/day) (here). This sex difference aligns with clinical data showing women are more vulnerable to alcohol’s toxic effects on the liver, heart, and cancer risk. By age: younger people (<40) generally do not experience health benefits from alcohol, as their baseline disease risk is low but alcohol-related risks (injuries, violence, etc.) are relatively high. Any potential cardioprotective effect becomes more relevant in middle-age and older adults; yet even in these groups, rigorous analyses (and genetic studies, see below) find little net mortality benefit outside of specific high-risk conditions like hypertension (here).

Confirmations and Refutations: The emerging scientific consensus leans toward refuting broad health benefits of moderate drinking. Additional support for this comes from Mendelian randomization studies, which use genetic variants as unbiased proxies for alcohol intake. One such study found that individuals with genetic traits predisposing them to drink less had a linear reduction in cardiovascular and mortality risk, with no J-shaped protection at low doses (here). This genetic evidence suggests that lower alcohol consumption causally improves health, refuting the idea that moderate intake is inherently protective. Moreover, global analyses like the 2018 Global Burden of Disease study concluded that “the safest level of drinking is none,” given that any slight reductions in heart disease are offset by increased risks of cancer, injuries, and other conditions on a population level (here). That said, moderate drinkers in past studies did often have lower heart disease incidence, and a minority of special populations (e.g. people with established heart disease or risk factors) may derive a small benefit. Overall, however, high-quality evidence now challenges the notion of a widespread health benefit from alcohol. The consensus of recent meta-analyses is that any benefit is at best small, non-generalizable, and likely confounded, whereas the harms of alcohol are suspected even at moderate doses and indisputable at high doses.

Direct, Indirect and Societal Harms of Alcohol Consumption

When evaluating alcohol’s impact, it’s critical to look both at individual harms as well as considering broader public health and social consequences. Even if moderate drinking has a health benefit for some, alcohol does harm others, and it’s not possible to know into which category you will fall, and in general the overall footprint on society is overwhelmingly negative.

• Direct Physical Health Risks (Cancers, Organ Damage) at Moderate Doses: Alcohol is a known carcinogen and even moderate consumption measurably increases the risk of several cancers. For instance, breast cancer risk rises by about 7–10% per 10g of alcohol/day – meaning even one drink daily can raise a woman’s breast cancer risk significantly over time (here). A recent National Academies review confirmed that moderate drinking is associated with higher incidence of breast and colorectal cancers (here). Alcohol also contributes to liver disease (e.g. fibrosis and cirrhosis can develop in some “moderate” drinkers who are especially susceptible), as well as hypertension and atrial fibrillation risk, which increase roughly linearly with dose (here and here). It’s notable that no organ system is truly spared – even low levels of alcohol produce acetaldehyde and reactive oxygen species (toxic metabolites), causing cellular stress and engaging often already overburdened detox pathways. A 2018 comprehensive analysis in The Lancet (Global Burden of Disease study) concluded that “no amount of alcohol is safe”, as any potential cardiovascular benefits are outweighed by increased risks of cancer and other diseases (here). The researchers found that the optimal level of drinking for health is zero, from a population standpoint, given alcohol was responsible for ~3 million deaths worldwide in 2016 (here). Thus, even moderate drinkers may pay a price in terms of long-term disease risk that isn’t immediately obvious.
  

• Addiction and Progression to Heavy Use: Alcohol is an addictive substance, and what starts as “moderate” use can escalate. A portion of moderate drinkers will lose control over their intake over time. Epidemiologically, any regular alcohol use increases the lifetime risk of developing Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD). Data show an astounding ~29% lifetime prevalence of AUD in the U.S. (here), and risk is “dose-dependent” – the more one drinks, the higher the likelihood of eventual alcoholism. Genetic predispositions can make even “social drinking” a slippery slope. The simple presence of alcohol in one’s lifestyle (versus complete abstinence) opens the door to habituation, tolerance and increasing use over time to achieve the same pleasurable effects. From a public health view, encouraging the idea of moderate drinking as healthy could inadvertently lead some people to drink who otherwise wouldn’t, expanding the pool of those at risk for alcohol’s harms.
  

• Family and Domestic Problems: Alcohol’s role in domestic and social dysfunction is well-documented. Domestic violence and abuse are frequently fueled by alcohol consumption. Estimates from the WHO indicate about 50–60% of intimate partner violence incidents involve alcohol use by the perpetrator (here and here). While these typically involve heavy episodic drinking, even habitual moderate drinking can set the stage for family conflict – for example, a person who has a few drinks every night may have impaired judgment or irritability that affects their spouse and children. Alcohol impairs inhibition and can exacerbate mental health issues (depression, anger) that play into family violence or neglect. Children raised in households with regular drinking may experience a less stable and nurturing environment, even if the drinking is “moderate” by clinical standards. Parental alcohol use is associated with a higher risk of behavioral problems and alcohol use in children (through both genetic predisposition and learned behavior) (here ). In fact, having a family history of alcoholism increases one’s own risk of AUD several-fold (here), illustrating how alcohol’s damage often propagates across generations. This intergenerational impact is not solely genetic – it’s also environmental. A culture of moderate drinking in the home may normalize alcohol for the next generation, potentially leading to earlier onset of drinking and higher lifetime consumption in descendants. In the worst cases, moderate drinking can progress to parental alcohol misuse, which is recognized as an Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) linked to long-term trauma for children. Even in utero, alcohol can harm: drinking during pregnancy (even at “moderate” levels) can cause fetal alcohol spectrum disorders. Health authorities therefore urge zero alcohol during pregnancy, since no known safe threshold exists to avoid developmental damage. The presence of alcohol in a family often goes hand-in-hand with marital stress, divorce, child neglect, and financial problems – all societal dysfunctions that radiate outward from the individual drinker.
  
  

• Accidents, Injuries, and Public Safety: Alcohol consumption – including moderate amounts – contributes to accidents and injuries that affect others. Even at blood alcohol levels corresponding to moderate intake (e.g. after 1–2 drinks), impairment can occur: slowed reaction time, reduced coordination, and altered judgment. This means moderate drinking can be enough to cause motor vehicle accidents or mistakes at work. Alcohol-related accidents are not limited to drunks; “buzzed driving” is dangerous too. Moreover, even a “moderate” drinker who occasionally binge drinks (e.g. social drinking that goes too far) puts others at risk. Alcohol is implicated in a large share of falls, fires, and other unintentional injuries in the home and community. On a population scale, these incidents translate to healthcare burdens and lost productivity. It’s estimated that alcohol-related workplace productivity losses and healthcare costs run in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually, amounting to at least 1% of GDP in high-income countries when factoring in all harms (here). These costs are borne by society at large (through insurance, medical costs, legal system, etc.), not just the drinkers themselves. In short, the externalities of alcohol use are massive, and even so-called moderate consumption contributes to that toll (since a large proportion of alcohol-related harm – like car crashes or violent altercations – occur at levels not far above the “moderate” range).
  
  

• Transgenerational and Community-Wide Stress: Alcohol’s harms tend to cluster and amplify across generations and communities. In communities with prevalent drinking culture, one often sees a cycle of alcohol problems: youth observe adults using alcohol as a coping mechanism or social ritual, increasing the likelihood they’ll do the same. Over time this can perpetuate cycles of addiction and social ills. Researchers also talk about “transgenerational trauma” where the dysfunction from alcohol in one generation (e.g. an alcoholic parent) leads to emotional trauma in children, which in turn can manifest as substance abuse or mental illness in the next generation. Thus, alcohol’s damage isn’t contained to one person – it spreads especially through families in an exponential manner across time. From a societal viewpoint, alcohol (even in moderation) can erode the social fabric by contributing to violence, abuse, mental stress, and reduced economic productivity. Consider also the psychological stress on loved ones: the spouse of a moderate-to-heavy drinker may live in chronic stress or anxiety, which can degrade their own health. The children of a drinker may suffer academic and emotional consequences. These indirect effects are harder to quantify but are very real; many argue they make any level of alcohol use net harmful when viewed holistically. As one analysis succinctly stated: while moderate alcohol might protect some against heart disease, those potential benefits “do not outweigh the risks” of cancers, injury, and social damage (here). Public health experts therefore increasingly favor the message that alcohol is best avoided altogether, since even moderation can fuel a cycle of harm at the individual and population level.

Conclusion: Do the Benefits Outweigh the Harms?

Bringing together the evidence, the picture that emerges is that the purported health “benefits” of moderate alcohol are on shaky scientific ground, whereas the harms – both direct and indirect – are substantial and in many cases directly experienced and obvious to any unbiased observer. Early low-quality population studies suggested moderate drinking (especially wine) might extend lifespan and protect the heart, but more rigorous analyses controlling for bias have largely nullified those findings (here ). At best, a small cardioprotective effect might exist for certain individuals and certain subgroups might live slightly longer, but even this is strongly disputed and very likely a mirage of confounding (“healthy user” effects). On the other hand, even low-level drinking incrementally increases the risk of cancer, alcoholism, liver disease, and more. Alcohol also contributes to a wide swath of social ills – from family violence and dysfunctional relationships to accident fatalities – that no study has ever shown to be outweighed by health benefits. As Ioannidis and others would note, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; the claim that daily consumption of a psychoactive toxin improves health has not met the burden of proof, despite millennia of widespread use. Instead, the most reliable current evidence (e.g. meta-analyses of high-quality studies and global disease burden data) indicates no net health benefit from drinking – and indeed a potential for net harm (here and here).

If a person doesn’t drink, there is no medical reason to start; and if one does drink moderately, it should be with the clear understanding that any minor possible benefits (such as a slight HDL boost or stress reduction) comes with real trade-offs including increased risks of cancer, dependency, and in the aggregate broader societal harm. And of course the aggregate includes each one of us, who contribute to the social acceptability of drinking.

Most think they are missing out by not drinking, but it’s exactly the opposite. The full range of human spiritual, emotional, intellectual and social experience is only available to those whose faculties are entirely intact and have been fine tuned and elevated by years of full contact living - the only kind of living that uncovers all our foibles and failures and allows us to correct them in a journey of gradual self-actualization.

Even though it’s often thought of in the opposite way, ultimately for most drinkers the question to drink or not to drink is like asking not to think, or to think?

Not to fully experience, or to fully experience?

Not to be, or to be?

Prepare to be horrified.

Alkaline hydrolysis AKA “water cremation” liquefies dead human beings and flushes their remains into the sewer where they go to water treatment facilities and from there are discharged straight into local rivers and lakes.

From where they can easily end up back in the municipal water supply.

But even worse some states allow the direct injection of treated waste water right back into municipal drinking water.

Even though the liquefied remains are treated the resulting “purified” water still retains many contaminants, worst of all prions, tiny malformed proteins which cause rapid onset irreversible neurodegenerative diseases like CJD.

There has been speculation on the clinical effect of prion-like domains found in the COVID-19 spike protein that may be contributing to the neurodegenerative diseases many experience soon after receiving the mRNA shot.

I was just contacted for advice by someone with a relative diagnosed with ALS post shot. Though ALS isn’t considered infectious like typical prion diseases, there is evidence suggesting that within the body of the person affected by ALS misfolded proteins “infect” other proteins in a prion-like way to advance the disease.

Now you might think that water treatment would eliminate pesky contaminants like prions, but that’s not the case (prions have actually been detected in US wastewater). Water treatment also doesn’t eliminate heavy metals, pharmaceutical, hormones, etc.

And it certainly doesn’t eliminate the energetic signature of the water from the human beings in question, what some might term water’s “memory,” a phenomenon studied for decades with research published by no less than Nobel Laureate Luc Montagniere shortly before his recent untimely demise.

Water cremation is billed as a “green” alternative because it uses less energy than traditional cremation and doesn’t involve the burning of fossil fuels.

Setting aside the misguided assumptions behind the green movement, the reality of water cremation is that is represents an utterly disgusting, shameful, extremely disrespectful way of treating the recently departed.

It’s just one of countless ways modern society is flagrantly defying all decency and morality.

The divine blowback from everything human beings are doing to themselves, their neighbors and the world at large, is already unlike anything the world has ever seen with rates of chronic disease and societal dysfunction skyrocketing at increasing rates, and it will only continue to get worse as the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse continue their inexorable ride across our world.

Many wonder at the stories of divine retribution passed down by ancient religions, scoffing at descriptions of fire and brimstone, but in truth the consequences need not be in any way miraculous.

Breaking the laws of nature creates self correcting feedback loops that are inescapable, wiping the offenders clear off the face of the earth, and taking their compatriots with them.

In late stage societies like ours everyone is punished, good and bad alike, in a tragedy of the commons.

There are currently 28 states that allow the abomination of water cremation. It’s been legal in Minnesota since 2003. Other states where it’s currently legal include: Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Michigan (not regulated, but appears available nonetheless), Missouri (classified under general cremation), Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

It was previously legal in New Hampshire but the law repealed and a newer bill failed to pass in 2013. A bill to legalize it failed in Virginia in 2023.

In the United States, several states have adopted wastewater recycling practices that allow treated waste water (from sewage and water cremated bodies) to go straight back into the drinking water:​

• California: Approved regulations in 2023 to allow direct potable reuse of treated wastewater.

• Texas: Cities like El Paso are developing facilities to treat wastewater for direct reuse in the municipal water supply.

• Colorado: Permits direct potable reuse.

• Virginia: Fairfax County has utilized recycled water to support its drinking water reservoir for decades.

• Iowa: The town of Osceola is exploring the use of treated wastewater as part of its drinking supply.

I travel to Florida often and boy am I glad that we buy bottled water when we’re there, but we occasionally purchase bottled water in airports and elsewhere, and I’ll be sure to check the sources from now on.

But what can you do if you live in a place where this is going on and can’t afford expensive bottled water?

The following is highly speculative and I’m certainly no expert on homeopathy or related water memory topics, but I don’t suppose any filter will do much to remove the energetic imprint of water, but a sufficiently good one should remove physical contaminants like pharmaceuticals and hormones. However from what I can tell removing prions requires reverse osmosis filtration.

If water memory depends on physical structures within water like silica, then filtration might work, but according to Montagniere’s work it appears to depend on some kind of electromagnetic effects stabilized by quantum coherence phenomenon, which means energy input would be required to clear it.

For example simple boiling would rapidly break hydrogen bonds between molecules which would reform in a random memory free arrangement on cooling.

Less practical certainly, but Nature’s own method should also work, i.e. vaporization followed by condensation, which also resets the hydrogen bonding networks. So the water cycle we all learned about in elementary school should also purify water of any residual memory.

Of course it's also possible that the dilution accomplished by being immersed in a large body of water like a lake or river will make additional “energetic cleansing” of any kind redundant.

Even so the fact liquefied human beings are being ejected into the water that eventually makes its way to my tap is so disturbing I will probably have to purposely block it out in order to even wash my hands or take a shower in a participating state like Florida.

Let people know about this and make some noise. If you live in one of the above states try to get the laws reversed (both the human liquefaction laws as well as the wastewater recycling laws).

Now please excuse me as I go vomit.

Obesity is due to starvation, not overeating.

The solution is consuming more, not less.

The increased appetite and resulting stubborn fat are misinterpreted messages that are meant to convey a deep need for what’s actually missing.

“CICO!” they proclaim. Meaning: Calories in Calories out, i.e. the cause is too many calories.

In terms of helpfulness this idea is dead on arrival. It’s only trivially true in certain circumstances (ignoring the body’s ability to change its own metabolism based on inputs including what you choose to eat to get those calories).

It’s like saying the cause of forest fires is focused heat making wood burn.

No kidding.

But just knowing that doesn’t help stop forest fires. To stop forest fires you need to know about the mismanagement of forests. For example not allowing small, scattered and intermittent natural burns to get rid of highly flammable underbrush until it collects to such an extent that when it finally does light on fire there’s no stopping it from spreading everywhere. And there’s much more in the same vein of simply respecting natural ecosystems. Understanding how the natural system works to minimize destructive fires and if not helping it, at least getting out of its way, is what can stop devastating forest fires.

Digging deeper to the real root cause is what leads to real solutions for problems. Not trying to hack your way around the superficial causes, without asking, “Why is this person eating more calories than is healthy?” Why is this natural system, which has enforced normal body weight since the beginning of time, suddenly broken in the last century, harming ever more people with each passing year?

One of the primary reasons driving obesity is that people who are starving are really hungry and eat a lot of food.

The key to understanding this is that they aren’t starving for calories, but for micronutrients.

The body is wired to expect calories will be rich in nutrients and when starving of micronutrients it makes sense to increase appetite. However, this natural feedback loop is thoroughly disrupted by modernity with its prevalence of nutritionally empty junk food.

On the other hand the appetite in obesity may not only be for missing micronutrients. Humans have many needs that overlap and create a phenomenon of “referred pain”.

There are some famous clinical signs taught in med school that illustrate this phenomenon at the physical level. For example a patient might present with pain of the right shoulder, when it’s really their gallbladder that’s inflamed. Or there may be pain in the center of the abdomen, which is really due to inflammation of the appendix located in the lower right. Every brain stroke illustrates the point perfectly: the location where the problem is first detected doesn’t always tell you where the problem really is.

As far as weight gain goes there are many physical causes not often detected by testing that manifest as increased appetite and weight gain including most commonly hypothyroidism.

While these are all examples taken from the physical body we can find ready examples of this phenomenon occurring between different aspects of the human being that move beyond the physical.

Emotional eating is the most obvious and pertinent one. Depression, anxiety, lack of fulfillment and more can all lead to increased appetite to fill an emotional, rather than physical void.

Modernity creates a perfect storm of missing nutrients at various levels not just the physical (micronutrients, sleep, intimacy, movement), but also energetic (light/dark cycles, natural electromagnetic fields including Schuman Resonances), emotional (intimacy, connection, gratitude), intellectual (meaning, purpose, plans, motivations, perspective, world view), and spiritual (rejection of higher realities, the next world and divine connection)

Even this perfect storm can be successfully weathered, but only if you understand what the real cause is and address it, instead of glibly throwing terms like CICO around and telling people to just force themselves to eat less and exercise more, approaches that, like the misguided “solutions” to forest management, actually make the problem even worse. People feel even more starved and often don’t lose weight even though they may be in a caloric deficit most of the time. Their bodies alter hormonal and neurotransmitter levels, enforcing even less activity, doing whatever it takes to hold on to the fat as they sense they’re in the midst of a famine.

So the physical solution to obesity involves eating far more nutritious food in order to get the micronutrients you need, along with synchronizing your circadian rhythms to help optimize your stress hormones so that instead of making you fat they power you through productive days, and sleeping enough so your body can properly recover every day from the hard work of living.

Doing that will lead to weight loss, but the real trick comes from focusing on the deeper levels and filling up your energetic, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual buckets. When you do that while having a proper understanding of your physical needs, it all just tends to fall into place automatically.

I’ve done this myself and lost 75 pounds without feeling deprived, without cravings, without forcing myself to eat less. If you understand what your body is telling you, you can give it what it needs and actually fix the problem.

If a scientist misunderstands what the body is saying they will offer you solutions that focus on the superficial while worsening the actual problem.

It is possible to drop pounds without fixing the root cause starvation by hacking the system, but as is the case with all false prophets, “by their fruits you will know them.”

A medical paradigm that looks for ways to starve the already starving has missed the forest fire for the trees. Much heralded “solutions” like Ozempic and its like just add fuel to a raging fire and this becomes obvious when we examine its mechanism of action and some of its side effects. No wonder when people stop taking it their weight rebounds with a vengeance. With Ozempic the biggest loss is not in pounds, it’s in the lost opportunity for real emotional and spiritual growth afforded by understanding what your body is getting at and giving your self what it actually needs to advance in its life journey.

For those interested in all the details the following is a 15,000 word deep dive covering:

1. How obesity is caused by deficiencies, which then trigger toxicity and pathogenicity, which themselves cause a self-reinforcing vicious feedback loop.

2. Ozempic is dissected to show how it worsens the underlying deficiency, toxicity and pathogenicity along with representative side effects which reflect the same.

3. Then, we apply a similar analysis to all the other common weight loss drugs prescribed today, including: phentermine, Qsymia (phentermine-topamax, Contrave (bupropion-naltrexone), Saxenda (liraglutide), and Xenical/Alli (orlistat).

4. Finally, we show how what some might term more “natural” approaches like the herb Ma Huang and supplemental thyroid hormone, both still used on the fringes for weight loss by some patients and practitioners, are similarly flawed and ultimately harmful for the overweight or obese.

   These analyses should serve to strengthen the baseline assumption that any similar approach using any other drug, herb or hormone, will lead to similar problems.

   The solution to obesity will never be found in a pill, potion or injection.

Read more

There are also more “natural” seeming approaches to weight loss which are similarly flawed. Until the 1970s physicians often prescribed thyroid hormone for weight loss whether or not thyroid tests showed overt hypothyroidism. Functional medicine clinics today may still prescribe natural or synthetic thyroid hormones for presumed tissue-level hypothryoidism without confirmatory blood tests. Finally various herbs, particularly Ma Huang (outlawed, but still available by seed) were used for centuries, in part for their weight loss effects. Despite being more “natural” than pharmaceutical drugs the underlying approach is based on the same mistaken paradigm of weight gain.

The following section may be consulted as a reference for those with an interest in any of the above and will hopefully serve to dissuade from their misguided use.

Other “Siege Tactics” in Weight Loss

Each of the following interventions takes a different “siege” approach to force weight loss. We will examine how they work, how they might deepen nutritional deficits or toxicity, and why they ultimately miss the underlying cause of obesity (a body and soul craving nourishment).

Phentermine: Running on Adrenaline, Not Nourishment

Mechanism of Action:

Phentermine is a stimulant (an amphetamine analogue) that tricks the brain into thinking it’s not hungry. It triggers the release of norepinephrine (and to a lesser extent dopamine and serotonin) in the hypothalamus, activating the body’s fight-or-flight response and suppressing appetite (23). Essentially, it floods the brain with adrenaline-like signals so you feel alert and full of energy, with a blunted urge to eat. In the short term, phentermine often leads to reduced food intake and weight loss.

Appetite Suppression and Nutrient Deficits:

The problem is that phentermine-induced appetite loss doesn’t discriminate between calories and nutrients. A phentermine user might simply skip meals or eat very little. If their diet was nutrient-poor to begin with, this drug-enforced semi-starvation can swiftly worsen any vitamin or mineral deficiencies. Research on low-calorie diets shows that reducing food quantity without careful supplementation leads to higher risk of micronutrient deficiencies. Phentermine’s effect is similar – it’s been described as an “anorectic” agent precisely because it can induce a state of inadequate intake. Common side effects like dry mouth and constipation are clues: the body is literally dehydrated and digestion slowed, signs of strain (24). Users often report insomnia, agitation, and a racing heart, which are symptomatic of a body pushed into overdrive with stress hormones (24). Under these conditions, the body may burn more B-vitamins and electrolytes, further depleting nutrient stores. It’s weight loss through pressure and deprivation, not true healing.

Toxicity and Overgrowth Risks:

By revving up the sympathetic nervous system, phentermine can mask the exhaustion of an overweight body but doesn’t actually resolve underlying toxic load or immune dysfunction. In fact, chronic stress from stimulants can weaken immunity over time, raising cortisol and potentially impairing white blood cell function. If the user’s diet quality remains poor, their liver and gut still aren’t receiving the antioxidants and fiber needed for detox. The drug may help burn a bit of fat (releasing toxins stored in adipose tissue), but a malnourished body may struggle to neutralize and excrete those toxins. The result? Even as pounds drop, the internal environment could become more toxic. Some people on stimulants get sick more easily or develop skin problems and fatigue – signs that their immune system and detox organs are overburdened. And because phentermine does nothing to address gut health, issues like dysbiosis or Candida overgrowth (fueled by years of high-sugar diets) may persist or worsen as overall nutrition falters.

Deeper Critique:

Phentermine is essentially adrenaline in a pill – it forces the body to run faster and eat less, akin to whipping a tired horse. The immediate weight loss can be convincing, but it’s achieved by intensifying the starvation at obesity’s core. The drug doesn’t supply any missing nutrients or mend any emotional void; it simply shouts over the hunger signals. As a result, the true hunger (for vitamins, minerals, purpose, comfort) gets louder in subtle ways. Patients often feel more irritable or depressed once the initial “high” wears off, because nothing substantial has improved in their biochemistry or life. In fact, any rebound weight gain when phentermine is stopped is often accompanied by an even heartier appetite – the body’s attempt to recover from the imposed drought. In short, phentermine treats the symptom (appetite) by amplifying the stress state of the body. It’s siege warfare through stimulation: effective for a quick victory on the scale, perhaps, but at the risk of longer-term defeat as the undernourished, overstressed body eventually collapses or rebounds. Studies note that without addressing diet quality, weight loss from phentermine is hard to maintain – the alarm bell of hunger returns, since the fire (malnutrition) was never put out.

Phentermine–Topiramate (Qsymia): Double-Edged Sword of Suppression

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Ancient wisdom unequivocally holds that the prevention of harm should take precedence over the pursuit of benefit.

This principle has stood the test of time because harm, once inflicted, can be irreversible, whereas potential benefits often remain uncertain and context-dependent. The principle is enshrined in the western canon’s Hippocratic Oath, “First, do no harm” and is also characteristic of traditional eastern thought. However the modern west has to some extent abandoned this core principle in every area, even in the medical field, where, although it still enjoys some fame in the popular consciousness, little more than lip service is paid in actual practice.

The principle can be applied to any area of life, but hits closest to home when applied to medicine, since the consequences are so immediate.,

We’ll highlight it’s applicability to animal research studies in particular, but this investigation should also help to illuminate how this same principle might be applied across the medical field and in other areas.

Although initially the concept seems simple enough, there are some nuances that crop up in animal studies specifically which help to better elucidate why it should be taken as a first principle. Similar nuances will undoubtedly appear upon examining other areas be they in medicine, social justice, the law, the economy, the nuclear family, spiritual progress, etc. From examining the particulars of many cases we may eventually become convinced that we’ve struck upon a foundational principle upon which we can establish any endeavor, be it tending a garden or raising children.

Without this principle it’s easy to become lost in a forest of seemingly right choices that nevertheless somehow end up leading you to destruction. It’s not impossible that in certain situations surgery may be the right choice despite introducing limited harm, but unless we begin from the stance that all harm must be avoided, we won’t ever see the possibility that very often surgery isn’t actually required, especially if we move our interventions further up the long chain of events that lead someone to the operating table. To the one holding the hammer, every problem is a nail, unless they’re guided by some higher principles that shine light on their circumstances and help guide their decisions.

Here we but reintroduce the familiar old idea in a new light so that you may choose to apply the same lens everywhere else.

Reliability of Animal Models in Identifying Harm

When an experiment reveals that a substance or intervention causes harm in animals, this should always raise a red flag, despite differences in human physiology. That’s because animals, particularly those in artificially controlled laboratory environments, lack the complex psychological, emotional, and intellectual stressors that all humans experience. These stressors—rooted in the human prefrontal cortex and HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis, which take events and assign stressful meanings to them—directly influence our immune function, metabolic responses, and overall health.

Animals, in contrast, exist in a more controlled physiological state. Their responses to toxins are often more straightforward since they do not suffer from the chronic stressors of human life, such as financial worries, social conflicts, or existential anxieties. While it is true that laboratory animals experience their own forms of stress, including confinement and handling, these stressors are stripped of meaning, more uniform and predictable than the multi-layered psychological burdens that affect human biology.

For instance, research on zebras has demonstrated that after surviving a lion attack, they can rapidly return to a state of healthful parasympathetic nervous system dominance, allowing them to recover from the psychological trauma immediately, and if physically injured heal very rapidly. In contrast, human beings—who remain psychologically trapped in stress even long after the initial trigger—may take exponentially longer to recover, or in some cases, may never fully return to a parasympathetic state. This chronic nervous system dysregulation has profound implications for healing and chronic disease pathogenesis. For more on this, one can refer to Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers.

Therefore, when animal studies show that a substance is harmful, it is prudent to take such findings seriously. If an organism that is naturally more resilient than humans succumbs to toxicity, it is reasonable to infer that humans—who are physiologically and psychologically more vulnerable—may be at even greater risk.

A common argument against the reliability of animal models for detecting harm is the thalidomide case, where birth defects were not observed in initial animal studies but later emerged in humans. However, this was not a failure of the animal model itself but rather a failure of study duration and design. If researchers had extended the observation period, they would have identified the teratogenic effects before the drug reached the market. Unlike human patients, lab animals can be discarded and forgotten, meaning adverse effects in animals may go entirely unnoticed or unreported if the study period is too short. This reflects not an inherent flaw in animal testing but rather scientific haste driven by economic incentives.

Similarly, cases like acetaminophen toxicity in cats illustrate another aspect of the equation. Some substances are toxic to certain species but safe for others, which highlights species-specific metabolic differences rather than a failure of toxicity detection itself. In some instances, species like cats that are more susceptible in some physiological aspects may exhibit a certain toxicity earlier than humans, but this doesn’t mean it won’t affect us, it’s more likely to mean those same adverse effects in humans may simply remain undetected or dormant longer, and will only show up in longer term human trials, which are rarely done.

The Pitfalls of Relying on Animal Studies for Benefits

Conversely, when an animal study claims a particular intervention is beneficial, we must exercise far greater scrutiny than we do for studies showing harm, before generalizing it to humans. Again, unlike humans, animals live with far fewer psychological burdens. Their primary concern is survival—availability of food being the most crucial factor. When well-fed and kept in generally optimal environmental conditions, animals essentially exist in a state akin to an idealized human life, free from major stressors. But can we extrapolate their positive responses to human beings, who are rarely (if ever) in such a perfectly controlled state?

To put this into perspective, imagine a hypothetical human study where all external stressors are eliminated—financial concerns, social conflicts, existential worries. While ludicrously impossible in real life, this scenario still might not even approximate the controlled conditions under which laboratory animals exist, because, in human society, even those who appear to have material wealth or ideal circumstances are not exempt from biological stressors such as social pressures, cognitive burdens, and subconscious anxieties.

Thus, when animal studies show benefits, we must rigorously question whether those same effects would manifest in real-world human conditions. The absence of major external stressors in lab animals can artificially enhance the apparent benefits of an intervention, making them unreliable predictors for human health outcomes.

Case Study: Rimonabant – A Cautionary Tale

A striking example of the limitations of animal studies in proving efficacy is the case of rimonabant, an anti-obesity drug. This medication functioned by blocking endocannabinoid receptors, thereby reducing hunger, promoting fat loss, and delivering other seemingly beneficial metabolic effects. If the research had been confined solely to animal studies, the drug would have appeared overwhelmingly positive, as animals displayed substantial weight loss and metabolic improvements. However, when tested in humans, an entirely different reality emerged. Rimonabant was eventually withdrawn from the market due to severe neuropsychiatric side effects, including depression and an increased risk of suicide. This raises a critical question: How would we ever assess an animal’s mental health in a way that translates to human experiences? An animal cannot verbally or in any way reliably express feelings of despair, existential angst, or suicidal ideation.

Beyond psychology, there is an even deeper issue at play: species-specific receptor distributions. The human endocannabinoid system (ECS) differs from that of test animals, affecting how drugs interact with neurotransmitters and brain function. The failure of rimonabant was not simply an issue of animals lacking verbal expression of distress, or researchers not noticing behavioural signs of the same; rather, it highlights how species-dependent receptor variations can lead to misleading conclusions in preclinical research.

The Imperative for a Balanced, Critical Approach

Given these limitations, it is imperative to apply a discerning approach to animal studies. When an experiment reveals harm, we should treat the findings with serious concern because animals, being physiologically resilient, may actually underrepresent human susceptibility to toxicity. However, when studies claim benefits, serious skepticism is warranted, as animals exist in vastly different psychological and environmental contexts.

In the relentless pursuit of profit, this principle has been completely overturned in today’s inflation driven hyper-capitalist world. Pharmaceutical drugs and even everyday household and consumer chemicals remain largely untested for long-term safety. A conservative estimate suggests that 60–85% of chemicals in common products have not undergone adequate safety testing, particularly for chronic exposure and endocrine disruption. Over 99% have never been subjected to long-term human studies. Most rely only on basic acute toxicity data (such as LD50 tests) while lacking comprehensive research on carcinogenicity, neurotoxicity, reproductive toxicity, and endocrine-disrupting effects.

Those who analyze scientific research in industry and at home as discerning consumers must understand the fundamental differences between human and animal physiology, stress responses, and receptor distributions. Failing to do so leads to misinterpretations that can have significant real-world consequences, as seen in the case of rimonabant.

Animal studies remain a useful but imperfect tool, and their results must always be interpreted in context. The real issue is not whether animal models work, but whether we are using them appropriately, with due diligence in study design and a commitment to prioritizing harm prevention over speculative benefits.

Only by scrutinizing studies from multiple angles, embracing a "devil’s advocate" mindset, and recognizing the vast complexities of human biology can we make informed decisions about the safety and efficacy of medical interventions.

First do no harm needs to be taken seriously again, and fanciful claims of doing good for society at large or people in particular need to be viewed not only far more critically, but also more suspiciously. Only then can we be truly safe from terrible, unexpected consequences in the modern world, where we have the power to split atoms, rewrite genetics, and litter the world and our own bodies to a degree utterly inconceivable before this age. Seriously considering all possible harms and forbearing to do something deliciously appealing and lucrative because of a responsibility of care to ourselves and society at large is simply the adult thing to do and it’s past time time the adults took charge again from the spoiled adolescents leading us to our destruction.

When Hakim Shahbaz saw my missive on the diet war against sugar, he sent me the following piece he had written that suggests everything we know about nutrition is fundamentally flawed.

We assume we’re at the mercy of our environment, requiring the perfect mix of nutrients delivered in just the right quantities. Historically we assume the great civilizations in various locations with different ancient food traditions developed hyper-local versions of optimized diets to keep their populations healthy.

But the truth is that most of our ancestors were dirt poor and didn’t have the luxury of going to the grocery store and choosing all the right ingredients to optimize their nutrition, even if those ingredients were locally available.

There is certainly an entire food industry built around advancing the notion that we need to eat a “balanced diet” - a little bit of this and a little bit of that. There is an entire supplement industry built around convincing us that our food industry is woefully inadequate due to depleted soil micronutrients and suboptimal practices, so we need to supplement a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

The basic idea proposed below, along with some supporting research, is that our bodies may actually be far more resilient than almost anyone suspects, able to swap out and switch between various available nutrients to fulfill all their requirements, especially when working hand in hand with various microorganisms that have a symbiotic relationship with us, providing certain nutrients we may be unable to manufacture within our own cells.

Ultimately fundamental ground truths are difficult to determine if we artificially hobble ourselves by accepting only nutritional “science” studies produced within a fundamentally biased system.

Aristotle’s eschewal of experiment in favor of philosophizing has been misunderstood and likewise we have misunderstood the place and value of experimental knowledge.

It is inherently difficult, if not truly impossible to accurately measure most things in the real world.

The book entitled The Golem, What You Should Know About Science, is required reading for everyone enamored of the scientific endeavor to measure and understand the modern world. It exposes the truth about many of the famous experiments that supposedly upended prior peoples understandings of the natural world. What is shown is that no matter how exacting the experimental setup there is always room for error in the measurement, perhaps even due to the fundamental nature of reality and observation itself.

Experiments are done, and then criticized and redone, and redone again, and again taking care of more and more objections, until eventually by a kind of social consensus the opposition gives up and the experimental result is accepted, despite not actually ever having been successfully proven through truly rigorous experimentation. We go from theory to theory, building on prior “successes”, thinking we have left Aristotle far behind, but we have really done nothing of the sort. Like children, many of us just don’t really understand what we’re even doing.

The path to real knowledge is by understanding deeper principles, and perhaps can only truly originate with Divine inspiration.

In terms of medicine these deeper principles were encoded and embodied within long dead medical systems.

But even though those systems have collapsed and lay now in ruin, once the principles are understood they can be used as a lens through which to rebuild them and while doing so reassess modern sources of knowledge, which cannot challenge those fundamental principles but only reaffirm and perhaps expand and cast new light upon them.

The ancient medical systems like Aryurveda, Classical Chinese Medicine, and others, appear to be functional and persist in the modern context, but the truth is they are shadows of their former selves.

Most of Classical Chinese Medicine was lost to the sands of time, and what scraps survived the warring states period were pieced together and reinterpreted by various schools of thought which built entire grand edifices upon them.

Various modern practitioners call what they do Chinese Medicine, as though it’s a single monolithic structure, but in reality it’s a hodgepodge of widely differing approaches.

While they can have great success in some cases, they don’t have the degree of success they could have if they really understood what was missing.

The work of rebuilding the real glory of past knowledge is like what an archeologist attempts in sifting through the ruins of an ancient civilization to recreate what it looked like and how it functioned.

It takes a certain steely resolve, determination, perseverance, and genius combined with sheer inspiration guided from above to have any hope of recreating what has been lost. Many have tried, but so far none that I know of have succeeded in comprehensively reviving what clearly existed at one time, and was subsequently lost.

I found the unlikely combination required for success in this endeavor in one man: Hakim Shahbaz Ahmed, who is right now working hard to restore the very heart and soul of long dormant traditions.

His revolutionary perspective on nutrition may strain credulity for some, but given his track record of healing the toughest illnesses and his deep understanding of fundamental principles, it’s well worth considering the following with an open mind.

The launching point of the discussion is Louis Kervran’s work on biological transmutation, as laid out in various works including the below book, which is out of print, but available for perusal in online format here.

Kervran developed a theory explaining how biological systems can transmute elements, basically recombine and create new elements from those available, arguing that the chemical and physical laws we understand are not applicable to the biological realm. His work was spurred by a large number of puzzles and inconsistencies observed in the 19th century and earlier, which are otherwise inexplicable, as they seem to suggest elements coming from nowhere.

Chicks are born with more lime in their bodies than the total present in their eggs to begin with, and the amount in their shells remains unchanged from the beginning to end of gestation. When grass depletes the calcium in soil it stops growing and daisies come up instead, but the daisies seem to somehow be involved in creating calcium itself or summoning it into existence since it is present in their ash, when burned, so as they die and are added to the soil they refresh it and allow grass to grow again.

Rather than simply theorize, Kervran proactively studied the phenomenon in some detail and showed repeatedly in many situations that it appeared elements were combining to create ones that were initially absent, essentially fusing together in an alchemical fashion. Nuclear fusion from a physics perspective shouldn’t be even remotely possible at the temperature or pressure conditions present within animals and plants, and yet Kervran argues it must be. Perhaps our theories of chemistry and biology are fundamentally incomplete.

Or perhaps the experiments Kervran and others conducted were somehow fundamentally flawed and missing elements were introduced from some unknown location - e.g. one inconsistency cited by Kervran has been explained by modern science, i.e. how chickens can produce eggs with adequate calcium in their shells despite being fed calcium deficient feed - they just leach the missing calcium from their own bones.

However the broader point in the piece below doesn’t depend on whether Kervran is right or wrong, but that one way or another in a truly healthy ecosystem - composed of people, microbes, plants, animals, the earth, and sun, - nutritional needs are highly flexible.

From the skeptics perspective this is at least in part due to long term nutrient stores stemming from periods of “feast” that provide for later periods of “famine.” As noted to me by Chris Masterjohn, some nutrient stores derived from the mother before birth may last into old age before becoming depleted. And extending that idea back another generation suggests that the mother could have received super adequate nutrient stores from her mother, etc.

But there is far more to nutritional resilience than just creating missing elements, there are also vitamins and hormones, like K2, that some, including Masterjohn (who actually discovered that K2 was the mysterious X factor described by famous dentist Weston Price), have argued are necessary to consume as there’s no known way to create them in our cells or within our microbiome (of course no known way doesn’t mean there is no way).

Regardless of the mechanisms at play, human nutritional requirements may not require strict adherence to particular diets, ongoing nutritional testing, food diaries, and expensive supplements to hit all the micronutrient requirements on an ongoing basis.

We should certainly resist being enslaved by nutritional theory when treating patients. As old-timers in medicine always warn newbies we should avoid “treating the test rather than the patient”.

In one way or another when human and planetary ecology is naturally optimized and intertwined, deep nutritional resilience blooms and therefore we should all, based on first principles, be suspicious of what’s new under the sun (like artificial lighting and staying up well after dark, or spending all day indoors, or consuming chemical additives, etc), even after it’s been normalized for generations, and do our utmost to support regenerative farmers and all the old ways, as well as entrepreneurs creating human friendly new technologies.

Anyway without further ado, I present for your consideration:

Rethinking Nutrition

Exploring Biological Adaptability

by Hakim Shahbaz Ahmed

Introduction:

When considering the modern biological and nutritional sciences, we often find ourselves entangled in a web of self-fulfilling prophecies, where the very methods of investigation we employ shape the reality we perceive. Louis Kervran's long forgotten hypothesis on biological transmutation serves as a unique lens through which we can begin to examine this phenomenon. From there we will delve into the harmful repercussions of modern life that have negatively impacted our microbiome and show how the classification of nutrients into essential and non-essential categories may simply be a reflection of reduced overall resilience, rather than a strict law of biology.

Kervran postulated that the body, like an alchemist, is capable of converting certain elements into others. If our bodies can transmute elements, it means we might not always need to get all our essential minerals directly from food. It opens up a fascinating possibility that our bodies have an incredible ability to adapt to changing environments and create what they need internally.

Ancient religious texts often mention people sustaining themselves on a yearly provision of a single type of grain or just one specific dried fruit, their only variety stemming from differing methods of preparation. My direct observations of Indian laborers provides a fascinating addition to this narrative. These individuals, working without the benefit of sophisticated machinery, faithfully showed up every day for demanding construction tasks and depended on their body functioning at a high level for their livelihood. Their staple diet, consisting mainly of a mushy lump of unpolished rice seasoned with nothing but salt, chili, and a raw onion, was galaxies away from any dietary recommendations. Surprisingly, this seemingly basic fare not only nourished them but also empowered them to tackle strenuous physical work day in and day out. These laborers, hailing from humble villages, were carefree about their past, present, and future. With minimal expectations from life, a simple lifestyle, and nothing to lose attitude, they embraced each moment, embodying a content and stress-free approach to life. Their robust genes and sturdy, unadulterated gut microbiome, combined with a barebones diet, fueled their ability to endure strenuous physical tasks without complaint while unloading 100-kilogram cement bags from trucks all day long.

The Compromised Adaptability of the Human Body:

In contrast to the seemingly backwards and disadvantaged Indian villager, our modern life of convenience is characterized by unnatural, genetically modified foods, replete with various pesticides, toxic additives, and preservatives. Our air and water add to the chemical load and perhaps most importantly for our microbiome, our healthcare stresses the relatively frequent use of antibiotics. These artificial elements all compromise the body's ability to transmute nutrients effectively, to adapt to varying circumstances of feast or famine. The intricate relationship between the gut microbiome and our adaptive processes cannot escape the repercussions of our modern lifestyle. Chemical pollutants, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), toxins, and medications take a toll on our gut bacteria, diminishing their ability to catalyze these transmutations.

Reevaluating Essential vs. Non-Essential Nutrients:

The dichotomy between essential and non-essential nutrients has been forged in the crucible of modern intervention. Conventional wisdom categorizes nutrients based on the premise that some must be obtained externally. However, if the body has an innate or microbially assisted capacity for transmutation that would challenge this classification. A comprehensive review in the "Annual Review of Nutrition" (Stipanuk, 2007) explores the concept of nutrient flexibility and the potential of the body to synthesize both essential and non-essential nutrients under optimal conditions. Stipanuk's exploration challenges the dichotomy, suggesting that, under favourable circumstances, the body can exhibit flexibility in its nutrient synthesis processes. This implies a dynamic and adaptable physiological system capable of generating a spectrum of essential and non-essential nutrients as needed, a notion that aligns with the principles of adaptability proposed by Louis Kervran.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Modern Nutritional Science:

In the realm of modern nutritional science, we frequently find ourselves trapped in a self-fulfilling prophecy. The incorporation of medical drugs, antibiotics, and a plethora of chemicals in food cultivation takes a toll on our gut bacteria, undermining the body's innate adaptability. This, in turn, sets the stage for the distinction between essential and non-essential nutrients. A cyclical pattern emerges, wherein unnatural, disruptive contemporary interventions create a real or perceived need for nutritional supplementation, fostering the notion of certain nutrients being indispensable. Consequently, a burgeoning industry of synthetic supplementation is promoted, adding another layer to the intricate relationship between our interventions and the nutritional landscape.

The Synthesis of Vitamin C in Gut Bacteria as an Example:

Propionibacterium freudenreichii is a notable bacterium recognized for its role in the dairy industry, particularly in the production of Swiss cheese. This bacterium's ability to synthesize Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) from glucose makes it unique among gut microbiota. However, modern lifestyles, dietary habits, and widespread antibiotic use have potentially eradicated P. freudenreichii and similar beneficial bacteria from the human gut.

More than a few studies delved into the microbial synthesis of vitamin C and its potential implications for human health. Vitamin C, traditionally associated with dietary sources like citrus fruits, is crucial for various physiological functions, including immune health and collagen synthesis. Understanding microbial synthesis could shed light on the body's capacity to generate this essential vitamin through interactions with gut bacteria. The study, "Bacteria as vitamin suppliers to their host: a gut microbiota perspective," published in the journal "Current Opinion in Biotechnology" explores the synthesis and supply of vitamins by food-related lactic acid bacteria (LAB) and human gut microbiota like bifidobacteria. Genetic analyses reveal the capacity of bifidobacteria and lactobacilli for vitamin biosynthesis, challenging the traditional view that necessary vitamins must come solely from dietary sources. The study emphasizes the potential of microbial communities in the human gut to supply essential nutrients, offering a more natural alternative to synthetic fortification. The implications may extend to reevaluating dietary requirements and acknowledging the intricate relationship between our microbiome and nutrient production, again aligning with the principles proposed by Louis Kervran's hypothesis on biological transmutation.

Synthesis of Essential Amino Acids and Fatty Acids from Sugar:

The research conducted by the Swiss team revealed that under specific dietary conditions, the bacterium Clostridium difficile (C. diff) (usually associated with a diarrheal disease triggered by antibiotic use killing off its natural competitors) actually becomes crucial for patient survival. Notably, when fed sweet potatoes, C. diff produces essential amino acids and fatty acids. It is important to recognize that every food a patient consumes acts as a probiotic. This means it either supports beneficial microbes in our system, nurtures pathogens, or, more critically, can transform symbiotic microbes into pathogens that harm us. Conversely, the right food and conditions can also convert what are usually considered to be pathogens into beneficial microbes.

Conclusion:

As we unravel the intricate tapestry of modern biology's self-fulfilling prophecies, Kervran's hypothesis provides a unique perspective. Our broadening perspective on the harmful impacts of pollutants, chemicals, toxins, and medications on the body's adaptive processes underscores the importance of revisiting our approach to industry, health and nutrition. By advocating for unadulterated natural living and preserving the resilience of our gut microbiome, we take a step towards challenging the very tenets that have shaped our understanding of essential and non-essential nutrients. We may reconfigure our relationships with the natural processes that govern our well-being, offering a glimpse into a world where the body's adaptive genius thrives in harmony with nature.

The next section of pay-walled content is an 11,000 word critical deep dive research report on the evidence and science for and against the theory of biological transmutation specifically - the proposed ability of organisms to change elements on the periodic table. Some observations seem to have been explained away, though proponents of transmutation would argue they haven’t actually been properly disproven - and perhaps it simply isn't possible to disprove them with available techniques and equipment. However there are other incongruent observations which remain quite puzzling and demand confirmation and further inquiry if we hope to advance our knowledge of biology. This is because it’s always in the unexplained gaps that we find the next great leap forward, though it challenges existing beneficiaries of the mainstream paradigm.

Also included are a number of fascinating theories that have been proposed for how biological transmutation could be happening in ways that do not violate the fundamental laws of physics as we currently understand them. Some of these tie into theories of quantum biology, some into research on cold fusion, and one of them was proposed by a US Army funded scientist in the late 70s in a report where he concluded that biological transmutation does indeed occur.

As with other forms of advanced and groundbreaking science I’m left with more questions than answers and wondering if some spectacular breakthroughs have been covered up in the interests of mega corporations and governments that benefit from our continued misunderstanding of our true nature.

This has happened in the past of course, Galileo being just the most obvious example. Another one that is closer to the topic at hand is the case of Wilhelm Reich, an established psychoanalyst, who proposed the existence of "orgone energy" - a hypothetical vital biological energy. In the 1950s the FDA confiscated Reich’s equipment, banned his books, and destroyed his research materials in government-sanctioned book burnings - an unprecedented act for the time in America. As a result Reich’s theories remained far outside mainstream science. However, later research into biophotons, electromagnetic fields, and quantum biology eventually renewed interest in related concepts, albeit differently framed.

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Parasites are a particular type of pathogen that are thought to benefit from the host, without benefiting the host in any way, they’re the prototypical vampires of the microbial community. They can infect various organs, feed off the food the host consumes either directly in the GI tract, or after it’s been processed and absorbed from the bloodstream - i.e. many are literally bloodsuckers. They can also exert dramatic degrees of control over their hosts (a la the mesmerizing powers of an old-timey vampire) by hijacking the same signaling pathways the host brain and organs use to send hormonal messages. They do this in order to survive and propagate.

For example there’s a common parasite called Toxoplasma gondii that spends part of its life cycle in mice and another part in cats (and is a serious infectious threat to human cat owners too). Once it infects mice it changes their neurochemistry to make them attracted instead of repelled by the pheromonal stench of cat urine, increases their risk-taking behaviors and slows their reaction times. This greatly increases the likelihood the infected mice will end up being eaten by a cat, putting the parasite that was pulling the strings all along into its next host so it can complete its life cycle and continue to propagate.

Even more horrifying, the “zombie” ant fungus, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, is a parasitic fungus that infects carpenter ants, manipulating their behavior to ensure its own reproduction. The fungus attaches to the ant and drills into its exoskeleton. Fungal cells feed on the ant's insides and spread throughout its body. The fungus releases chemicals that compel the ant to leave its colony and climb to a high point, typically on a branch. The ant then bites down in a "death grip" and eventually dies, a fungal stalk shoots out of its head and releases its spores to infect other ants. This dramatic manipulation of the ant’s behavior ensures the fungus’s life cycle continues.

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But, surely human beings aren’t so susceptible to behavior modification as ants and mice?

Well, you might be surprised just how sensitive your personality, emotions and behaviors are to external manipulation, though when you give it some thought you really shouldn’t be - just consider what relatively small quantities of alcohol and illicit drugs can do to people.

But it’s not just drugs of abuse we need to be concerned about, it’s also common over the counter drugs you wouldn’t expect and the changes often escape notice because they’re so subtle. But subtle or not they can have profound impacts on our choices. For example, over-the-counter Tylenol and ibuprofen make people less empathetic, which can significantly interfere with healthy relationships and even end important ones like marriages.

Similarly over the counter Benadryl can cause mood disturbances. Common Parkinson’s drugs like ropinirole and pramipexole can cause increased risk taking behavior (one man, profiled in an interview famously became a gambling addict). Ironically, some drugs marketed as “antidepressants” include the side effect of suicidality, especially in teenagers. Accutane, used for acne can also make its users depressed and suicidal. Smoking cessation drug Chantix can lead to hyper-aggression and suicidality. A very commonly prescribed class of heart and blood pressure medications, the beta blockers, often make patients less motivated and less emotional.

But the greatest self-altering drug most people use on a daily basis is social media. The famous Facebook emotional manipulation study from 2012 showed tiny effect sizes, but only because it was so crudely done. With modern AI-driven algorithms its childs play to manipulate users. Anyway, traditional media, private marketers and public institutions have been manipulating us for generations (it recently became legal for the US government to propagandize Americans).

As for parasites, it turns out we’re just as susceptible to having our inner selves hijacked by them as the ants and mice are.

Toxoplasma gondii, the same protozoan parasite we discussed infecting mice, is transmitted to humans primarily through contact with cat feces, contaminated food, or mother to child during pregnancy. Infected humans may show the same increased risk-taking behavior and slower reaction times found in affected mice. Studies suggest that chronic infection may be linked to personality changes, including reduced fear and possibly increased impulsivity. There are also associations between T. gondii infection and an increased likelihood of developing psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia.

Some personal preferences are also associated with a much higher chance of being infected by parasites. For example gay men are more than twice as likely (over 70% incidence) to be infected with parasites than straight men.

However it is not at all easy to diagnose parasitic infections. Stool tests are notoriously unreliable, with different samples and different labs commonly reporting entirely different results. Many experts will order multiple stool tests over time from 3+ labs, knowing that even then they may miss the problem. The reason they seemingly go overboard like that is that often only one sample of many sent to one of multiple labs will reveal the parasites that are actually there.

What appear to be extreme measures turn out to be well justified.

Given the frequency of parasite die-off in our patients, it’s entirely possible that a significant percentage of all people with chronic health issues harbor parasites, and those who are diagnosed with them simply have the highest parasite burdens or happen to be tested during just the right time in the parasite’s life cycle.

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On social media there are numerous examples of people reporting the sudden loss of desire for anal sex (a good way to increase likelihood of transmission) after taking ivermectin or some other anti-parasitic medication. In some cases they didn’t even make the connection until months or years later.

Same goes for alcoholism, sugar cravings, and smoking, to name only a few common behaviors that have been linked to parasites.

According to the research, alcoholic patients are more likely to be infected with the parasite Strongyloides. Drinking raises human stress hormone levels which make the female parasites more fertile, and make their young more infectious. The alcohol also alters the gut barrier and immunity which both also contribute to more severe infection with Strongyloides.

Below are the confirmatory experiences of real people replying to a series of threads on Twitter discussing parasites, many referring to their own and others experiences after taking ivermectin or other substances with anti-parasitic effects, often for something other than parasites, eg as treatment for COVID-19:

The Intelligence Thief

Turns out there are “IQ parasites” too.

A 2008 study found that Brazilian children infected with hookworms performed worse on cognitive tests than uninfected ones. Children infected with more than one type of intestinal parasite performed even worse than those infected with only one. Intestinal parasites in school children have also been linked to stunting of growth, physical weakness, and low educational achievement.

According to a 2010 study by University of New Mexico scientists Christopher Eppig, Corey Fincher, and Randy Thornhill, the prevalence of parasites in a country may be related to international differences in intelligence. The "parasite-stress hypothesis", suggests that children who get parasites use more energy fighting off the infection, leaving less energy for brain development. The study found a strong correlation between average IQ and parasite stress across all nations and within each continent, except South America. The scientists believe that infectious disease is the most powerful predictor of average national IQ, even when other factors like temperature, education, and GDP per capita are controlled.

Once you see it you can’t stop seeing it, or suspecting it may be contributory to any number of diseases, but it’s important to realize that simply killing off parasites without addressing the deeper underpinnings of disease will not solve the real problem that the disease is manifesting. Sure the symptoms may vanish in the short term, but if the underlying organ is still weak it will continue to build toxicity due to inadequate detoxification, and will be prone to being infiltrated by parasites once again, and even if none of that happens a new sign, symptom or full blown disease will usually crop up at some later date, because the energetic imbalance remains. And the energy depends on something in the psyche, where the real problem lies.

Don’t Oversimplify

While it’s important not to oversimplify anything when it comes to human beings, at least some of the time parasites may be the primary superficial cause of symptoms or historically marginal proclivities like same sex attraction. However, this doesn’t mean the parasites are necessarily the only cause, or the primary one.

Parasites tend to infect certain bodily environments more readily than others, and this isn’t by chance. When individuals deviate from societal norms, it subconsciously triggers their neurological fear circuitry which is genetically and epigenetically encoded and passed down across deep ancestral time, leading to a profound stress response that elevates cortisol levels, which likewise lead to elevated estrogen levels.

Modern science has proven that the experiences of parents can be passed down to their children epigenetically. Take for example male lab mice who were shocked each time they smelled almonds, a scent they would normally be attracted to. They were subsequently mated with female mice and the resulting children showed fear responses to the smell of almonds, despite never having been shocked themselves. If something like this can be passed from father to baby mouse in one generation, imagine the reinforcement learning from hundreds of generations before you, most of whom, certainly throughout recorded history, were rather prudish by modern standards.

The overactive hormonal milieu triggered by stepping out of line compared to ancestral norms creates a toxic, immunosuppressive environment in the body that becomes particularly inviting to parasites for the very reason that it leaves the body’s usually robust defenses for fighting off parasites weakened.

Moreover, it's widely acknowledged that engaging in anal sex increases exposure to a range of harmful microorganisms, so the overall microbial load in these cases can be significantly higher. What many people label "worms" or parasites often aren’t a single organism but rather what’s known as a pathogenic biofilm community. In these biofilm communities, a wide array of microorganisms connect and function together as if they were a single organism, held together by a fibrous matrix, much like our own cells and beneficial microbiome live together in a close-knit communal
”super-organism.”

Biofilms are a mucus-like substance and are formed for different reasons - some are beneficial and some harmful. The body, for instance, may create therapeutic biofilms as a protective measure against toxins and heavy metals. In contrast, pathogenic biofilms are formed by harmful microorganisms, including parasites, to shield themselves from the body's immune responses, antibiotics, and antimicrobials. By hiding within these biofilms, pathogens can evade treatment and persist in the body, making infections much more difficult to combat. This distinction between therapeutic and pathogenic biofilms is key in understanding how microorganisms, especially parasites, survive and proliferate in environments that should otherwise be hostile to them.

Managing Parasites

Historically, all over the world people took anti parasitic herbs or drugs with some regularity, the same way animals today are given regular dewormings. Many in third world countries have over the counter access to anti-parasitic pharmaceuticals like ivermectin and albendazole and take them.

However in modern industrialized societies we’ve mostly lost this concern with parasites, primarily I think due to a common logical fallacy of believing what we can see (or in this case detect) is all that exists, i.e. the famous streetlight fallacy from the old joke:

A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what he lost. “My keys,” the man replies. The policeman helps him search for a while and then asks, “Are you sure you lost them here?” “No,” says the drunk, “I lost them in the park.” Policeman: “Then why are you looking here?” Drunk: “Because this is where the light is.”

Basically, our medical establishment doesn't believe any of us have parasites because every time they check for them they don’t find them.

Basically our parasite tests are no good for a number of reasons, which explain why different labs will give different results on the same test samples, and even if samples are sent to many labs, parasites may still be missed:

• Intermittent Shedding – Many parasites are not consistently present in stool, blood, or other samples, leading to false negatives.

• Low Sensitivity of Microscopy – Traditional stool tests rely on manual examination, which can miss parasites due to their small size or low numbers.

• Inadequate Sample Collection – Single-sample tests may not capture intermittent parasite presence; multiple samples over days are often needed, but not often done, and even when they are can still miss parasite presence.

• Morphological Similarities – Some parasites resemble debris or harmless organisms, leading to misidentification.

• Immune Evasion – Certain parasites hide in tissues (e.g., liver, brain, or intestines) rather than circulating in blood or stool.

• Limited Testing Methods – Many labs only test for a small subset of known parasites, missing rarer or emerging species.

• PCR and Antibody Limitations – Molecular (PCR) and serological (antibody) tests may fail if parasite DNA or immune responses are too low to detect.

• Unstable Samples – Parasites may degrade or become unrecognizable if samples are not properly preserved or analyzed quickly.

What this means is that we have to assume we have parasites. This seems a safe assumption to me since every single chronic disease patient we’ve treated with a proper sustained parasite cleanse has passed obvious visually identifiable intestinal worms in their stool. Not everyone who takes antiparasitics will pass parasites right away, but if they complete a comprehensive detox protocol that marshals their own immune system to mobilize dormant or hiding parasites from deep within biofilms, they invariably pass parasites within weeks.

So to treatment then. There is no generic protocol that is optimal for everyone. Some people will be happy with taking ivermectin and fenben every 6-12 months, whether or not they pass any parasites or feel any different after doing so. Others will add some herbs like turmeric, wormwood extract, oregano oil, or broad spectrum antimicrobial chemicals like chlorine dioxide. Others will add liver and gallbladder support, which is very important, since many of these affect the liver gallbladder system, and it’s a primary passage of elimination, with many parasites ending up in the stool after being ejected from various tissues and passing through the blood to the liver for final elimination. So castor oil packs and coffee enemas can be important. Also giving up anger and allaying chronic anxiety and fear are important for boosting health of tissues affected by parasites, these can be accomplished with various modalities like breathwork, inttellectyual regrounding and neural retraining. Binders like chlorella and others can be important if parasite die off releases toxins. Diet is likely more important than most will appreciate since it so intimately ties into gut and liver health, which are so important for successfully clearing stubborn parasites.

Overall it’s important not to be too extreme too fast especially utilizing unnatural approaches. Complex ecologise like the body resist changes to their equilibrium, even when the equilibrium appears unhealthy to us. The body demands respect, otherwise it resits or simply breaks under undue pressure. Take it easy and slow and you'll accomplish a lot more than if you take it too hard and fast.